Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Personal Activities - Computers




Personal Activities - Computers


What was your first, at home, personal computer?

I’m a computer user, not a techie geek, so it is really hard for me to remember. My best recollection is that it was an Apple II with two floppy disk drives in about 1982.

Actually, I found a classic photo of my nephew, Evan, working on it... note the dot matrix printer...



Here is a good story from Wikipedia, Apple II Series article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series

The first ‘computer’ in our house was actually in our home office for our business - it was a ‘dumb’ computer terminal that we used for inputing the bookkeeping information for our small business accounting service. The information we input on the terminal was then transmitted via phone lines to the mainframe computer in Illinois where the actual computing and printing occurred. The output was returned to us via postal service, as well. Oh my, so long ago…

I got to thinking about this last night when I found some old papers of very early internet genealogy connections a few years later. I'll share some of these in the coming weeks...

In the meantime, I should step away from the computer, and go for a walk...  ;-)

2 comments:

  1. How were they being generated for you back in the mid-70's ? I remember computer print-out style reports... ? I know I was doing everything by typewriter and copying... !

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    1. Great question! We began in mid-1976. We would send our work folders/packet into Chicago and they did the input for us then. Next step, a few years later, was the 'dumb computer terminal' in our office... Kept the folders in our office. Much less stress. Never lost one in the mail, but, it was always a concern! ;-)

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