As a child of the 80's, I had a front row seat to the beginning of what was then called personal computing. My elementary school got its first Apple around the time I entered kindergarten. That was also the time personal computers were starting to make inroads into offices (largely thanks to VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3). By modern standards these machines weren't very good. At the time they were transformative. They brought computing to places it hadn't been before, and gave access to entirely new sets of people. For someone with an early adopter's mindset, it an optimistic and exploratory time. It's for this reason (and the fact it was my childhood) that I like looking back on these old machines. That's something I hope to do here in an informal series of posts. If there happen to be a few lessons for modern computing along the way, so much the better.
If you're reading this, you're probably familar with retrocomputing. It's easy to go to eBay, buy some used equipment, and play around with a period machine from the early 80's. Emulators make it even easier. As much as I appreciate the movement, it doesn't quite provide the full experience of the time. To put it in perspective, an Apple //e was a $4,000 purchase in today's money. This is before adding disk drives, software, or a monitor. After bringing it home, and turning it on, all you had was a black screen and a blinking prompt from Applesoft basic. If you needed help, you were limited to the manual, a few books and magazines at the local bookstore, and whoever else you happened to know. The costs were high, the utility wasn't obvious, and there wasn't a huge network of people to fall back on for help. It was a different time in a way retrocomputing doesn't quite capture.
My goal here is to talk about my own experiences in that time. What it was like to grow up with these machines, both in school and at home. It's one person's perspective (from a position of privlidge) but hopefully it'll capture a little of the spirit of the day.