5
bahua
2y

We had an ADAM/Colecovision unit before this, but I don't really count it, as it was more of a console for us than a computer.

In 1986 dad brought home a Tandy 1000 SX. It had an Intel 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and no hard drive. With dual 5.25" floppy drives, our write-protected DOS 3.1 disk stayed in drive A almost all the time. Games and other software were run from drive B, or from the external cassette drive. For really big games, like Conquest of Camelot and Space Quest 3, we were frequently prompted to swap disks in B: before the game could continue.

Space Quest, King's Quest, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, several editions of Carmen Sandiego, and at least a dozen other games dominated our gaming use. We wrote papers with WordStar, and my parents maintained their budget with Lotus 1-2-3.

A year or two later, Dad installed a 10 MB hard drive, and we started booting DOS off that instead. Heady days.

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  • 2
    I recall how FAST a 5MB hard drive seemed after using 80KB floppies. Yeah, a 5Mb transfer rate. Varoom, varoom!
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