This random photo was taken in December 1986, when our family visited my parents for Christmas. I found an envelope of pictures taken during that trip, and, since many of the pictures had Christmas motifs, I will save them for December posts. But this picture is of an early IBM personal computer—the IBM-XT, or a clone of one, that was my father’s first home computer. I think he had purchased it a couple of months before we visited.
I had not been a PC user for very long myself in 1986. As I recall, I first began using PCs at the office in late 1984 or early 1985, shortly before my daughter was born. It was late 1985 or early 1986 when I purchased my first PC for home use—an IBM-XT clone made by Leading Edge, the Leading Edge Model D, to be precise. I bought my computer along with another attorney at work who bought one also. We got some type of discount for buying two of them.
I don’t remember much about what I used that early PC for. I had a word processing program on it, but I don’t think the program was compatible with what we used at work. At some point, I purchased Think Tank (an outlining program) that I used in the office for organizing my deposition preparation. I wanted to be able to work on the outlines at home also, but I had to remember to copy the latest version of what I was doing onto a floppy disk to bring home.
My Leading Edge XT clone had dual 5.25” floppy drives. I later had a 20 megabyte (yes, that’s mega-, not giga- or tera-) hard drive installed, but until I did, the computer did not boot up without a boot disk that had DOS on it. (Remember boot disks? Remember DOS?)
That first computer could not connect to the outside world. Not even dial-up. I think it was the second computer I bought that first had a modem in it. And that necessitated moving where I kept the computer so it was near a phone line.
Four-year-old son and me at an early PC, December 1986
The computer pictured in this random photo was my dad’s computer, not mine. I don’t know why he bought it or what he did with it. I don’t remember if he had an IBM-XT or an IBM clone, but I know that it was of the XT generation, because that was the latest PC technology in 1986. The IBM-PS/2 generation of computers didn’t come out until 1987.
If you look closely, you can see some type of A-B-C program running on the computer. I think he’d bought a child’s educational program for my four-year-old son, and this picture shows me teaching my son to type with it.
And such was the state of technology more than 30 years ago. That four-year-old is now grown and makes his living in the technical world, advising his clients on website design and content to help them communicate better with their customers. I doubt any of us had any idea in 1986 that careers involving websites would exist by the turn of the century. Though research began on computer networks as far back as the 1960s, the World Wide Web didn’t really go commercial until about 1991.
What was your first experience with personal computer technology?
I’m trying to remember if I put your first work PC on your desk. Seems like I did, but 1984 or 1985 would have been pretty early in my career at the card factory.
Kim, my recollection is that Brian and Tom were the first IT folks involved. But you weren’t far behind them!
Theresa
And my first personal desktop wasn’t until about 1986 or so — before that we had a shared PC in a common area in the department.
We didn’t have a computer till about 1994 with a dot matrix printer.
Oh, yes, dot matrix printers. Half the time they were illegible.
The first computer I worked on was when I was a summer hire at the Pentagon. It was HUGE and the servers took up massive rooms. We’ve come a long way, haven’t we? 🙂
Jill,
In college I did a couple of computer projects for an economics class. I had to feed a stack of punched cards into the machine to get the calculations done. And during that same period I had a summer job as a clerk for a group of nuclear engineers — even THEY had to program their simulations of reactors with those punched cards.
Now my laptop — and even my smartphone — probably have about the same capability as those computers.
Yes, we’ve come a long way.
Theresa