Nostalgia Computing

So dig it: I found someone who has search-able pdf copies of all Radio Shack catalogs, and that's the best place to find my grad school computer. So what I had was a Tandy 1000 TL/2 with a VM-5 12" green screen monitor. I loved that thing! In fact, I only recently parted with the keyboard (it's the one you see in the picture below. I had 3 different adapters for it, and it finally gave up the ghost about 2 years ago (Kathy persuaded me to throw it away). It had substance and felt like a real typewriter. I snapped these images from the 1990 catalog.



I guess it does not surprise me that there appears to be a nostalgia computing community on the Internet. From the time in 1979, while sitting in the passenger seat of my mother's car on the corner of Coolidge and Maple, when I heard an Apple Computer radio ad for the first time, I've been aware of computers in some form or fashion.

The Obsolete Technology Website is pretty cool.

I used my Mom's TRS-80s a bit and have written about them here. She also had a Tandy Color computer, which we hooked to a color television. Then there were the hand-me-down Tandy TX-1000s (I had 2 of these, cast off from my mother's business).

I never could get the hang of Scripsit or SuperScripsit, so I wrote most of my college papers on a SmithCorona word-processing typewriter.

The first computer that was legitimately MINE was a Tandy 1000TL. I specifically did not want a color monitor--the ones they were selling at the time were really ugly in my view--they had HUGE type and awful colors. Check out the user's manual below:



So, I walked into a RadioShack and asked for one of the monitors they had hooked to the cash register. It was a small, green screen affair, with limited graphics. All I used it for was writing and e-mail, so what did I care. These little monitors came in gray screen, orange screen, and green screen. Mine was green. The 1000TL was a 286 IBM clone that ran MD-DOS. Through graduate school, I ran WordPerfect 5.1 and EndNote on this machine. The only other thing I did with it was telnet to the MSU mainframe for my Pilot e-mail, connect to the MSU library server, or do some MOO, MUD, or MUSH things (oh and a BBS or two). This is similar to the monitor I had (this one is a little bigger: I actually LOVED my little green screen monitor):



In 1994, after working at my first professional job for a year, I took out a loan from the college and dropped $3,500 on a Dell running Windows 3.1 and I purchased a CTX 17" monitor. The CRT in that thing was HUGE! I kept the 286 w/ green screen as a second computer and used it for plain-old writing (including a hunk of my dissertation proposal) until the mid-late 1990s. I ditched it in 1999 when I realized I no longer had a computer that it could accept input from, the old 286 having died a few years previously.

There was something romantic, dare I say sexy, about the plain flicker of those old monitors. Couple that with the "newness" of getting online back in the day. Pretty thrilling, actually.

From there, I got back on the mom's castaway computer bandwagon; my buddy Todd helped me hack and build many computers based on the husks my mom had given me (most of them the mini-tower design that is popular now in PCs). Todd did most of that stuff--it was fun to watch him work on them. I still have (right here in fact) the Inca Computers mousepad we bought one day in Flint at the now-defunct Inca Computer store.

Right now I am going down to throw junk out in the basement.