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Jerry Feldman mentioned an old computer: > My first home computer was an Apple II (1978). What Jobs saw back > then was that a desktop computer could be useful to real people. > At the time, there were a few hobby computers. I almost bought a > MITS Altair The first desktop I ever ran across was in my math teacher's class in Arlington, VA in 1977: an HP 9830A (you can find pics of it via Google). Anyone else remember those? It had 4K of RAM, kept your programs on a cassette tape, printed out (quickly) on an 80-column wide thermal printer. You programmed it in BASIC; I remember writing a banner printing program and a biorhythm chart generator. Being exposed to bigger mainframe computers starting around '72, I never thought of these micro things as anything other than toys. So when the TRS-80 and Apple ][ came out, they held little interest for me--my first factory-built (i.e. not cobbled-together) home computer was a 1982 DEC surplus PDT-11/150; it ran RT-11. The first "real" home computer, that rivaled mainframe performance, came along about 10 years later: the Intel 486. That's when speed-of-light constraints came to favor microchips over the "frames" containing CPUs in multiple circuit boards spread across a backplane, and transistor density has accelerated ever since. By the time of the 486, Linux was available: today's supercomputing clusters usually run Linux. -rich
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