Sarah and I spent “Christmas” with my Dad’s family yesterday. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that we had a sincerely good time with them. Dad took us out to the mall to pick out a Christmas gift, so Sarah and I decided to round out our crystal collection. When we got back, my Dad and I chatted awhile. We hit the usual mundane, finance-related topics: loans (mortgages in particular), taxes, and debt. We also talked a while about the old-school Tandy 1000 TX in my kid-sister Kimmy’s room.
This computer kicked off my original interest in technology. When I was about 12-years-old, I asked for a typewriter for my birthday to practice the mad typing skillz that I’d learned in grade school. My dad decided that the timing was right to up the ante and purchase a brand-new computer for the family. We all piled into the car and headed off to the local Radioshack, where my dad plunks down some $1,000 on our new screaming 8Mhz personal computer. When we got it home my dad and I took over the dining room (which I’m sure my mom was ecstatic about) and plugged everything in at the end of the table. It was awesome: the smell of new electronics plastic, the whir of the fans and buzz of the 720K floppy drive when you turned it on, and all that weird information that flashed across the screen. The Tandy became for my dad and me an almost obsessive project. We would spend hours in front of it on a Saturday just copying programs–by hand–from computer magazines into the BASIC compiler. Dad would network with RadioShack dealers around the state and spend hours hanging out with them in smoky backrooms, just working with the computers.
By the time we had retired the computer in favor of a flashy new 486SX/25Mhz, the Tandy 1000 had a 40MB hard drive (up from the stock 20MB), 2MB of expanded RAM (which came on two gigantic ISA-slot cards), Super-VGA graphics adapter, 2400 baud modem, a 20MB removable-disk Bernoulli disk drive (Iomega’s predecessor to the Zip drive), and a math-coprocessor making the box capable of speeds up to 12Mhz. None of these upgrades, though, held a candle to the 5-bay, 8-card “slot box” that my dad added to the machine. This piece of equipment was a whole, separate computer case (count them: two boxes for one CPU), connected via a thick inflexible bus cable, built simply to add more cards and more drives to the machine–truly a last-ditch effort to stretch the machine before deciding that it was time to upgrade.
As we both looked at it on the floor of my sister’s rapidly shrinking room, encased in its yellowing plastic case and thin layer of dust, my dad offered it to me for anything I might find a use for. I smiled–I don’t even think that it would serve as a good Linux router at this point, having less horsepower than my graphing calculator or my Sony Clie. I knelt down to the floor, pulled the case off and discovered the hard drive that contains all the pirated games, batch files, and book reports of my youth. “I think I’ll just take this for now,” I told him, wondering if there’s anything in there worth remembering.
The hard drive is sitting on a countertop in our kitchen, just waiting to become another Saturday afternoon computer project.
If you really want to read about my misadventures in the consumer-XML space, you can look at our beta site. Enjoy!