DaveLembke,
That is very old hardware.
Are you really old enough to have bought that new?
Interest in computers started with Atari 2600 and TRS-80 Model 1I think that sums it up...LOL I have been fixing, building, and working on PC computers since 1983
And in elementary school they had these learning computers in the early 1980s (1982) that accepted LP Records and you had to sit at the terminal which displayed questions with a massively large headset on and the audio tracks and logic was loaded off of the LP for the educational computer setup they had at the elementary school in Northern New Jersey. It was more of a Dinosaur version of the modern Leapster for kids.
When the school got their first batch of IBM 5150's around 1983, that is when the fun really started, especially when introduced to GW-Basic in early 1985 in which most of the programming I did on my TRS80 could now be done on the way more powerful IBMs at school which were not supervised well, although there were some Basic functions that didn't work between Tandy and IBM when messing around with Peek and Pokes and memory addresses were different...LOL Oh and I manually typed in Basic from the TRS-80 ( 80 Micro Magazine ) to play the programs in the magazine and there were frequent typos in the magazines Basic code that made debugging the errors fun, but it was hands on learning that way,... and before getting a 5.25" floppy drive for it and RAM expansion module that was the size of a boom box laid on its side to expand from 16k from 4k of RAM, I had to perform cassette save and loads using tape recorder.
The PIC you see by name is the very first computer i had. It had a label on the back of the monitor that stated Sept 1977 and i dug it out of a data centers trash in 1982. Brought it home and turned it on and it worked, but the power supply had a loose intermittent connection. Fixed that and then I just needed software for it. It was just black and white monitor, keyboard, external power supply and thats pretty much it. A friend of mines uncle had a TRS80 and gave me some cassettes with software on them in binders to use and I hooked a tape recorder to it and was cassette loading and saving. Then later on I lucked out getting the 16k RAM expansion module that the monitor is resting on in this picture, which had a blue ribbon cable connecting the keyboard/Main Z80 CPU to the extra memory, and this expansion module also added ability to have 2 x 5.25" upright floppy drives and Dot Matrix printer which was a Microline 80 when people were getting rid of their Trash 80s for next to nothing at yard sales since they upgraded for real computers like C64's, Amiga, and IBM XT's.
I went almost 20 years not buying a new computer, but getting by on cheap and free parts and out dated systems. Mainly because they were too expensive. When people were going crazy over the 286s i had the 8088 XT, and when the 386 came out i got a 286 cheap, and then 486 came out and I scored a 386SX to play Wolfenstein 3D etc, and then Pentiums came out and I finally got a 486SX 25Mhz, then DX upgrade etc... and on and on and on to about 2002 when i had to get a real computer for college a Pentium 4 to run Microsoft Visual Studio .Net 2002 edition for advanced C++ because the Refurb Tiger Direct $350 Toshiba Portege Laptop Pentium II 366Mhz running Windows 98SE on 192MB RAM wasnt powerful enough to run this required software when Borland C++ 5.02 didnt cut it for modern Visual C++ Programming. The transition from VC++6.0 and Borland C++ 5.02 to VC++ 2002 .net took a lot of getting use to
