"Living with a Computer"

[Thomphoolery]

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/82jul/fallows.htm

An article from The Atlantic Monthly, July 1982 - "Living with a Computer". It's a great read, and highlights not only a snapshot of the early personal computer boom but also the authors motivation for buying a personal computer and how it affected his work life (and his home life).

-j

[Oddjob]

My parents used a green screen computer up until the late 90's(iirc) for storing records of the family business

[Omegaman]

That was a great article and so funny and awesomely retro.  He mentions the Osbourne 1 in the article, which is pretty funny.  He says of the Osbourne 1 -- "When unfolded, it looks like an outdated military radio." LOL

My first computer was one of the first competitors to the Osbourne 1 in that it had the same "portable" design which manufactures like Compaq and Osbourne at the time touted "could easily be stored underneath your airline seat". I had the Commodore SX-64 with a huge 5 inch screen.  I spent many hours in front of that screen and that soab was heavy -- I think it weighed like 25 pounds.

Off-topic:

I ran across this a while back and chuckled and meant to post.  FedEx used to have a service called "Zap Mail" in 1984 where they'd deliver "an exact duplicate of your document(s) coast to coast in 2 hours".  Imagine faxing documents (before fax machines could be afforded by consumers) over a 1200 baud modem?  Apparently from Wiki, they initially charged $35 per 10 pages to be faxed.

Commercial (start at 2:01)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc1ITcYmPAk

Interestingly enough the COO of FedEx at the time of Zap Mail's launch was Jim Barksdale, who later became the CEO of Netscape until it merged with AOL and was the one who famously testified to congress about Microsoft's "monopoly" on Internet Explorer on Windows based PCs.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/4612