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Old October 21st 04, 08:51 AM
David J Taylor
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Larry Caldwell wrote:
[]
My first PC was one I built myself and had no connection to any
mainframe.


Your first PC was years after they were common in the business world.
My first PC was a Reynolds and Reynolds TC-1000, designed to be a
smart terminal for a DEC PDP-11 at General Motors. The first kits
were designed to get affordable computers into the hands of home
experimenters, but they were a long ways from leading edge technology.


No. My own PC preceded my business PCs by about ten years.

My first PCs were around 1975, and the S-100 system I subsequently built
around 1977 had a hard disk and high resolution graphics.

At this stage our business was still using a 300 baud teletype to access a
mainframe. I was responsible for the purchase and running on a DEC VAX
system (the PDPs were not powerful enough for us) and all of the access
was via dumb terminals until we got the Retrographics VT640 add-on
(perhaps around the start of the 1980s?).

PCs did not start to appear with us until the early-1980s (and they were
not even IBM clones). I actually bought the very first IBM PCs for my
company, and that was the AT model (6 MHz) in 1985. Its high-resolution
graphics was an EGA video card....

Cheers,
David