TI 994a. Cassette storage, RF adapter to small TV, 300 baud modem, 5” Floppy and extender cabinet, lived close to the distributor when they announced they were going out of business. Stood in line for hours to buy tons of software I would never use. $3,000. Invested. Bad decision.
Learned on Data General Mini at work especially after hours stumbling with some assistance but no classes, running clunky RDOS. We had office IBM PC’s for the secretaries so by 84-85’ I was able to use after hours.
Then IBM PC Jr. w 1024 expansion side cards 1200 baud modem and used Compuserve a bit, logging into BBS’s all over. Next IBM Clone AT 286 1987’ w 2400 baud modem, DOS 3.1 stuck with it many years. IBM ThinkPad running Windows 95, then about 30+ computers in my business and at home since then. Started on internet in 1995 and did first HTML websites in 1996. Top of Yahoo search position all my product keywords for business and ready for 2000 surge. Switched to Apple mostly in 2006. Things were great until about 2008.
Unfortunately, I dislike where we are now where Google controls way too much information and 5 companies seem to control everything and owning a website feels like owning a house you need to protect like in an online ghetto. Ranking websites is super difficult. The amount of bots stealing data and brute force attempts from all over is disgusting. The internet has changed so much since the early days and to be so much spying, tracking, phishing, bot scrapers, etc.
On the bright side though and By choice, I Don’t do any social media, I believe in forums like this nice one and websites and wish more people would create websites instead of using Facebook. The vast amount of reference information and Youtube tutorials by so many creative people are great.
Thanks to all good people out there on this forum and Youtube!