Saturday, November 7, 2015

old computing 1

My first computer was an Amstrad 286 running DOS, of course.

It had 1Mb of RAM and a 40Mb HDD. Nothing much these days.

On it I ran Word 5, mainly, a few shareware packages and Timeline 3, I think it was.

I replaced this with an Amstrad 386 shortly afterwards and added Windows to the mix. It was necessary to run Excel, which I did.

I added a couple of other packages over time: I was fascinated with Hypercard on the Mac, and bought a Brightbill Roberts knock off named Hyper Pad. It was very buggy. I also bought Toolbook thinking it would do something similar, but it did not.

On both I relied on Norton Commander for file management, although I added XTreePro Gold for some of its nicer functionality. Commander was my mainstay.

For pure text processing I used Boxer; very handy for making batch files, which I found very neat speed ups for a lot of system level work, starting programs, etc.