My first computer was a used TI-99/4a, given to me as a gift on my twelfth birthday, just after Texas Instruments abandoned it. It was a wonderful little device, despite the quickly-outgrown 16K of memory. One of the best things about it (besides the hardware speech synthesizer module that I got with it) was that when you turned it on, it was instantly ready to do your bidding. You might have to load a program first, which involved a cassette tape drive, a lot of electronic wailing, and enough time to play a game on our Sears-branded “TeleGames” Atari 2600 clone, but that was a small price to pay.
I’ve never really gotten used to the DOS/Windows/etcetera concept of having to load the operating system from external storage. It makes sense when OSes are regularly updated, but it always seemed to me that there was no reason why the computer couldn’t instantly be ready when we turned them on.
It seems that I’m not the only one who misses those days. 🙂
I had the fortune to start with an Apple II+ with a disk-drive, so I don’t pine for those days. Though I did play with a Vic-20 that didn’t have one and liked that it booted fast, though the cassette-drive was unbelievably slow. (It had a cartridge-slot too though.)
BTW, with all of this talk of $200 laptops, twenty years ago these were about that price, and pretty light-weight too.
(These meaning the Vic, then and now, Apples were expensive.)
Yes, but today’s $200 laptops are the equivalent of about half a mainframe back then, ability-wise. Maybe more. 🙂