Although I had worked on mainframes before and even had a couple of Apple IIIs in my Piraeus office, the joys of working with Microsoft were never revealed to me until I came back to Australia in April 1985 which also coincided with the release of Microsoft DOS 3.1.
Personal computers needed two persons to carry them, and came with an A: drive (and sometimes with a B: drive as well) to "read" those very floppy 5¼-inch disks with a capacity of 360KB, and hard disks were typically 10MB or 20 MB (the Apple III had a 5MB hard disk which we thought would last us for ever). Larger hard disks had to be partitioned into C: and D: drive before MS-DOS 3.31 allowed larger partition sizes.
Computers were heavy beasts which first had to be "formatted" with a low-level format followed by a high-level format, after which the SYS files were transferred from the A: drive to the harddisk, followed by the user-created config.sys and autoexec.bat files. (I am not even going to bore you with 'interleaving', FAT - file allocation tables - and IRQ - hardware and software interrupts.) Only then could any application software be added, of which there were not many, such as WordStar, a very clunky word processor, or VisiCalc, an equally clunky spreadsheet, or the very first and rudimentary accounting programs. Monitors came in screen displays of either green or orange, and printers were of the noisy dot-matrix variety, devoid of any fonts or graphics capabilities. And to brighten up the day, we always had the 'Hangman' game to fall back on.
Those were the days and we thought they would never end because we thought we had everything we would ever need, but, of course, there's always more, and today's mobile phones have not only displaced the phone, the torch, the watch, and the camera (and in cases of extreme addictions, even whole families), but also have a computing capabilty that we would never have believed possible in those days of floppy disks and noisy printers, which is what I was reflecting on as I wandered the aisles full of computers in the local Harvey Norman store, followed by Steve, the "sales consultant", who was eager to earn a commission.
I still have my trusty old HP which has kept me going for more than ten years, but which is probably past an upgrade to the new WINDOWS 11 operating system, and so I am forced to make a choice between a very mobile "Clearance" laptop which I can easily take outside to sit on the sunny verandah while I type my daily blog and a more like my current HP-style "Hot Deal" large monitor on a stand. I don't want to spend too much as the old Valhalla burials where I could take everything with me, are a thing of the past. "Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual." Look it up!
This may be the last upgrade I'll ever need before my final downgrade!
