Amstrad PC Computer System Discs
September 13, 2010
My goodness when I look back on our computer experience it is astounding just how far we've come in a short period of time. When I was in secondary school we were introduced to computer punch cards using Fortran. I proudly brought my spent cards home so they could be turned into a Christmas wreath for the front door. Years ago we bought an Atari 64 that one of our kids was just mesmerized by. Said kid would sit for hours and I do mean hours punching in line after line of code for the simple reward of seeing a small white ball bounce across the screen. When I went back to university I was still working on an old electric typewriter which was a step up from my even older manual typewriter. Back in secondary school I learned touch typing and a Pitman shorthand both of which I still use today. Think of the shorthand as an earlier version of today's internet lingo like LOL. The electric typewriter was upgraded to a self correcting electric typewriter the same year. Then I discovered computers! I learned a whole new language called Linex and learned how to search using Gopher and get email through Pine. If that wasn't bad enough I was introduced to Mac. All of a sudden a whole new world opened up.
My husband declared that the self correcting typewriter was not good enough for academics so he brought home a brand new Amstrad PC that ran on MS Dos®. It even had Gem Paint™ and Wordperfect. I think we had that computer for a couple of years before we upgraded to Windows 3.1. Fast forward to now and having gone through a lot of operating systems I am still comfortable working in Linux, Windows, dropping to Dos and Mac. For daily computing I prefer Mac while my husband uses Windows. My computer is dual OS both Mac and Windows XP.
Just look at the size of those discs though and they were only write protected with a small piece of foil tape! Over the years the discs got smaller and smaller but always increasing in storage space. Next on the scene for us were the 3¼ floppies with the hard case then came CDs and now memory sticks that likely could hold more memory than our old Amstrad could!
It's rather fun reminiscing about computing and how much it has changed in a very short period of time. It's also amazing to think of how much we've learned over the years about computing and everything that goes along with it. I wonder what the next 20 or so years of computing will bring?
Garden Gnome
©2006-2010
I completely agree. My PC which was only three years old, couldn't handle all that I am doing now. It just means that there are so much more going on and technology advanced so much that the software are no longer compatible. If you want to have more options, you have to upgrade.
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