Colorado Memory Systems made tape drives in the 1980s and 1990s. I installed one in a Gateway 2000 PC, I got this promo handkerchief, too. Tape drives were superseded by better and faster technology devices that could store more data.
I owned an Atari 800 computer. It had 48k memory and software was on cartridges. You could buy (which I did) external cassette tape and 5 1/4″ diskette drives. I got an Atari 300 baud modem and connected to CompuServe in 1984. The communications software was on a cartridge.
I had an Epson 9-bit dot matrix printer which connected to the Atari through an interface box called an Ape-Face.
CompuServe was launched on September 24, 1979. I started using CompuServe in 1984. I used an Atari 800 computer with a 300-baud modem. It cost $16 an hour.
I thought it was great. For example, I am an Orioles fan. If they played a night game in Seattle, the box score would not be in the next morning’s paper. However, I could go on CompuServe about 1/2 hour after the game was over and see the box score.
This is amazing. You can have a picture or song that takes up five megabytes now. My first Windows PC (1992) only had four megabytes of memory. It was top of the line, too.
When I registered for college courses (1971-75), they used punch cards to enroll you in a class. If there were, for example, 20 slots in a class, there would be 20 punch cards in a bin and they would give you one if there were cards left. When you were done, they processed your little stack of cards.
I got my first Windows computer in 1992. QEMM was a very effective memory management utility.
The first tweet reminded me of the Commodore 64. I didn’t have one. I had an Atari 800. The Vic 20 was a less powerful computer from Commodore. I had a cassette recorder with my Atari.
Sad! 