Dr A's Technology Milestones

By KarenAnewalt

  • Apple IIe

    Apple IIe
    When I was growing up, most people didn't have a home computer but we did. My dad thought computers were interesting and bought one to play around with at home. He taught math & programming at a neighboring high school. The Apple IIe sold for 11 years from 1983-1993. I think we probably got ours around 1984. My sister and I mostly used it to type pretend newspapers and play simple games.

  • TRS 80

    TRS 80
    I wrote my first program in 8th grade using TRS80 computers, which were manufactured by Tandy Radio Shack Corporation. The TRS80 was released in 1977 and the company president announced, "This device is inevitably in the future of everyone in the civilized world—in some way—now and so far as ahead as one can think." The TRS80 originally sold for $599 and was the top seller in personal computers until 1982.

  • BASIC

    BASIC
    I took my first programming course in 9th grade. It was probably just 9 weeks or maybe a semester long. We learned to program in BASIC which is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Edsger Dijstra famously said, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." I seem to have come through the experience unscathed.

  • Pascal

    Pascal
    In high school, I took a few more programming courses and learned to program in Pascal. I distinctly remember crying in frustration as I tried to understand pointers.

  • NeXT Workstations

    NeXT Workstations
    I started taking computer science courses sophomore year of college. Our computer lab had about 9 NeXT workstations in it. This was a big deal because these sold for about $6500 a piece at the time (which is equivalent to about $13000 in today's dollars). Most of my classes had 12-18 students so we had to share the computers. While I was trying to master Vi and C, Tim Berners-Lee was using a NeXT computer to write the first web browser software and serve as the first web server.

  • Mosaic

    Mosaic
    Online communication wasn't a thing when I was in college. Only public school teachers and college professors had email addresses. I remember one of my computer science friends showing me this "cool new program" sometime in 1993. "Mosaic gets you on the World Wide Web," he said. My response was "Why do I need to use that?" Adams response was, "Well you can find out stuff, like what the baseball scores were last night." I wasn't impressed.

  • Sources

    All information is from
    https://www.wikipedia.org/ Image sources:
    Apple IIe: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_iie.jpg
    TRS80: http://www.8bit-micro.com/modelIII.htm
    BASIC: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/397301998366590311/
    PASCAL: http://www.whenwasitinvented.org/when-was-pascal-programming-language-invented/
    NeXT: http://photonicsguy.ca/_media/vintage/next/next_cube.jpg
    Mosaic:https://media.cmgdigital.com/shared/img/photos/2013/04/16/81/3c/Mosiac-SG.jpg