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My first BYOD

jrioux

Active Member
I don't know what made me think of this, but my original Commodore VIC-20 was my first BYOD (bring your own device). Sure it only had 5K of memory, practically no "business" software and a painfully slow tape drive, but it was a real computer and had a pretty good keyboard. I used it for light word processing, some financial analysis and calculating amortization tables for "alternative" mortgages. The California Housing Finance Agency used my calculations for some of their "new" loan products 33 years ago.

Commodore-VIC-20-FL.jpg

What was your first BYOD?
 
I had a TI-994A in the 80s - but I was still in High School. My first BYOD was a Toshiba Satellite T2130CS Laptop, it was a 486DX4 with 20MB RAM (upgraded from 4 MB) and 2.1 GB Hard Drive (also upgraded from the 500 MB).
 
I created a project plan and documentation for the US Navy on my C64 using the PaperClip word processor. Although I had a Vic 20 I don't recall using it for any work related tasks but did dial into the University to remotely use their computers with a Terminal Emulator.

My first IBM PC compatible MS DOS machine was an 80C86 Toshiba 1100+ dual 3.5" floppy, LCD Laptop. After that I got a Gateway 2000 386 DX-20 with a gargantuan 80MB HDD, DOS and Xenix.
 
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We had a VIC 20 in 1988 - it was ancient even then. Never really did much with it, but I remember typing in code for a "red alert" sound from a book. Also waiting 3o minutes for a game to load from tape only to have it crash almost ins.tantly
 
We had a VIC 20 in 1988 - it was ancient even then. Never really did much with it, but I remember typing in code for a "red alert" sound from a book. Also waiting 3o minutes for a game to load from tape only to have it crash almost ins.tantly
I hated the Tape, it wasn't long before I forked out the money for a floppy drive and a whopping 16KB ram expansion. Although most of my programs I made fit into the default 5k once I got them working. :)
 
I hated the Tape, it wasn't long before I forked out the money for a floppy drive and a whopping 16KB ram expansion. Although most of my programs I made fit into the default 5k once I got them working. :)
I agree that adding a disk drive and 16K expander made a world of difference for the VIC-20. I eventually bought a used CBM 8250 for my C=64 and had a cool 2 megabytes of online storage available! It also used the parallel port so it was much faster, too.
 
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