Our first computer at work in the early 1980s was an NEC APC (Advanced Personal Computer)  and uniquely supporting both CP/M-86 and MS-DOS from large 8-inch floppy disks, making them a distinct, high-performance alternative to IBM PCs. They featured an NEC 8086 CPU, significant RAM (128KB+), expansion slots, and a distinctive design with integrated 8-inch drives.  They sold for about $4,000, which is expensive for the time.

We later updated to a computer with 5½” floppy and a 10 MB hard drive. Only small text files were used, no graphics and our thoughts were that we would never fill such a big drive.

NEC had their own operating system which, at the time and was better than Microsoft but only available for NEC computers. Microsoft later became more popular when other, cheaper brands of computer were developed.

In the 1980s I helped write a book, with me doing all the typing on an Amstrad PCW9512. These used CP/M, and 3″ floppy discs, awkward when it came to arranging printing. Luckily the friend-of-a-friend route found someone with a dual drive to copy everything to 3.5″, MS-DOS / WIN 3.1 discs, and I had also saved the files in plain text.

The computer also came with an auxiliary disc holding a lot of experts-only stuff, a rather neat 3D-image chess game, and the compilers for both BASIC and a strange language called Digital Research “LOGO”. I bought teaching books for both.

I made some progress learning BASIC, which in its Hewlett-Packard editions was used at work in locally-written programmes for driving electronic measuring instruments. The character and string-manipulating routines were fun!

I found the LOGO impenetrable. The book claimed the language was developed to help school-children learn “structured programming” whatever that was, but it was extremely telegrammatic and not at all intuitive even at a simple level. I carefully typed in the exercises and they worked, but I never understood them.   .

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Later, my section at work installed its own, dedicated system for fast number-milling. Own server in a secure room, and half-tonne CRT terminals on people’s desks. These SUN ‘Microsystem’ computers used a very bare version of windows, I was told was much closer to the IBM original than the µSoft “Windows” copy.

Their starting took about five minutes of self-setting and testing, with screen-full after screen-full of nothing a non-programmer could understand. I forget if they had mice, but using them was almost all command-line typing not unlike MS-DOS. They used a similar, lengthy closing routine too, before you could turn off the power.

I do not know the performance but that system was way ahead of the “ordinary” PCs running mid-era MS Windows. Though perhaps now my relatively modest, modern PC here at home might give it a run for its money, if it could be operated off-line and with far less Microsoft guff.

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They do call the yoof of today “computer literate” and we of bus-pass age just the opposite, even “Luddites” by those who do not know what that means.

Really? I reckon the other way round for many people, because unless actually employed in IT somehow, the yoofs only have to learn how to use the instrument, the Internet and perhaps one or two common applications. They do not have the range of IT experience many older people have, some from MS-DOS and earlier days; and you see as many oldies as younger folk using “smart”-‘phones; though perhaps not addictively so.

Hi Paul

The NEC APC (Advanced Personal Computer)  was not unique in supporting both CP/M-86 and MS-DOS

The Dec Rainbow did as well. It was a great machine but you were supposed to buy DEC formatted floppies.

George

That’s computers for you, George.

Depends what you choose to store in the cloud. Personally, being an Apple user, I have contacts and emails stored/backed up on iCloud, but I don’t see this as being anything worse than people having their telephone numbers and addresses listed in the phone book – were the Post Office or British Telecom ever regarded with suspicion for holding all that personal information? – or sending communications on a postcard, which is all emails are in terms of security in any case.

Rob

Hi, my telephone number hasn’t been in a telephone book since 1986, and I’ve changed my address several times since then, and my mobile numbers have never been in one, only those that need to know have them.

Regards Nick.

In the early 80’s I installed a Unimate PUMA robot to load and unload 12″ discs on and off the lathe that faced the aluminium blanks at Control Data in Brynmawr (Wales). The blanks were first stacked and annealed under a weight to ensure flatness. After that, they were rough ground, about 10 at a time, on a big Lumsden, then finish turned. The lathes had a vacuum faceplate and used a single point diamond tool for facing. Each lathe was equipped with an extraction pipe about 4″ in diameter, as the swarf had to come off in a single continuous string. Any break in the ‘chip’ and the disk was probably scrap.

I think that was the place where some wag reorganised a couple of the stickers to label the machine “TEA UP MATE”

At the time, they were still making ‘washing machine’ drive cabinets, but the production of 5″ Winchester discs was ramping up.