40MB in the 80’s?? wow, you were really ahead of things. in the 80’s my family had a tandy color computer 2 which had no hard drive at all–everything was stored on cassette tapes. we upgraded our memory from 8kb to 16kb and were really excited about it.
it wasn’t until the early 90’s that we got a new computer, with a 105MB harddrive, which we thought we’d never use. it had windows 3.1 and we had our first experiments with the internet (but we didn’t use it a lot because we had to dial long distance in order to get online…).
how things have changed, even in my short life! i have no doubts that the problems with software and hardware for ebooks will be vastly improved within a few years and we will all start becoming converts.
Yes, it was the last word in computers at that time! It didn’t run on Windows, I think it still just used DOS. I have actually used computers since 1967 - running on punched tape and needing to sit in a specially temperature controlled room! I think my microwave oven has more computing grunt these days! I am actually a shameless techno-junky but I can’t afford to upgrade everything as fast as I’d like. By the way, I still have one very old computer at home running Win3.1 which controls a midi keyboard. Every attempt to “modernise” this set-up results in disaster so we now just leave it be. It’s an interesting antique these days, I guess it will eventually become valuable like an early Moog synthesiser. (And having used one of these years ago I have to say they were much more fun than modern equipment). For those too young to be familiar with these - I think they were used for the music on the earliest “Dr Who” series.
Do you still use it? I have an old Brother wordprocessor (old, I mean, to me) which I still use, on those rare occaisions when I can find ribbon for printing. I really like the low-tech feel of it. I’ve actually been trying to talk my mom into locating her old electric typewriter…so far, no luck.
Yes, I use it all the time for writing midi and as an “electric piano/organ”. We turned it off recently whilst moving things around - first time it had been switched off in several years. We buy a new cooler fan for it every few years but apart from that it is left as is. It is plugged into a keyboard and a sound system and that’s about all it does (apart from playing some old games on it when you get sick of playing music!)