Robin Williams and I Purchased a Computer

Sort:
RichColorado

In 1982 when I was buying my first computer, a man wearing what looked like a farmers outfit. It looked like he had been working in the garden. He was wearing a dirty tan hat. He was also looking at the same computer I was looking at.

                                It was Robin Williams.

"What do you think is the best one?" He said to me.

I said "This one is just a Franklin clone of an Apple II."

"Are they both the same?"

"Not really, This Franklin will do the same same and run the same programs as the Apple but it is way cheaper."

As I left the store we smiled and knodded to each other. He bought an Apple II. I bought the Clone

Later on I found out he had a home on the hills East of Santa Rosa, toward Sonoma.

                     May Robin Williams Rest In Peace.

In 1983 when I purchased my first full computer the Franklin 1000, it came with a one floppy 5 1/4 inch disc drive. It was the Apple II true clone.The Franklin Computer company was sued by Apple and in 1984 they stopped producing the Franklins. It is still in my garage. It will run any computer program made for the Apple II. In comparison to the present computers they were infants. 

That was 32 years ago!

 

johnyoudell

I think my first PC was a ZX Spectrum with all of 48 kilobytes of memory.

I first used a computer at University in the sixties. It was the size of a large room and needed specially reinforced foundations and a hermetically sealed space within which to function.  It employed either Algol or Fortran programming languages and we got to write tiny programmes to run on it.

PCs and the web are, without question, the advance which stand out above all others in my time.  It is my belief that they change the world and human society for the better.  But I guess that is something yet to be demonstrated.

RichColorado

RIP ROBIN WILLIAMS . . .

RichColorado

I worked on teletype machines that read punch cards or punch tape.

later i worked on reel to reel computers but they took a long time finding things.

later i learned Dos, 1 through seven. By 1984 i had a fake apple 🍎 FRANKLIN with 5 inch floppies. . . . They were a pain because they had no memory . . .

learned HTML 1, CSS to make web pages. Using notepad. . . HTML5 . . .

I stopped all of that for my enjoyment and knowledge . . .