A Surprise Telephone Call From China
2140 hours my cellular rang... It was Lin. After exchanging pleasantries he arrived at the crux of the call. A manufacturer is contemplating mass production of a hand-held meter referred to a...
Forum Discussion
MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
In my haste I ommited that the new scopes will be multi color storage. For general tinkering these critters may be useful. My Techtronix is a huge worry in Michoacan's humidity 600 meters from the crashing surf. I sort of put forth a wish for a scope meter the size of three Kindles Stacktd one atop another. A three hour battery life dual channels with carrying case for probes and accessories.
LA 1991. Comp USA. Compaq desktop. 25 mHz processor. 4MB RAM. 155 MB storage. 2,242 dollars plus tax which included a b&w monitor. Jeewheeze!!!
My dad's first computer was a early Radio Shack TSR 80 with 4KB of memory, and a cassette tape deck to store the data. He later upgraded it to 16KB of memory, and removed the case of the tape deck, moved a wire (soldered in into a new location) to double the tape drive speed, so that it became much more reliable at storing and putting back the data. This was between 1977 and 1978 (when he got a new car) I remember we took the older car to go pick it up in Palm Springs, the only Radio Shack store with one in stock. The local LA county stores where only allotted a few each month, and they all sold out quickly.
He upgraded to a Morrow Designs 64KB machine in 1982, one with dual 360 KB floppy drives (noisy!) and some programs ran from the floppies, because of limited RAM in the computer. HE also bought a 1200 baud modem at the same time. You placed the phone receiver on top of this modem, to transmit the beeps and squeaks. (think War Games 1984 movie). I remember thinking why not design the modem so that it plugs directly into the phone jack. But that came a few years later.
My first Mac (1987) was a used 128 KB model with only 1 400 KB floppy. I later bought another used 1 MB Mac with a 20 MB hard drive and 800 KB floppy.
One of my high school instructors had a "Portable" computer with a 4" screen, and size 4 font, could work from the 10 AH battery or normally ran from 120 volts. It was built into a aluminum case, think large photo storage case, I recall it being about 8" tall, and perhaps 20" square. The front came off to hold the keyboard and show the display behind it. Probably about 30 pounds? I forget the manufacture.
