Write about your first computer.
My first computer—or rather, my family’s first computer—was a Tandy 1000. I believe we got it sometime around 1985 or 1986.
It was a big monstrosity that took up a lot of room. This thing was not sleek or compact by any stretch of the imagination. It had two floppy drives and no hard drive at all. Every time you wanted to use it, you had to boot it up and load the operating system from a floppy disk. If you didn’t have the right disk handy, you weren’t doing much of anything.
I distinctly remember that Daddy paid extra to have 64K of memory added to it. Yes—K as in kilobytes. At the time, that was a big deal. It felt cutting-edge, like we were living in the future.
For perspective, my phone now has 128 gigabytes of storage. That kind of comparison makes me laugh and feel old at the same time.
Even with all its limitations, that Tandy 1000 opened the door to a whole new world. It was my first exposure to computers, technology, and the idea that machines could do more than just sit there. Looking back, it’s wild to think how far we’ve come—and how that clunky old computer was the starting point.
The Dee Zone 