I remember when this issue of Popular Electronics came in the mail. I wanted one, but couldn't afford it at the time (or at least, I couldn't justify spending the money on what was essentially a toy). As this article notes, it first became publicly available thirty-two years ago today.

Here in Albuquerque at the Museum of Natural History and Science, they are having an exhibit called "STARTUP: Albuquerque and the Personal Computer Revolution." I haven't been yet but plan to go.

I remember putting together the 8800a, which was sent as a subscription kit: every month you got more parts you soldered together. I eventually needed some help getting it to work. The 4k memory card was extra, and another kit, but mine worked the first time! (Later used it in a SOL-80 to bring it up to 20k.) The Good O'l Days™— they were terrible. But I do miss the blinky lights where you could tell what the computer was doing by their behavior.

I still have an 8 k ram card, a 256 x 256 line "high resolution graphics card", and 8080 cpu, PROM/RAM cards, a Z80 card and many other S-100 cards.

I just donated my S-100 bus computer (A Vector Graphics Inc. 3100) system to the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

The first Microcomputer game I played was "Hammarubi" which was the great great great great grandaddy of the SIMS. I still have a functioning ST-506 Hard drive with a CP/M operating system.

Ahh those were the days.

We had a lot of fun starting the revoluion.

Thanks to Moore's Law, 40-year olds now can tell grandfather stories. In fact, even 35-year olds can.

The above made me think about a similar conversation I was having with my 9-year-old daughter. Then I asked her to imagine the kinds of things she would be saying to her children, like, "Back when I was a kid we had flat-screen monitors and we had to push around a thing called a 'mouse'. Not like you kids today with your meta-reality matrix generators."

Here is a link to the start of my virtual museum of my Vector Graphic Inc. S-100 Cards.

http://web.mac.com/wingod/iWeb/Site/Library.html

Merry Christmas!