An integration of times in my life with what new technology was appearing.

Late 40’s | Decade of 50’s | Decade of 60’s | Decade of 70’s

Decade of 80’s | Decade of 90’s | The 2000’s | Present day

 

Gaining experience—1970’s

Love those hair styles of the Seventies and Eighties, notice the amount!

The decade of the Seventies brought us the Apple computer built in a garage by Brian Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is still around today as the head of Apple Computer.

 

 

You can purchase a microcomputer 8080 kit and assemble it for $700.00 then you can write your own programs.

 

 

 

Bill Gates drops out of college and begins to write a computer language, the beginning of DOS (Disk Operating System) language. He also forms a company known as Microsoft. Bill Gates is still around today as the head of Microsoft.

Jr. High, then Sr. High—1980’s

The Commodore 64 appeared during the eighties and can still be found at garage sales. Games and programs that ran on a personal computer
The Apple IIE appeared at the beginning of the eighties and could read programs stored on a 5 1/4 floppy. At first monitors were monocolor and showed black text on a green or orange screen. Soon video cards would allow sixteen colors to be shown on the monitor.
In 1984 the Macintosh featured a mouse, 3 1/2 floppy drive and its own operating system, something that featured a graphical user’s interface. This featured icons on the screen that could be dragged to different file locations rather than writing command line instructions. The era of desktop published arrived with the teaming of the Mac, laser printers and soon color lasers capable of printing resolutions of 300DPI and more with the advent of the Postscript printer language and Postscript fonts, and Adobe pageMaker software that allowed you design pages with text and graphics.

More complex programs required that computers be able to store the code in memory known as RAM chips so the applications could run faster.Pictured at the left are two four megabyte memory chips.

I purchased my first computer in 1985 and a one megabyte chip cost $150.00 and a 20 megabyte external hard drive ran $750.00 (yes, mega byte not Gigabyte).
In 1985 the CD-Rom was invented by Phillips and marketed by Sony Corp. and music was never to be the same.

 

High School—Late 1980’s

My older daughter accused me of following her to the high school when I became a math/computer teacher at the high school during her freshman year. That year my computer classroom consisted of four Apple IIe's and no printer. When I retired after thirty-five years of teaching, the last fourteen at the high school, my first computer classes were: Basic Computers, Computer Science.