@ -166,7 +166,13 @@ Anyway, that Wednesday afternoon experience was a real game changer for me. It w
This was the golden age for my generation for computers. These days you can buy a computer magazine and it has a CD or DVD with programs for you to try out. (Although I haven't been in a bookstore since the pandemic started, so that may have changed.) In the early 80s, computer magazines had programs \textit{printed} in them, so if you wanted to try out a program, you had to very laboriously type it in, and then spend the rest of the evening debugging it before you actually got to spend the last 15 minutes before bedtime playing around with it.
This was the golden age for my generation for computers. These days you can buy a computer magazine and it has a CD or DVD with programs for you to try out. (Although I haven't been in a bookstore since the pandemic started, so that may have changed.) In the early 80s, computer magazines had programs \textit{printed} in them, so if you wanted to try out a program, you had to very laboriously type it in, and then spend the rest of the evening debugging it before you actually got to spend the last 15 minutes before bedtime playing around with it.
Some of the TRS-80s did have disk drives. But these were 5.25" floppy drives, not the 3.5" floppies in the hard plastic case. (Heck, we even had a CP/M machine with an 8" floppy drive, if I remember correctly.)
Some of the TRS-80s did have disk drives. But these were 5.25" floppy drives, not the 3.5" floppies in the hard plastic case. (Heck, we even had a CP/M machine with an 8" floppy drive, if I remember correctly.) You had to load TRS-DOS from a TRS-DOS disk, and then swap it out for a disk that you were going to load a program from or save your work to. I actually remember thinking at one point that if you had a computer with six or eight of these drives stacked up, you would never have to swap out a floppy\footnote{The name of my next band.}. You could just start it up and go and never have to worry about it.
Needless to say, when I found out about hard disk drives, my mind was blown.
And yes, in the early days, computers did not have a hard disk drive. I am writing this on a fairly ancient Asus laptop with 8GB of RAM and an 3rd generation Intel i5 chip in it. I bought it used, and the minute I got it, I wiped the drive, and installed Ubuntu. That made it speedy, at least a lot faster than it was running Windows. But a while ago I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 20.04, and I removed the hard drive and replaced it with a two terabyte\footnote{Did I \textit{need} 2 TB? No, I did not. But reader, I got an excellent deal on it.} SSD (solid state drive). This sucker \textit{moves}.
Twelve year old me's head probably would have exploded.