No, let me revise that.  Those days were different, quite a bit different.  The picture to the right is of the very first “portable” computer I owned.  It weighed about 35 pounds, had an 8 inch (it might have been 6″) screen and two 71/4 (I think they were 71/4?) floppy drives (no hard drive).  And like the picture to the right, the letters on the screen were always a very bright yellow.  No other colors were supported, not even 16.

I ran an entire CPA firm using this computer including doing audit workpapers and taxes.  I used MS Word.  You put the Word floppy in the A drive and your data flobby in the B drive.  But Word back then was around 8 floppies as I remember so everytime you did something in the program that wasn’t on the floppy you happened to have in the drive you had to change it to the correct floppy to continue.  Of course those were the MS-Dos days, no windows, no icons.  You had to know that “c:/programs/microsoft/word/word.exe” (enter) was the only way to load the program.

This computer actually had a metal keyboard, the keys and all!  Can you imagine that.  Kind of like when they used to make cars out of metal.  It was called an IBM “luggable” since portable was a misnomer given its weight.  As I recall it cost me around $3500 used from an IBM employee.  They were upwards of $10,000 new.

Down the road I actually installed a hard drive in the computer by removing one of the floppy drive bays.  It was a 20mb hard drive!  Can you imagine that.  And I don’t exactly recall but I am sure the drive cost at least $700 or more, used!.  And this was when hard drives had a rubber band on the bottom of them, something like what you find in vacuum cleaners, that turned the drive arm and eventually wore out.  Years later I ended up putting it out by the road so that someone else could snag it for themselves.  It was gone in 5 minutes.  Didn’t have the heart to actually throw it away.  Now I wish I still had it as a momento.

I also owned a IBM series II laser printer.  It took two people to move the printer, cost me $2300 (it was a year old used unit).  My firm in three years ran 300,000 plus pieces of paper through that laser printer.  When I finally tossed it ten years later, it still worked fine.  It just took up too much space.

Wow, have we come a long way.  But if you compare those times to writing computer programs in my Fortran IV class in college using a punch card machine, it was quite a miracle to have my 35 pound ‘puter.  What are punch cards you say?  What is Fortran IV?  Aw forget it.