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My First Computer

I have fond memories of my first computer, a KayPro II. Purchased in 1985 for $1800; it had 64kb of memory, CPM OS, sported two 5 1/4 floppy drives, and a 9in monochrome amber text screen.  It came with Wordstar for word processing and several other programs.  To run a program you had to put the program floppy disk in one drive while saving work to the other drive since there was no hard drive.  When the drives engaged they made a loud mechanical sound.

At The Kaypro 1986 For those of us who grew up using typewriters, even this simple machine was a huge breakthrough.  You could turn out perfect documents (well as perfect as dot matrix printers could make them!), do things like find and replace words, among many other time saving tasks impossible with a typewriter.  To make bold or italics text, you would have to insert formatting tags much like you do with html today. 
I still have floppy disks with documents I’d written on them, unfortunately I have no way to read them since Kaypro went bust in the late 80’s and I gave my KayPro to a local thrift store.

Find Out More About Kaypro Computers
Read A Review From Byte Magazine 1983
Obsolete Computer Museum
Old Computers.com they are currently working on a personal computer timeline