Graduation Memories

It's a little on the late side, but it's still graduation season, especially for high school. I was sending off a graduation card to a second cousin (I must have fifty second cousins) yesterday, which led to an interesting memory . . . .

I netted about $800 from my graduation party back in 1987. But I spent that money well--I took it, along with about $200 of my savings, and bought a Tandy 1000EX computer for my use in college.

Yes, in 1987, a Tandy 1000EX PC-compatible computer, with color monitor, cost one thousand dollars at Radio Shak. This was a computer that didn't have an internal hard drive, or even a built-in 3.5 inch floppy drive. It ran on a primitive MS-DOS operating system, and I'm pretty sure it didn't have a mouse.

Just last summer, I bought a Mac PowerBook, with an 80 GB hard drive, etc., etc., for about $1300.

It's a bit of a cliche, I know, but the cost of computer technology has really, really come down. The difference between the Tandy 1000EX and the PowerBook on which I'm writing this . . . is huge. The Tandy did, however, get me through college, and I even wrote one year of graduate school papers on that thing. (Those papers, many of which I still have, are easy to pick out, to this day, because the Tandy printer printed in a non-standard font, with little, cramped characters.)