Keeping Up and Looking Back Elsewhere
Apr. 30th, 2019 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt wasn’t that long after I started a Tumblr weblog that a feeling of difficulty when it came to putting together posts for here faded, but by that point I was on my way through a project of putting up a selection of old computer magazine covers. That a little while is spent every day skimming a PDF and coming up with a few words of summary does get me wondering about “making best use of my time,” though, and knowing “running out of magazines from some years into the new millennium at last” is still a long way off has begun to raise a ghost of fatigue even as I got wondering what to post here next.
However, while there’s a bit of a disconnect between loading the covers into my queue and them becoming available for whoever else may see them, I did realise today one particular cover from 1986 had just become available, the September 1986 issue of The Rainbow where the Tandy Color Computer 3 burst onto the scene at last. There’s some personal nostalgia here in that my family used one, in fact held onto it for years after Radio Shack had stopped selling them and whatever third-party sources of interesting new programs and games there were were fading away, which I fear to admit led to some feelings of frustration at the time for all that holding out meant that when my father finally shelled out thousands of dollars for a complete new system where he’d been able to use existing disk drives with a new CPU and add an RGB monitor for less of an all-at-once layout six years before we took the jump to a Macintosh LC II and not a generic PC box (for all the games that would have meant). I suppose there were thoughts afterwards that the “CoCo 3” had had adequate word processing, colour paint programs, and basic telecommunications, and anything a newer computer could do was just elaborations... CD-ROM might have started seeming a bit different, though. At the same time, though, I can also reflect that as young as I was in 1986 I’d already been able to use two previous generations of microcomputer and home computer.
However, while there’s a bit of a disconnect between loading the covers into my queue and them becoming available for whoever else may see them, I did realise today one particular cover from 1986 had just become available, the September 1986 issue of The Rainbow where the Tandy Color Computer 3 burst onto the scene at last. There’s some personal nostalgia here in that my family used one, in fact held onto it for years after Radio Shack had stopped selling them and whatever third-party sources of interesting new programs and games there were were fading away, which I fear to admit led to some feelings of frustration at the time for all that holding out meant that when my father finally shelled out thousands of dollars for a complete new system where he’d been able to use existing disk drives with a new CPU and add an RGB monitor for less of an all-at-once layout six years before we took the jump to a Macintosh LC II and not a generic PC box (for all the games that would have meant). I suppose there were thoughts afterwards that the “CoCo 3” had had adequate word processing, colour paint programs, and basic telecommunications, and anything a newer computer could do was just elaborations... CD-ROM might have started seeming a bit different, though. At the same time, though, I can also reflect that as young as I was in 1986 I’d already been able to use two previous generations of microcomputer and home computer.