Nostalgia

I’m not super interested in FreeDOS, but did enjoy this video from Jim Hall since I lived through all this, and was working in IT (well, ‘data processing’ actually) during the introduction of the IBM PC.

My first DOS was 2.11, but spent a lot more time on 3.12, and later 4.01. Windows wasn’t really ready for anyone until 3.1 which is when I dived in there. I seem to remember purchasing a PC with a whole megabyte of RAM in anticipation!

Jim mentions AsEasyAs in the video, which was a ‘shareware’ spreadsheet I used extensively at home (work had Lotus 123 – AsEasyAs was a play on that name).

It couldn’t conceivably serve any useful purpose, but I do have a small hankering to find the executables on old drives and see if I can set up my Clipper environment and compile some of my first commercial software.

I do wish I had a few screenshots from over the years – you never know what you’re going to enjoy looking back on. For example, I’ve spent hundreds of hours over the last few years in various versions of the WordPress editor and never thought to record that.