1979

Home Computer

ADM-3A computer terminal

I upgraded the memory in my IMSAI computer to 32 KB (yes that is Kilo Bytes) and a dual 8-inch floppy disk which stored 128K per disk. For the first time I was able to write things using the basic text editor that was part of the CP/M operating system and store the text files on floppy disk.   The first “word processing” program Wordstar, which ran on the CP/M operating system that I was running, had just come out in June but cost $495 ($2,349 today) which was half as much as my original IMSAI computer, I would get a bootleg copy of it from a friend the following year. I had bought a small dot matrix printer and just using the basic text editor typed up and printed the following.

Note:  “Type” is a CPM command and “NIGHTFLY.PME” is the filename stored on the 8-inch floppy disk.  There was no standard for suffixes at the time so “.PME” was my suffix for poem.

Journal Entry
September 7, 1979
Night Fly