What would we do without computers?

I bought my first computer in 1984, when we were living in Searcy, Ark., and I was pastor of Grace United Methodist Church there.

I obtained it through Montgomery Ward. That was back in the days when Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck were still big in the mail-order business, and both had numerous brick-and-mortar stores. It is still astonishing to me that the mail-order business faded back in those days, Montgomery Ward meandered over into other lines of business, and Sears struggled on, trying to stay afloat over the years, while online buying has blossomed via Ebay, Amazon and retailers like Walmart. Online buying still seems to be growing, all possible because computers are all over the place in our society today.

Online buying was not possible with my first computer, which was a Commodore 64. I actually bought a modem with it, but never set it up and never used it at all as long as I had that machine. In those days there was still no Internet, no World Wide Web, no Facebook, no Instagram. There were a few networks that could be connected to, like some university systems, but most of us had never thought about doing stuff that called for connectivity such as is commonly available today.

Computers from the 1950s to the 1970s were mostly huge machines devoted to government work, university work or big business work. The computers in those days tended to fill rooms, with all their wiring, their huge collections of glass electronic tubes, their massive tape drives for storage, plus the air conditioning required to keep the whole apparatus cool. Some electronic kits were available to individual computing enthusiasts who might build a unit they could use at home, but at first there were no programming languages available to simplify the programming of software; machine programming was necessary, and extensive and detailed knowledge was required to do such programming.

Before I bought my Commodore 64, I had been going to Intro to Computing classes offered by teachers at Searcy High School. In those days, such training usually involved becoming able to handle the BASIC Computer Programming Language. The high school was using TRS-80 computers, each outfitted with two 5¼-inch floppy disks for storage. There was no printer ready at hand. If something was to be printed, we had to take the floppy disk to a room computer that was attached to a printer, and print our program or document there.

I spent about $800 on my Commodore outfit, which included the computer which was installed under the keyboard unit, a tape drive, a 5¼-inch floppy drive, and a dot-matrix printer. Oh, and that modem I never used. And — I also bought a small black and white TV to serve as my computer monitor. Commodore offered a color monitor, but that was expensive, costing several hundred dollars. At that time the Commodore commonly gave you more features for the price. You had graphics capability, so you could have pictures and graphic designs on screen, and you also got a rather capable sound card with music capabilities.

These features were not yet readily available and not yet economically available on the IBM computers. Back then an IBM computer might cost nearly $3,000, and even with that it didn’t offer sound or graphics. Those were add-ons at an increased price.

For a time, the Commodore Vic-20s and Commodore 64s were all the rage for home use and for schools.

This would change as many IBM-compatible machines began to be produced by company after company and the prices became competitive. Some people bought computers for the purpose of playing games. Others were interested in word processing, financial record keeping, maintaining mailing lists and addresses and other contact information, or even keeping recipes for ready access in the kitchen. Typically, early home computers had no mouse, no