NICHOLS: Computer changes

hard drive, no color monitor, no CD or DVD drive, no thumb drives or any such things. One or two 5¼-inch floppy disk drives were the usual form of storage, since by the mid-1980s the old slow tape-drive units were fading away.

I was very interested in computer programming in those early days, including development of software for writing documents and keeping financial records. I never bought any software for my Commodore 64. I wrote all the software I used, using the Commodore BASIC language which was built into the computer as part of its operating system. I even got into Commodore machine level programming for a time.

After Commodore faded from the market and I switched over to the IBMcompatible computers, I began to buy some software, especially software for office use, since I was doing a lot of writing, keeping financial records, and maintaining numerous mailing lists that called for address labeling and so on. I have maintained an interest in working out spreadsheet software for keeping financial records, and also working out database record systems.

Well, it appears I have gone on and on about getting started with computers. I want to go on farther to talk about how computing has changed over the years, and computers have changed how we do things in ways that would hardly have been imaginable back in the 1980s.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, and a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by email at joe369@century tel.net, or call 621-1621.