A sunny day in Fall 1982, at lunch on the terrace, Kenji Hakuta shared the news that the IBM Personal Computer, introduced the previous year, was finally going on sale and he was on his way to buy one. I promptly said something like “me too” and after several others joined in, we set off.
Later that day (or maybe the next) we lugged our boxes into our studies and, with eventual help from the Center tech staff, connected a PC with 64 K of memory to a monitor, keyboard, and printer and began to learn Wordstar.
The next day (or maybe the day after) at lunch, Kenji announced that the PC’s 64 K of memory was not nearly enough but IBM was selling additional memory on separate 32-K chips! So. . . back we went to buy 6 of the chips plus a handy little tool for setting them into the computer’s “mother board.” Now flush with the maximum 256 K of memory, our scholarly output went full speed ahead for the rest of our year at the Center.
Lois Bloom, Class of 1982-83
October 21, 2014
Leave a Reply