Robyn wrote about Merlin today, and other toys of yesterday. I have a Merlin. Yes, have. Red, just like the one on the site. Like someone else posted there, “Getting my Merlin for Christmas made me officially (if briefly) the coolest kid in the grade … Like someone else mentioned, I also remember covering the speaker with my pillow so my parents wouldn’t hear me playing with it in bed late at night!” I also played with mine so often that my parents bought me rechargeable batteries and the power cord! I thought about my Merlin and my Mr. Professor this summer when I was in North Dakota – I would always sleep in the upstairs bedroom, across the hall from my Grandparents, and I would read, play Merlin, listen to my Barry Manilow 8-tracks… “One Voice, singing in the darkness …” Or I would listen to WLS on the AM radio – out of Chicago, you could pick it up at night even in Sykeston, North Dakota. Yeah, I am serious … why are you laughing at me? *grin* I know, it’s pretty damn funny to think about, but it made me misty-eyed this summer, knowing that those times are gone forever.
What was your first computer? My Mom shelled out way too much money for a Radio Shack Tandy computer, probably when I was in 5th grade or so, for Christmas. I took my first programming classes on Saturdays in 4th grade – 1978-1979. We wrote code to make pictures on the screen, and I plotted out a rainbow. Yep, I was the bomb! Apple IIe computers, someone donated 2 of them to our school. But back to that Tandy, I think it had 4mb of RAM? Maybe 8? My mom *still* won’t confess to what she paid for it! It had a cassette recorder tape drive. Wow. And we used the TV as the monitor. What sucked was that the Commodore 64 came out that year too, and I really wished she would have gotten one of those instead – it would have been a lot more “bang for the buck”!
By the way, I have 2 old 486s sitting here, with enough power to run Win3.1 but not a lot more. Not a lot of RAM or a very big hard drive. One of them may actually have Win95 on it, not sure. Anyways, is there anything I can use them for besides bookends? They are gathering dust and I have no idea what to do with them! I guess I should look over at e-Bay and see if I should bother selling them there. Hmmm… Suggestions anyone?
5 replies on “Sigh, those were the days…”
I actually bought a Merlin on EBay a couple of years ago. It doesn’t have an instruction book, so I’m trying to piece together memories of how it works! If my mother hadn’t gotten rid of mine, I wouldn’t have felt nostalgic and paid $10 for the stupid thing! *grumble* 🙂
I’m still using my first PC. Well, sorta. I still have the case it came in, a mid-size tower. All the guts have been changed out. It was a 486 with maybe 16 mb ram and no CD drive, the year was 1992 I think. The day I got a CD-Rom the whole world was shiny and new.
Whoa! Flash from the past. I loved playing Merlin, too. My first computer? Apple ][+ at the age of 10.
Wow, I had a Merlin too! My kids didn’t beleive me when i was telling them about it. We also got a Vic 20. I think that was a little before the C64. We had one of those too.
Man, I’ve been a computer geek for a loooong time.
My first computer was a Texas Instruments — it was basically just a keyboard that you plugged into the television. I was the envy of the neighborhood with that. Then we got an Apple IIE with all the bells and whistles. I actually took that to college with me — typed my senior thesis on it and it took almost 9 hours to print dot-matrix! My grandparents bought a Commodore 64 back then, too, so I’d be able to play with both brands…that rocked…