The IBM Personal Computer on display in a window in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg. Actually – my window, back in the days when we still had our office in Oderberger Strasse 2. So next to the IBM you also see a mini DIY TV-Tower which can be downloaded from here.
Another photo of my old IBM PC together with the modem we used to connect to the internet, which basically did not exist back in the days.
Oh how I loved to play around with the contrast and brightness controls – and it was just so intuitive. Today no computer screen I know has extra buttons to control brightness and contrast – but back in the days, at least the screen of the IBM PC had this basic set of controls.
A ‘portrait’ of the IBM Personal Computer – the original PC – my first computer. What a beauty! Two floppy drives, one RGB screen – and loaded with a promising 64 kBytes of RAM. We also had an Acoustic Coupler which would connect me to the world whenever I liked – although there was not much to connect to.
A screenshot of the cockpit of MS Flight Simulator, approaching the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York. The graphics were of course quite poor – but the ‘plane’ and all the surroundings were at least moving in real time. So it really took time to fly the little Cessna from example from JFK Airport to Manhattan.
Back then the game designers could not add too much detail to the map – but at least the Twin Towers, the Brooklyn Bridge the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty were there to see and enjoy. And looking down you could see one white line resembling Broadway and another white line resembling Fith Avenue – and of course a large green rectangle that would resemble Central Park.
Being bored kids of the Eighties we would usually take off at JFK and fly some rounds above New York City. The usual Tour de New York would include a round around the Empire State Building, then flying down Broadway, trying to fly between the Twin Towers, taking a look at the Statue of Liberty and then back above the Hudson River, enjoying the view to the Brooklyn Bridge. Yay!
The MS Flight Simulator was one of the first rather complex games you could play on an IBM PC in the mid-eighties. Here’s a screenshot of the settings screen. You could basically choose any start position for your flight – but also details like Airspeed and Reality Mode which would make flying the Cessna a bit more difficult.
Turning on the old IBM PC the first thing you get to see is a system message, asking for the current date – in this case in German:
Datum ist: Di, 1-01-1980
Neues Datum eingeben: _
So that would mean the current date is January 1st, 1980 – please enter a new date… Poor machine. Put in simple words: back in those days most computers could not guess the correct date, let alone remember anything from the past, simply because they didn’t have a memory that would remember.