so, when i was 8-9 or so—this would've been 1993-1994—we got our first home computer. however, bc broke single mom, it was not the latest and greatest. it was a secondhand Tandy of some kind, with a monochrome monitor (yellow on black). there was no mouse, and no internet connection.
it was graphical, with a desktop consisting of various applications in a sort of grid layout. we mostly used the text editor to write stories (printed out on a dot-matrix printer, natch), but there was also a game of hangman, a music application (I distinctly remember a delightfully screechy MIDI version of Pachelbel's Canon in D), and various businessy things like a contact manager and a database application that we had no use for.
anyway, i recently went on a deep dive to figure out what the operating system was, and it was some version of Tandy DeskMate: http://toastytech.com/guis/indexdm.html https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-deskmate/deskmate-3x
(the music application is only mentioned in the manual for Personal DeskMate2, and hangman in DeskMate 3. the drawing application that looks closest to what I remember is the v2 one. and, like I said, it was a monochrome monitor so things looked a little different than in the screenshots I've found online. I also remember a password-protected "diary" application, but maybe I'm misremembering and it was on a later computer.)
#computeing
nev /
npub19v…upvrs
2025-02-27 19:56:45
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wss://relay.mostr.pubPublished at
2025-02-27 19:56:45Event JSON
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"content": "so, when i was 8-9 or so—this would've been 1993-1994—we got our first home computer. however, bc broke single mom, it was not the latest and greatest. it was a secondhand Tandy of some kind, with a monochrome monitor (yellow on black). there was no mouse, and no internet connection. \n\nit was graphical, with a desktop consisting of various applications in a sort of grid layout. we mostly used the text editor to write stories (printed out on a dot-matrix printer, natch), but there was also a game of hangman, a music application (I distinctly remember a delightfully screechy MIDI version of Pachelbel's Canon in D), and various businessy things like a contact manager and a database application that we had no use for.\n\nanyway, i recently went on a deep dive to figure out what the operating system was, and it was some version of Tandy DeskMate: http://toastytech.com/guis/indexdm.html https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-deskmate/deskmate-3x\n\n(the music application is only mentioned in the manual for Personal DeskMate2, and hangman in DeskMate 3. the drawing application that looks closest to what I remember is the v2 one. and, like I said, it was a monochrome monitor so things looked a little different than in the screenshots I've found online. I also remember a password-protected \"diary\" application, but maybe I'm misremembering and it was on a later computer.)\n\n#computeing",
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