Comment on The Useful Personal Computer by Keith Palmer

I had been wondering when I might offer my family's pittance of personal experience with home microcomputing; it just might fit in between your two latest posts. My father bought a TRS-80 Model I in 1979; however, he'd been interested in amateur radio beforehand (he went straight from subscribing to Wayne Green's radio magazine to a charter subscription to 80 Microcomputing without stopping in on Kilobaud) and had some thoughts of applying a computer to that hobby. (After reading one of your earlier posts I asked him if he'd ever encountered interactive computing with a minicomputer; he repeated his only previous experience had been submitting programs to his university's batch-processing mainframe, which he had not enjoyed.) I do know we eventually had a word processor for our Model I; we also had a good number of games even before making a lateral move to Radio Shack's "home computer," the Color Computer.

As a proofreading note, I did notice the comment about Apple's sales picking up towards its IPO shows up twice. A smaller quibble is "if" being used where it seems "it" would do better when the Apple II Plus is mentioned just before the VisiCalc section begins.