Those early computers are pretty robust if you keep them in a safe, dry place. Up in the attic though, if the machine has been exposed for 20 years to dampness, wild swings of temperature, and insects and arachnids, then all bets are off.
Old floppy disks are usually all right — again, if you keep them indoors. I have Apple II disks from over 25 years ago that still work just fine. And I do have a few that lost data some point along the way, but these are a small minority. Yours, lingering in the attic, could very well be fried.
My first computer (I was twelve) was a Radio Shack TRS-80. Don’t remember any of the specs, but it didn’t have any kind of floppy drive. It used cassette tapes. All of the programs for it except one or two had to be entered myself from computer magazines. The only fun game I remember was some type of sci-fi text adventure. But I loved it.
My mom worked for IBM for well over 30 years, and she used her employee discount to buy us one of these when I was seven years old. It had very limited music-playing abilities, from what I recall.
It wasn’t my computer, but it was my first computer, in the sense of the first one that I was in the same room as, and that I wrote little programs for (as part of a university course). It was about 45 years ago, but the computer was already old then, as this description will tell you. Because it used valves, not transistors, it filled a large room, but its internal memory was 256 (32-bit) words, and its backing magnetic store was 8,192 words. In other words, as a computer, it can probably be outperformed by the average telephone or microwave oven these days, while a hand-held calculator would rung rings round it.
According to this the iPod Touch 2G runs at 533 MHz with a 133 MHz bus. It has 128 MB RAM. It has a screen resolution of 480×320 pixels at 163 ppi and weighs 4.05 oz. The storage is 32 GB/16 GB/ 8 GB.
That’s a pretty good benchmark. I’m not sure what the specs for my old Commodore 64 were, but it’s probably comical.
Several people here have forgotten the specs of their old computers, which is perfectly understandable. As you’d expect, all such information is lovingly, reverently cataloged in great detail on various websites. One such site is the one Loach and I both linked to (by an astonishing yet meaningless coincidence).
Another site that’s maybe a little more thorough is www.old-computers.com. Their Commodore 64 page is here.
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