I first started working on computers back in 1982, using DOS 2.0. I bought my first PC in the spring of 1984. It was a "portable" Panasonic with a small black and green (text only) screen and a built-in thermal printer. It was called portable, because it was like a small suitcase and weighed about 26 pounds! There was no hard drive, only two floppy drives using 5 1/4" floppies.
The operating system was on one, work was done on the other. The RAM was, as I recall, 640kB. It was state of the art back then and cost about $2,500.
I worked on it at home and carried it to the office. In the Dranetz sales department it was the only PC! A couple of engineers had PC's, one was an Atari, the other a Commodore. Then I advanced to a Zenith portable with backlit LCD screen with limited graphical capability and a hard drive, about 5MB - a great improvement. The sales department had now acquired a couple of IBM -AT's. Then in 1989 I acquired a Gateway with color mointor and OS2 system. It also included Windogs 3.1, which I hardly used, the OS2 system was so superior. But Gateway supplied the Windows OS because, as their saleamn informed me, their contract with Microsoft prohibited then from shipping computers without Windows.
This was when Microsoft effectively started their market domination, because PC manufacturers, in order to be able to buy Windows, were not permitted to use any other OS. Shortly after that software manufacturers effectively ceased providing new versions for any other OS. Consequently, when I wanted to upgrade my Wordperfect and Paradox software, no other version was availble. Consequently my next computer, bought in 1995, came with Windows 95 installed. The only other choice was Macintosh, but there was no other software available for Macintosh except that produced by, or for Apple.
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