October 2, 2022 – Millarville, Alberta
Storage space is plentiful at our place – the problem with having ample storage is, stuff gets stored.
Like this 1986 Sharp PC-4500 computer, which I have had tucked away for three and a half decades.
I hesitate to call it a laptop. The computer would fit on your lap, and it has a folding handle to make it look like you could carry it, but it is not designed to be portable. The computer itself weighs about twelve pounds. The charging converter is a brick with electrical cords, and the not-so-floppy software discs add complexity. Throw in a dot matrix printer with a long 25-pin cable and you better be sitting near a load-bearing wall, certainly not on an airplane.
The Sharp PC doesn’t have a hard drive. It is a rudimentary word processor with some temporary data memory which is transferred to floppy disks for long-term storage. The PC-4500 has a tiny monochromatic screen, no graphics capability, and ten Function keys that don’t function.
Internet, e-mail, and social networking were still the stuff of science fiction in 1986. Amazon was a river, and the only mouse involved is one I chased out from behind the storage container.
The computer came with an accounting program called First Choice which I integrated into my fledgling business. Before the Sharp PC, I was using a pencil and a ledger book to keep track of finances. I remember being impressed by the simplicity of maintaining computerized ledgers and the wonders of digital word processing. The PC-4500 balanced my books and corrected my spelling. Life was good!
The Sharp PC isn’t the only computer memorabilia I have in storage. My first computer was replaced by this 386 PC. The 386 hardware is gone but we still use the box for storing Christmas decorations.
I dusted off the Sharp computer, dragged it up to the house, and plugged it in. I felt a surge of nostalgia as it clunked to life. The DOS operating system loaded from a disk and I watched in amazement as computer code scrolled across the ancient screen, behind a blinking cursor. The old computer might still be able to do what it used to, but I would have to un-learn what little technical know-how I currently possess, to make it work. I was not willing to take the risk, so I shut it down.
I re-packed the computer and decided to send it back to storage for another 35 years; it might be of interest to another generation.
Before I closed the carton, I browsed through the software operating manual, which offered these gems:
“Sharp PC-4500 uses a DOS operating system (rhymes with “moss”)”
Rediscovering the Sharp PC took me back to a better time, …
… when kerchunking was normal.
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