I purchased my first computer when I came back to the United States. I was in the military, and my wife and I were stationed on Okinawa in May of 1981, returning to the U.S. in January of 1985. After settling into our new assignment at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, we went out and dropped about 2 grand on a Kaypro II. That was a huge chunk of cash for us. Looking like a portable sewing machine when it was closed, the heavy blue computer had a small green screen, 64K of ram and two 5 1/4 floppy drives. Running at 4.77 megahertz, the machine’s operating system was CPM 87.
My primary software was MicroPro Wordstar on a floppy.
In 1987, I replaced the Kaypro with a Zenith 100, which could use PC Dos, MS Dos, and IBM DOS. Still ran at 4.77, but the monitor was a big separate RGB monitor. I later added a 10 Meg hard drive, changed the processors, and added more RAM. 10 Meg, we thought, wow, would I ever use that much?
So much has changed in the decades since.
Michael Seidel, writer 