Me and My Eagle

"Mine, I tell you!  Mine mine mine mine mine!"

In 1982, I bought my first computer, after years of doing everything on a typewriter with correction fluid and cut-and-paste (the old-fashioned way: scissors and glue).  It wasn't a hasty decision; a close friend had owned an Apple IIe for years, and kept urging me to make life easier for myself.  Another, older and closer friend had put together one of the first Altairs from a kit with a soldering iron.

So I was ready to buy a computer, but which one should I buy?  Not an Apple; despite Ed's urging, I had seen how expensive Apple computers were, compared with all the CP/M computers on the market.  Nor did I want my desk to be covered with little square boxes tied together with ribbon cables, half of which had to be plugged in separately.  Furthermore, it wasn't easy to hook up a hard disk to an Apple; Ed's had one, but I had seen what Herculean efforts on his part it had taken to make that work.

Another possibility was the new IBM PC.  But PCs were also more expensive than CP/M computers, held less on their floppy disks, and couldn't hook up hard disks, either.  Furthermore, where CP/M computers had a wealth of software available for them, the only software for PCs was the few packages that had been ported from CP/M; a mere handful compared with the hundreds of titles available for the CP/M operating system.

By chance, the computer store Ed took me to sold Eagle computers as well as PCs and Apples.  Here was a sleek machine with beveled edges in a plastic case, unlike the square metal boxes of the IBM PC and the Apple IIe peripherals.  Furthermore, it was all in one piece, again unlike the IBM and Apple computers.  And it ran CP/M, which meant it would run any software on the market, except the stuff specifically written for Apples.

But the greatest selling point was that it came in a variety of models.  My choice quickly came down to the Eagle III, with two 782-kilobyte floppy-disk drives (most computers put between 360k to 380k on a floppy), and the Eagle IV, with a 10-megabyte hard disk and one 782k floppy-disk drive.  Unfortunately, the Eagle IV cost $1000 more than the Eagle III (and the Eagle V, with its 32-mb hard disk, was completely out of the question).  I figured that with two 782k floppies I had over a megabyte of storage, and it saved me a big hunk of money.  We loaded the computer, the printer, the software and the manuals into the car, and I was the proud owner of my own computer.  And I never regretted that decision.

A smug Eagle owner and his indulgent wife

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