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Smokin' Joe wrote:"What's missing from our culture? A dream. When we had that frontier, that challenge, that great height to hope to reach, vicariously if not standing there, we were a greater, better people."Back when Kennedy proposed sending men to the moon, Americans still had those things you write about above -- along with a relative unity of culture with next-to-no "diversity" (with which we are plagued today).T'ain't so no mo'.
Do I worry about the debt? Debt makes the world go around. You are probably right about those first footsteps not being American. It'll be some multinational group (even corporate) that makes it happen. What I lament is all the money spent (created, borrowed, and spent) subsidizing the social problems that the Socialist (Democrat) Utopia was going to cure, making them all the more problems, instead of curing anything. We coulda, shoulda been there by now.
???The birth of the IBM PChttps://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_birth.html...On August 12, 1981, at a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom in New York City, Estridge announced the IBM Personal Computer with a price tag of $1,565. Two decades earlier, an IBM computer often cost as much as $9 million and required an air-conditioned quarter-acre of space and a staff of 60 people to keep it fully loaded with instructions. The new IBM PC could not only process information faster than those earlier machines but it could hook up to the home TV set, play games, process text and harbor more words than a fat cookbook.The $1,565 price bought a system unit, a keyboard and a color/graphics capability. Options included a display, a printer, two diskette drives, extra memory, communications, game adapter and application packages — including one for text processing. The development team referred to their creation as a mini-compact, at a mini-price, with IBM engineering under the hood.The system unit was powered by an Intel 8088 microprocessor operating at speeds measured in millionths of a second. It was the size of a portable typewriter and contained 40K of read-only memory and 16K of user memory, as well as a built-in speaker for generating music. Its five expansion slots could be used to connect such features as expanded memory, display and printing units and game "paddles." The unit also ran self-diagnostic checks....https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-1/
I had one of those, the PC-1 initially running cassette basic (used a cassette tape deck to save and retrieve BASIC programs).... I had both the monochrome and CGA adapters/monitors. I finally threw it in the trash earlier this year...
