I was in WalMart earlier and they had this one on sale. It looks like it has what I'm looking for. Once again, I appreciate your assistance & insight. http://www.walmart.com/ip/ASUS-Blac...ory-500GB-Hard-Drive-and-Windows-8.1/37332618
No, this was my first computer. No monitor, no mouse, no disks, in fact no direct interactivity at all. We wrote our programs ourselves in FORTRAN or COBOL. Typed them out one line at a time on the keypunch onto punched cards. Then we took stacks of cards to a card-reader which read them in batch move to a queue in the CPU which did them all one at a time, very fast of course. Then we waited a few hours until the program processed and spooled the output to a fanfold dot matrix impact printer or to a giant flatbed pen plotter. Make one mistake in one digit in one line of code and all you got was a single sheet that told you your program failed to compute. Then you had to find the bad card, find the error, repunch it and replace in exactly the right order and try again. Since then I've gone through CP/M computers in a giant rack, UNIX workstations, DOS computers, Mac and Windows computers. Trust me when I say that I appreciate the Macintosh computer for reasons unrelated to looking cool, although they certainly look cool and that is OK with me. I really, really appreciate the flash drive. It totally beats carrying around a dozen long boxes holding thousands of punched cards.
It looks to be more than adequate for what you want to use it for. $229 is a good price. I might get one of those myself. If you want a bigger screen you could hook it up to an external monitor while you are at home. I have a Toshiba with a cracked screen that I still use at home with a 21 inch flat screen monitor.
My first computer was a Packard Bell 386 with Windows 3.1. It had a 100 megabyte hard drive and 2 megabytes of ram. It was 6 months old and I bought it from a co-worker who had paid $1300 for it at Circuit City. Now one flash drive holds 16,000 times more data than that hard drive
My first tombstone Mac in 1985 had an 800 Kilobyte floppy drive and no hard disk at all. You had to be able to get the operating system, the application and your data on an 800K floppy. They wrote tighter code in those days . . .
I remember having to buy a unix shell account with an out of state provider, on dialup, just so I could telnet into LSUs mainframe.
Ditto all this......cannot go wrong with a Mac, costs a little more but when it's still going strong in 5 years you'll know where the extra money went.
That's not a terrible choice for the price. I'd prefer something with at least a dual core processor if you're going to stream any video (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) but for playing DVDs it should be fine. As you start to fill the HDD with video, photos, etc. it will get slow.
