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http://www.vintage-computer.com/sharppc1251.shtml
Dreadful in the extreme.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=987
Pretty bad as well, since it is alphabetically arranged.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=560
This is quite possibly the worst color combination in human history.

But in terms of usability, the Atari 400 was by far the worst. I had one and the lack of ANY feedback as well as the fact that speeds of typing over 5wpm were impossible rendered it the single hardest computer to EVER type on.

Oh - and the delete key didn't have a repeat function. And they annoying fake click was like some water torture. click click click click click click click.(souded a lot like a beep actually). Imagine your PC speaker's startup beep at half volume every time you press a key.

It wasn't the keyboard itself so much as the entire package - AND that the Atari 800's keyboard was one of the best at the time. The panalty yo paid for buying a 400 over an 800 was even more severe than the PC Jr was compared to the PC.

From the article: "Sinclair developed a scheme of assigning multiple BASIC keyword commands for each key, so users would have to press only one key (such as P for "PRINT") instead of typing out the entire command. Using the keyboard to type something that wasn't a BASIC command, however, turned out to be an exercise in frustration. Only masochists had any fun attempting word processing on the Timex Sinclair 1000."

I'm tired of this bashing of the Sinclar-family keyboards! Speaking as somebody who used one for over five years, I tell you that the multi-function keyboard was very efficient, at least for typing BASIC programs of course. Remember that all cheap 8-bit computers had to cut fabrication costs in items like cases, keyboards, power supplies etc; NONE of these machines had a decently built keyboard. With this economic constraint in mind, Sinclair solved two important problem: maximising typing speed for typical usage, and reducing wear-out of cheap keyboard components.

As for common text input, no problem because the ROM input routine was modal. The cursor would be toggled between several modes - it was a "K" for the main BASIC keywords or symbols, "E" for extended ones, "G" for graphics, "L" for letters, "C" for capitals and "?" to flag syntax errors in BASIC lines (an advanced feature, most machines would accept any input and only issue syntax error messages when you tried to run the program!). So you could type in any mode without continuous usage of SHIFT or other mode-changing keys. Another nicety was the embedded color-code input, made in "E" mode IIRC. Once you memorized the several functions assigned to each key, and got used to the modal system, you could type VERY fast compared to any other micro that also had low-wquality keyboards but required typing I,N,P,U,T,SPACE for INPUT and so on. (The Sinclair editor didn't require spaces; its BASIC pretty-printer inserted spaces as necessary... and these spaces didn't consume memory, like it happened with other micros, so people would resort to cryptic space-less coding like "FORX=0TO10:PRINTX:NEXTX", while Sinclair users very very porud that their BASIC listings were always readable with canonical spacing.)

P.S.: The model I used was a Brazilian TK-95, a Spectrum 48 clone that had a better keyboard, see photo and article here. This keyboard was among the best in this class of computers, I used it for 5+ years without any key stopping to work... even though I didn't program much in BASIC, in the end of the first year I was already hacking only in Z80 so I had to type stuff letter by letter. The keyboard was good enough for this and word processing - similar to the C64, but sans stupid layout problems. (I concede that the original rubber keyboard was bad for fast non-BASIC typing, like word processing.)

I have to say, it really is a super-computer, great for learning on.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=602
(Link might not work so look at google cached copy from following URL)
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:HkrZrUYOXy8J:www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp%3Fc%3D602+old+computers+hektor&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1

Okay, not the EXACT same machine, but they sound the same.

This is why it's destructive to classify people based on some perceived innate intelligence or lack thereof.

I couldn't possibly agree more. My parents, and most of the adults in my life significant to my formative years, never made any assumptions regarding what I was or wasn't capable of. They did encourage me to view any challenge as a game, and rewarded me with a lot of positive support when I figured something out. I grew up in the 80's on PBS, with shows like Nova that sparked tons of curiosity about the world around me. My parents encouraged me to read as much as possible, and talked to me regularly about what I had read. They never said, "Oh, that book is a little ahead of you right now" or other such nonsense. I was never told I couldn't do something, so I wound up able to do a lot more than most of my peers at times. My father gave me an AT&T PC-6300 as kid, with a DOS command reference, GW-BASIC programmer's guide, and C compiler/programmer's guide. He told me if I wanted more software, I could just learn how to write it myself, so I did :). A couple of years later, I discovered the world of BBSes and things evolved rather exponentially from there.

In my opinion, a parent's role in fostering a thirst for knowledge and a creative outlook on life cannot be stressed enough. Now I'm "all grown up" and married, trying for a child of my own. I sincerely hope to be at least half the positive influence my parents were when it comes to learning and exploration of the amazing universe we live in.

The last thing this comment should be moderated is Offtopic. This is one of the more insightful comments you'll find.

My first computer was an IMSAI 8080. I built it from the kit, as well as the Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal I connected to it. This was in 1976, and I, too, miss those days. While we can do some cool stuff today with 3-D graphics, multithreaded and multiprocessing operating systems, networks, etc., there was still something about building everything from scratch.

I'm with Woz on this one.

Actually, quite a few computers in the late 70s and early 80s had cassette tape drives built in. I remember the PET, of course. There were some ZX Spectrum-based machines (in the post-Sinclair life-cycle) and I remember a TRS-80 model I clone made by Dismac (I am from Brazil) that had one next to its keyboard.

A trip to http://www.old-computers.com/ should turn up a lot of them.

Here's a link to a page about these amazing old laptops. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =233

I still fire it up and poke around in Microsoft BASIC every so often. Unfortunately, I no longer have a printer that accepts a parallel connection, and I never bothered to pick up a tape drive for it, so it's no longer very useful to me any more, but it's still a lot of fun.

DAMN YOU! I would have predicted this first, but I predicted that someone would post it before me. Apple would be idiotic not to do this. BUT Apple has been known to drop the ball. Color Newton Message Pad? Message Pad Mini ( Palm ). Have you seen the iWalk demo?

http://www.crackman.de/newtenlightment/movies/iwal k/sayhello.mov

Apples Cheap Plastic(^tm) OS X interface is NOT built for touch screen, but the HP150s interface was.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/doc.asp?c=139

Kinda gives me goosebumps, about Apple going a way-o-back to 1983.

If you really want an ARM notebook, you could get an Acorn A4 http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =31 from ebay. Perhaps not the most powerful computer you will ever use, based around an ARM3 running at a blistering 24MHz, but not bad for a 16 year old model!

Old technology pwns!

Learn from the past a bit now that we're on the subject.

that IBM built based on the M68K, and, yes, it cost about twice as much, as I recall.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?s t=1&c=623

Nutria already gave some examples, but I've got more for you.

Tandy 1000, HP's 95LX (and 200LX) palmtop PC with DOS (the 200 had MS-DOS 5.0), the HP 1000CX DOS palmtop, some of the early IBM Aptivas, the HP model 110 line of desktops, the rather famous GRiDLite (my GRiD laptops all loaded DOS from hardrive -- always wanted a GRiDLite too though), the IBM EduQuest Model 30 and Model 40 (I have a few model 40s, but only one still boots -- into OS/2 Warp because I'm not using the on-chip DOS), the Sharp PC-5000 portable, the IBM PCJr, certain IBM PS/1 machines, the Tandy 2500 XL, and some others.

Also, Franklin, Commodore, TI, and Atari had systems with some form of OS in the ROM. Some Franklin systems had something called F-DOS in ROM which I think was mostly a ripoff of AppleDOS.

Notice that these examples are not modern hacks to try it out at home, but all commercially shipped systems from the late 1970s to early 1990s.

AMD and Intel still have documentation on DOS in ROM for embedded systems on their websites, and AMD even recommends Datalight's solution.

Back in the day (round about 1-2-3 v1.0a), MS-DOS ran on a multitude of machines, not all of which were fully IBM PC compatible. (Apricot Xen being one example). Standard magazine reviews would try to run 1-2-3 (and MS Flight Simulator, IIRC), to see how compatible they were.

The problem with 1-2-3, even on full IBM PC-compatibles, was that they used some pretty low level tricks to get it to run remotely fast, and these tricks often used memory addresses that MS would then try and use in a later version of DOS, which given DOS loaded first, would break 1-2-3.

By 1-2-3 v2.2, the problems had been mostly eradicated; by 1-2-3 v3, Lotus had gone from coding in Assembler to writing it in a higher level language (C, I think), which bumped up the executable size from ~400k to ~2Mb

8Ghz? that's easy. All you need is 4.77Ghz processor, and then you press the turbo button

I concur. This is a good list of the dawn of personal computing. I disagree with other posters about vintage mainframes and minicomputers (such as PDP/11) since they were not widely accessible. For those system not available, emulators are a good choice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator
http://www.emulator-zone.com/

These sites have good descriptions of the history and the classics (my favorites at top):
http://oldcomputers.net/
http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
http://www.vintage-computer.com/
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/
http://www.computercloset.org/
http://www.sinasohn.com/clascomp/

It is important to keep the history alive. Although for us old timers, it just seems like yesterday, many youngsters do not realize the history of their shiny new laptops, etc.

I wouldn't be... I've still got my boxed set of Dos 3.2 in my desk drawer at work and also have an old twin floppy "laptop" with cga screen that runs DRDOS GEM 2 just to prove to folks you don't require wizzbang hardware to run a gui on... here's the beasty...

This Sinclair* machine was released in 1984:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?s t=1&c=275

* I think Sinclair was sold under the "Timex" brand in the USA.

Its lovely little chiclets taught me to touch-type, its sucky Basic pushed me towards assembly, and its lack of games gave me all the inspiration I needed to write my own software .. and .. most important of all .. the Atmos is still one of the nicest looking machines, ever!


I had an MSX for a while (Yamaha), but only for the superlative MIDI support .. now *that* was total integration .. ;)

I'm not sure it was a Vector Graphic, but something like that in the 1980s. I remember that the computer was up on a stage and there was some applause or something and a man who said "What a mind" and then a woman says "what a body." Hilarious at the time, no doubt ultra-camp now. Probably the Vector 4

From around 1983:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =499

(small 2nd screen above the keyboard, in case it isn't obvious)

I always thought that it was a daft idea then...

And don't forget dear old SoftSide. I remember waiting for each issue, eagerly awaiting new stuff to type into my Atari 400 (always a pain because most programs were for TRS-80's or Apple's, so some tweaking was usually required to get the programs to run).

-- Please forgive the poor spelling and typos. I'm typing on a small keyboard and have limited editing here.

Lemme guess, it's a trash-80 model 100

--I worked for them 23 years ago. They were crappy employers back then. You're right, nothing has changed.

The Acorn Electron was a bulky piece of kit, so controlling the spin of such unwieldy moulded plastic is a great achievement. I wonder if they did it with the Plus 1 or Plus 3 expansions attached ...

It does beg the question of why they were spinning it in the first place, rather than playing Chuckie Egg, but the minds of scientists are quite different from yours or mine, and we should just sit back and applaud the achievement.

> The term Personal Computer just didn't exist prior to IBMs release
> of that god awful expensive piece of junk.

Apple II ad from 1977

Nothing beat my Mattel Aquarius and my catridge of Utopia, aka Civ 5.

I seem to remember playing Doom on a SGI Indy back when... I can't remember if that was before or after it was available for Linux though. Is there anything Doom doesn't run on nowadays ? (apart from my old Sharp PC-1403 I found this week end, although you never know)

Like one of these?

http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?s t=1&c=31
http://www.tribbeck.com/computers/stork/
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/NC.html#NewsPAD
http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000090050610/

Any of these could use solid state storage, and the OS is always in ROM. The last machine in that list was designed with flash storage in mind.

I had the opportunity to hold and use a NewsPad in 1996 at a computer show, and it was well ahead of its time. TFT touchscreen, camera, voice recognition, and all in a small package the size of current day "tablet PCs". Running off an ARM, too!

I remember those, some were made by osborne and some were made by compac; I think they had 5.5 inch CRT's and the keyboard doubled as the cover.

That's like the first computer I had to work on (my dad's computer, really, but anway): the Kaypro 2. Ah, the memories... It was a CP/M machine, and had this strange version of BASIC called "MBASIC" (the m was the first letter of the company that made is... nowadays more commonly referred to as MS :) ). I remember all the "BASIC games" books we had, and I remember keying in all the program listings from the books and then reveling in the glory of ASCII-games :)

My parents still used their Kaypro 2 to print the labels for their Christmas cards up until a few years ago when my Dad couldn't find the disk the labels were saved on or something like that. The Kaypro is still working... boots up in like 2 seconds to :P

Multics running on an Apple ][, now that would be something to brag about!

I learned to program in BASIC on a North Star Horizon. It was a Z-80 box. The hi-lite was North Star Basic, which the machine booted into directly. Possibly the first built-in support for 5 1/4" floppy disks, at a time when Apple was limited to audio cassette tape.

IMSAI had some nice looking equipment, with lots of toggle switches. Always wanted one of those, because it LOOKED like a computer. But that beautiful hardwood case on the Horizon, nothing like it today unless you build it yourself.

who can forget the precursor to the BBC micro, the Timex Sinclair Z80?

No, the Sinclair ZX80 was the precursor to the ZX81 and ultimately the Sinclair Spectrum. The BBC Microcomputer was built by Acorn Computer, who were rivals of Sinclair Research in the competition for the BBC contract, and won because of clearly superior engineering. This rivalry became something of a personality clash between the founders of the two Cambridge-based companies: I remember reading reports of an altercation in a Cambridge pub or restaurant on New Years Eve 1982 or 83 when Sir Clive Sinclair ran into Acorn's Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser and reportedly got a little hot under the collar (although all parties refused to comment on the incident). The precursor to the Beeb was the Acorn Atom, which itself grew out of Acorn's early work on fruit machine controller boards.

Worthy of note is that Acorn went on to produce the ARM processor to power the third generation of BBC Micros, which is now used in many portable devices including the iPod. So the BBC Micro can be seen as the precursor of Apple's music player - if you stretch the facts a bit.

who can forget the precursor to the BBC micro, the Timex Sinclair Z80?

No, the Sinclair ZX80 was the precursor to the ZX81 and ultimately the Sinclair Spectrum. The BBC Microcomputer was built by Acorn Computer, who were rivals of Sinclair Research in the competition for the BBC contract, and won because of clearly superior engineering. This rivalry became something of a personality clash between the founders of the two Cambridge-based companies: I remember reading reports of an altercation in a Cambridge pub or restaurant on New Years Eve 1982 or 83 when Sir Clive Sinclair ran into Acorn's Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser and reportedly got a little hot under the collar (although all parties refused to comment on the incident). The precursor to the Beeb was the Acorn Atom, which itself grew out of Acorn's early work on fruit machine controller boards.

Worthy of note is that Acorn went on to produce the ARM processor to power the third generation of BBC Micros, which is now used in many portable devices including the iPod. So the BBC Micro can be seen as the precursor of Apple's music player - if you stretch the facts a bit.

who can forget the precursor to the BBC micro, the Timex Sinclair Z80?

No, the Sinclair ZX80 was the precursor to the ZX81 and ultimately the Sinclair Spectrum. The BBC Microcomputer was built by Acorn Computer, who were rivals of Sinclair Research in the competition for the BBC contract, and won because of clearly superior engineering. This rivalry became something of a personality clash between the founders of the two Cambridge-based companies: I remember reading reports of an altercation in a Cambridge pub or restaurant on New Years Eve 1982 or 83 when Sir Clive Sinclair ran into Acorn's Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser and reportedly got a little hot under the collar (although all parties refused to comment on the incident). The precursor to the Beeb was the Acorn Atom, which itself grew out of Acorn's early work on fruit machine controller boards.

Worthy of note is that Acorn went on to produce the ARM processor to power the third generation of BBC Micros, which is now used in many portable devices including the iPod. So the BBC Micro can be seen as the precursor of Apple's music player - if you stretch the facts a bit.

who can forget the precursor to the BBC micro, the Timex Sinclair Z80?

No, the Sinclair ZX80 was the precursor to the ZX81 and ultimately the Sinclair Spectrum. The BBC Microcomputer was built by Acorn Computer, who were rivals of Sinclair Research in the competition for the BBC contract, and won because of clearly superior engineering. This rivalry became something of a personality clash between the founders of the two Cambridge-based companies: I remember reading reports of an altercation in a Cambridge pub or restaurant on New Years Eve 1982 or 83 when Sir Clive Sinclair ran into Acorn's Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser and reportedly got a little hot under the collar (although all parties refused to comment on the incident). The precursor to the Beeb was the Acorn Atom, which itself grew out of Acorn's early work on fruit machine controller boards.

Worthy of note is that Acorn went on to produce the ARM processor to power the third generation of BBC Micros, which is now used in many portable devices including the iPod. So the BBC Micro can be seen as the precursor of Apple's music player - if you stretch the facts a bit.

who can forget the precursor to the BBC micro, the Timex Sinclair Z80?

No, the Sinclair ZX80 was the precursor to the ZX81 and ultimately the Sinclair Spectrum. The BBC Microcomputer was built by Acorn Computer, who were rivals of Sinclair Research in the competition for the BBC contract, and won because of clearly superior engineering. This rivalry became something of a personality clash between the founders of the two Cambridge-based companies: I remember reading reports of an altercation in a Cambridge pub or restaurant on New Years Eve 1982 or 83 when Sir Clive Sinclair ran into Acorn's Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser and reportedly got a little hot under the collar (although all parties refused to comment on the incident). The precursor to the Beeb was the Acorn Atom, which itself grew out of Acorn's early work on fruit machine controller boards.

Worthy of note is that Acorn went on to produce the ARM processor to power the third generation of BBC Micros, which is now used in many portable devices including the iPod. So the BBC Micro can be seen as the precursor of Apple's music player - if you stretch the facts a bit.

Yes and no; I've never heard any such rumour about the ZX80 or the BBC Micro. I heard that POKEing a certain memory location on the Commodore Pet would cause it to burst into flames, but never saw it happen so can't confirm it. A quick google turned up this page, which has details about the Pet rumour and the BBC Micro one, but nothing about the ZX80.

Woah, not my Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor)? Nooooo..... I *love* that chicklet keyboard. And the awesome monochrome graphics. They have the playing card suits built in as *characters*, mind you. You can 1000 PRINT them in the built in BASIC!

Let me tell you, though, it was a bitch getting an entire TCP/IP stack working in the 4K of RAM and still have room for a web browser. And don't even get me started on how hard it was to get 100BaseT working over the exapasion port.

Guess it's finally time to retire the old PET.

Basic model w/ cassette. Presumably like many others wrote a program to catalog what was on the cassette. Didn't have the patience to type in the monstrous code for the game programs in the magazines, however I *do* have an original Wumpus book. I tried selling it on Amazon, but they don't have a listing for Wumpus! What I really wanted was a Sage http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =607 . Advertised in Byte, it supported a phenominal amount of languages, including FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, and others. However, it was way out of my price range! Next machine was IBM PC, complete w/ monochrome monitor. I wish terminals today were as good as that monitor. Lovely to look at! Of course, I also recall Wang computers having monitors that could display a complete 8 1/2 x 11 inch. Truly a pity that never caught on!

> was a Rockwell AIM 65 that used a 1 MHz 6502 CPU. It had 8 MB RAM (4 for the system and 4 for the user)

...

> Later I impoverished myself by ordering 32 MB of RAM (...)

Now that was a bitchin' computer for the time - I had to make do with 2 KB of RAM at the time 8-P

Btw, further up some guy writes about his 286-era PC with a 20 GB harddisk... I guess in a few years we'll make that sort of mistakes with MB of RAM instead of GB and GB instead of TB for disk size...

Bingo!

And it was exactly that color too!

My first one was a very obscure machine called the Comx-35. You couldn't get much software for it, but on the plus side, it had a radiation-hardened CPU. (It was the same one used in the Voyager, Viking and Galileo spacecraft.)

The first computer I learned to program was a Vector MZ ( along with a similar "Vector 3" ) made by a company called Vector Graphics. It ran CP/M and I learned to program in a version of BASIC made by some company called Microsoft. This was equipment I managed to talk a high school teacher into letting me use at weird hours, since I was in sixth grade, not high school.

True story: I briefly considered taking my summer work check and buying Microsoft stock, then realized I had no idea how to do so ( didn't know anyone, even an adult, who bought stock in any company ), so I bought a jacket instead. Sucks to be me, huh?

Later, after being exposed to many, many other kinds of computers, my parents were finally able to buy a TI-99/4A. Despite having 'color', I learned a lot more from the CP/M machines than I ever learned from the TI-99 ( except that using a tape to store data *sucks* ).

The first computer I learned to program was a Vector MZ ( along with a similar "Vector 3" ) made by a company called Vector Graphics. It ran CP/M and I learned to program in a version of BASIC made by some company called Microsoft. This was equipment I managed to talk a high school teacher into letting me use at weird hours, since I was in sixth grade, not high school.

True story: I briefly considered taking my summer work check and buying Microsoft stock, then realized I had no idea how to do so ( didn't know anyone, even an adult, who bought stock in any company ), so I bought a jacket instead. Sucks to be me, huh?

Later, after being exposed to many, many other kinds of computers, my parents were finally able to buy a TI-99/4A. Despite having 'color', I learned a lot more from the CP/M machines than I ever learned from the TI-99 ( except that using a tape to store data *sucks* ).

I guess I'm an old-timer here.
Back in '77 my dad bought me a Commodore Personal Electronic Terminal (PET) while I was still in Elementary school. It was a PET 2001-4N with a whopping 1mHz processor, 4kB RAM, and a cassette tape drive! It had a BASIC compiler and was really fun for a kid learning programming. I learned how to program on it in a few days and eventually made my own "hunt the wumpus" game complete with ASCII graphics.

Great pictures of these dinosaurs are at: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =191

I bought my kids laptops last year. They are at the same age where I learned programming, but haven't picked it up yet- they've seem too distracted by all of the pre-packaged apps and games, "infotainment", and GUI features on their PCs. My son says "for loops" are "Sooooo boring"

A Microprofessor I with a 1.79 MHz Z80 and 2K RAM, back in 1982. I wrote programs to produce morse code, and to make the red led blink (which wasn't easy, since it was directly attached to the Z80's paused pin).

It had a 6 MHz 68000 processor,512K of RAM, a 20meg hard drive ($4000 extra!) and a couple of dumb terminals in addition to the console. It ran a variant of System 7 Unix with a very primitive menu-driven interface. Software was quite limited and shockingly expensive. I seem to remember the C compiler being something like $700, and not near as good as the gcc you can get for free today. But it was good enough for me to learn C quite thoroughly. I also taught myself relational DBMS programming with Informix on it.

Total cost was about $15,000,or perhaps $30,000 in today's money, so it was a lot of computer for a teenage boy to be in charge of. Nevertheless, I made it pay for itself, with some custom Basic, C and Informix applications that were quite useful to my folks. It gave good service for a decade. We still have it in some forgotten closet.

-ccm

Another SVI user :) My first computer was the SVI-738. Microsoft Disk Basic 1.0, baby. Disk Basic 'cause it had an internal 3.5" floppy! I didn't know it at the time, but understood it immediately after I heard it; the MSX machines are apparently considered as having the best arcade conversions out there. And man, were the games good.

I just (today) inherited a TRS-80 Model 100 (the portable one). Don't know if I'll keep it or just throw it away... It'll fit nicely in with the 738 and the SparcStation Classic :)

My first computer was a Model 100 from TRS. My parents bought it used for me. I had a lot of fun with it, but, it was pretty limited in scope for me. I wanted to play games, and it only had 1 game available... I DID play the heck out of that game, though. :-) http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =233

My first owned computer was the Grundy Newbrain with 32 k of RAM, Basic, RS-232 port, cassette interface and quite a decent 80 character monocrome display when connected to a TV. It also came with a 16 character one-line display on the unit. It could even run CP/M and had an architecture that supported up to 2 MB of main memory.

I even wrote some assembly embedded in a Basic text processing application to output Norwegian characters in graphics mode on an Epson printer that did not support anything but 7-bit ASCII. It was a fun machine to use, and quite impressive at the time.

Otherwise my first real computer experience was on the Univac university mainframe and the Norsk Data NORD-10 multiuser minicomputer that could support up to 30 concurrent terminals in up to a whopping 256 kilo-words of main memory.

Later, my grand-father gave me his even older Tandy TRS 80 Model 4 computer.