Slashdot Mirror
First Computers
theodp writes "You never forget your first love. Or your first computer. Good Morning Silicon Valley readers share fond memories of their first computers, including SuperELFs with 256 bytes of RAM, $99 Timex Sinclairs, 26-pound 'portable' Osbornes, 'high-speed' 300 baud modems, Apple IIs running COBOL, and even a Mattel Aquarius (complete with Microsoft Aquarius-BASIC 1.0!)."
...has a list of most of the candidates, including the Mattel Aquarius.
No TRS-80 pics, though... odd...
The Army reading list
C64 BABY!
Cannot beat those vertical drives where the spindle would fall on disk when powered down!
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Some remember their first kiss. However, for the 43 year old virgin still living with mother (and who salivates over Galactica remakes), this question will do instead.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I'll never forget playing Leisure Suit Larry on an orange screen computer, God knows the specs, I was too young. But the PG-13 content kicked ass.
[Please sign here]
you can keep your Amiga, when STE and Cubase rocks every studio in the land
with a GEM of a desktop
with Parsec!
I co-oped at a Federal Agency that tried to use these, back in 1987, it was to laugh.
Apple ][+ in 1980. 48K RAM (later upgraded to 64K with a US$99 16K card I bought on a trip to Las Vegas), two 143K floppies, TV with composite in. No cassette, I was a rebel even then
In 83 or 84 or so I got a 10 MB hard drive for the Apple and thought I'd never need more.. how quick we forget.
Trolling is a art,
My first 'puter was a Tandy TRS-80. It had 8 colors! I hooked up a radio-shack tape recorder as a storage device. I wrote a 10k line Tangrams program! And I was 8 years old. Beat that! (Okay, so my dad helped with the program.. but still!)
an 8088 made by "Amstrad" or some company that was doomed. See, when I was a kid, my parents insisted that everything you buy at Costco was an unbeatable deal. It was a choice between the Amstrad POS and the Apple IIgs. We ended up with the PC and regretted it from then on.
It had a non-Windows GUI ("Geoworks" or something like that) and was generally a slow, unresponsive, clunky, piece of crap.
I hated it. It's now sitting in my sister's garage, covered in dust.
Wow, all those oldtimers and their 1970s era computers. We've got a Commodore 64 in the basement, but our first home computer (at the ripe age of six) was an IBM PS/1, with a 386 processor and an 80mb hard drive. It's taken the years rather well, and I still tinker with it. I've put Slakware on it and use it as a journal.
My fist pc was back in 1989, I know, not too old to some of you, it was a HP Vectra ES-12, 12Mhz 286 /w 640k of ram, and a 40MB IDE hard drive, VGA graphics. I'll tell you it was neat to see that they used IDE instead of MFM. We eventually bumped it up to 4 meg of ram, and added a 1x cd-r and 80 meg hard drive. That computer took forever to boot, to count all the way up to 4096 bytes of ram. and windows 2.11.
now that makes sense...
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
... was a Toshiba T-100 with two, count 'em two, 5 1/4" floppy drives, running C/PM on an 8bit Z-80 processor, with a whopping 64k of RAM. It didn't take long for them to discontinue it, since MS-DOS was taking over the world at the time.
I blame that computer for my being a professional developer today. I had to write software if I wanted any, being discontinued, and local shops only carrying DOS and Apple programs.
This line from the article cracked me up...
Next one was a Toshiba laptop, secondhand from my brother, running OS/2. How's that for dating myself? Barely opened Web pages. I remember looking forward to OS/2. Hell, I remember looking forward to the Lisa and __ducking__ to Windows 1.0. Web pages? What were those?
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
and it's still around.... every few years i power it up to play some games with the Mach2 joystick.... . Beachhead, spy vs spy etc... AH the memories! too bad the internal modem burned up many years ago (literally... smokey and melty).
A commodore+4, I think (correct me if I'm wrong please), this was released in the states as the vic 20. The plus 4 reffered to the MASSIVE 4Kb of extra RAM, this made it ideal for "Business Applications". It's currently in a loft in Scotland in my mothers house, but still works with the original tape deck and everything!
...Sorry, got carried away.... god I miss her.(the Commodore, not my mother!)
John, I'm Only Dancing!
I know most slashdotters are too young to remember this marvel. First, it had a lovely membrane keyboard. Second, its memory was so low that every time you typed a character the entire screen had to noticably refresh which was really hard to look at. My friends and I were kids at the time and all getting our parents to buy us computers. Well, except for one of us. So, being kids, the rest of us made fun of him because he didn't have a VIC-20 or TI/99-4A like we did. He begged and begged his parents to get him a computer so he wouldn't be the odd man out. They finally relented and bought him ... a Timex Sinclair! Oh boy, if you thought we teased him badly before...
GMD
watch this
My first computer was an ADAM. They stopped making it right after I got it so the only programs I ever had for it was a word processor and a Buck Rogers video game, both of which ran off of cassettes.
Ahh that brings back memories.
I used to do my homework on it and I got in trouble because my teacher thought the computer was doing it for me. To this day that still makes me laugh.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
...and man that thing was badass.
You just plugged it into a tv and you were up and running. Sort of an early portable. And even cooler, if you didn't have a system disk in it when it started up, you could just start programming in basic. I've still got it somewhere. Damn thing still works. Take that, modern hardware!
10 PRINT "(little brother) SUCKS!!!"
20 GOTO 10
Good times.
It was the APF Imagination Machine.
:-)
8k of memory. I wrote a cassette basic program that took about a several minutes to load into memory. It was a graphical/musical Christmas card.
Ah, the smell of nostalgia.
I can still remember the day when I was running Duke Nukem on some ancient 30 MHz processor - and still being gallous that on of my friends had a Intel Celeron 60 MHz that got around 30 fps in the game (I was getting around 2 fps - but I remarkably still beat the game without any cheat codes (which I later discovered - and ruined my gaming experience))
I don't have any really old computers here, but I "own" a Sun 4 SPARCstation with 110 MHz processor that I will make a web-server once I get a 50-pin SCSI hard drive for it.
Commodore 64 with two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, and , wait for it, the Commodore 128 cartridge. Man, I thought I was the coolest kid on the block. Blue screen, green screen. Took me an hour to program games in basic that I never got sick of. I still have a book on basic game programming, now I am going to go home and do it. I also remember, and feel free to correct me if I am wrong, a children's science magazine that used to feature a basic game for kids to program in the back. I can not for the life of me recall the title. It may be 3-2-1 Contact but that doesn't sound right, same vein though.
I hate sigs.
Who could forget the good ol' Commodore 64!
I got mine for my fourth birthday, and was making simple basic programs within a few weeks. Had it not been for that little hunk of plastic and silicon, I would probably be working in the automotive industry, my other hobby. Things as small as a birthday gift can change someones life forever!
When I heard that Sinclair was teaming up with Timex to sell the ZX-81 with a new name (and a double the memory - upping it to a whopping 2K) I remember thinking it could make computers more popular.. :)
Don't forget, lots of nostalgia like this is discussed by many in the BBS Documentary that's in the works.
Ahh, the good 'ol days.. Imagine a typical slashdot post loading at 300 baud? Eugh..
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
My first was a 286 Tandy from Radioshack. I used to play Space Quest 1 and Kings Quest 1 on it. I learned DOS using that box. Good times.. We sold it for 5 bucks at a garage sale, and somebody later tried to return it because it wouldn't boot into windows so they thought we ripped them off.
- tom -
My first video games device was an Atari 2600. Not really a computer, but I loved it. A few years after I got it my aged cat peed on it and it never worked properly again. :-)
:( Oh, well!
My first real computer was a ZX Spectrum 128 +2B [1], the funky non-standard thing Amstrad put out after they bought Sinclair Research. I still have it, and it still works perfectly!
After that I got a 486-33 PC. I requested an Acorn 3010 (remember those?) for Christmas this year but the asshole salesman talked my parents out of it
[1] +2A with the distorted sound problem fixed, says +2B on the underside and is in a black case.
Coding up adventure games out of my "101 GW-BASIC Adventure Games" (or whatever it was called) whiled away quite a few hours. Had a cartridge slot, and I remember wishing to high heaven that I had the external tape drive for it.
10 PRINT "I AM THE GREATEST! ";
20 GOTO 10
At least I think ';' is the "no hard return" character in GW-BASIC.
Ahhhh, memories.
Things got more interesting when I stepped up to the high power Tandy 1000 from Radio Shack (YEAH, baby!). I still remember upgrading the RAM from 256K to 640K. I thought I was the MAN!
5 1/4" floppy drive. No hard drive. Playing The Bard's Tale I, II, and III (Mangar's Mind Blade RULES ALL), Space Quest I-III, King's Quest I, a handful of Zorks, countless others. All by swapping those 5 1/4" floppies to and fro at several points during the game.
Those were the DAYS, baby! The DAYS!
El riesgo vive siempre!
20MHz, 10240KB, 40MB HDD, MS DOS 5.0, 14" NEC monitor.
It kicked ass.
It had Word Perfect, Sword of Aragon, Wing Commander and QBASIC. There have been few computers better.
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
No TRS-80 pics, though... odd...
I sometime get the feeling that the computer industry is trying to deny that the TRS-80 Color Computer ever even existed.
the days when windows wouldn't recognize over 12 of ram and 200 mb of hard drive was more than enuff space. I miss a game on only 2 floppies (easy to back up too..) and the pride of having that 15" monitor. and leet speak was simple talking computer spec's. :sniff: I miss it
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
i can hardly rember my first system, i know it was a PC, 808g 64k ram.. 2 5 1/4 floppys.. .. hell i still do typing on it.. with the glorius dot matrix printer..
but first class 3.0
makes for the fiance wanting to kill me.. soemthing about a collection (3 to 7 on at any time) of early to mid 80's computers networked with tokin ring that don't really do much of any thing i think..
but not bad for a 2-bedroom appt. i do say.
and the glorius 486DX 40Mhz (with turbo) as a firewall/mailserver is the best bet you'll find for $5.00 at a swap meet hands down.
My very first computer when I was 12 yrs old (even had 8" floppies) and a DEC writer for a printer.
Still have my Apple IIe, wish I kept my old Bell & Howle Black Apple. This system still reads disks from back in 1981 with the hole puncher double sided disk trick. Those write protect labels still do not like to come off easily.
What ever happened to Beagle Bros? Remember those old 1 and 2 line program contests?
int27h
Integer math took another bit for sign, and performed operations with decimal arithmetic; binary 00101 + 00101 = 00000 (plus overflow).
Hard to believe you could get a playable 3-d tic-tac-toe in 20k...
Ahh my first loves, that PDP 11 that was on the other end of the 9600 baud dedicated circuit when I was 10. Then came our first home computer, chicklet keyboards, basic and I got it at Radio Shack - wow - what a stunner, color graphics and everything. Yes my 6809E powered Color computer
It all went downhill from there - in the room with me now are 3 alpha powered multias. Including the First box I ever ran Linux on. Now I'm surrounded by obsolete sparq boxes, some old X86s and somewhere around here is a
dragon 32 I've been thinking of playing with for X10 stuff. Eventually I'll have to get a pdp 11, just so I can say I've come full circle.
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
a TRS 80, mod III. I remember playing a flight simulator on that beast. It used periods for the runway.
My father was a DP Manager when I was growing up... I remember visiting the Univac every Saturday morning, and playing startrek. Sorting cards occasionally earned me a buck.
The original definition of PC compatible was whethere a computer could play MS Flight Simulator" 1.0.
We've come a long way.
I loved that thing. I became a man on that computer... so to speak.
My dad, latex gloved and static wrist banded just couldn't push the 8k memory chip in... he was afraid of breaking it. But I needed (_needed_) to play F15. So I unceremoniously shoved him aside and snapped it in with satisfying, manly, click.
The next was an A500... best computer ever. 4096 colors _and_ half brites!
This
What else do you expect from a computer made by the Connecticut Leather Company? I kid you not. Go look up that "CoLeCo" means.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
TRS-80...the old big grey one, 4k with 2k usable. Mine had everything!
My home system now has a color printer, scanner, external storage, modem and network. The only thing my TRS-80 didn't have was networking. I had a 110 baud modem that I ran a 'nighttime only' news bbs on for friends, a 4-color pen-type plotter on 4 inch roll paper, a barcode scanner that required 3 scans for every read for accuracy control, an external cassette drive and a floppy drive. That thing was HOT, man! I upgraded to the white 64k CoCo2 just after they came out and didn't find it necessary to upgrade the modem!
..was more hefty than the one in the article, mine had 24k ram and 8K BASIC on tape (dual cassette interfaces). Never did have money to buy a printer for the thing. I think terminal was vt-52 clone, but not sure since I've worked on so very many vt's in past 22 years.
Brought home in October 1985, as an early Christmas present when I was in 7th grade.
128K RAM, single 5.25" floppy, no HD, running DOS 2.11 or so. What a piece of shit that thing was. It wasn't even 100% PC-compatible, it was more like 85-90%. And of course most of the stuff I really wanted to run on it needed that extra 10-15%-- I remember saving up for weeks to buy a copy of F-15 Strike Eagle, only to find out it wouldn't run. Man, was I pissed off that day.
In late 1990 or so I upgraded it with a 640K 3rd-party RAM upgrade and 10MB hard drive on an expansion card. One year later I got a Mac LC as I prepared to start college, and 10 minutes after getting it out of the box I knew I'd be an Apple customer for life.
The Tandy was relegated to the closet, and then I later threw out all but the motherboard and keyboard. I screwed them together and hung the thing on the wall in my office because, hey, it was my first computer.
~Philly
Father bought it as a kit, i was like 5 or 6 at the time, mostly I helped put the keys on the keypad.
For those wondering WTF is a super elf, or what kind of stuff it did, well it could do a lot for the time.
Old man programmed some sort of music synth on it. We also spent hours typing in programs (stuff like that stupid cowbow game) I was too young to understand what was going on internally, I just knew it was the closest thing I had to an atari 2600 at the time.
386SX16MHz
1MB RAM
256K VGA
41MB HD
STAR 9-pin dot-matrix printer
3-1/2" and 5-1/4" floppies
14" CTX SVGA Monitor
Keyboard
$1450? Looking back on it, I think my stepdad got hosed, he bought one for us and one for his other kids. No mouse, no CDROM, no SoundBlaster...I had to add all that crap later on. I guess it got me to to this job today. Later we bought various PackardBell, Dell, Compaq computers, but that first one was just a plain white box.
We played JetFighter, Family Feud, Oregon Trail, some shareware games....Fun times.
that 640 KB hard disk would be enough for everyone... Who knows what is going to come up in the future.. quantum computers.. molecular computers... and to remember your first old computer argh... I don't want to... Now Battle Star Galactica won't be too encouraged by this eh?
With a typewriter printer the size of Montana.... Many wasted hours with Basic & Hitchhiker's Guide....
"My first computer is a P4 3.2 GHz, 1 Gig Ram, 2 120 gig HDs, a 20 inch LCD monitor, ATI Radeon 9800 XT and a 8x DVD-R Burner"
If a 10 year old kid said this to me I'd give him a high-five for having a nice computer, and then punch him in the nuts for being spoiled. (Mine was a 8086) =)
Ah, radio shack's great computer. I spent many an hour at age 8 playing Dungeons of Daggorath. Always will have a soft spot in my heart for that computer, as I learned to program (yes, in BASIC) on it.
Cassette initially then expansion to a single floppy. Composite video output. 8K memory. Built in Basic. Parallel and serial ports.
$300.
My second computer was a Xerox 820 with Z80 and
CPM for $3000. Not much better then the Ohio
Scientific.
Soon kids will be able to plug their computers into the TV again as their display, just like the ol' vic 20 and c64 pioneered in the "before time".
Only now they will be plugging into the DVI port on the 42 inch plasma HDTV set in the living room.
My CoCo had a glorious 32k of ram and a .87 MHz 6809 processor. With a poke you could copy the rom to ram to reveal another 32k of ram (oooohhh-aaaahhhh) and with another poke you double the CPU speed.
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
The first computer I actually owned was a TRS-80 Model III. I was quite excited when I learned to program the graphics of this 128x48 display.
I loved my ZX-81. It was cooler BEFORE Timex jumped in and put their name on it. I tricked mine out with a memory expansion pack, 300 baud modem, and custom (real keys) keyboard. Wish I'd taken some pictures of it. It's probably across the country in my mom's basement.
Oh, and the speed... it was awful. So I started learning assembly. None of the cool programs were in BASIC; they all looked something like this:
10 REM !@#(*~>8A6$^Q@#&@!(... ETC)
20 CALL 16514
The assembly code was stored in a REMark statement, the first line of the program. The second like would jump into the BASIC program storage area. The reserved words were all tokenized, so 'REM' was just one byte at memory location 16513, and 16514 was the first byte of the comments - your assembly program!
Ah, thanks for the trip down memory lane. Almost forgot about that machine.
My first computer was a TRS-80 Model I Level I with a whopping 4k of ram. Good times.
One of the earliest computers around was WEIZAC (picture here).
Not much to say about it.
...and through the Osborne Users Group I met a friend I've had ever since.
That 300 baud modem was so slick the way it fit into the floppy storage tray. My amber monochrome monitor was so beautiful. I spent all my allowance / grass-cutting money on those 5.25" floppies, and so much time with the hole puncher making them doublesided. What a boon!
My friend had a Kaypro.
Then I migrated to a Northstar Horizon and I discovered ZCPR/3. That was slick. The hard drive in the Northstar would occasionally honk like a train and require a quick smack to set it straight.
Anyone remember "pip"?
How could they overlook the PCjr?
16 colors, TI 3-voice sound..
Mine even had a v1.0 Microsoft Mouse.
It was even "portable".
I'm a 2000 man.
... and Atari 520 STe. I still have it, too.
:)
The `enhanced' sound has been dodgy for years unless there's a piece of card placed carefully under the unit (which has suggested to me for a while that there's a slightly dodgy bit of solder in there somewhere).
That said, I've still got it, and it still runs. It's filled to the brim with 4MB RAM, a 2.5" 170MB internal IDE drive (which the unit was never designed for), and an upgraded serial controller to allow for a 56kbps modem to be connected.
Of all the computers I've owned, it's taken the most abuse, and has definately been the most reliable. Two or three years ago it failed once, due to a dead PSU. Fortunately, I found a replacement quickly and cheaply, and brought it back to life
I could look it up, but I guess I'm just more curious if I was the only person who grew up with one. We had one at home in England (my dad has been in the computer biz since the beginning). Our school got one and I had to teach all the teachers how to use it. It was then I realized that there was money to be made doing this stuff! :)
--D
Everyone remembers Apple II and C64, but does anyone remember Atari 400/800?
e /
I dug this up in my closet recently. Very amusing little book:
http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~flynnj/ComputersForPeopl
I never had an Atari, but they had neat graphics ability. It was more of a C64/128 competitor than an Apple II competitor. I do remember the 810 disk drives being gawdawful slow, and only holding around 90K per disk. Apple II drives held 140K!
We're fricking' SPOILED now, folks. }:)
Texas Instrument 99/4A was my first computer. My father bought one so I could learn to use a computer except I learned to use it for games. I was into Atari 2600 games and arcades (e.g., Pac-Man).
:)
Recently, I finally got TI99/4A to work in MESS emulator. The instructions can be found here in case anyone is interested. Some of those games still rule!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My first computer (in the loosest sense of the other word ) was an HP-25. With 49 steps of program storage it was just enough to play with prime number generators, moon landing simulators, and other simple programs. I got it in the spring of 77. This started my obsession with HP calculators, erm umm computers.
My second computer (or first if your are somewhat picky) was a Timex Sinclair that my wife and I got for sitting through a time share vaction sales presentation in the early 80s. Boy, did we have to sit through all kinds of abuse to get the computer without buying the odious timeshare. But with 8k of memory and a flaky cassette drive, it was not very useful.
My third computer (or first real computer, if you are extremely picky) was a Mac 128k in 1985. Now that was a true computer and I really loved it. We still have it and it still works, but does not see much activity. I'll have to boot the 128k on Jan 24th to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Macs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
1: homebrew 6502 on OSI bare PC boards. I had 4 4k ram cards and a cpu card with the TIM monitor.
2: DEC LSI-11 that I assembled from parts salvaged out of the dumpster when I worked at DEC. I had a 5' high rack with two 4 slot card cages, 64kb or ram, and an RX01 dual floppy drive. Ran RT11.
3: KIM-1. didn't do too much with this.
4: CPM system built from a 'BIG BOARD' kit. 3 8" floppies, 64k (later expanded to 256k) ram, and also later added a 5mb 5.25" hard disk with another kit.
All of these were sold off quite some time ago.
It's been a chain of pc's since then.
Adam! Zilog Z80-A @ 3.58MHz 80K, 64K available TV (RF) & composite video 24 X 36 text, 16 colors 256 X 192 graphics cartridge, video, AdamNet 3 internal expansion slots Daisy-wheel printer 1 or 2 internal cassette drives External floppy drive OS: BASIC, loaded from cassette
fear... Just hope you didn't record Rick James' "Cold Blooded" over BASIC
MoFscker
"I'm sure somewhere Bill Gates was crowing about how two strings ought to be enough for anyone
You are misquoting Bill Gates from when he was talking about telephony. He mentioned 2 strings and 4 tin cans as being enough to handle telephone needs.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Since this thread is likely to degenerate into a "my first PC is older than yours" competition, I'll try to win right away:
My first PC was a block of wood with keys etched into it using a sharp rock. We had to press the keys and draw pictures really fast into the dirt with sticks.
We were very poor.
# Erik
haven't seen anyone post about the greatest computer of all, the atari 800 xl. 300 baud modem. wonderful for bbsing.
My first was an original Pentium! Only had 16 megs of RAM and a 40 meg harddrive! Ah, the memories of cranking out assembler on that puppy to squeeze out the last bit of performance...
Had SVGA though.
Circa, 1968, this machine had a card read, line printer, a plotter, a selectric typewriter and keyboard, 1MB cartridge disk, and 8192 16-bit words. Fortran, APL, RPG. Remarkably forward looking. The cpu was IPLed (that's: initial program load for you youngsters.) I learned assembly lanugage programming on it ... sniff.
If we're speaking technically, my first computer was a Little Professor calculator. If we're talking something that could be used for programming, then we have to count the the Atari 2600 with its Basic Programming cartridge and controllers. If we're talking first, full-fledged machine, then mine was an Atari 800XL.
Are these high-speed or full-speed modems?
Seems the bad-geek stereotype always involves a basement. Good thing our family didn't have a basement. There but for the grace of slab foundations went I, I s'pose. It made me go out and be halfway-normal...
Atari 1200XL, early eighties. Remember to hit F2 to disable video during CPU-intensive operations for improved speed! Oh -- and death to cassette drives.
signed
ATARIO
fer cryin' out loud
P.S. Key-clicks and I/O noises kick ass; disk-notching tools are for wimps (what'sa matter, you too clumsy for a one-hole paper punch?); a program that just prints "Hi" over and over should never be over two lines long, ya hump.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
funny shit, mod up... seriously
My frist printer was a Thinkjet serial connection it was the equiv of a 9 pin dot matrix, but, it was one of the first, or the first, ink cartridge based printer. It was very impressive, it had a footprint of a sheet of paper, and it was really, quiet, for the time, all you heard was the servo motors going feeding the paper, and moving the print head back and fouth. we got it in 1984, and it still works to this day.
Where's the...
//c
Apple I
Apple ][
Apple ][+
Apple
and most importantly, my baby, the...
Franklin ACE 1000
eh?
Oh, sweet, sweet Commadore PET, how I miss your screen's high-pitched whine...
Texas Instrument 99/4A was my first computer. My father bought one so I could learn to use a computer except I learned to use it for games. I was into Atari 2600 games and arcades (e.g., Pac-Man).
:)
Recently, I finally got TI99/4A to work in MESS emulator. The instructions can be found here in case anyone is interested. Some of those games still rule!
You can see my computer and console history here.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Anyone with a Slashdot user ID number of 300,000 or higher should probably just keep quiet on this one; we don't want to hear about your wimpy first PC being a lousy 386SX.
Let the old timers speak of the early days in computing, and how the moth got caught in their relay contacts...
Yup, I remember it fondly. Xmas in the 80's and a Commodore 64 under the tree. A big old floppy drive, keyboard, monitor and a couple of games. Popeye and some drawing game. Those were the days.... The monitor still works great, wish I still had the other gear.
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
I detect a new /. meme...
256 bytes of code/ram toggled in from slide switches..
Since the 1802 is full cmos I debugged the wiring by putting a toggle switch where the xtal goes and stepped it one machine state at a time..
First program.. (Q was a one bit output tied to a LED)
set q #turn on an led
reset q #turn it off.
jmp 0
I remember wondering why the LED seemed to stay on, until I measured 2 volts at the LED and realized that the computer was blinking it too fast for me to see.
I dawned on me how "fast" computers were, and I was hooked.
chuck
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 (with the 16k expansion pack)....I think that my folks ordered it from American Express.
It was not a Timex-Sinclair 1000!!
No one got beat up more often than the mimes of the old west!
I still have my first computer, one of the original Compaq "Portable computers". It must weigh about 30 pounds. I bought it in 1984, and lugged it by car, train, bus, and airplane between my home in New York and school near Boston. When flying I would ask for a center seat because that gave more room to squeeze the computer under the seat.
It has an 8088, 640K, and fairly low resolution green-screen graphics. I can't remember if it used 2 or 4 bits to store each pixel.
I added a huge 10MB hard drive. I never expected to fill a disk that big. For what the hard disk cost, today you could buy several hundred GB of disk space.
Today I carry a PDA in my pocket that costs much less than any of my Compaq-era peripherals, and is more powerful in every way except screen size (but it comes close).
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
My first computer was a C64, it shat all over my mate's Spectrums, with their color clashes and manual volume controls for loading tapes and all that.
But my brother has an Osbourne, the first portable computer, and still has the disks that came with it, and they still work. Space Invaders, Chess, and some appalling word processor that made DOS Edit look like Office 2010. He wants to sell it, anyone got any idea how much it would go for?
I tried showing them how a golfing game worked on it, but they wouldn't touch it unless I was there with them.
Damn you /.!! I have one glass of wine and read this and now I'm getting all sniffly over old-school sh!t.....
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
My first computers were a Pet, Atari 400, and later an Apple ][+. Those computers, combined with the generous time of a volunteer teaching BASIC at my elementry school, have made my life all the more interesting by getting me on the "tech path".
In this season of giving, think of a kid who doesn't know a lot about computers, but has an interest. Sit down with them and explain the fundamentals. Teach them the basics of a programming language. If needed, build them a new system with your spare parts so they can experience what you enjoyed growing up.
In your nostalgia, remember there is probably someone you know who deserves to have similarly fond memories in 20 or 30 years.
Happy Holidays.
My father first bought a TRS-80 model I in 1977, back before they released the Expansion Interface and Level II BASIC. It came with 4KB of RAM, a B & W monitor, and a cassette tape drive. He quickly upgraded the RAM to 16KB, and bought an expansion interface and SSSD Shugart floppy disk drive (5 1/4") as soon as they were released by Radio Shack. We then proceeded to purchase sixteen 4116 300ns RAM chips on the open market and upgrade the expansion interface with an additional 32KB, for a full 48KB of RAM in the system. He paid over $300 for those 16 chips.
:)
In 1980 he bought me an ELF II from an unknown company named Neutronics. It had a 20 key Hex keypad, 256 byes of RAM, a run toggle switch, two 7 segment LEDs and one LED lamp for the 1802 Q bit. I wound up expanding that thing with a cassette and serial I/O and Rom monitor board, an extra 8KB of static RAM (which ran a bundle) and an old VT52 terminal before dad bought an IBM XT and gave me his trash 80. Heh, that was fun too. Ran a BBS from 1982 to 1986 on that trash 80 with an old package called TBBS. Excellent BBS software and plenty of fun times for a teenage kid.
--M
A bunch of bloggers have similar stories to tell, the Newly Digital meme made the rounds for a while starting in June.
LOAD "$", 8
LIST
*checks list*
LOAD "GIANA", 8, 1
RUN
* the message 'CRACKED BY MR Z' appears *
* screen starts to flicker in all sorts of colors *
* voila! *
That's all I cared to learn, except for the occasional '10 PRINT "HELLO!" : GOTO 10' program.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
1979 Atari 800, 8k, cassette for storage. Better hardware, better color, better sound, better graphics than anything out there at the time. Don't argue with me on this! Serial number was 0271. Sitting in my Dad's basement 1000 miles from here, but it still works.
.sig (C) SCO Group. Please insert $699.
STAR RAIDERS IS THE BEST GAME EVER!
This
That 30 lbs. US "portable" was quite a burden for my scrawny preteen self.
I'm afraid I don't go back quite that far.
I did recently find a receipt though, from 1990 (I think) that showed me paying $160.00 for four 1MB simms. That's $40/MB! Sheesh!
I used them to upgrade my first PC - a 386-25 with 4MB (upgraded to 8). It had a 40MB hard drive, which was like a $300 upgrade from the 20MB drive it came with.
Who knew I'd ever be cruising along with a dual Athlon MP 1900 with 1.5 GB of ram!!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
This is excerpted text from a story about my geeky youth. It details my experience getting my first computer.
Not long after I started my 10th grade school year, and through no coaxing from me, my parents decided to get me a computer of my own. OH BOY!! I'll be in the big time now! One of the few kids on my street to own one. There is kind of an interesting story in getting this computer. First, we went to the obvious place, Radio Shack. They had the TRS-80 Model I & III and the Color Computer. The regular TRS-80's were a little too pricey so I contemplated the CoCo. It was nice although I wasn't totally impressed with the 16 row display and the psychedelic flashing cursor. Graphics seemed awkward due to the plot command and they were a bit chunky. Besides, I like to eat chicklets, not have a keyboard full of them. Then, my parents suggested the local computer store, ComputerLand. We walked in there and saw many Apple computers. I was familiar with these by name, but had no practical experience with them. After a full demonstration of their capabilities (I must say, I was impressed at the time), my parents stated that the $1000 price tag was too much. They asked the salesman if there was anything else that was cheaper.
Now, most everybody in this world has one time in their past where something attracted their attention in such a way that they swear that they could hear bells ringing. This was my time. As the sales person pointed his arm across the room, a virtual glow of light shimmered which induced a feeling that these days can only be compared to Clark Griswold's reaction to the glowing house lights on National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Up on the wall above the actual unit was the Commodore VIC-20 poster. Advertised on the poster was 5K memory (25% more than other computers started with), 23x22 display (seemed a more natural aspect than the CoCo's), Expandable to 32K memory, and the best thing, only $399. This was the one! I also learned how you could easily select character colors from the keyboard, type using many of the graphic symbols on the fronts of the keys, and how easy it was to edit your programs with the full screen editing capabilities (something that couldn't be done with the other computers I looked at). My parents and I agreed quickly that this is the one to get. So we picked it up, along with the $99 tape unit, a home financing program, VIC21 BlackJack, and Raceway. Also this computer just hit the market not long before we bought it. I remember looking at the manufacture date of Oct '81 on this unit. I stayed up very late that night trying to learn it's version of BASIC and typing in a game program. A magazine that we picked up at the store was just talking about the VIC-20 and had a type-in game (remember those?) called Catch-The-Bombs. It was a simple game that allowed you to catch balls falling down the screen. This program demonstrated the use of the built in graphic characters, therefore it was easy to create games without having to manage so many pixels. I still have this computer and I still have the Catch-The-Bombs game, along with many others I stored on cassette. I even created a Christmas and New Year's graphic/sound demo.
By BILL GATES
c.1996 Bloomberg Business News
[...]
QUESTION: I read in a newspaper that in 1981 you said, ``640K of memory should be enough for anybody.'' What did you mean when you said this?
ANSWER: I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.
The need for memory increases as computers get more potent and software gets more powerful. In fact, every couple of years the amount of memory address space needed to run whatever software is mainstream at the time just about doubles. This is well-known.
When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked Microsoft for its role. These critics said that 8-bit computers, which had 64K of address space, would last forever. They said we were wastefully throwing out great 8-bit programming by moving the world toward 16-bit computers.
We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years. (The IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available. That's where the now-infamous ``640K barrier'' came from.)
A few years later, Microsoft was a big fan of Intel's 386 microprocessor chip, which gave computers a 32-bit address space.
Modern operating systems can now take advantage of that seemingly vast potential memory. But even 32 bits of address space won't prove adequate as time goes on.
Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
When I got into HS, I got my very own 286 and was esctatic. Granted, there were Pentiums coming out at that time, but hey, a first is a first.
It had this horrific modal interface where you had a 6 row, 4 column keypad (actually, two 3x4 keypads that locked together). Every button had four possible values, denoted by color, and you'd press a special button to cycle the cursor through the colors until you found the one you needed. For example, suppose the top-left button had "A (red)", "B (green)", "C (yellow)", and "D (white)". To write the word "CAB", you'd hit the toggle button until the cursor was white, then you'd hit the top-left button. Then, you'd toggle until the cursor was red and hit the button. Finally, you would toggle until the cursor was green and then hit the button.
Of course, that only meant that it took longer to fill the 63 byte memory.
It was a total letdown. I'd begged my parents for months to buy this so that I could learn to program. I think the box cover had a spreadsheet and some physics formulae on it, and I fully expected to be balancing budgets and flying to the moon in no time.
By comparison, I was ecstatic at the unbridled power and possibility of the ZX-81 (with 16KB RAM pack!) that I got for Christmas the next year.
Take your fancy-schmancy PowerBooks and get off my lawn, you whippersnappers!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
fp45 is much firster than you.
After that, I got an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P, complete with a floppy drive. My first printer was one of those awful Radio Shack printers that used silver thermal paper. I soon replaced it with a Base 2, which eventually became known for bursting into flame.
Timex Sinclair 1500, $100/1983. Black and white.. chiclet keys, 16k of memory. Took 15 minutes to load a 16k program off of cassette. Replaced by an Atari 800 with 48k ram. Still have the Atari, and it still runs great, though if I want to relive my past, I boot up the Dreamcast with the Atari emulator. 1 cd has the emulator, and practically every program ever made for the Atari 8 bit computers.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Remember that too, spent WAAAY too much of my night time playing that.
;-)
Your "orange screen" must've been one of those driven by "high-res" Hercules card, not standard CGA.
And about the questions you had to answer (Re: next post in thread) -- if it was hard for you, imagine how hard it was for a teen growing up in Russia!
Paul B.
was an aweome Spectravideo SV328. 80k ram 64 k rom, tape , interface card , printer ( star brand but cant remember model ), joystick etc. Friends all ragged me as they had Vic20's and Commodore 16's and 64's , but hey MSX was gonna rule wasn't it, it was going to be the utopian standard that all the manufacturers would accept and use and then we'd all be able to talk to each other.............hhhmmmmmm After that , went for an XT
The first commercial computer I used, in high school, was an IBM 402 accounting machine, along with an IBM 82 card sorter, an IBM 77 tabulator, and, of course IBM 26 keypunches. (Unfortunately, no IBM 514 summary punch or 602A multiplier.) I was able to get that gear to generate poetry.
In late 2001, my neighbors gave me their old Mac Performa 630CD. This was my first computer. I thought it was great. It had 32mb of RAM, a 33mhz processor and a 250mb internal IDE drive and a 500mb SCSI drive and a CD-ROM. I still used the family Windows box, though. Then I got two LC 5200s from my school. One had a TV card. So I took the motherboard, Harddisk and TV and Ethernet cards out of one and put them in the 630. Then, this august, I got a Sony Vaio PCG-FRV25 laptop. 15" screen, 4ogb HDD, 2.66ghz P4, DVD-ROM/CD-RW, USB 2.0, 4-pin firewire, Memory Stick Pro slot, PCMCIA slots and a Sony mini-video out connector. The external video is driven by a Radeon IGP card. I have it running RedHat 8.0 (SuSE 8.2 Pro install won't load, damn winmodems!) and XP home. I went to the dark side, but returned to a modereately grey aeria. But I want an Atari portable!
I have gas, but my car uses petrol.
But the monitor to my ole C-64 still lives on! Use it as a home ET monitor.
An action well conceived is bold in so far as the risks are understood.
So I'm not as old as the usual /.'er but man I was happy when my dad brought a shiny 286 home. Packed with games :). It was running dos 5.0 and had a pacman-clone called CD-Man (anybody remember that game?).
I was real happy when I got dos 6.22
I'm running linux-2.6.0-mm1 now, and have never understood why on earth I was so happy to get dos 6.22.
Curse you dos.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
That feeling of power seems impossible to duplicate, apparently... My current home system is a 2.4 GHz P4, 1G RAM, 80G disk with dual 1600x1200 21.3 inch LCD monitors, and it's just a boring desktop system. Other than the monitors, it's a standard low-end desktop machine.
I remember the day my dad brought it home for Christmas. My mom could've shot him.
I remember learning about DOS and how to format disks with a program called KinderComp. It was awesome.
Tandy 1000 XT 4.77Mhz w/ memory upgrade to 640K
Dual 5.25 low density floppy drives, later upgrdaed to 720k 3.5"
16 Color monitor.
Then a buddy of mine and his dad bought a computer. The Tandy 1000 SX, which was a 6Mhz computer, and a single stand alone 3.5" drive. My first copy of Thexder (wow!) was on dual 5.25 disks, which I got from the same friend. At the time, the boxed set came with both sets of disks.
I remember downloading using my 1200 baud modem, using J-Modem and using the Procomm (not plus) version.
Ahh.. those were the days...
harryk
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
And I tought my first PC-XT, with 256 KILObytes of RAM, had little memory.. :P
Test Drive and Karateka runned fine, but I had to add 256KB more later to be able to play Battle Chess and Grand Prix.
The best part was the AT keyboard that came with (they went out of XT keyboards), one the best keyboards I've seen in my life, and is still being used (now by my sister) and working fine, 15 years latter.
First, in elementary school, I forget which grade, but it was down there,,, 3 or 4, I guess... my school got some computers.
a few TRS-80 model 3's. They had names, too, like "Fred" and "George".. we put stickers on them.
Now, we got to play with those a bit, and do some stuff... not much, though.
Later, my parents bought me a Vic-20, and later, a C64. I have to say those were my first two computers, and I have to mention both, because both were really important in getting me going.
Rolling forward a decade and a bit, to University.
I was finishing my last year of computing, and a truckload of old computers from the local school district rolled in (the university takes donations of stuff like this to be used for teaching low level stuff, usually). What rolls in, but, much mroe beat up, Fred and George, with the stickers still on them, but faded to nothing! Surely, this was a sign! The powers that be let me take one home, as only I could appreciate such a machine anyway.
Ahh, how could I forget my C64, with its amazing games, video, sound... no, really, it took the PC industry years to catch up.
And as for Windows, that literally took a decade to catch up--we had GEOS, which was technically superior in every way until perhaps Windows 3.0 came out. (and even then, it was still far smaller and more efficient)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I had a Wang with no hard drive. Now I have a wang that's always hard, but never driven. My parents doomed me in their prophetic first choice of computers. :(
A Sperry/Univac machine programmed in Fortran IV (WATFOR) with bubble cards?
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Aaaah yes...my first computer. I was 12 and desperatly wanted a C64 (all my friends got one). But my parents bought me a Atari 600 XL (doh!). After the innitial disappointment i began to like the little machine; even if there was no software for it to buy in the stores (the Netherlands). Because of this i had to resort to typing listings from magazines, eventualy becoming quite good at basic (at one point i could even compile ZX81 listings to my Atari ;-) ) and eventually machinecode.
:-)
And my friends where wasting their time with C64 games....PAH !!
..hello ?..is this thing on ?...
I just this month brought my TRS-80 to work and hooked it up. First time it's seen power in over 15 years, and it still works! Kind of. The monitor itself seems to work, but the text disintegrates a few seconds after the CPU/keyboard is turned on. No problem with executing a "Hello World" program, even typing it in blind. I suspect some crystal has gone kaput. This being Slashdot, I suspect someone out there knows exactly what to do...
I never did hook up a disk drive. I did find some printouts of my old code (and man is it ugly). If I can get the old girl up and running, I'll probably hook up the cassette port to the audio in/out of the P-IV and start downloading. Meanwhile, though, it makes a great desk ornament!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Growing up my big brother had an Atari 400 and then an Atari 800, both of which I loved playing with and I wrote endless BASIC programs on them.
When I was about 10 year old, I FINALLY got my own computer-- An Atari 520 ST FM. Now that thing kicked ass! Everything from Object Logo to Dungeon Master, and it had all of those nice synth music channels. Ahh those were the days.
First computer with a hard drive came a couple of years later. 386SX-16 with a HUGE 20MB drive and a Zoom 2400bd modem. Its amazing how much CGA and EGA porn you can fit on a 20MB drive downloading it off local BBS's.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
My favorites, and all games I still like playing now:
Raid on Bungling Bay (sp?)
Raid over Moscow
Summmer Games/Winter games series
Mission Impossible & MI 2
Hacker & Hacker2
Bruce Lee
Karateka
Spy-vs-Spy series
Beach Head series
Barbarian
My vote for best all around game: Paradroid!
my girlfriends kid complains cos the laptop in his bedroom wont run Return to Castle Wolfenstien as fast as my machine. I distinctly remember a similar complaint when I first tried to run the original Wolfenstien on my firt PC!
John, I'm Only Dancing!
All we need is a Beowulf cluster of these things!
Beer! It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Does anyone remember this gem of a book (booklet, IIRC) on Extended Basic game programming for the TI 99/4A? Fond, fond childhood memories of programming my first (and, come to think of it, only) games using their cute little recipes.
What a great little machine...
Hello master.
sid=90367
formkey=TUEPKU0nmJ
This is a joint venture that will be mutually advantageous to both parties involved.
more rumours about the won-eyed girl/robbIE's gnu dating servive?(Score:mynuts won, you need a date buddIE?)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23, @03:52PM (#7797654)
just kidding. everybody knows that's not stuff that matters, &/or the won-eyed girl in the jump-you ads is not real, &/or not a member of robbIE's gnu proprIEtary dating service?
ly frequent reports of the creators' intervention on unprecedented evile/the walking dead contingent, however, have been found to be founded, in fact.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... get ready to brighten/lighten up?
for each of the creators' innocents harmed, there is a badtoll that must/will be repaid by you/US, as the felonious corepirate nazi perpetraitors of the life0cide against the planet/population will not be available to make reparations, after the big flash occurs. not that they would anyway.
here's hoping robbIE's dating service works better than his/lairIE's whoreabully infactdead PostBlock(tm) devise.
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily (forever, if we were a little more ept) been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down, like with fuddle's phonIE ?pr? ?firm? bouNTy hunter scam? If you think this is unfair, we don't care
The Aquarius was, I am not ashamed to say, my first computer, and my only one for quite a while.
I think my parents got it at a yardsale in 1985 for like $5, and I hooked it up to the B&W TV in my bedroom and proceeded to learn BASIC. If I recall, the manual had a complete syntax guide and some sample programs.
I managed to code up a few little character-based games on there, but you couldn't get too fancy with so little RAM. And I never labelled my tapes, so I frequently recorded over my programs with silly pop songs.
I think I bought roughly 1% of the games I played. Copies of tapes full of games spread faster than chicken pox through my middle school.
I've recently started collecting all my old computers... so that my kids can see what dad used back when he was their age.
I remember how hard I worked and saved for each computer, having to sell my old ones with all their peripherials and software in order to get the money to buy the latest.
I started with my dad's Sanyo MBC1150, then my folks got me a Commodore64. That C-64 was a monster by the time I was done with it, disk drives, modem, tape drives, printer, the works! I sold it all used to get seed money for an Atari ST... looking back on it, that was dumb. I ended up getting rid of the Atari and going to a Mac. I sold the Mac and bought a PackardBell (ugh!), which I used until I started building my own machines in 1996.
Ahh the good old days, out of all those machines, I think the C-64 served me the best. There was nothing like being online in the mid 80's! Funny that after all that money I spent on those systems, I can buy them all back through eBay for pennies on the dollar. Purchasing every PC I used throughout my childhood (even the Apple II I used in school) ended up costing me less than $200, and now I have a working computer museum!
One - a TRS-80 I ran BASIC and Miller Microcomputer FORTH on and two - an Atari 400 I played games on - including Chris Crawford's 1941 - When I took Moscow and held it for 3 days with Das Reich #2 SS tank division, it was the pinnacle of my gaming experience up to that time, and still a great memory.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Ah, the Commodore PET. It must have been frightening to see, the sight of 20-odd 8th graders milling about a fully stocked computer classroom, plotting the downfall of Carter-era America with their BASIC workbooks, cassette tapes full of awesome Man-fighting code laboriously typed on its Lilliputian keyboard. Had they but known I spent my weekends wielding the knowledge they gave me against the Honeywell CP/M at the nearby university they never would have allowed me to suckle upon their precious monochrome-screened trapezoidal teats.
Good times, good times...
Bemopolis
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
"...26-pound 'portable' Osbornes, 'high-speed' 300 baud modems"
You just wait. In 10 years, people will be referring to your gear like this:
"4-pound 'portable' Dells, 'high-speed' 100Mbps ethernet ports".
The lesson is: don't be snotty about "today's" technology.
The first computer I actually had in my house was a Tomy Tutor The game "Traffic Jam" and a port of "Jungler" kept me entertained for many hours of my young life =p
"where words meet intent, lies rhetoric's lament"
First computer exposure, IMSAI 8080 with a nice, open chassis, "Don't touch - lethal voltages" monitor. Had to key in a 80+ byte cassette loader program in the monitor to load in BASIC. (Tried to bootstrap it off of the front panel, but that was miserable even before it didn't work).
School then got a shipment of PET computers, while I got a nice, shiny KIM-1 board to play with. First Book of KIM was a GOD SEND. The TV turned to snow whenever I fired this thing up. Loved the little Asteroid game. And Reverse.
Dads office had a TRS-80, great fun that was.
Later moved on to an Atari 800. Fabulous machine. Cassette tape was terrible (The PET has a great tape drive. Just flat worked.) Owned the tape a week when I decided that a disk drive was more important than food.
Then, Mac 128k (upgraded, natch, twice) "meese and menus, ooh!", NextStation Mono "DPS and DSP, ooh!", random 486/66 (parted together back when the Computer Swap was cool. $500 for the CPU) "Why did I get this horror again? Oh yeah, someone is paying me.".
On fourth PC now (P133 -> Celeron 400 -> P4 1.8 something - games.), with a Sun Ultra 10 and I think either an iMac or iBook coming soon.
Still have a Model 100 (working), and a PB 520C (not). Use the eraser ends of #2 pencils, wrapped in tape for legs on the M100. Work perfectly. Best keyboard EVER!
And today, I have a 3Ghz Dell that's been sitting here for the past week at the office because I'm not motivated strongly to get off of my current 3 year old 900Mhz Dell. Go figure. Maybe after the holiday.
All that work with no saving? And relying on the ability to hot-plug a cassette drive in?
"Hard core, man. Fucking hard core."
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
...or, rather, it's a II on the outside, but I swiped the D0 and D8 PROMs out of a II+ to upgrade it. (Not exactly overclocking or case-modding, but not bad for a 12-year-old.) Serial number 23099. I bet it would still work if I found an appropriate cable to hook it to my TV, too.
I've also got the Red Book that came with the early II's, the one with a complete source listing of the operating system. Don't tell Darl.
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
my first real COMPUTER that wasnt a gamesystem (Vectrex) was a Sharp MZ-700 I got for xmas in 1983.. wich means this christmas.. aka.. TOMORROW I celebrate my 20th year in the digital realm.. and I'm not even 30 yet..geesh.. I need a life :D Fantastic piece of hardware with a built in tapeplayer. =D
We all would write FORTRAN programs to run on this machine, and of course we would try for the holy grail of finding out the password on the "MFD", the "Master File Directory" ... you see, each directory could be protected by a password but there was also a system subroutine called GPAS$$ (IIRC) which would obtain this password in a form suitable for going one level down. Which I think was called "attaching" to the directory. Going the other way however, was nontrivial....
We typed our stuff in using some 1200-baud terminals which only worked with capital letters, so all our code got this dense, brick-wall, appearance, what with FORTRAN requiring things to start in column 7. The only 9600-baud terminal was the graphical Tektronix one right next to the machine room; this was to be used sparingly for nongraphichal purposes lest its screen wore out. Apparently, this terminal screen operated on a principle similar to an analog storage scope, flooding the phosphor with electrons. That thing was FAST though. It also allowed lowercase characters, but the compiler didn't like those, which made for interesting debugging sessions on the other uppercase-only terminals. This is probably where I got into the habit of starting loop indexes at J. I looked too much like 1...
I learned a lot of computer details on this thing, stuffing text into INTEGERs two by two characters, and experimenting with left- and right-shifting them... The characters were like ASCII but with the 8th bit set, the interface was basically 16-bit with a 65536-word addressing limit, and this could be extended for programs with big data using some compiler switches, -32R and -64V and similar. Of course we did have to try and find out what were the limits, how far we could go with lists of INTEGER*4 size prime numbers or electronic component matrices before it overflowed or our program crashed.
AFAIR, no-one ever managed to take the system completely down. And the MFD password was revealed at one point, but as a result of social engineering, not cracking...
Now for the second computer, that was a Commodore PET, and the third, which was a Commodore 64, both of which ran BASIC with line-numbers and two-letter variables. After having become used to writing fairly structured FORTRAN, having no way of partitioning things into functions with local variables felt restrictive... I never became a fan of BASIC in this form, and by the time BASIC had shaken off its linenumbering shackles, I was already done with Pascal and having discovered the UNIX workstations they had at the university, learning C. These things were more in the same league as that old PR1ME system and C certainly was a lot nicer than FORTRAN.
Of course, a student in the 80s couldn't afford anything that ran UNIX, so I learned Pascal and practiced C on the fourth computer I had and the first one I actually owned, this was a 4.77 MHz IBM XT Clone from 1985.
I still got that one, it still works, and I power it up occasionally, just to feel the factor of 700 or so difference in processor speed.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Mine was two 74S181 ALU's with 16 bytes of RAM, toggle switches for entering program, 8 LED's for output, and second-hand paper tape punch/reader for external storage.
Download Mazes and Puzzles from www.puz.com
The Atari 500ST was my Amiga wannabe. I never tried video, just some audio and great (for the time) print layout. Darn thing paid for itself in no time, and put me through an undergrad degree (though I still used the mainframe for my own papers). Not that I miss it, or the nasty dongled apps I was using.
What I do miss was my next computer: the Mac 512KE. Well, I don't miss it since it's still booting just fine when I pull it out of the closet; what I miss is its reliability and speed. Boots in 17sec, networks, runs MS Word (v.3)--imagine if it had a hard drive!
Damn those pesky terrorists
My first computer was the good ol' Atari 2600. Mmmm, wood finish :) A tandy games thing, C64, amiga 500s, PCs... now.
But back in the '80s, my Dad set up the home with the central heating controlled by a Commodore 64. It was custom software on external tape, with different programs for summer and winter. The software controlled 10 zones, 7 "rooms" (the hallways in the house counted as 1 room for instance), 2 towel rails and the hot water. The C64 was wired, presumably via a com port, to relays which controlled the oil-fired boiler being on or off, and valves on the hot water pipes.
Each room in the house had a temperature gauge and a radiator, a dial for manual heat setting, and a switch to toggle between manual and comuter temperature control. The c64 was programmed to set to heat certain rooms at certain times of the day, to ceratin temperatures. The hot water could be turned on easily too, via software or via a pull cord in the kitchen. The TV out that the C64 gave was connected to the TV cabling in the house, so you change to a channel on the tele in the lounge or a bedroom and see what rooms has heating on, and their tempatures, times heating was due...
By the time the system was done, it had a custom UPS as lived in the middle of nowhere, and power cuts were frequent. Reloading the C64 was a pain, so my Dad sorted out a battery backup system. It could run the C64 for a good while, but when the batteries died, so would the C64. And without the C64 there was no heating (without grovelling into a way cavity to flick the valves mannually).
I moved out in 1996, but since then my parents have split up and the house has been sold. But AFAIK, the system is still going strong. It was when my parents moved out in 2001. That C64 must have had monster uptimes thinking about it....
Car analogies break down.
Apple //c:
128 kB RAM
1.4 MHz MOS 65C02 8-bit processor
2x 143 kB 5.25" floppy drives, one internal
Apple ImageWriter II color dot-matrix printer
One-button mouse, rather like a Mac's
Joystick
12" color monitor
Koala pad (remember those?)
Ran both Apple DOS 3.3 and an early ProDOS.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
My first home computer was an Acorn Atom 6502 cpu and a few K of memory It cost about 100$ CDN in 1983. It had a nice version of basic. I put it head to head in a game of computer chess with a TI99. After about 10 moves my Acorn was soundly defeated. Not due to a better TI99 chess program but because the Power regulator chips on the Acorn went up in a big puff of smoke. I could never get it working again, Also a charming little museum of early PC's is located in Annapolis Royal Nova Scotia http://www.computermuseum.20m.com/museum.htm
I worked all summer on a paper route in the late 70s to gather the $379 it took to upgrade to 16K of RAM and Level II, so I could use PEEK and POKE commands to stuff Z-80 machine language into the RAM. Oh, the deal with the upgrade is that they kept the old memory, too.
To put that in perspective, $379 for 4K bytes is 2.3 cents per byte. Many of today's sub-$1,000 PCs have 512MB of RAM. The equivalent cost of that RAM in the late 70s would be $12.3 million dollars. I think that's about what the A-10 aircraft cost at the time.
I usually drag that out when people say PC components are too expensive.
Who else is completely sick of nostalgia about how crappy things used to be.
"Oh boy! Things used to be horrible and we loved it! Yay! I guess in hindsight we're idiots and should shut up!"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I remember my first computer. :)
The thing about it wass... it was a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum knockoff o_O
It had a slightly faster processor than z80 (i remember that because some games seemed a bit too fast and sounds a tad too high-pitched). Nevertheless, it was otherwise fully zx-compatible
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Which is probably why I have two C64s and a C128, plus Frodo on my phone. No need to remember when you can still use the computers. I just hope they last as some of the logic ICs used in the 80s were of the programmable type (PALs?) and have a limited life.
O/S on ROM, BASIC and assembler on ROM, excellent quality keyboard, connect to TV or RGB monitor; RS432, parallel/printer, analogue port (with on-board DAC/ADC), cassette and disk-drive ports, User Port for turtles et al (remember LOGO?), 'Tube' port for a (gasp!) co-processor and direct access to the system bus. I used these all the time in secondary school, saw 32 of them networked up to a 60MB Winchester HD, used one to run a CNC lathe, learned datalogging and control systems, played far too much ELITE and FRAK, and wondered if there was anything you couldn't hook a 'beeb' up to, or if there was anything it couldn't do.
Oh, and an assembly-language speech synthesiser that fit on a single 5 1/4" floppy and sounds better than Stephen Hawking.
My first computer was a C= 64...I had tons of games for the thing...made me pretty popular when the rest of the kids only had an Atari at home...
Actually, it was the family computer...my first "sits in my room, taken to college" computer was a C= Amiga 2000 (no hard drive, just dual-floppies)...
I think it's worth mentioning that the C= 64 was my first REAL introduction to computers...the fact that the only storage I had was a Datasette and an almost endless supply of Computes Gazette and Ahoy magazines (the ones with the programs in the back) was what started me on programming...
The list trials out from there - in the 70's now.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
WOWZER! :D ..or rather another one like it: http://www.interface1.net/zx/clones/delta.htmli ne didn't have the russian letters, though... but I now remember I color-coded the keys, too ;)
found mah machine
M
I guess I should've kept it for nostalgic purposes XD
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
My forst computer was an old California Computer Systems S-100 bus based CP/M monster running an 6809 processor with two 5.25" full-height floppy drives and a Perkin-Elmer data terminal.
I traded it up for a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 64K of RAM, two floppies, an old color TV and a 32 (yes, thirty-two) collumn thermal printer.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Back in 1972 at my junior high school we had this computer for the students in all of the high schools and junior high schools. Each school had an ASR-33 teletype with a 110 baud acoustical coupler and an 8 bit paper tape punch.
Anyone remember the red "Introduction to Programming" paperbacks from digital? They were after the orange ones.
The PDP-8 was a 12 bit word machine with 8 instructions in its machine language. Each user got to run in a 4K address space that was swapped by the timesharing system (TSS/8).
We programmed in basic of course and played lunar lander.
Interestingly, I went to work for the school district and found a program that you could use to play 4 part harmonies on a radio placed on top of the CPU. It was an assembler program, so you had to put the note values in as numeric values and it would flash the register lights on the front panel. I programmed the first movement of the Brandenberg Concerto #3 and National Emblem march.
I then moved to work on the district's main computer, a PDP-10KA with 128K 36 bit words of memory and VT-05 terminals. We were a pretty advanced school district back then. All of the character data was in 6-bit encoding, only upper case. And everything was in COBOL except for some assembler.
What a geek...
I remember my old Packard Bell. Windows 3.1 and I don't remember anything else about it. I thought I was cool because I knew what dir /p did. I hate myself.
My first computer that I didn't share with Mummy or Daddy(Mine only) had: an Intel PIII 1GHZ, 512 MB RAM, and 2 * 20 GB IDE hard disks.
,just arrived yesterday!!)) is a Sun Blade 2500 with 2 * 1.28GHZ UltraSparc IIIs, 8GBRAM, 2 * 36GB SCSI hard disks(currently, but I'm trying to purswade Daddy to give me 2 15K SCSI hard disks), and a Sun XVR-1200 graphics card.
My second computer had: AMD AThlon XP 1800, 4GB RAM, and 2 * 36GB SCSI hard disks.
My third computer was a Sun Blade 2000 with 2 * 1.2GHZ UltraSparc III Ci CPUs, 8 GB RAM, and 2 * 73GB SCSI hard disks.
My forth computer(the one I am writing this on) has: 2 * AMD Opteron 248s, 8 GB RAM, 2 * 146GB SCSI hard disks, and a NVIDIA Quadro 2000 graphics card(unfortunately, Daddy wouldn't give me the Quadro 3000).
My fifth computer(my latest and greatest one
All the computers described above are used only by me and sometimes with my brother, except the first two ones, which are very old and not that good at all. I gave one of them to Mummy because she did not have a computer.
The very first one I owned was an Ohio Scientific single-board trainer, complete with 6502 CPU, slide-switches, red LEDs and a whopping whole 128 *bytes* of RAM. It taught me how to really be frugal with memory, that's for sure! I used it to make music, one squarewave note at a time. Sadly, my father threw it out a long time ago :( I still miss hacking in binary on it, and thanks to that I can still add, subtract and multiply, in my head, in binary and hexadecimal.
:(
... that used hard-sectored disks. grrrr! Goddess, what a weekend~ I managed to craft, in machine code in DDT, a simple program that allowed me to send MODEM7 over, and then we used MODEM7 to send Wordstar, Spellstar, Calcstar, Basic, C, CBASIC and a shirtload more. I was wiped - 48+ hours of no sleep, plus the most intense hacking session I'd done to then, but Greg and his new wife sure appreciated it. Wheee!
:) Some day, I'll be buried beside it, and their I'll lie, "dreaming" of Wordstar 3.3 and DDT, content to rest, at last. :)
My next machine was a huge step up - an OSM Zeus 4 multi-user unit, complete with 10 megabyte hard drive. It had 5 Z-80s, each with 64k of RAM, and ran a varient of CPM as an OS. That machine, I used not only to write programs for businesses to use, but multi-player, multi-user text games. That unit taught me C, and gave me an even better grasp on assembler. Sadly, it went to the same fate that my OSI met, when my father cleaned out the attic one spring
Next was a throw-back, sort-of. A Zorba luggable. Z-80, 65k RAM, dual floppies, tiny green screen. This one could *natively* read, write and format almost any soft-sectored 5.25" format, wheee! I took it, and an Eagle II, to Ohio, and hand-crafted a "bootstrap" program, in machine code, to allow me to download all my software onto my friend Greg's brand-new Heathkit computer
I still have that old Zorba in my closet. My father never even got near it, I defended it with my life
Lemon curry?
And Bill Gates couldn't possibly have lied in that interview.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Single board 1Mhz 6502, 256 *bytes* of RAM (well, plus a few more tucked away in the memory-mapped I/O chips), and a 6-digit, 7-segment LED for output. Oh, and a hex keypad scanned by lines from the aforesaid GPIO chips.
But this wan't a crippled system, no sir. It also had a handy 20MA current-loop interface (and I happened to have access to KSR-33 teletypes), and a screaming 300-baud-or-so cassette tape port. Plus a bunch of fun I/O lines just begging to be hooked up to control, well, *something*.
Not bad for $250 (power supply not included).
There's nothing like hand-assembling code to hex (and constantly recalculating branches and jumps) to give you a feeling for what going on in the guts of the machine. Something that was sadly lacking, even with the intimacy of the RSTS/E command line.
It doesn't get any better than Jumpman and the various Summer/Winter Olympics titles on the C64.
A 16k Commodore Pet with a tape drive. I loved that thing.
The cake is a pie
Of course when I got to college (for engineering naturally) the first thing I did was to hack an XT machine using a VIC20 CPU running at an unbelievable 10MHz!
The VIC-20's CPU (the 6502) is completely imcompatible with XT architecture, and even if it wasn't, the 6502 is limited to 1 MHz. He's either lying, or has a very hazy memory.
And for the record, my first computer was a Commodore 64 with a Datasette. Still have several, in fact! :)
I still have 2 RCA VIP single board computers. They had an 1802 uP, 1K or 2K of memory, a keypad for data entry/programming. It had an additional "language" "Chip 8".
The 1802 was a CMOS uP. I replaced all the other 74xx-series glue chips with the CMOS equivalents (74Cxx series). The result would run for weeks on a two AA batteries. :-) I
One fellow I know worked for a radio station. He used such a modified VIP to gather data remotely at a commercial broadcast radio station he worked for. Once every two weeks, he'd stop by the transmitter, swap computers and take it home and download the data to his home PC.
Cool little computer. I wish I could find some spare 1802s. The ones on my boards are dead. I loved to play with the machine again. Any suggestions? :-)
Any other ex-RCA Cosmac VIP owners? Drop me a note
Best PC I ever owned
286 20Mhz(!)
1024k RAM (but most things only used 640k so the extra was usless unless the game supported extended/expanded memory)
13"(?) SVGA monitor
2400 baud modem (got it a bit later)
20-something(?) MB HD
3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives
3 button wheel mouse that never really worked well
ahh... the best PC I ever had
Fondest memories:
I think my computer is my first love, like women are for some men, or cars are for others. My life is totally fucked up now but thinking of the 286 brings back good memories
I guess that pretty much confirms that I'm a geek
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I still have my Osborne 1. all of the software, supercalc, wordstar... oh ya... I've even got the massively nonfast 300 baud modem that mounted in one of the slots. AND I have the cooling fan attachment. Those were the days. Needed a custom cable to simply get it hooked up to my Epson RX100 wide carriage printer. all these years later I still have an epson printer photo 960. my how times have changed.
My two-bit computer isn't among the elite either....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Yep, that machine cooked! (not)
:)
It was a kit computer, but It was pre-built when I received it (I'm not a chiphead). It was an S-100 system that handled 8K static Memory cards (and they cost about $500 a pop!). The BIOS was on ROM, everything else loaded from Tape. SOL Integer Basic tool up 5K, leaving me with 3K to program. When I finally got another 8K board I could move up to SOL Advanced Basic that handled these cool things called strings and arrays, but I never saw a use for them.
It's pretty funny how efficient you can be with 3K of space! And all in all, it was a good machine to learn on. The real maple side panels were cool as well.
The only downside to the machine was a faulty solder point or something inside on a cap or resistor (I used to know which one) that would cause the machine to halt during boot. Giving the machine a loving boot to the side fixed it. I always liked having to 'boot' my machine
(And for those of you looking to set your dial on the WayBack Machine, 1978 would be about right)
My pop brought this home from work one weekend. Its clockrate was less than 1 MHz, and had 32 kilowords of RAM (16-bit words.) This was in 1976.
The neatest thing about it was, when you powered it on, it presented a "machine language monitor" to whatever console device was hooked (e.g. teletype.) With it, you could store octal words to memory locations, list the octal value of memory, and execute programs (like FOCAL)
In fact, that was how you booted the damn thing. To boot a disk drive (we eventually got two 8" floppy drives), you'd type in the start address of teh boot loader EPROM, followed by 'G', and off it'd go. We ran RT-11, and eventually RSX-11S. Both were command-line O/Sen. Here I learned how to write code, mostly in the PDP-11 instruction set, which even back then was a better design than the 80x86 set.
It's a real antique now, in boxes in the folk's garage. We eventually got a "video terminal kit," which to make operational, we had to hand-solder each and every resister and capacitor onto a circuit board. Fortunately it worked first time out, unlike many of our other hand-built projects!
Overall, this was as good an introduction to computers as I could expect, as it taught me the innards of computers -fundamentals like bits, bytes, registers, etc.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
10 PRINT "I Learned To Program On A Timex Sinclair 1000"
20 GOTO 10
Ah, the memories I had of it. It seemed fast at first, but eventually the 64 bit OS, the 4GB of RAM, the speedy 200GB Ultra SCSI drives, man it shows how so little could satisfy me at the time.
{Sigh} All these posts with pre-built boxes like the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET.
All I had was a kit with silkscreened motherboard and a bunch of parts including a 6502 and 48K of RAM. Added the 80-column CP/M card later to max it to 64K. Tape cassette drive for storage (later replaced by dual single-sided floppy drives).
Given to one of my siblings who subsequently sold it in a garage sale whilst I was living in Japan.
I have mourned its loss ever since.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
So cute with your megahertz and your hundreds of K of RAM and your storing your bootstrap sequences in hardware instead of typing them in everytime your turned your computer on!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"And Bill Gates couldn't possibly have lied in that interview."
It really isn't that likely he would have said that. Virtually nobody in the computer industry would ever say something like that.
"Derp de derp."
1st computer - IBM1130 (Basic, APL, FORTRAN, Assembler) 1971 at high school!! I was addicted. Now have a career because of that. Try www.ibm1130.org for a simulator.
This is a bit like a Monty Python skit isn't it -- but here goes...
:-)
:-)
My first computer was a Signetics 2650-powered system I built myself in late 1976/early 1977.
"What's a Signetics 2650?" I hear all you young fellers asking
It was a Philips (yes -- they actually had a brief fling in the CPU business way back in the late 1970s) chip that ran at an astonishing 1MHz
Initially this system had 512 bytes of RAM memory and a 1MB ROM cutely named "PIPBUG". For its day, this was actually a pretty powerful processor which offered a whole lot of really cool mini-computer-like instructions such as serial I/O (110 baud), advanced memory addressing support (post/pre-increment, absolute, indirect, indexed, etc).
I also built a glass TTY (terminal) to communicate with this "computer". The TTY was ultra-cool because it had 16 lines of 32 characters (all upper case of course) and a *real* QWERTY keyboard. Yes, I was the envy of all my peers who were still flipping toggle switches and peering at LEDs hooked across the address/data lines.
One of my first software projects was an assembler for 2650 code -- hand coded and hand assembled. It was about half-way through this project that I realized 512 bytes of RAM wasn't going to be enough -- so I splashed out on 4 of the amazing new 2114 static RAM chips that had just been released. Wow -- these offered 1/2Kbyte of static RAM on a single chip (1K x 4bit) so now I had 2Kbytes of RAM and I was sure that nobody would ever need more than 2Kbytes of RAM
I managed to get the assembler into a little over 1KByte and then realized that I needed some long-term storage -- just in case the power went off. Keying in a thousand hand-coded bytes of assembler as hex characters on a QWERTY keyboard was not fun.
More late nights and long hours resulted in an NRZ tape system based on a cheap cassette deck. Once again I was the envy of all around -- since they were still using crappy and unreliable audio cassette decks with FSK modulation. My NRZ system was very reliable and had the potential to run as high as 1200bps -- woo hoo!
I was also probably one of the world's first over-clockers and managed to get the 2650 running at an astonishing 1.8MHz out of this chip that was only spec'd to 1.25MHz. This was great because it meant that the normally sloth-like 10 characters per second interface between the TTY and the processor then lept to an astonishing 18 characters per second - that's less than two seconds per line of characters!!
Despite its very limited capabilities and unbelievable crudeness, I probably had more fun with that computer than with any other I've owned or used since.
I can recall spending many, many hours hunched over that keyboard and screen, and all the non-geeks who dropped by to see if I was still alive were astonished by little marvels such as the text-based games I'd recoded for it.
Who remembers:
Towers of Hanoi
Number Guessing
Wumpus
etc, etc.
Before retiring the hardware I also wrote a simple BASIC interpreter that fitted inside the now massive 4Kbytes of RAM I'd upgraded to.
And, to give Philips/Signetics credit where it's due, when I eventually moved on to the 8080 processor I was gobsmacked by the crudeness of its instruction set in comparison.
And these days kids start bitching on boxing day because they've already clocked the latest PS2 or Xbox game -- ah, they don't know what they've missed
My first computer was an Amstrad, it was an all in one mobo/keyboard deal and we plugged it into our Sony TV. I used it from 1988-1995, when I finally begged my Dad to get me an IBM 486. My dad's girlfriend at the time then used the Amstrad all the way up until 1999. Such longevity!
The Amstrad was more sturdy than any computer I've owned since. The 486 crapped out on me several times, a later PC's soundcard kept dying, and my iBook has had three trips to be serviced for a reed switch. But damn, that Amstrad. I used to carry it around to different TVs, friends would shove discs in the wrong way, and it would deal with it all. Sniff.
I remember that computer... My memories of it were anything but fond. It's a good thing I discovered PCs years later, otherwise I may have had no interest in computers whatsoever.
The game/program cartreges only worked sometimes - you'd have to blow on them, slide them in and out... Eventually, if you got lucky, it would load. The joysticks were equally flakey and loading something from the cassette recorder was usually an excercize in futility.
Now my first PC was a Tandy 1000RL and I actually have a writeup about that on one of my old pages somewhere... For a PC, it sucked, but what appealed to me about it was for the first time, I saw a glimmer of potential in personal computers. Potential to play games that were more than just colored lines and shapes, potential to listen to digital music that wasn't just beeps and blips. Potentially spending a fortune to upgrade to newer technology so I can do more.
At any rate, my hat is truly off to people who got into computers back in the days of text-only displays or even further back. Course, to some 12 year old who's getting a brand new P4 this xmas, my old Tandy 1000RL probably seems just as acient.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
If you can call it a computer, my first was a kitset using an RCA CDP 1802 processor. It was a pc board with the processor, a static ram chip (256 bytes I think) and some I/O logic. I/O was 2 seven segment led digits, a few single leds and a hex keypad. The keypad was an optional extra luxury because it also had toggle switches. It either came with a speaker or I hooked one up to an I/O line. I spent many hours writing hex machine code to play simple games, flash lights etc. Eventually I turned it into a fusible link prom programmer.
A quick search on Google shows that it was suspiciously similar to the COSMAC ELF which was featured in Popular Electronics and others have mentioned here. I bet it was the same circuit. It came from a company called Kit Parts Ltd in New Zealand.
Looking back, learning machine code and knowing about hardware gave me a great start in programing with an understanding that I wouldn't have if I started with a high level language.
Cheers
Ross
Bought my first computer 11 years later, an SCP 8086 system, followed 4.5 years later by a Deskpro 386.
Still have my HP-45 kicking around - the young-uns on /. wouldn't comprehend what a change the HP-35/45 represented.
Hmm...
:-)
I thought that memories of the first kiss and of the first computer were mutually exclusive.
That is... if you have long-term memories of owning a computer, the memory of the first kiss is probably still recent....
I wondering if anyone has any information about this company.
They were located in Los Gatos CA in the early 80's.
I only ask this question because one of the daughters of the founder was my girlfriend in High School.
http://www.Slaveway.com
the graphics were decent, and it held my interest for a long time, even more so than LodeRunner. Of course, I think that Jumpman is responsible for the deaths of multiple atari-style joysticks at my house.
I also had an SDK-85, the Intel single board computer which showcased the 8085 chip. This was about like the Sym-1, but less neat-o hobby-oriented stuff in the rom. It actually had a proper area to which I could attach a breadboard, so projects on this looked a little less kludgy. Since I never really took a shine to the Intel chips, this collected more dust than the Sym.
Then, there were my portables: First an HP-41c, then a Sharp PC-1500 (also known as the TRS-80 PC2). The Sharp was a hand held, calculator sized (like a 10 inch long chunk of 2x4), basic programmable calculator. Its basic was almost entirely comaptible with the MS GWBasic which was shipping with PC-DOS at that time (1982 or so), so I could develope programs on it, then retype them on the PC. The little CMOS CPU on the Sharp ran at a slower clock speed than did the IBM PC's CPU, but the programs were still nearly as fast. I had the plotter/cassette interface, which let me print out circuit diagrams and so on in class, for tests. Since there weren't enough PCs in the classroom for everyone to use at once on tests, I got a big advantage out of this.
Of course, before I owned any of these, there was the Honeywell mainframe (lousy link, that'll give you an idea of how obscure Honeybucket computers were and are) I used at UAF.
Then, there were some that I worked on, but never owned:
The Otrona Attache. These were wonderful little CPM machines, with a Z80 CPU and a TI screen controller chip which I was never able to find a source for (Not sure about the TI part, but definitely sure about the hard-to-get part.). I never owned one, unfortunately, because none of the people who owned them would ever part with them, including the owner of the one with the chip I couldn't replace.
Then there were the various models of Altos and Vector Graphics machines. Both of these were multi-user, multi-CPU CPM machines.
See what I've been reading.
The Commodore 1541 floppy drive was painfully slow as well.
:)
I developed for all three machines (Apple II, Atari 800, C-64) back in the day, and, while I don't remember the exact details, I do remember that our tests showed that the Apple II's drives were ten times faster than the Atari's, and the Atari's were ten times faster than the C-64's. Which made the C-64's drives a whopping one hundred times slower than the Apple's.
Of course, the Apple drives also used up all the CPU while they were running, so it was a good thing they were so fast.
We had this for a few years when I was in high school. Later it was replaced with a DEC Rainbow 100. (Does anybody remember the Rainbow with it's Z-80 and 8086? It could run either CP/M or MS-DOS, but was fatally flawed by not being PC compatible.)
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
How about the DEC Rainbow? I almost bought one when I found out that it had PIP. Budget prevailed and I waited a couple of years and had my debut with the Tandy 1200... the selling point for me was the 10Mbyte hard drive.
Regards,
John
Falling You - beautiful
Collecting dust somewhere in the house.
My first machine was a Timex Sinclair 1000! It came with 5Kbytes of main memory and 32 Kbytes of expansion memory (or was it only 20KB?), and the 20K that you added disabled the first 5k. The color display (black, white and grey are all colors) from the TV was kewel. I even attached a tape recorder to the thing to store programs! The membrane keyboard was a little tough to type at, but you could write nice programs with it. ...Almost more fun than the 1.9GHz machine I have now with 1GB of PC2700 ram, 420GB of disk, Nvidia Ti4200/128, 17" flat panel,DVD/CDRW, tv tuner, SBLive! and FedoraCore1 that I have now. Almost more fun.
Back in 1993, I was doing a cyber cafe, here in denver. At that time, I met a guy who was into marketing, but it was his mother that was interesting. She had gotten into computers by working on the Eniac. I found her to be very interesting to talk to as she had been one of the first female managers at SkunkWorks as well as the first female director at Lockheed. I tried to get others interested in interviewing her for posterity sake, but I got nowhere with it. I have since lost contact with her, but I only hope that she is still here and with her facilities. It would be useful to get an interview and netcast it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We had a VIC-20 that my dad bought new. I would spend hours on it trying to figure out BASIC.
Later, my parents bought an Apple IIc with the orange monitor. I remember when my dad brought home a mouse, and I thought "Who the hell will ever use this crappy thing? This will never catch on."
My first computer was a Cosmac Elf. I added on to the kit with color graphics, and a whopping 8k of ram. I had a full ascii keyboard add-on, the cassette interface, and tiny basic. After that I got an Atari 400 that I upgraded to 800 capability and a pair of floppy disk drives. My first serious program was an assembler written in Atari Basic. It hasn't been the same since!
TT
My first computer was made from an article in Radio-Electronics magazine using an Intel 8008. A little googling showed me this as an example of the machine I made way back then. Nothing quite like writing a boot loader and keying it in by hand so I could read the rest of the program in from an audio tape. Then I built a keyboard and I could fill my 1K of memory in short order. And a clock speed that ran in the KHz would really light you on fire.
By god we were hackers then, in the best sense of the word. What practical use was it? It jump started me into a lifelong career and paid for itself thousands of times over. And it was fun!
My first "computer" was a philips videopac. It was just a video games console, but you could buy a cartridge (number 9, if memory serves) that would let you program the videopac. It came with a whopping 100 bytes of memory and 12 bytes of video RAM. Still, you could program things like "guess the number" and something I called "random blob".
Actually, this was quite fun. I still remember the manual that came with it. It was the source of some real frustration, even for an eleven year old like me at those times. You see, the manual kept talking about this strange symbol, an 'O' with a slash through it. It took me half a year to figure out it was a zero...
Amazing... Brings back a lot of memories.
Please login to access my lawn
So far it has been a fun and interesting project. Looking at my old code has been a joy and a laugh. I hope to be able to get OS-9 running on the emulator as well.
One thing I want to put out here - in case anybody knows anything: I have a copy of Diecom Software's "Gates of Delerium", which was an early Ultima clone for the CoCo - my main disk seems to be bad. If anyone has a copy or knows anything, please contact me via my website. I have already spoken with Dave Dies (he has a company now called Cosmic Infinity that makes handheld games and such) - he has no problem on the copyright issue - not enforcing it. I am wanting a copy of the game, to get it transferred over to the emulator. My copy errors out, and I haven't found my backup yet. If anyone has any interest in the project, let me know...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
A Southwest Tech 6800 with all of 16K of RAM, 2 floppy drives. Included handwiring every connection on 4KB memory boards and then debugging it when it failed to run. Its time is past and I don't regret leaving it behind, but it sure was fun then.
It really isn't that likely he would have said that.
I agree, but then I also doubt that Microsoft was the driving force behind IBM choosing to make their PC 16 bit as he seems to be claiming in that interview, so I guess it all balances out.
My first computer was a Texas TI99/4a that my Dad bought for the family. I always wanted that extended BASIC cartridge... Return to Pirates Isle was a great Scott Adams adventure. Donkey Kong was a brilliant arcade conversion!
A couple of years later, I got a 48K ZX Spectrum, and eventually learned Z80 assembly. Hah, I hacked Jet Set Willy to bits!
A C=128 followed, along with my first disk drive. Started writing demos, and got online with Compunet. What a cool online service that was, around '86?
I then moved onto the Amiga, and the rest is history!
-James.
I was a slut back in those days. My uncle had a TRS-80 so I would desk-assemble Z-80 code and poke it into memory using a basic routine that would then call it.
The school had an Apple with integer basic. It turns out there was a mini-assembler in there. I would write graphics routine in assembly and another guy wrote the game logic in basic.
Another friend had an Atari 800. No assembly there, we'd just stupid graphics demos in basic.
I had a VIC-20 with the assembler cartidge -- it rocked beause it had labels. (The built-in Apple assembler didn't).
Anyway, back then I was a slut. I guess I still am. Currently write code for Sun, HP, Windows, Linux, and a little 8051 assembly on the side.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
My friend who had cooties (a girl) had an Atari 400 sitting in her room that was never used. I used to sit there and just punch in words just to see what would happen.
Odd that now both of those experiences now accurately describe my current computer use. Randomly inserting words into my Apple with XCode seeing what will happen.
.deviatefromtheabsolute.
I know many posts here talk of computers older than this, but I think the Commodore had pretty advanced graphics and a large library of nice games along with being a computer that you could open programs in and PEEK in the code.
,8,1 run..
That was my first computer. I think it took me almost a week to figure out how to run the first game.... what was it... load prog.run
It really gave me a head start into BASIC, but I was pretty jealous of a friend later with a 8088 XT, who could run GWBASIC and draw circles, while I was busy building tables of peeks and pokes.
I've never been a real fan of cutting edge computers. If I had the money to buy an Athlon64, 1GB ram, 260GB SATA disk, Radeon 9800XT.... I'll spend it on an RS/6000 40P and an AS/400 system. I recently had a blast learning the very weird OpenVMS on a miniVAX I obtained from a company. Wish I had the hardware to run MULTICS.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
My first computer was a Macintosh Plus with an extrnal 40 MB Hard Disk the size of an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. That is not the cool thing though.
My first programming environment in college (circa 1996) was an old RS/6000 running AIX that the entire Computer Science used. The last year I was in college we opened it up and it was an RS/6000 with a 33 MHz processor and one 2 GB hard disk, which was the bomb in the 80s when they bought it. Our first assignment wsa to write a page of text using VI. I swear I was so confused, you type CTRL x-s to save the document and CTRL to switch out of edit mode and use ijkm as your cursor. What the hell? That took some getting used to (I was a pro actually). What was notable is that it took turns compiling C++ programs in the lab. We would type in VI and compile Unix programs on the command line, everyone would have to wait while the queue of compile processes went away. I remember upper division students compiling their work and we would go have a cigarette 4 floors down and walking back into the lab and no one had compiled yet.
This was great practice on crappy hardware so programming on PII 233 machines in JBuilder was like playing a video game. You could actually type normally wihtout using VI commands. That was such a relief. Now having a 2.2 GHz P4 is like playing with an XBox.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
RTFLA. One guy said Apple I, one said Apple ][, one or two said ][+, many said //c, many also said //e, and nobody said anything Franklin.
Billings Data-byte System I from the early 70s complete with dual 8" floppies in a convenient 60lb carrying case. The beast that gave me a lovely "It's not a real computer unless you have to turn a key and flip two switches, two and a half feet apart, at the same time." complex. Salvaged during my wilder years for the aerosol can sized capacitors. Billy was my sister's cat...emphasis on big capacitors and past tense cat.
Thank you all for making me feel so young, some of the computers you mention were before my time.
I remember the VIC-20 and C64 in junior high school, but learned that I sucked at programming. The first machine I owned was a 386DX-40, 4 MB RAM, a 120 MB hard disk, and both 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy drives, a one megabyte Diamond Speed Star, and a 14 inch monitor. I can still remember when there were 75 megs free on the hard drive.
I began upgrading almost the day I got it. Added a modem, sound card, more memory, math coprocessor, CD-ROM, better video card, tape drive. The best training I could have had for solving resource conflicts, and fixing other problems that operating systems have from time to time.
Now I have a foundation in Windows and Linux, and remove spyware from my friends' computers for money. Not bad!
What about an Atari 2600 (their original game console) with a BASIC cartridge? Now that was a weird little guy to program.
My first computer was Amiga 500. I was 5 years old at the time, I think. :)
I still have my working commodore PET 2001, 8K built-in tape drive and 40 Column 10" mono display. Ah the days of
**** COMMODORE BASIC 2.0 ****
7167 Bytes Free
Ready
This Bad Boy was purchased in 1979 and still works with the tapes.
I've also managed to rescue every computer I wanted as a kid. Apple II+, Atari, Mac(orginal), SuperPET.
You always remember your first, but did you keep it?
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of RAM. Got it in 1982 IIRC. Then I had the Spectrum +, and then bought a second-hand Sinclair QL. Yes, I had a 32-bit machine in 1988 :-)
My first PC was an Amstrad "portable" (full AT-sized keyboard, with a small 8 in or so supertwist monochrome display, and was capable of running on Duracells too). Then in 1990, I got a 386 for much less money than the dude in the article paid for his 286! About the same time I had my first experience of UNIX (an IBM PC/RT running AIX) and from then on I was hooked...I needed Unix of some sort for my 386. That dream was finally realised in early 1992 with Linux 0.12 (or was it 0.14?). In fact, one of my first USENET posts was asking about a kernel panic I was getting on the machine.
I learned C on that machine, running Linux 0.95. I even managed to get X to come up (I only had 2.5MB of RAM so it swapped a lot and wasn't really worthwhile). Upgrading to a 486 with 16MB of RAM in 1993 was luxury! And a sound card! And Ethernet! I had something like 50MB of disk space for Linux on that 486, and squeezed on gcc, X11 with the Open Look Virtual Window Manager and a few other things, and continued exploring C programming and writing small X11 apps. I only had about 2MB free. It worked with no swap space. I even built new kernels on it.
Now my machine menagerie consists of a P-II/266 used as an ADSL router running Linux, a Sun Ultra 5 (333MHz, 512MB RAM) running Solaris 8, and a P4-2GHz with 512MB of RAM running Linux.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Well, I hate to admit that the first computer I ever OWNED was something as pedestrian as a C-64 ... but the first one I ever had to play with was an IBM 1130 with a whole 8 K-words of core memory, a chain printer the size of a refrigerator, a card reader/punch and 30 inch disk packs that held a whopping 10 megabytes of data each!
My watch has more transistors in it than the 1130 did!
utter rubbish
Newtronics elf was my first computer. Also built every I/O board, the matching terminal. Also had a Kim, Sym and a 6800 trainer...
I still have my Comx-35, a micro sufficiently obscure that almost nobody has heard of it. It had a radiation-hardened RISC CPU; the same model put in Voyager. Every now and then I turn it on to see if it's become sentient yet...
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Wow I had a lot of fun with that computer
If you want to really understand how a computer works at the most primitive level, it's the to go. Emphasis on the primitive of course; I always envied people with KIM 6502 single-board computers, which seemed pretty luxurious in comparison (man, a keyboard with tactile feedback, and real subroutine call instructions!).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I now collect of video games and computer stuff and have such things as the TRS-80 lovingly mentioned elsewhere, as well as a C64 with one of those new network adapters -- I just need more space to hook-up everything.
Linux Gold Corp. Identify Placer Gold Targets on the Fish
The best thing about the Mac was the community. I used to go to Berkeley Macintosh Users Group meetings and swap pirate software and score pot. There were a lot of bulletin boards that had pirate software, especially beta stuff.
When Jobs was fired from Apple and started making pronouncements about the NeXT having Display PostScript and running on a UNIX-derived OS, I built a 10mhz 286 machine and got a legit copy of Microport UNIX. The basic set was $99, but you had to pay another $99 for the compiler and yet another $99 for their 'text processing' addon which had troff and nroff.
Open Source saved me from a life of crime. I haven't gotten any pirate software for a couple of years now... but it's one day at a time.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Later on I got a chance to use and program an RCA Spectra-70 in High School. The Spectra-70 was a poorly designed clone of an IBM mainframe. The school board had the computer, and each high school was given a teletype and a 110 baud modem. You could write programs in WATFOR (Waterloo FORTRAN), Dartmouth BASIC and RPG.
The first electronic computer that I actually owned was a TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K RAM, later upgraded to 16K RAM, and Extended BASIC.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
My first computer was a plastic DigiComp 1 that I had back in about 1968. All mechanical.
It was a few years later that I read about the first 'electronic' computer that I lusted after. It was actually just a binary up/down counter made out of discrete transistors with a telephone dial and a toggle switch as the input device. I read about it in an 'electronic project' book in the school library. For some reason it was designed to use big 2N3055 power transistors for the flip flop elements, which made it damned expensive. These days if I wanted to build such a machine, I'd use small inexpensive transistors. Maybe some 2N2222s.
It was a lump of a beast. An Apple II+ with 16Kb of RAM and dual 5 1/4" floppy drives and a green monochrome monitor. Heck, I still even have my first copy of Windows 1.01 on 5 1/4" floppies from 1985.
Homebrew Intel 4004 wire wrap on perf board - basically it read the state of toggle switches and flashed lights (not leds) accordingly - worked for Western Electric then and we had a prom programmer (and UV eraser) in the EofM lab and 1702A eproms available in store room. Is anyone else here old enough to recall what FIM P0 means?
... and after an ET of about 33 years working for the same company doing many things (wireman, fixing things, designing things, implementing various wafer fab processes, writing IC test software) while the Bell System gets progressively smaller and goes thru many names (I worked for all of them) (Western Electric, Bell Labs, AT&T Microelectronics, Lucent (damn 1643 win modems), and finally Agere) I found myself working for a company that is being run by three green cards (limey, indian, and pakistani) and is busy closing its wafer fabs, selling the manufacturing equipment to the Chinese for pennies on the dollar, and sending the bulk of the manufacturing work off shore (can you say TSMC).
Next was homebrew Intel 8008 again wire wrap on perf board but with multiple boards and my first backplane - making the 1103 DRAMS work was a real education. Took a hint from DEC (had a PDP 11/20 doing industrial process control) and mapped some i/o into memory, had a primitive panel with toggle switches and lamps (still no leds) to load memory (which was lost when power went down or I screwed up). Good learning experience. My first homebrew backplane - IIRC clock was about 200Khz -doubt my wired backplane would have allowed much faster.
Time passes
Next bought bare board from OSI (Ohio Scientific) - populated it with my all time favorite, the 6502.
OSI published what we might now call a BIOS - burned same into 1702 eprom (forget if the 1702 was 128 or 256 bytes but you learned to cram a lot into the little space available) - IIRC the board supported 1K of RAM ( 2102s - static rams!!). Later bought bare memory boards (each supported 4K of RAM using the 1K 2102 Srams). Bought the cassette interface bare board - built it up -bought MS BASIC on a cassette tape - designed and built a front panel (again imitating DEC) but with LEDS - now I could toggle code in from the panel, do single instruction execution (and see the results when I screwed up and put things into a tight loop by mistake ) - and after writing code to extend the BIOS (OSI code took one 1702 and the CPU card supported two 1702s) I could now save and read code using the cassette deck. Added a SWTP (South West Tech Prod) keyboard bought an OSI video bare board and built it up (it used a bunch of 74163s as dividers to generate H and V sync and to clock info from the video ram thru the 2513 5x7 character generator) hacked an old Sony portable TV to accept the composite video from the OSI video board and could now run BASIC! The WeCo store room added HP hex digit displays to their stock - one weekend later my panel now had both per bit LEDS and also HEX displays for adrs and data bus - HP displays really sucked current - divided the clock (1Mhz) by four (2 flops in a 7474 IIRC) and used it to strobe the HP displays -cut the display current to 25% and they were still plenty bright.
Various adventures with RCA CDP1802, Moto 6800, the Fairchild F8 (sort of the first distributed microprocessor), the 8080 and Z80. THis pretty much marks the end time period where a individual could keep up with all the features and instruction sets on the market.
Time passes
First purchased machine was an AT&T PC6300 which used an Intel 8086 - moved up to 16 bits - added a 300 baud acoustic modem and could dial into work and use the mainframes to do my homework (was working on BSEE at night at Lafayette) - being able to do ADICE simulations (BTL's NIH version of SPICE) from me instead of submitting a card deck at school and waiting for a 24 hour turn (after driving 20 miles one way to school) was a real treat.
Time passes
All in all it wasn't a bad ride - I learned a lot, had a good time, got a pair of free degrees, made a good buck, got to play with a lot of expensive toys and have a retirement income.
Sorry about the OT but after thinking back to the 4004 days the rest just sort of followed
You're all lu-u-users...
mine was an abacus you insensitive clod!
at my folks house this Christmas Day we're going to have a Impossible Mission tourney.
I love old games, even better when you have company to enjoy them with.
Happy Holidays!
I feel so spoiled, getting my start on an OS with an actual GUI.
my first computer was a 486dx2 packard hell.....and i can't say that it was a fond memory....Installing Linux on it was a nightmare....and I had so many issues with it, i can't even count. (Linux or otherwise)
though I gotta say, I still like it better then any emachine I had the misfortune of touching.
Alien.
It stood in two DEC 6 foot rack cabinets with 4K words of core, a hispeed tape reader/punch, one 8" floppy drive with a home-brew interface and, later, 16Kwords of RAM and two 2.5 Mbyte diskdrives (14 inch ?? platters).
I programmed in Fortran, Focal (kinda basic-like) and ALGOL (from Hungary)
It kicked ass! Realize tho, this was in 1979.
Z80A processor & tape drive. It had plug-in cartridges of games + a BASIC cartridge with about 16K of RAM. The BASIC was actually pretty good, with a lot more commands than the C64. But rubber keys man, what were they thinking?! I figure the designers were also into leather...
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
But this wasn't exactly my first computer, that happened to be an IBM 1130 with punched cards, a 2501 card reader (the fast one!) and an 1132 printer (the slow one!) in 1970. Later we upgraded to a 5 megabyte multi platter drive and a Logicon ripoff of a 1403 printer for about 100K.
Our beast had 8K of honest to God core. Typing in almost any of the McCraken FORTRAN progams of the day was a non starter - they wouldn't run in 8K.
I learned I/O double buffering on that machine, wrote a program called "news" that did a bulletin board thing, learned why reentrancy was important, learned what macros were, what index registers did and could single step program through the console. It had lights and switches. I miss lights and switches.
Of course I was supposed to be going to math, english and history classes, but somehow I muddled through.
I have pictures. If sufficiently provoked I can produce them.
Need Mercedes parts ?
My first three comptuers were TRS-80's. For my first model I, I was too cheap to buy the expansion box from RS, so I bought a clone circuit board and a box of chips from an ad in a magazine. That allowed me to upgrade to 48K of RAM. I borrowed a friend's Level II ROM and burned a copy on my home-made EPROM programmer. Wow, I had forgotten about all of that! Sniff. That was true hacking.
I still have that system, and as of a year or so ago when I last fired it up, it still worked.
I have fond memories of many, many after-school hours typing hundreds of pages of BASIC code for games out of various magazines and then spending coutless hours debugging and finding my many typo's. Those were the days.
I was surprised to see mention of a long lost friend in this article. In the late 70's my dad built a Southwest tech 6800 (see the link in the article for pictures and details - you had to code your own OS, and it had a 300 baud modem for the tape (cassette) drive). I learned to "program" this machine by reading the heavy BASIC manual that came with it. Many (many) years later, when I was in at University (taking, what else but computer science), I realized that this old system would be cool to hold on to. I called my Dad and asked him if he still had it. Unfortunately he had just thrown it out!
Wow, I had no idea the Aquarius was so rare. that was my second computer. (First was an atari 2600 with a "programmers cartridge")
Thing that sucked most about it was that I had no cassette for it. Tried hacking the DIN jack to use an off the shelf tape recorder, but it never worked right. I "upgraded" to a VIC-20. (imagine having to retype your application into your computer every time you wanted to run it.. ugh!)
You know, I do believe the aquarius was faster than any other computers I'd had in those days.
Wish I'd have kept it around.
First, was a PET... but I was only 8, I think. It was actually my neighbors, but we fiddled with it enough for my old man to see how curious I was about it.
Next, we got an Apple ][. I wrote some stuff for account keeping on it. Loaded it up with Magic Window, when it was finally non-vapor, and it went to the office.
It was replaced by a ][+. Then we got an MX80, and later splurged and got / built a BAM16 card. Saved more cash and got a 2nd drive, built some paddles and later built a joystick, and later an 80 column card, and got a Smartmodem 300. Visicalc was later invented, too, so that went on it.
Then we got a Microsoft SoftCard for it, which was basically a Z80 running CPM. Added a 5 meg Sider, then another, then DBase II and a C compiler. Then scored a CrackShot card. After 3/4s of a year and writing what was needed in C / DBase, much of it went to the office.
It was replaced by another ][+, 64k, a pair of 10meg siders and another MS Softcard. Then I ditched the smartmodem for an AppleCat, and did a decent job of not getting caught.
Fun days, those were... Oh, the endless waiting for the next release by Beagle Bros. Oh, the ever famous Naked City...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Why is there no Altair 8800 on this list? We had one at home when I was a kid. To bootstrap it, you had to use toggle switches on the front panel (each with a corresponding LED) to give it enough of an instruction set to tell it YOU ARE A COMPUTER! PLEASE READ THIS PUNCH TAPE. Then you could feed a BASIC interpreter through the punch tape reader hanging off the side of the teletype, and *then* you could sit down and start coding. The teletype was the only I/O we had for the longest time... then we got a monitor, and used the teletype as a keyboard. We had a Pennywhistle 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, too... you had to pick up the phone, dial the number you wanted, wait for the line to be answered by the remote machine, then jam the telephone headset into the modem's cradle and start jiggling toggle switches madly in an attempt to handshake. My dad ported one of the old Trek games from the PDP-11 to the Altair. I wonder how many dead trees I used up killing Klingons on that thing? We also managed to get Will Crowther's ADVENT game (aka Colossal Cave Adventure) running on the Altair. I'll never forget the CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA sound of that teletype... damn thing sounded like it ran on gasoline.
Some old Mac at school. I don't even really remember what model it was as I was like twelve or so at the time. We had a PC in the house as I was growing up, but I'll be damned if I could figure out how to use the thing.
I still have them! The Atari (like Amiga) was really cool; fully documented OS (on ROM) was available and hackable.
The OS for the XLs had changed; some programs wouldn't work. So, I took the Atari "Translator disks"(The old OS loaded in ram over the new ROMS), dumped them onto EPROMS, and replaced the ROMS onboard. Voila; old OS in new system. And, while I was in their, I changed the function keys to do unique things(but I forget what now).
Also, I helped an entire user group to build 256k bank-switched memory expansions, soldering and all, onto their machines.
I had the Indus GT drives; very fast for Atari drives. The Apples were always ugly; remeber the Percom (?) drives and their clunky boxes? The Indus had status and track LEDS on front, with a hydraulic dampened smoked cover; very cool.
So, you hackers; do you remember when you would buy and build the -kit-, assemleb cost 20 dollars more(?); I don't remember aall details, just that you would get a box of parts from Sinclair, bare boards, components, and the familiar case/keyboard.
A buddy bought one and built it; I watched and played with it in roughly 1981, I thinks.
If you did it right, great. If not, bzzt.
Yeah, baby! 4k of ram goodness. With all upperase letters on that TV resolution. The manual had a pretty decent intro to BASIC. The "chicklet" keyboard didnt catch on, though. (thank God)
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Motorola 1802 microprocessor. Hex keypad, cassette interface, video output, 2k ram. Oh and the CHIP-8 interpreter. Had to build it. Ah, the good old days.
--- gr8s-n-ppppp
My first desktop was a DECMate II - dual 5 1/4 floppies and CP/M (It was a thrill to get the 5MB hard drive when it came out) and it ran a DEC word processing program that I still think fondly of.
My first laptop was an Epson Geneva PX-8. The software ran off RAM chips and it stored data on an answering machine tape. It has the distinction of being smaller in physical size than my current Dell Latitude. And while I never use it anymore, I do still have it.
300 baud was considered fast for those that actually used 110.. but for the most part most people that was the first speed they saw... No-one ever called it high-speed... I would love to see some artwork for a "High-speed" 300 baud modem.
:)
I thin it was US robotics that started high-speed with thier Courier line I think it was 9600 they had thier high-speed light on em... Thats where the coined term highspeed came from If I do remember correctly.. If I am wrong let me know... I would like to know who coined high-speed
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
I got it around '85 or so and sure hated it when everybody else had C-64s or even Amstrads. The basic had to be loaded from a tape if you wanted to do programming. And the damn thing didn't even have proper sprites! About a year later I got a C-128D and that thing kicked ass! You could even overclock the C-64 to 2 MHz! Except most games wouldn't work after that. Didn't use CP/M very much as the floppy was missing from the package and I couldn't care less back then. After that the Amiga and PCs since 1993.
Ahhh. The memories...
I remember fondly the hours I spent twiddling the bits on what was at the time one of the most powerful computers in existence...
I could manipulate its digits directly with my fingers. I remember the distinct clanking noise made when I moved its keys... soothing and satisfying.
I will never forget my abacus.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
i'll never forgot my first computer, back in 1976, went to a radio shack on welland avenue in st. catharines (ontario) -- there was a black and white TV, with a typewriter keyboard -- how curious a TV-typewriter... since i'd liked radios, and saved desperately for an LED alarm clock (which i got for christmas), and coveting the most electronic thing i had ever seen in my life up to that point -- my accountant unkle's LED four-function calculator.
so i typed on this keyboard, and the words appeared on the screen. tried that 'return' button, and some words appeared on the screen that i hadn't typed myself, they said:
?SYNTAX ERROR
_
soon a friend showed me what happened when you typed:
CLOAD
there were no disk drives, it made a sound, like a modem, and i had to record that into the second-most electronic thing in the house: my dad's panasonic gheto-blaster. this was at 600/1200 baud, but the modem was 300 baud, and there was a popular hack to overclock that to 450 baud. there was no internet, so we used bulletin boards, and eventually hooked the bulletin boards together with a free mail-relay system called 'FidoNet'.
programmes were all typed in uppercase, because there was no lower-case -- the extra 8th bit would have to be purchased, and soldered-in separately no provide lowercase on the monochrome 64x16 display (128x48 graphics).
my father had agreed to buy me a used TRS-80 computer for $450 from my friend anton epp in virgil. his father gave my father some advice -- 'john, its just the beginning'. truer words were never spoken, because since then, it has been one long continual upgrade.
the trs80 model I level II had an 8 bit zilog Z80 which ran at 1Mhz. life was getting good with an expansion interface which held 48k of RAM, a parallel printer port, a real-time clock, optional RS-232, and a western digital floppy disk controller (for 5.25" single-sided floppies which held 70k each). i couldn't afford one of these wonders in my early teens, so i found a sympathetic computer store owner who let me have an old 5.25" drive that didn't WRITE, but still READ okay -- but without a power supply (which i couldn't afford). so my dad and i went to that same radio shack, and bought a circuit board and etching solution, and built a 5-12 volt power supply, and that gave me the ability to boot from LDOS which was before MS-DOS, and had some really nifty device indepent sort of behaviour -- it abstracted the file system so you could read the myriad disk formats that existed in those days. you could also run macros on anything you typed by sending it through KEYFLT, and it would expand your commandline macros on the fly.
the PC, excel, and windows hadn't been invented yet. the spreadsheet was Dan Bricklin's VISICALC, and the word-processor was 'Scripsit' (and later wordstar).
most programmes were written in BASIC, but if you wanted to get games, and had no money, you had to use TASMON and SUPERU to zero-out the jump-pointers to the disk protection code, and resave the memory image to disk.
my cousin vic goosen had some time-life books on the future in their rec room on a farm in virgil. being the 1970's one of them happened to have an article by a man named 'alan kay' who said that in the future, children will carry small notepad sized devices in which they would keep all their notes. why would someone want to do all that when we've got paper notebooks which already superseded portable chalk slate boards? i wondered.
then in grade 10 high-school (governor simcoe in st. catharines), we ran into a room full of commodor PET computers -- all with green monochrome 40x25 (and the 'good' ones had 80x25) text displays. the also had basic -- there were no games. if you wanted games, you had to write them, or swap files on the data-cassettes with others in the class who did. i only managed to make a 'Centipede' imitation: you could move the cursor, and it would have a tail with a definable length, and a robot would track its movements towards
http://oldcomputers.net/ti994a.html you know how sometimes alashdoty makes you go through all kinds of loops? well I pulled out the old ti-99, plugged inthe sound module and slammed in PARSEC[space fighter game]. honestly the best part is that this thing uses RCA cables so its on my 40" TV with surroundsound mono. :) thanks /.
some info on it: It had a speech modulater and carts, no non-volitile memory to speak of and cost way too much. but i loved it. It had AWESOME games and I even learned to program in basic on it.
the book that came with basic was huge and had program examples and stuff. a ot of good it did me when I got to college though...
whats? that? my speech modulater is talking, I gotta go. cool cool cool my alienware's gonna hate me tommorrow. so is my girlfriend
I was the biggest software pirate in my grade school... well, second biggest... I got my wAreZ from the science teacher :)
And before anyone tries to sue me, I don't have a single floppy of it, or any of the hardware to run it on... a damn shame, I LOVED the crack intros, most of them had better gfx/sound than the games themselves.
I loved my pb100!! Yes that thing I LOVED!! But I really wanted the sinclair ones, a friend had the z-81...Do you guys remember the "flight" simulator for the those?? amazing stuff......I was jelous until I got my hands on a second-handed(disapeared from a big company when they upgraded...heh..)commendore PET 200(you could (I did) peek under the PET-sticker and find out it was an commodore 8032), now days I dont even know the hardware I am typing this at (yeah it says Dell inspiron 8200..but I dont know whats inside..nor do I care.. ;( ). It doesnt seem to matter how 'fast' machine I have, I still spend my time waiting on some processing to be done, e.g now I am waiting for nokia devel suite(j2me) to get to the point where shit 'appens (prob some DataInputStream related) and see what the verbose output will say, have been waiting for hours, veeerryyy slow action there.. My point beeing, well likely spend our time waiting in the future as well...maybe its a good thing..dont feel so bad when I am drinking coffie and kick back.. :) By the way...Merry christmas!
Star Raiders: The Best Game On The Atari.
.79 more MHz (3/4 faster than the C64) made a real difference back then.
OMFG the funniest thing about Star Raiders was how long it stayed on the favorites list of almost every gaming mag back then until they all collapsed in 1984.
That game deserved it though. Amazing graphics, sound, and gameplay. I spent many hours trying to improve my rating. What was even a bigger accomplishment was SR on the 2600 game console! It came with a special controller to call up shields, command consoles, etc. That was a feat I never thought I'd see done, or done well, and it was!
It was games like SR and Rescue on Fractalus that raised the bar. And when you saw 'Rescue' on the C64 you began to realize that the Atari's potential for greatness was largely untapped. It may seem trivial now, but true graphics co-processing and
It took years for the PC to equal those kinds of games. In fact, I would say that it took Elite (on various platforms) and Wing Commander on the PC to really knock them off their pedistals.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Anyone here remember this computer?
. ht ml?theKey=mindsetpc&byCompany=0
http://www.trailingedge.com/~dlw/comp/htemplate
My buddy got one of these back in 1984 and paid handsomely for it too! It used an Intel 80186 - a rarity in and of itself. Few PC's were made with the 186 - most of these ended up in drive controllers. The 186 had some compatibility issues with the x86's previous and most PC vendors opted to use speeded up versions of the 8086 or wait for the 286.
However, the 186 was a true 16-bit chip and the Mindset went one further - it included an FM synthesizer for sound and two graphics co-processors (one of which included a sprite blitter!). It also had standard video out so you could do presentations with it and could be fitted with a Genlock for superimposing.
You could do weird stuff like have sprites bouncing around on the screen while typing in a program in GWbasic. It also came with a game, Vyper, specifically designed for the Mindset, programmed by Synapse that was simply astounding. It was a 3-D fly/shooter and it had everything else out there beat - bigtime. I suspect very few people ever got to see/play this thing, but it gave gamers goosebumps anytime it was shown.
It was a strange hybrid of Amiga-like capabilities with PC 'sensibility' - and it totally failed. It was pretty pricey, but this was back before the term 'multimedia' had been coined. Until that word happened, it seemed socially unacceptable to have good graphics and sound on 'business PC' back then (at least in the US).
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
My parents had an Atari 400 then straight 48k 800 w/48k of RAM.
They bought me an 800XL about 6 months later for Christmas then a couple years later a 130XE. I spent countless hours rotting away in front of the Amdek monitor typing programs out of Antic magazine. A lot of people still don't believe the 800XL and the XE series were capable of 256 color graphics at low resolution (192x80 or something like that, less than an average Palm).
I loved these machines, I even had a SCSI interface that used that warped I/O bus on the XL's. We switched to ST's a while later then to macs for some reason. The Atari ST's were really slick as well, 512 colors, built-in midi, sound chip from hell, SCSI!. The 16-bit micro era didn't last all that long.
Anyway, enough about my life story. I've owned a ton of different machines over the years, but I still get a grin on my face when I look at an Atari. My parents had the 400 since the day I was born and one of my fondest memories was playing Missle Command and Star Raiders with my grandfather barely after learning to walk.
I remember growing up from (essentially) the beginning of the "microcomputer revolution" to where we stand today. At least computers then usually forced the people using them to grow a brain, now they just call helpdesk and say it's the SysAdmins fault they can't get to a site that's down.
Despite all of this I still have a social life, a wife and kids. Heh.
--Kevin
My very first exposure to a "computer" was with Bell Labs' CARDIAC in the early 1970s. This was an instructional tool designed to teach young people (ages 12 and up, I suppose) the fundamentals of computing using cardboard sliders to simulate operations. It was a gift from my uncle, who later worked on software development for the space shuttle, so he really knew where computing was headed.
However, I wasn't even 7 years old at that time, so imagine how weird and scary this was to a kid who hadn't learned his times tables yet! Predictably, I never touched a real computer until more than a decade after that vaguely traumatic experience.
I still remember the CARDIAC with the appropriate awe, nevertheless.
"Folks just call him Buckethead." -- Les Claypool
My first computer was a commodore 128. I had discovered programming a few years earlier though using my school's Commodore PETs and TRS-80s. At first, a disk drive (c-1570) was not in my parent's budget so I had no place to store programs. That was ok. I was so ecstatic about having a computer that I would write a program, turn off my computer, and rewrite the same one again the next day. Today, Microsoft has releaved me of the burden of going through this process by making reboot/rewrite a feature of their software.
I had one as well, that we built from a kit (I think we ordered it from england). The 16k expansion pack was terribly wobbly, and had to be fixed to the back via duct tape to be reliable (lost more than one program to a RAM pack wobble).
I also added a keyboard, a TI/99 4a keyboard I think. That was very nice, although I didn't mind the membrane keys too much.
I also got a Timex-Sinclair 2068 later, but did hardly any programming at all on that compared to the ZX-81.
If your ZX-81 was slow, you must have forgotten to put it in "fast mode", where it skipped drawing the screen while it was processing stuff (like keypresses). I worked that way almost all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First computer that I remember using: An Atari 800, running Atari Logo, sometime in 1982 or 1983. This also makes Logo the first programming language I bothered learning.
First computer that my family actually bought: Coleco ADAM, early 1984. We kept it under lock and key at first because it was such a BIG DEAL (we'd never owned a computer before, and I had a tendency of taking things apart when I was bored, which was pretty often), but eventually, I found the programmer's manual and learned BASIC...which also turned out to be helpful when my school started using Apple IIes, since ADAM "SmartBASIC" was essentially a ripoff of Applesoft + DOS 3.3. By the way, I was only 6 at the time, so I started programming way early. ^_^ Oh yeah, and having a built-in ColecoVision made it a good gaming system, too.
We didn't have much money then, so we didn't get another computer until 1990 (by that time, Dad was bringing home loaner PCs from work for various things); okay, it was a PCjr, but it was a good DOS learning machine.
Most fondly remembered computers: The aforementioned Apple IIes, and the Apple IIgs. I was also a big Mac fan during the tail end of their original heyday (circa 1990-1992), even though there was no way we could afford one at the time.
-lee
Not long ago, I was reminiscing with some friends about our old computers, and the hoops we jumped through to make them do all sorts of neat things.
Remember when floppy disks were the prefered removable storage medium? Rembember when they used to be expensive?
Take a single-sided 5-1/4'' floppy disk. The floppies had magnetic coating on both sides. So you take a signle sided floppy and cut out a new write protect notch on the opposite side, then carefully use a hole punch to create a new reference hole near the center of the disk. You just doubled the capacity of that little floppy.
Floppies evolved. Soon, 3.5'' drives were capable of using 1.44MB "High Density" media, but you were stuck with the old 720K "Double Density" disks. The difference (besides the amount of coating required on the disk) was a hole in the corner of the HD disks. So you go ahead an get your hands on a hole punch made just for this purpose. You punch a hole in the corner of your 720K disk and format it for 1.44M. It didn't always work, but when it did, it was great. You could always just format it as 720K again if it failed.
Years before the overclocking craze, we were pushing our technology far beyond their specs, squeezing everything we could out of them.
I wonder when the death of the floppy will finally be official. I thought it would happen years ago. Yet I'm still clinging to my old Win98SE boot floppy, and it may be the sole reason my next machine will have a floppy drive at all.
So I wrote a program that allowed me to create UDGs (User defined graphics - the speccy didn't have sprites). My mate saw the Space Invader I created with it and spent 30 minutes typing: Dear Computer, Please make me a game with this graphic: to pearls of laughter from my 9 year old self. He's contributing to the Linux source now. Be Afraid :)
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
lost the modem for it though, that's a real shame because with that lovely little chiclet slab, i discovered unix on a sunday afternoon in a very, very remote place ...
first 'real' computer. before that i had a z80 experimenters kit i'd built myself from a 'radio & electronics' magazine someone had given me for my 11th birthday. i wasn't really so keen on it as a 'computer', since it only had a numeric (not even hex) display, and my family always referred to it as my 'self built calculator'... which was always funnier to them than it was to me, for some reason.
but anyway, yeah baby, mmm... the oric-1. what a floosie.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This was my first one. 1979 IIRC. http://www.tcp.com/~lgreenf/otherpag.htm
"Hello, World", 17 errors, 31 warnings
Z80 machine based on the popular "Big Board," one of the first single-board computers, circa 1981. A maxxed out system with a whopping 64k RAM and TWO 8-inch floppies, running CPM. Case made out of particle board and hand-cut sheet aluminum. It's still in my basement but has not been turned on in many years, since the Zenith monochrome monitor died.
My fondest memory was powering it up for the first time and nothing happened, or nothing seemed to happen. After a frustrating half hour checking connections and repeated reboots, I finally thought to turn up the Brightness knob on the monitor, and beheld the glowing green characters of success.
Devition is... ...not just reminiscing about your old PC, but also reciting the serial number (from memory, I'm sure) and storing it in the 30ish year old original boxes.
You gotta love Apple ][ users.
Why the Hell did you copy my very own first first post ? ;-)
Canon AS100. Two eight inch floppies in a seperate case. This guy I worked with was part of a geology club. When they upgraded to a pc, they gave me this beast. It came with either Dos 2.2 or CP/M (old brain cells) and db2. The printer had a propietary connection aand wouldn't work with my C64.
It was the late 70s and our schoolsystem had yet to own a computer for students to use. Since our parents refused to pony up the $3k to buy us one, we would go to the local radio shack to use the floor models. The clerks were actually really nice about... they'd let us program literally for hours. I remember the first program I'd written was one that would use those screwy text characters to draw a face, then make the eye wink... As a couple of years past, his folks ended up getting his a ModelIII, and he actually upgraded the thing over a period of a couple of years to a Model IV, two floppy drives, the 'high-res' graphics, board, printer, and a 5MB hard drive (it was actually the first hard drive I'd ever seen, and was the size of a IBM PC XT). I remember one program he's written with it, that he'd typed in from some magazine, that would allow you to digitize sound by talking into the condense mic on his old tape drive, and play it back though that absurd sound 'card' they had on those things. Good times...
640K mem, and an external 3.5 floppy. Oh yeah, we had all those Sierra games too. Yeah, baby, yeah!!
w2^7me out.
Yep, that's right.. a little black and gray keyboard, separate b&w monitor, cassette tape for storage, 4K of ram (I think).. I have many fond memories of playing games on that little machine. I wish I could remember the names, though..
not really a computer, more of terminal. I was 12, so that's about 1991. single line of 40 characters. size of a phonebook in a town of 80000. not progammable. could store 40K of text. had a serial port and and 110/300 baud *modem* built in. hello BBSs. I met a lot of weird bastards at a pizza party someone had organized. youngest person there, lot of hams and that sort of folk.
I can only find on ereference to it on the net here.
Eventually traded it for a commie 64. goodbye modem, hello BASIC and a tape drive.
at 15 I discovered sex drugs and girls. goodbye computers, until I was 20 and decided to go to college. hello pII 350 (I still it have it). frustrated by using *nix at school for programming, installed redhat 5.0, soon replaced by 5.2.
now I manage 212 debian machines, and a handful of personal stuff. Fun!
I grew up with an Atari 400. But we didn't have one of them newfangled "disk" drives. We had a few cartridges, sure, including Basic and a few games, but the really GOOD games were stored on regular audio cassettes.
//c (FAR superior to the //e, I must say) with dual floppy disk drives. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein spoiled me for good.
The hard part was figuring out where exactly the game started... the tape label would have the tape counter location for each game, assuming the ink wasn't smeared, and you'd have to fast forward to that point and listen for the beeps to start.
So, say you wanted to play "Dog Daze", in which you and your opponent control your little doggies and try to pee on the most fire hydrants (I tell you, they just don't make quality games like this anymore!). Fast forward to tape position 49 or something. I don't remember the exact process, but I think if you turned the unit on with no cartridge installed you get some sort of command prompt. Or maybe you boot up with the BASIC cartridge.
Anyway, by typing something along the lines of "load" and hitting enter, and then very quickly pressing "play" on the Atari tape recorder, you might get the game to start loading, provided you fast-forwarded to the correct location.
After 5 minutes of listening to what sounds like a phone ringing and watching a plain blue screen, the game eventually displays its opening graphics! Of course, 1 in 4 times, the load would fail and you'd have to rewind and try again.
Eventually my parents got a sleek new Apple
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
In about 1981. A friend bought it for $5000 and had it in his living room, much to the chagrin of his mother!
Aide: Grant drinks too much to command an army. Lincoln: Find out what he drinks and give it to my other generals!
How can there be a list of early personal computers without mentioning Osborne? I first saw one in 1981 or 1982 when a client brought one in to my real estate office. I had an Apple II+ for doing spreadsheet projections, after years of doing them by hand with a calculator and a pencil with an eraser. But a computer you could CARRY with you, oh man the future had arrived.
J. Lyons & Co. made the Lyons Electonic Office, the 1st commercial computer.
Their business was food and they needed a better way to keep track of the books
so they made their own computer and sold copies of it.
gewg_
You know, I'm actually unable to remember my first computer. I started at a VERY young age. In fact, so young that my earliest memory involving learning about computers was asking my dad about how to use the copy command to write files from scratch (copy con filename).
Sure, I have some memories of some computers I've used (earliest I can think of was a 286), but that's pretty much it.
> SL is like DX with power management
Well, not entirely.
Yes, it did have power management, but internally it was nothing like a 486dx.
The 486 SLC line of cpus actually look more like a crossover between a 386sx and a 486dx or dx2. It is however derived from the blueprints of the 486 core.
Its external data bus is 16 bit, the address bus is 24 bit. As a consequence, it can address 16 mbytes of physical memory only, and needs 2 reads to transfer a full 32bit word of data.
Unlike the 386sx however, the 486slc line of cpus had first level cache on the chip itself. Also, the cache controller was faster and smater then the ones found in the 486 series from intel.
I'm not sure if either the 486SLC or SLC2 had a fpu.
The main difference between the SLC and SLC 2 is the fact that the SLC 2 used clock doubling technology, and ran at 40 mhz on a 20mhz fsb.
Besides the power management, the SLC cpus had a lower power consumption then anything else on the market at that moment that was intel compatible.
Also, this same cpu is what cyrex based its last series of 486 cores on.
Can I ask what machine you had exactly? It could have been one of the isa bus models (ps/2 models 35 or 40 ?) or a MCA machine (PS/2 model 56 and 57)
I have a model 35 and a model 57 around (and a couple of spare cpus and upgrade kits), the model 40 runs pc-dos 5.0 with windows 3.1 and the 57 runs OS/2 (warp by now, 2.0 originally)
How do I know?
At the time I was involved with marketing and supporting those machines for IBM.
Oh.. and I hated all 4 models.. the 486SLC technology was wonderfull for extending the life of original 386sx machines (this was how the models 56 and 57 came to be, they were originally 386sx models, the one that I have has a SLC 2 upgrade now, but started life as a 386sx) but as new models they made little sense at the time I think unless you were talking about notebook/laptop computers of that time, for which the low power consumption and power management together with a cpu almost as powerfull as a 486dx opened nice new possibilities in portable performance.
Some of you may think me a young'n, but the first computer I had was a Magnovox 386. Being just a child at the time, I don't remember much about it, save for it running Geoworks on top of DOS instead of the usual windows 3.1. No CD-ROM drive, just a one each 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives. For almost as long as we had it, I was mostly clueless about it's operation, just used to play games on it (didn't we all?).
Then back in '95 or so came the first REAL computer into my life. I still have pieces of it laying around scattered throguh the various junk piles. It was a Pentium 100MHz with 16MB of RAM (later upgraded to 32MB) and a 1.2GB hard drive (later a 2.0GB was added).
I played games with it, but I also learned. The spark was lit inside me. I did so much with that machine... Upgraded, hacked, cracked, tweaked. Eventually, I had to replace it (this was about the time of the AT/ATX switchover). I decided to build myself my first real home-brew computer. I started with a PII 450MHz (back when this was top of the line, mind you!) and used an Abit BH6 motherboard (I still swear by them to this day) dropped in 128MB of RAM (later upgraded to 256MB) Put a whopping 13.6GB hard drive in... and installed Win98. I had trouble for a while, but this was a good system to me. Things worked out, and she was good to me for a long time. I now had two computers, and that opened up the possibility of networking to me. A long time later, it was time to upgrade. I wanted something 1GHz or faster, and went back to my old friends at Abit. This time I chose a KT7A-RAID and a 1.4GHz AMD athlon (quite an upgrade from the 450, let me tell ya!) And went with 512MB of RAM. I Took the plunge and installed Win2k on the 120GB hard drive, and have seldom looked back since. I still use that machine configured much the same as it was then, excpet now every single expansion slot is in use. SCSI/firewire, display cards, Sound, Network, PCMCIA... This was (and still is) my baby until the power compnay fucked the hard drive. I'm now praying that a friend can dismantle it and recover my data. Once that happened, I basically moved from the desktop over to a Sony Vaio and a Dual 1.42GHz G4 Macintosh. I use the laptop when I feel like using windows, and the mac for most of the other stuff.
Over the years I've owned and used many different PCs and macs, several laptops, and done many things, both hardware and software. I've played with SMP, both on the PPC side (Daystar Genesis 4-CPU Mac clone... NICE system!) and on the X86 side (BeOS machine with two Intell P3's at it's heart). I've upgraded machines beyond reason (put a 333MHz G3 into a powerbook 1400) I've hacked software installs, I've hosted a website off of a Mac SE, I've run every major version of Windows, Mac OS, BeOS, a few flavors of Linux, and some other things.
I currently run a 30-odd machine hetrogenous network in my home.
And it all really started with that lowly Pentium 100MHz running Windows '95.
Ah, memories.
I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it!