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
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]
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!)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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) =)
Boy, wasn't I styling once I got the 64K upgrade and the floppy!
No, you weren't.
Sincerely,
The girl who never wanted to go out with you in school
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.
I'm sure somewhere Bill Gates was crowing about how two strings ought to be enough for anyone.
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. }:)
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.
"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
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
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)
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
10 POKE 144,88
20 PRINT CHR(RND(255)+1)
GOTO 20
The nice thing is that the program is really quick to type...
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
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
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.
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.
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
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)
10 PRINT "I Learned To Program On A Timex Sinclair 1000"
20 GOTO 10
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
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
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 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! -
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
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