First Computers

The "Home Computer Museum"... by tcopeland · 2003-12-23 09:16 · Score: 4, Informative

...has a list of most of the candidates, including the Mattel Aquarius.

No TRS-80 pics, though... odd...

First kiss? by AtariAmarok · 2003-12-23 09:16 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

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Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.

Re:First kiss? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-23 09:34 · Score: 5, Funny

Hello AtariAmarok, this is your mother. You spend far too much time posting to Slashdot ! Now leave the computer alone and come and watch a nice episode of Galatica.

Ti-99 4/a by georgeha · 2003-12-23 09:17 · Score: 4, Interesting

with Parsec!

I co-oped at a Federal Agency that tried to use these, back in 1987, it was to laugh.

Re:Ti-99 4/a by kenjib · 2003-12-23 09:26 · Score: 5, Funny

I see your Ti-99 4/a and raise you a voice modulator. "Fuelling station ahead" in a lusty female voice... Who needs to remember your first kiss, anyway, when your first computer sounds totally hot?

*sniff* by grub · 2003-12-23 09:18 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 :) Oh, bought an Apple Super Serial Card to drive my external, manual 110/300 baud modem (dial, listen for the carrier, flip switch, hang up phone). Oh, I got a printer with it too, an Epson MX80 which was driven by a Grappler card in the Apple. That printer was an absolute battle tank and still works although it's out of use now.

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. :)

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Trolling is a art,

My first... by I8TheWorm · 2003-12-23 09:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

... 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?

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Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.

Timex Sinclair by GuyMannDude · 2003-12-23 09:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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watch this

Re:Timex Sinclair by magarity · 2003-12-23 09:35 · Score: 4, Funny

A friend of mine had one of those. When he first got it I went to his house and he asked if I wanted to play a game.
"Sure," I said.
"Hang on," he replied, "I have to program it."
So the next 10 minutes were taken up by him typing in a racer-type game in basic.

The Anti-CoCo conspiracy by RevMike · 2003-12-23 09:24 · Score: 5, Funny

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.

Re:The Anti-CoCo conspiracy by telekon · 2003-12-23 09:29 · Score: 4, Funny

My uncle has two of them!! The evidence cannot be silenced!! I will show the world, there WAS a CoCo.
I'm scared. Do you think their assassins are coming now? Go, my friends, find the CoCos. Trust no one. The truth is out there.

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To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

Re:ADAM by GuyMannDude · 2003-12-23 09:25 · Score: 4, Interesting

Ah yes, another blast from the past. This system consisted of a keyboard, a CPU/drive box, and a daisy-wheel printer. And guess where the power switch for the entire system was? On the printer. I shit you not. So, if your printer ever broke down and needed repair (a not-to-uncommon occurance for daisy-wheel printers), you were SOL for however long it took them to fix the problem and mail your printer back to you. You couldn't even play your Buck Rodgers game. Who the hell puts the system power switch on the PRINTER???

GMD

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watch this

Connecticut Leather Company by AtariAmarok · 2003-12-23 09:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

What else do you expect from a computer made by the Connecticut Leather Company? I kid you not. Go look up that "CoLeCo" means.

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Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.

P4 by WordUpCousin · 2003-12-23 09:28 · Score: 5, Funny

"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) =)

Re:Trash-80 by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-23 09:28 · Score: 4, Funny

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

You mean ZX-81? by Chazmati · 2003-12-23 09:31 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Atari! by ZorinLynx · 2003-12-23 09:33 · Score: 4, Informative

Everyone remembers Apple II and C64, but does anyone remember Atari 400/800?

I dug this up in my closet recently. Very amusing little book:

http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~flynnj/ComputersForPeople /

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. }:)

Re:Atari! by ZorinLynx · 2003-12-23 09:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

The sad thing is that Steve Wozniak all on his own designed a 140K per side drive that was about four times as fast as the Atari drives using commodity parts, and Atari, with access to all their specialized custom stuff, was only able to come up with the crap they did.

It's one of those great big mysteries of the industry...

The Apple drive wasn't more expensive than an 810, either...
Re:Atari! by Atario · 2003-12-23 10:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

Well, the reason the Atari drives were so much more expensive was that they were "intelligent", which in this case meant you'd issue a few-byte command like "read sector $04A" and you'd get back a 128-byte frame. Whereas on virtually all other floppy systems of the time, you'd write whole routines to move heads and spin the spindle at such-and-such a speed, and see what the head is seeing, and interpret it into sectors, and so on.

The speed issue had more to do with their odd choice to make the drives' data rate 19.2Kbps rather than the SIO bus top speed of 54Kbps (which is most of what third party upgrades like Happy and Supra did, besides "skew-formatting" and such).

Probably dumb penny-pinching as happens all the time in electronics -- all VHS VCRs could have been able read SVHS tapes now (though only at normal VHS resolution), if only manufacturers weren't so cheap they didn't want to spend an extra nickel to give the ability. Probably the same story at Atari back then.

There, now aren't you glad you mentioned it? (Sometimes I scare myself...)

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"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt

On some old big iron by Ashtead · 2003-12-23 10:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

The first computer I ever used was the PR1ME at the Oslo College of Engineering. This ran something called PRIMOS and it would reply with "OK," or "ER!" as a prompt depending on the outcome of the previous command. We had class accounts for the programming class, and the ones of us that were in active hacking mode made our own subdirectories for our stuff.

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.

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SIGBUS @ NO-07.308

C64 powered central heating by internewt · 2003-12-23 10:13 · Score: 5, Interesting

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....

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Car analogies break down.

My first computers by MsWillow · 2003-12-23 10:30 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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 ... 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!

I still have that old Zorba in my closet. My father never even got near it, I defended it with my life :) 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. :)

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Lemon curry?

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