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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!)."
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.
Apple ][+ in 1980. 48K RAM (later upgraded to 64K with a US$99 16K card I bought on a trip to Las Vegas), two 143K floppies, TV with composite in. No cassette, I was a rebel even then
In 83 or 84 or so I got a 10 MB hard drive for the Apple and thought I'd never need more.. how quick we forget.
Trolling is a art,
No TRS-80 pics, though... odd...
I sometime get the feeling that the computer industry is trying to deny that the TRS-80 Color Computer ever even existed.
I see your Ti-99 4/a and raise you a voice modulator. "Fuelling station ahead" in a lusty female voice... Who needs to remember your first kiss, anyway, when your first computer sounds totally hot?
What else do you expect from a computer made by the Connecticut Leather Company? I kid you not. Go look up that "CoLeCo" means.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"My first computer is a P4 3.2 GHz, 1 Gig Ram, 2 120 gig HDs, a 20 inch LCD monitor, ATI Radeon 9800 XT and a 8x DVD-R Burner"
If a 10 year old kid said this to me I'd give him a high-five for having a nice computer, and then punch him in the nuts for being spoiled. (Mine was a 8086) =)
I loved my ZX-81. It was cooler BEFORE Timex jumped in and put their name on it. I tricked mine out with a memory expansion pack, 300 baud modem, and custom (real keys) keyboard. Wish I'd taken some pictures of it. It's probably across the country in my mom's basement.
Oh, and the speed... it was awful. So I started learning assembly. None of the cool programs were in BASIC; they all looked something like this:
10 REM !@#(*~>8A6$^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.
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.