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What Was Your First Computer?
michaelmichael writes "News.com.com is running a special report, asking readers to tell everyone what their first computer was. This was prompted by another article commemorating the 60th anniversary of ENIAC." I started on a trash 80 in like 5th grade. And although I did a lot of programming and games on 8086s, it wasn't until I got a 286 in middle school that I really considered a machine "Mine".
I also did a lot of work on the TRS-80 when I was in junior high (yikes...just dated myself there). I put in a lot of late days and managed to write a few cheesy games (press play on tape
(BTW, don't try to chat on IRC with a 300 baud modem and a 40-character-wide screen. It causes brain damage.)
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
An emulated IBM 370 on VM/370. Running WATFIV. happy days.
mine was an Amiga 500+ - ah, those were the days.
The good ol' TI 99/4a to be precise. It has cartridge basis. Those were the days.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 which I got when I was twelve. Much more deeply than the actual computer I remember the moment when I had first switched it on and typed "print 2+2" on that piece of membrane pretending to be a keyboard ("print" was actually a function key, you couldn't type it letter by letter). I still remember my astonishment when I pressed the "New Line" field and the number "4" appeared in the top left corner of the screen. It was something radically different from a pocket calculator. Or so I felt. Since this moment the fascination of programming has never left me again.
Although, that DEC PDP-8 was pretty sweet at the time.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Used to do my FORTRAN homework in BASIC, get it working then translate back into FORTRAN at UIC. Ran upstairs from the basement screaming and danced my mom around in circles when I got the modem working. After many months, I simply neeeded to cross pins 2 & 3 on the serial cable. Yeah, I was a lamo.
I had a battleship gray 16k coco with a chicklet keyboard. One of my first. The coco was a user name for the color computer from radio shack. I miss my my cocos.
Purchased on January 24, 1984, from, of all places, a Dillard's department store in Dallas, TX.
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;-)
There it is, next to a NeXT Cube and a CHRP box, on the top shelf in my office:
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/CHRP_128K_Cube
Also present are a 20th Anniversary Mac and a PowerBook Duo, with dock:
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/20th_Duo.jpg
And over 22 years later, I'm still using Macs. Even found a wife who loves Macs too.
And Microsoft Basic. And no tape drive to store anything, so once you turned it off, your BASIC masterpiece was gone forever. It was a couple years old by the time my dad brought it home from work, but perfect for me at age 5.
The best part about my Apple IIc was that it had a handle to make it seem portable. Unfortunately, the monitor was not attached and was not portable. It seems Apple is better in the design department these days.
First computer I've ever operated, don't know, but its interface was a paper terminal, circa 1975.
"family" Commodore 64 "mine" 486sx (which beat the hell out of my friend's 386)
Buttons aren't toys.
VIC 20 was my first, the predecessor to the Commodore 64 (which I also got). We were green with envy for the kids whose parents had gotten them a Commodore 128.
Then... Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, then I got my first PC, an IBM BlueLightning, specifically to play Doom.
Unfortunately all I did on all of those machines was play games. Had I started programming earlier...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
My first computer was a Commodore 64 with a blazing fast 300 baud modem. Nothing like dialing up a BBS, waiting for the modem to scream in your ear, then pull the phone cord out of the headset and plug it into the back of the modem. Ah, those were the days.
Watch this space for the exciting followups "what is your favourite movie?" and "what did you have for dinner last night?"
OK, so it was a BBC model B.
sudo ergo sum
which I used to connect to internet services such as archie, veronica, and gopher on a remote VMS system.
No, ENIAC wasn't my first computer - that was a Tandy MC10 - but here is a link to the ENIAC museum.
with a ):monochrome:( screen
This
My first computer was a TRS-80 "Pocket Computer," which was a little gadget the size of a small ruler, about an inch thick, with a two-line, 40-character (?) display. Followed by a Timex Sinclair and then an Apple //, but I can never forget the glee when I typed something that I saw on the display of the TRS-80 pocket ("run") only to have it start beeping and ask me to play a game (forget what the game was). That got me hooked on computers.
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
I had a Commodore 64, it lasted about 2 years before it died. My favourite game was Bruce Lee where you kick ninja butt incessantly.
Also did some BASIC programming with it.
Captain Kirk was a great salesman. He could have sold Valentine's Day cards to a Vulcan.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Commodore PET, with a whopping 8k of memory.
followed in short order by an Apple II.
Oh well, what the hell...
Vic-20, taught myself 6502 assembly on it by poking bytes into memory (did write an assembler eventually though :D). Plus/4 followed, then the mighty Amiga...
It was in school, our GATE program had an Apple ][+, and I had a subscription to COMPUTE! Magazine. Later that year my parents bought a TI-99/4A. I want to say this was around 1980/1981, I was about 6. Later that spring I wrote my first video game on the TI.
Very similar to this machine:
http://www.thebattles.net/wang/wang.html
Eventually I got a paper tape punch, but I had no reader... also had a removable hard drive with a 5 megabyte platter.
The good ol' Apple II was my first...
Yeah, that was the first computer we had at home. Technically it wasn't mine, but I did spend the most time using it. Later my dad got an Epson Apex (XT clone, /w 20MB hard drive), followed several years later by a family IBM PS/1 (486SX-25, 2MB RAM, 120MB hard disk).
Finally, around the latter half of 7th grade, I got the first machine that was 100% mine:
Custom-built 486DX2-66, 8MB of RAM, 540MB disk
(ran OS/2 2.1, had DOS/Win 3.1, eventually wound up tinkering with Linux and Win95 as they became known/available to me.)
I started on a trash 80 in like 5th grade.
So it was like 5th grade? Was it 5th grape, or was the submitter abducted by aliens?
But in seriousness, I'm worried about the use of 'like' in such a fashion in colloquial speech. It emits a lack of confidence of the writer, afraid to commit opinions, facts or asertation.
Very similar to saying "You..." when the speaker really means "I...". Try it. Try dropping 'like' and 'you' used in these contexts and see how more confident and clear your thoughts become to the listener.
the Timex Sinclair 1000 was my first. Black and white TV output, no lower-case characters, a membrane keyboard, and a whopping 16 kilobytes of memory made it a wonder that I didn't move to a shack in Montana and foreswear all technology.
It's doubly surprising since my second computer was the ill-fated IBM PCjr (which, to be fair, was a decent computer once the infamous chicklet keyboard was replaced).
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
We'll have none of that computer stuff around here, thank you very much. Mine was an abacus...
The first computer I ever used was a BBC Model "B". I spent the next few years lusting after one, but my parents could never afford it. The first computer I ever owned was a ZX Spectrum +2B (the black case without the scewed up sound), complete with weird Amstrad modifications. I hated Amstrad for years afterwards, especially since my first PC was an Amstrad 486SLC, with weird Amstrad crap hardware and no upgradeability.
Now, the first machine I every actually paid for myself was an AMD X5-133 the served me well for 4 years before the motherboard finally gave in.
was a Franklin Ace, apple II clone.
It was given to me by the elemtary school I was attending at the time, someone had donated it and they didn't need it. They were even considerate enough to provide me with pirated copies of all of the software that they had at the time. (mostly terrible 'educational' games)
man I wish I still had that thing.
I'd used Trash 80's and Apple ][e's in school, but my first computer was sadly the Coleco Adam (Bomb). It lasted, oh, about a week.
Hell, I even wrote some code using GFA Basic, which wasn't a bad little package, actually.
My first 386 wasn't far behind, though. I recall a friend of mine (who worked with big machines for EDS) saying, "What could you possibly need with an entire 386 at home?"
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So I am sorta kinda still young, so what? ;)
... though the first machine I really used was my fathers olb box, some IBM thing running DOS.
Tunnels of Doom was the best game of it's time.
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My first computer was a Packard Bell Legend II AT (286), purchased by my father in 1988. The interesting thing is that my parents were absolutely steadfast about not allowing me to have a modem. My father was overly concerned about me calling Sydney Australlia (always Sydney for some reason?) for hours at a time. My solution was to illicitly buy second-hand 2400 bps modems from the kids at school who were, at the time, upgrading to expensive new 14.4kbps ones. And I do say "modems"--I went through three of them after my parents kept discovering them. I would get up at 3am and run a 100 foot telephone cable from our living room to the basement, where I would spend about three hours a night chatting and playing Tradewars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon. Always by dialing only local BBSs of course. Kinda funny that 15 years later I would help found a VoIP company, which helps people save on calls to Sydney. ;-)
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Followed by the great Commodore 64. I got my mileage out of that machine!
And then about 8 years later the Amiga 500. Then I decided to slum it with the rest of the world and got a 286.
I really wish they would make a console system that could be programmed out of the box. That's why I'm a programmer today, because I was able to write my own games as a kid. But the kids with the consoles can't program it out of the box. It think it's a real shame.
My first computer was the Acorn Electron, I used to write games on it (including my very own Spaceballs adventure game.. ahem).
Coca-Cola, sometimes War.
I started on a 8086 in school. The first PC I bought was a 80386 :)
I lost my signature... help!
My first computer, however, that was mine and mine alone, was a Commadore A1200. It had the stock 68020 running at 14 Mhz and 2 megs of RAM. I splurged and spent $600 upgrading it with a expansion board with a 68030 CPU and FPU both running at 50 Mhz! I also got an 8 meg simm to bring the memory up to 10 (the simm was half of the $600). That plus an 80 MB HD meant that I never had to worry about space;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I guess I'm the young buck in the room.
My first was a KIM-1. The level of excitement I experienced playing Hunt the Wumpus has rarely been matched since.
Siggy Wiggy Figgy Tiggy a bana bo Biggy!
A breadboarded 4004 with gobs of 74xx series support goo to make it act like a computer. Then an IMSAI 8080, with the coolest front panel ever.
--MarkusQ
Essentially the same machine as the ZX-81, but it came as a kit. Unlike "building" a PC nowadays, you actually needed to solder all the parts onto an empty PC board. This was the first machine I actually OWNED.
The first machines I did any work on were Commodore PETs and Trash-80s in Junior HS.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
TRS-80 at school, while Dad had a portable (suitcase size) Compaq at home, my first machine to program on was an Atari 400 with the integrated keyboard, etc. "Hey, bro, throw me that BASIC cartridge..."
Mine was a 486 with 33Mhz. I loved the "Turbo" button that allowed me to power down to 8Mhz for running older applications (that way I could play "Red Baron" and not have the plane moving too fast).
I meta-moderate because I care.
Commodore 64, with the tape drive!
I remember riding my bike to the local Radio Shack when I about 13 and sitting in the display window loading programs from the cassette drive and learning BASIC. My dad had an *original* IBM PC with 64k ram, TWO 5.25 floppies(!) and that screaming 4.77MHz processor, and of course the 300bps modem to connect to Compuserve...
MY first real machine was a Atari ST, and what a great machine that was...so far ahead of its time, a full-color GUI interface in 1985. I can still remember the buggy BASIC that came with it almost caused my to fail a CE course because the chip simulator I wrote with it kept giving some random result! My prof was a ST fan at that time, and it took an hour in his office for me to prove to him that my code was indeed correct and that there was a bug in the interpreter...
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
My first computer? A Turing machine ;)
...you can still them at work at the Museum of Science and Industry. For all the changes that place has been going through, they've left the west balcony pretty much undisturbed, which means that the physics displays are still running on their original TI-994/As. You can even see them through a clear panel; some are black, some are that strange ash color (did these actually exist for purchase?)
As an added bonus, they're showing the Game On exhibit again (all video games from Spacewar to the present) for a double dose of nostalgia.
I was in college and loved computer science. I bought and assembled not only the H-8, a wonderful 8080-based machine, but also the notorious H-19 "terminal" - a real monster of a kit that gave me nothing but troubles. The H-8 was an incredible machine, and still ranks among the best experiences I ever had. It had a nice breadboard board that you could have fun with, and an extension card so you could raise the breadboard card out of the chasis and play with it while your machine was running. I miss those days.
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
My first machine was the ORIC-1
I was too young to remember ever not having a computer.. but I still have fond memories of its awkward rubber keys, the way you had to hook it up to the hi-fi to load the programs off a tape, and best of all, it's game of frogger.
Strange that in many ways it's the limitations of such machines that you fondly remember..
This is going to be one of the threads with the most unique replies and the least moderation tags... Simply 'cause EVERYONE has an "opinion" about it and nobody if anyone has the same as another poster.
But to keep the few people who don't post but instead mod from bashing me with "offtopic" down into the sewer, my first computer was an Atari 800XL. And I STILL say its graphics was way ahead of anything commodore put into its 64!
. o O (Great. Now you get modded down for flamebaiting...)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I was so lucky to get it!!! In today's dollars that is like buying your kid a $12,500 computer! Good thing my parents were loaded!
Ultima III / IV / V best games EVAR!!!
Laser 128k which was a cheap Apple IIe Compatible ripoff... with an orange and black screen!
http://evoketv.com - TV Listings 2.0
The high school connected to some local college with a teletype terminal. We had access to BASIC. I wrote a Conway's game of Life in BASIC for my first program. CRT terminals did not become common until 1975 when 1K RAM memories could store a 5x7 pixel display character set.
and my first portable computer was a TRS-80 Pocket Computer 2 with (gasp!) 8K RAM. Did anyone else have one of these?
Ah those were the days--writing BASIC programs in the back of math class. I still remember some of the games I wrote using ASCII characters as the spaceships and how "cool" all my nerdy friends thought it was.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Monitor, CPU and keyboard all encased in one giant chunk of metal with a whopping 16K of RAM. Plus, an uber expensive tape drive attachment.
s t=1&c=103
And it was instant on, baby! Of course, it took forever to load something from the tape drive.
Here you go.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?
Sinclair Spectrum 128K +2 with the built in tape player. I must have spent hundreds of hours glued to Elite or writing Basic programs on that machine. Second was a Sam Coupe.
I was using an Apple][ to play lemonade stand, and winning, before I could form complete sentences at 6 months old. When my dad saw that, he gave me that Apple][, and then proceeded to buy an Apple][e for himself.
I *think* the first computer I owned was an NEC PC-8201A... and I still have two of them. I mentioned something about it once at a lunch with Bill Gates, who was all smiles talking about how it had the best implementation of BASIC ever. Later, I asked one of the original MS employees what the deal was about that. He said it was probably the last piece of code that Bill actually worked directly on. I haven't seen Bill for years, but if our paths cross again and I want to make him smile, I guess I know how.
The first computer I ever used was on the top floor of Scaife Hall at Carnegie Tech -- now CMU. It was a mainframe, IBM, if I recall correctly. It was one of the university's five computers at that original center. I was part of a research project to see if kids could use computers, a mystery back then (I was 11). We learned some interactive system and later Algol on it.
...with the "extended BASIC" cartridge... and SPRITES! God how I loved the TI-99 sprites. Even made $60 as a 16-year-old by inventing a computer game that I submitted to 99-er magazine. Still have the issue where my game appears in all it's GOTO-laden glory. :)
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
First computer I owned was a handed down 386sx-16mhz in college. 486s were already out and Pentiums weren't too far behind. It worked for what I needed it for. That's right, I used to for IRCing. I remember dialing up to my university's dial up line, annoying my roommates as I tapped away on my clicky keyboard all night long and running MS-DOS. I even tried to run slackware on it, but I had no idea what I was doing with it. And yes, porn. Hmmm downloading porn after I bought a 14.4 K modem, viewing them with cshow. Those were the days.
The first computer I used and learned on was a TRS-80 with the ram expansion for 64k!
MY first computer was a C-64. Only the best computer of all time! =P
An HP 9830 "desktop" computer. It had an integral thermal printer, and the two together weighed about 80 pounds. It had no processor: it was entirely TTL. The screen was a fiber optic display consisting of about 30 9x5 arrays, so it could display one line of text. It had 1K of memory, I believe, and ran a primitive version of BASIC called (informally) Rocky Mountain BASIC, which was an HP standard in the '70's. I think it was released in 1970, and we got ours in 1974, on loan from dad's work. We kept it until the early '80's, when we upgraded to a Series 80 which actually had a DISPLAY and GRAPHICS and stuff. I think the 9830 was the first full-keyboard desktop computer ever produced. It certainly was HP's first.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I'm not too old so I can say that my first one was a Gateway 2000 486. All I remember is playing wolfenstein 3d in black and white because it wasn't even a color monitor. After that we upgraded to a Celeron 400mHz system from eMachines. yeah a big jump. but we all loved that old Gateway so much...
Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing now if he had given in and bought me a NES.
An Atari ST, with the assembler and C compiler that came as part of the Atari development kit. The original machine is long gone (my feckless brother sold it without telling me), but I bought one off of Ebay for nostalgia reasons. It came with Lattice C, which is a pretty decent compiler and even works under the hatari emulator.
Not mine, of course. The first computer I owned and assembled (years later) was a ZX81 kit. If you were used to 4MB of RAM and MVS , using 1K made you return instantly to the IBM. Sold the kit at a profit and the next box I owned was a home-built 386. Again, many many years later.
I got a Tandy 1000HX when I was seven or so. 3 1/2" AND 5 1/4" drives! Wow! And DeskMate built-in! Later I received a Tandy 1000RLX, which was my first very own computer. I got a 40 meg HD to play Space Quest 4, the first game I drooled over that required a hard drive... Now those were the days. I still want that DeskMate 3 that came with the RLX; I have dreams about that weird yellow on blue color scheme.
My first computer.. was a family computer, bought on a local auction here in Norway for 3000 NOK. It had Windows 3.11 on it. I believe it was a 486. Then, my first own computer, was a Duron 850 mhz. I believe I paid 8000 NOK for it at QXL.no (auction).
our school got 4 trash 80s when I was in 10th grade.. but the
first I owned was a early edition AppleII w/48K! And then there
was that dec2060 I 'owned'
With the grappler for printing those cool asci images. Also had two floppy drives, so I could play Ultima without that annoying "Insert Data Disk" message.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
My first computer was an Atari 800 with a tape drive. I later got a floppy drive for it and there was much rejoicing. To be fair, I did have to share it with my Dad. My Dad liked to type in programs from Compute! magazine, which was quite annoying when we only had the tape drive, as he would tie the computer up for days typing in a long program and and not saving it. ( I wanted to play Crush, Crumble and Chomp! or Temple of Apshai.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I had user accounts on a Prime 400 and a VAX 11/750, but this was the first computer that was "mine". It was incredible, a "portable computer." You could put the keyboard up, a couple of snaps, and you could carry it around. OK, it weighed a ton, but still! Built-in monitor, a ton of bundled software, two disk drives, CPM, etc., etc.,etc.
I sometimes think back to that one when I sit trying to install some new word processing software that takes up more space on my hard drive and more RAM than before. Gee, I used to be able to do all of this on a computer with 64K of RAM, and off of a 360K floppy - and this new program does pretty much the same thing!
It was a piece of crap but I learned my first assembly and basic with it.
Time to reenact the playground arguments fondly remembered by everyone who was a child in 1980s England: Sinclair Spectrum owners and Commodore 64 owners hurling abuse at each other for no particular reason. (The rich kids whose parents bought them BBC Micros somehow rose above it all).
*clears throat*
Speccy forever! Commodore is rubbish!
-Stephen
The first machine I owned was an Apple II.
:)
Oh, the first machine I 0wn3d? That'd be Windows 95.
My parents had a Apple ][, but the first computer that I could call my own was a mac SE/30 (which still works and is occasionally used). I also had a (Tandy?) 'Portable' with a 2x80 character display and a form of BASIC on it. I think it was sold as a word processer.
My dad worked for the company and we had a teletype in the den. Learned GECOS and MULTICS and learned how to program in Basic.
My first job was programing the Altair 8800 to handle inventory control.
(yes, I'm an old-timer)
...are all posers. My first computer was an abacus.
-- "Mathematics is music for the mind, and Music is Mathematics for the Soul. - J.S. Bach"
Back in the Christmas of 1981.
Man, I *loved* Tombstone City.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
those rubber keys... also had a Spectravideo 328, Apple 2e, Vic20, Atari 400, Amiga 500 and various others. First PC was a 486SX33.
My father gave me his old Epson Equality II+ 8088 when I was in second grade. I learned MS-DOS 3 and GW-BASIC on that bad boy. I even play with PASCAL on that sucker. It finally wasn't enough for me, so I opened it up having no clue what anything was and stabbed a part that looked important to me (with my compass). It definitly made the machine not work, it just turned on and then blinked...
:) It just couldn't find that uber huge 20MB Hard Drive it had...
Years later I now know I stabbed the IDE cable multiple times
But, fear not. My dad gave me his 486SX33 then...Windows 3.1, I felt like the king!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Ahh, the old Superboard II.
I hacked that thing to buggery!
- overclocked the 6502 (to 8MHz IIRC),
- doubled the memory by stacking RAM chips on top of those on the board with a few legs stuck out the side and soldered with wirewrap wire to a modified memory controller,
- video upgraded to 80x24 (but not all of it could be read due to overscanning) Ahhh, happy days.
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
Learned on a PET, but the ZX80 was the first one that I owned. Man, trying to program in ONE Kb really keeps you on your toes. I remember when I finally got that 16K upgrade cartridge - wow, the programs that I could write then. And then my first commercial game - the flight simulator - never looked back.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
First computer that I owned was a birthday present: a Commodore Vic-20. (I may still have it and the cassette tape drive still in a box somewhere.) I must have been in 5th or 6th grade when I got it.
However, I used an Apple-II for programming at school before getting the Vic.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Used it to log on to the campus system in about 1980. Wrote first program to automatically access online data in 1983 for a senior project building 3D Black-Scholes options pricing models with the first and only IBM PC on campus.
16K RAM, chiclet keyboard, a knockoff of the C64 that was inferior in every way despite being developed years later. A sign that Commodore was on the way out due to breathtakingly incompetent management. At least it was damn cheap and you could program in BASIC on it. Maybe it was a good thing there was little software for it, it forced me to spend more time programming.
...close to 100 comments and not ONE that goes like this:
"The first machine I ever OWNED was your Windows box."
C'mon, slashbots! Wake up!
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
We had this in Trig in High School. The school was too cheap to get a real computer in 1973.
love those punch cards!
Oh! you really had to suck up to teacher to get access!
with 32kB RAM!
4K of static RAM, serial I/O, a KSR 33 and a music synthesizer (one VCO driven by a DAC). Switches and LEDs for a front panel. Fortunately, after a year of that I came to my senses and built a Heathkit H8. :)
was the first computer I owned. It had a cassette tape drive for mass storage. The Model I was followed by a Model III with dual 8" floppy drives and the finally a hard drive in the first IBM PC. I also had one of the first 128 Kbyte Macs.
The first computer I ever used was a DEC PDP-8 on which I spent many hours writing BASIC programs using stolen accounts (I was in junior high and used to look over the shoulders of the college kids when they logged in after I had snuck into the local college computer center).
Frank W. Miller
When I was six, my parents bought an Amstrad 128K. This technological marvel only had volatile storage, so to save something, you had to use 3" floppies that could kill a man if thrown at him. Its other media type was a normal audio cassette. When I wasn't busy copying game code verbatim from magazines, my sister and I would play a game from those audio cassettes, like Green Beret.
But it wasn't easy. A game on an audio cassette would only load successfully a third of the time, and the external cassette deck used to even be sensitive to vibrations. I have very fond memories of putting a cassette into the deck, pressing play, tip toeing out of the room, and closing the door behind us ... keeping it slightly ajar so we could peek at the monitor and see if the splash screen came up.
*Cue joy and laughter if bouncing blob with green head appeared*
Those were the days.
*blinking cursor*
Apple IIe was my first home computer. Fully loaded with 64K of memory, dual floppies and a 1200bps modem. Wahoo!
...richie - It is a good day to code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
I think not. Good times, though...
I was given an Altair. For the young pups around here, you had to punch paper tape to program it.
IBM PC jr got it for christmas about two weeks before they discontinued it. Still enjoyed it, though. Fortunately, I got the one without the chicklet keyboards....
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
I had the combo machine. It was great. Wrote the old talk back program that would talk to you in a very Max-like voice whatever you typed. Oh yeah...
Religion and politics, without the flame. godgab.org
My first was the Pet 4032 (Fat 40). My second was the C=64. My third was the Kim-1. (Kind of a step backwards, but I was reading Lance Leventhal's 6502 book and it seemed like a good idea at the time.)
It amuses me that my cell phone has more memory than my first 6 computers put together. And that I carry around a USB thumb drive that is bigger than my first 4 hard drives (including the one I installed SLS Linux on) put together.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
with keyboard, disk drive and VDU drawn on with felt-tipped pens.
z80
zx spectrum
286
386
486
p1
p2
p3
p4
In 1985 when I was in grade 2 or 3, my parents picked up a Vic-20 for around $100 U.S. at Woolco or K-Mart when we visited Grand Forks. I still have it, the original box, tape drive, and several of the games that we got at the time. I remember it entertaining me for hours punching in pre-written BASIC programs & seeing/hearing the results.
I don't want to brag, but I had the 16k upgrade. 2k just wasn't enough for me. And that kick-ass tape drive.
I think a lot of us upgraded. I know I had a coco3 with 1 meg of memory and two hard drives at one point. Those certainly were things that radio shack didn't plan on happening when they built that computer. I just don't think you see that sort of thing happening much any more.
My first computer was the Sinclair ZX-81 with a whopping 1K of RAM. I think we got it some time around 1982 or so.
After that, I had a Spectrum+, and shortly after got online with a Prism VTX-5000 modem (1200 baud down, 75 baud up - I could type faster than it transmitted). We had a Prestel+Micronet subscription. All the supposedly 'new' things happening during the bubble (mainly online shopping) had already been done by Prestel+Micronet in 1986.
My modem access came to an abrupt end when I ran up a £200 telephone bill playing Shades (a multiuser game). Incidentally, Shades is still going.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
My first computer back in 1979 was a TRS-80 Model 1. I built several interfaces to real-time clocks, Modems, an expansion box to connect 4 90K floppies, etc! What a grand time that was. It still boots! I used that box to connect to the university and keep me from having to spend nights at the computer center.
with integrated cassette deck baby!
I still have it stashed away in the basement.
~ this space brought to you by ~
I bought a Southwest Technical Products 6800 system (1MHz) in 1977. I upgraded it using Smoke Signal Broadcasting hardware as it came out until it was 6809 based at 2MHz.
I designed and built a hard drive interface for the old SASI drives.
It still runs to this day.
All Windows problems are hardware problems. Don't load it on hardware, no problems.
Not meaning to be Clintonesq, but what is yours? In High School, they had a PDP 11/34 under RSTS/E, that I used and had more control of than the teachers and the sysadmin. But, I didn't buy a computer until 1982 -- an Apple ][+ clone with 256k of ram, 6mhz z80b, and a 5 diskette 6mb disk pack.
Fight Spammers!
I was a Junior CSE student at UPENN when the 50th anniversary was being celebrated.
I can't believe it has already been 10 years.
I think I still have my copy of the card with the Eniac on a Chip that a couple of our Master's students worked on.
To answer the question at hand my first computer was a Timex Sinclair.
I remember spending more time with my TI99/4a however and copying BASIC programs out of the back of magazines to get it to do cool stuff (like the slot machine program.)
MY first computer was a Vic-20 back in '80. Had a blast with that thing -- especially when we upgraded a year or so later to have a floppy and the 16K RAM upgrade. My first exposure to a computer was in the early 70's, when I typed on the keypunch machines at my father's job; they had an IBM 360. My first exposure to computer *stuff* would be the late 60's. For all intents and purposes, I got to teethe on write protect rings. Now that my wife's pregnant, wish I could find me some of them. (Got some? I'll buy 'em. See my e-mail address.)
Timex Sinclair 2068, in 1984, when I was ... mmm... young.
An AT&T 8086. Did have a 1200bps modem. Was super cool when we dialed two of these bad boys together and played some Jet Figher game against each other from across town! Yeah!
My first computer was an ADAM which had a printer and cartridge type drive. had a few programs with it and I learned C-64 type programming on it with peeks and pokes into memory addresses. It was new and fun and I became a geek...
the first computer I used was a Mac Performa- and it was a nightmare. Either it couldn't run the software because it wasn't a PC or it couldn't run it because it wasn't a "PowerPC". Although, it did last forever, and it came standard with a TV tuner card, which you still don't really see today.
The machine I built myself in high school out of approximately forty DPDT relays didn't count, because it didn't have any memory or any way to execute a program automatically. It was a five-bit binary adder and multiplier. But in order to make it multiply, I had to press about six buttons repeatedly in a predetermined sequence. I always figured eventually I would add some kind of clock and sequencer, but I never got around to it. By the time I got more than about a dozen relays, the train transformer I'd been using to power them no longer had enough power; my allowance didn't enable me to buy enough #6 Ignition dry cells; and my parents flatly refused to let me have a car battery.
GENIAC certainly didn't count, and neither the the "analog computer" with three potentiometers and a voltmeter that I got as a science kit.
The PDP-1 truly feels to me like it was "my" first computer, even though I had to share it with about a hundred other MIT undergraduates, and come in at 2 a.m. in the morning to get time. I used it mostly for programming, but also for what would now be called word processing (formatting with a program called TJ-2, and outputting in Flexowriters which had IBM electric-typewriter mechanism and produced what would later be called "letter-quality" output. No spreadsheets, but Expensive Desk Calculator was a lot more capable than most real desk calculators. No MIDI, but using Pete Samson's harmony compiler I coded up a few pieces of music and had the PDP-1 play them in four-part harmony.
Games? Spacewar, of course. And "flight simulator simulator." That was a byproduct of a real research project, which coupled the PDP-1 for human input (joysticks etc.) and display to an analog computer that did the real simulation heavy lifting. That was the "flight simulator." The guy who did it, Ray Tomlinson, knew that people enjoyed "flying" it so he made a "flight simulator simulator" in which the analog computer was replaced by a much simpler and less-realistic set of calculations made by the PDP-1 itself.
The first computer I personally owned and had in my home was a VIC-20. I don't have anything like the same depth of feeling for it that I have for the PDP-1, however. At about the time I bought the VIC-20, there was a gentleman who lived about a block away from me who was in Digital's AI group and they let him keep a real computer--I think it was might have been one of the original Microvaxes--in his house. I was green with envy.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Mine first cmputer was an Atari 400 that my dad bought in 1981. He could do programming on it, and I could play video games (Star Raiders was the sh!t). I wrote my forst program in BASIC that year too.
10 PRINT HI
20 GOTO 10
I can still hear the screech of loading programs off of cassette tape.....good times.....
Everyone should believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer.....
Ahh, the days when dual 5 1/4 inch floppies were a luxury. You know where you boot with dos 3.1 in the first drive and run your app on the second? I remember running DisplayWrite or one of the first Word Perfects and the thesaurus/spelling floppy was on an extra disk. You needed to swap it to spell check and swap it back when it was done. Needless to say, that my reluctance to switch disks helped improve my vigilance in spelling. Oh and with the black and green display, the movie "The Matrix" really hit a nostalgic chord in my heart. Good times.
I sure don't feel young, but given what some of the other folks on here are putting as their first compy, I guess I'm a relative newcomer, comparatively speaking.
I think I was 6 or 7 at the time (1989-1990ish). My folks went to the local Radio Shack to see what this "personal computer" craze was all about.
Of course, I'd used Apples at school before that, but those weren't "mine." Pretty much all we ever did on them was use that dumb Logo app.
Anyways, I remember that all the Tandy really had was this drawing program that I barely remember, some kinda notepad for reminders and whatnot, a weird recipe book type thing, and a few other apps that I can't remember (probably because I never used them). All I gotta say is, Prince of Persia rocks!
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
I got in a little late in the game (slightly younger /.-er alert) with a Macintosh Quadra 800, which moved at godly speeds and did all these things my NES didn't...like draw stuff, design stuff, and make papers at school a lot easier. Also introduced me to my first desktop publishing items (edited in some little Mac word program), my first little crack at page design (pagemaker x.0 where x is 5), and tons of other cool yet worthless things. I got so excited when OS 8.0 came out...first computer that I actually owned was some random tower that ran Mac OS 8...I can't seem to remember the model though.
My first computer was an Apple IIe, but i wasn't allowed to have any games for it, so I ended up checking out every book I could find in the school library on programming for it. I spent many a late night typing in lines of code only to find out I messed up somewhere. heh.
My next computer wasn't until Windows 95 running on 486... after that I was upgrading that machine just about every other month. Eventually the only thing left recognizable from the old 486 was the case. I finally threw out that machine about 4 years ago.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
My first computer was Atari 800XL. ;)
I started my programming on it. I learned Atari Basic, then Turbo Basic, tried Forth and assembler.
For the first time ever I composed music on Chaos Music Composer.
I've seen 3D graphics in games...
I've played M.U.L.E. hours and hours.
OMG I am starting to cry, time to take my pills... I mean to start emulator again
I cut my baby teeth on a TRS-80 Model II and TRS-80 Color Computer, but my first computer was a Commodore-64. Unfortunately I only had the tape drive, which I considered very limiting. About a month later my Dad brought home an Apple IIe for "business". It had two disk drives and a 80-column/128k card. He started asking me how to use it, and pretty soon it became mine merely by squatter's rights ;-) He tried to reclaim it for a while by buying me a bad Apple-II knockoff called the "Pineapple" (supposedly a compatible-clone). But if you'd type too fast, the Pineapple would reboot! (incredibly frustrating!) So the Pineapple went in the trash soon.
I also remember working a summer job so that I could buy a modem -- I got a Prometheus Promodem 1200 (internal!), and my only real problem was that at the time there were only about 3 boards in the Seattle area that even supported 1200 baud, and those were usually busy! I also bought a TRS-80 model 100 (the portable) clone made by Kyocera. That was a pretty obscure machine!
Ah, those were the days. Oh wait, no they weren't -- these are the days!
First used a Tandy TRS 80 with Level II BASIC.
But the first computer I owned was a Heath/Zenith H100. Awesome machine for its time. And it used Z-DOS (a re-worked version of MS-DOS). Which did NOT have the 640K limit imposed by the IBM PC architecture. At one time I had 768K of RAM in it, all visible (3 banks of 256K, and I had to mod the motherboard to allow for the larger chips).
Let's see, two floppies, 128K RAM for the video, S100 bus. Later I added a sound card, and my first hard drive, 10M full height, full size. And an 8" floppy drive. And a V20 chip which let me clock at 7 Mhz, with a switch to slow the clock down to 4.7 Mhz so I could run games.
My have we come a long way, when I comapare that to my current machine....
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
My C64 was the first computer I did real work with (in college, doing word processing and terminal emulation), but the first computer I owned was an Atari 400 with 16KB RAM, cassette drive, and flat keyboard (years before ST:TNG made flat computer consoles cool). I goofed around with BASIC on it, but mostly played Star Raiders and Missile Command. Before that, I'd used an Apple ][ and a couple TRS-80s, and a few terminals (via acoustic-coupler modem) connected to a DEC PDP.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
IMSAI 8080
This is not an automated signature. I type this in to the bottom of every message.
8085-based.
See "How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot" by David Heiserman. It makes a great starting point.
I just built the computer bits, not the robot bits, because my family was living in a tiny military housing home at the time, and there was no room for all of Rodney. I remember ignoring my teachers to write assembly in class and being frustrated with switch-flipping.
There was a series of Byte articles on building your own processor out of LS components, too... "Komputar" or something like that. I didn't build that one, but maybe I still will. Of course, I'll do it today with VHDL just to tickle my programmer.
[Error 407: No signature found]
8088, 16K of DRAM (that's not a mis-type), booted to ROM BASIC, no floppy drive (it would have been an 8" floppy), you saved and loaded programs with a cassette tape player. We used it for a J.C. Penney security system (Silent Watchman, inc.) and made our own EPROM memory board with an RS-485 interface to our own input multiplexers (they had 8048 micros with software written in assembly).
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
It all started in 4th grade. I was put in an advanced learning class that had three TSR 80s. (Otherwise known as Trash 80) The first program I used was a picture store about the Hindenburg. Then a friend down the street got a Commodore 64 which we recreated songs in basic, and created digital dice for AD&D. After that, my father bought a Tandy 1000, which followed by 7th Computer Literacy class and we had a room of Tandy 1000s. That is were I advanced my GW-Basic programming skills ;) My friend upgraded to a 286 laptop with Compuserve. Then dad upgraded to a 386sx 16 with Windows3.1 and I started the upgrade to Q-Basic, then Borlands Turbo C++. Friend upgraded to a 486, then I finally was able to by my very own PC. Pentium 75 with a MONSTER 1.275GB hard drive!!! From there a Pentium 200MMX, Pentium II 333, and from there it's a big blur. Today I have a laptop and 2 other desktop Athlon boxes ranging from 1.4-2.2ghz that are in peices and I just haven't cared enough to rebuild.
Man I still recal the great feeling of going to a Apple dealer to pickup that computer. That was in the early 80s.
My first was an Apple //c. With 128K of memory, I thought I was *the man*. Of course, my C-64 using friends used to always say that the C-64 had way better graphics, using sprites, and they were probably right. Oh well, anyone remember:
- call -151
- What pages $100, $200 and $300 were for? (And what '$' meant in those days?)
- How many 6502 opcodes can you remember? Let's see, here are a few:
4c JMP
20 JSR
60 RTS
A9 LDA(?) (Load accumulator, direct)
Well, it's been quite a long time, I'm surprised I can remember any of those.
It had some overheating problems a couple years back. Turns out it needed a new fan (imagin that a fan would die in 20 years of use and dust, dirt, fuzz... ). Once I took it apart and replaced the fan and cleaned out all the dust, it is running like it's good old self. Now if I could just find the hard disk enclosure or a disk drive for it, the tape load system is just painfully slow, although it is nothing like having your favorite program's "song" memorized to let you know how far it is in the load process...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
32K of RAM, Microsoft (yup, the very same) BASIC in ROM, Motorola 6809E CPU of just over 1MHz. In BASIC you could POKE &HFFD7,0 and switch the CPU to a double speed mode. Weird. An almost identical computer was sold as the Tandy TRS-80 in the US, which meant a steady supply of games :-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
In 1978 or so (not sure exactly), my dad picked up a TRS-80 model I with the upgrade to 16K of ram and the external cassette player. We had all kinds of games. Eliza. Pinball. Some game where you try to drop bombs on a city of buildings. Another game that I can only remember there being shapes like a pound sign and a square, and something about moving them around. Boy, those were some memories. The last time I used that computer was around 1990. It finally bit the dust and was laid to rest at a local computer recycling company. My old CoCo-2, Tandy 1000A, and Tandy 1000TX ultimately met the same fate.
Z80 processor, tape drive, programmed in basic. I didn't have another computer until I bought an Atari 800XL. After that it was commodore 64,126 Amiga. I didn't buy a PC until 94.
Osbourne:
//c:
Dad got it for spreadsheet, I remember playing Adventure. That was an awesome "portable". I think the original Compaq was influenced by the design.
Apple
First computer i programmed in (BASIC). Of course the arguments with me and my friends was over what was better -- Apple II or Commodore. Of course our friend w/the IBM PC was a boring lamer.
Then i went to Mac SE, Then PC.
I adore my 64 my Commodore64!
Man I do miss those days when being "into computers" actually meant something.
300/1200 baud pocket modem.
BBS's
1581 & 1541 floppy drives.
Ahh the core of my geek upbringing.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
In 1897 my dad bought me a "Superboard" kit from OSI, it took me about 8 months to put it together correctly, and yes by myself.
He wouldnt let me do the Powersupply because he was afraid I would get zapped. (funny part it he did about 5 times, the PS was from olsen an a kit as well)
Then came the S100 Bus sytems and by 1982 I had serial number 2 Ibm PC sitting in my basement
He was VP of marketing for Tecmar and they had a deal with IBM to get their hands on the first production systems,, Serial Number 1 and 2 (with a bunch of 0's in front and another ID code I think)
I still have the Keyboard for #2, on the keyboard for #1 we learned why they were robitcally asembled.....
Tecmar toasted 1 with with a lithium battery explosion that send shards of PCB into the arm of one of their techs, (Yes the old lithium batters were Quite capable of this if crossed)
They "THOUGHT" they cooked #2 so the old man brought it home, and we fixed it.....
Ahhh the good old days....
I was about three years old and I was in the kitchen with a bunch of my more interesting toys. (Mostly wind up stuff) I also had a ball of string. I was using the string to connect the various I/O ports on my toys to each other and wrapping the string around the table and chair legs. My goal was to use the wind up crank motion when the toy was playing twinkle stars to reel in the string and pull the chair in under the table. I figured I could set it up so that the chairs could automatically be pulled in after dinner at the push of a button and I wouldn't have to remember to push my chair in myself. When my mom asked what on Earth I was doing, I said, "I'm building a computer". She didn't realize the import of that statement until years later. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
My first computer was an Apple Lisa. My dad bought one for the store that he managed, but it lived at home while he (and the kids) learned how to use it. I was probably 4 or 5 at the time. Once we got the computer, I stopped drawing on paper and would only draw on the computer (LisaDraw, and then later MacDraw and MacPaint). That probably explains why I can't draw freehand to this day. My dad also used to get all over me over the years for messing with the system settings, being so sure that I would screw something up. I never screwed anything up, but now he's the one who comes to me with computer questions.
The first computer I used was a briefcase-style "luggable" that my father used for work. He had a copy of that trek-style game on it, and I was too impatient to read the rules for it. He used to get really nervous when I used it, since it belonged to his office.
The first computer I considered mine in any reasonable sense was a Commodore Vic-20, but frankly I couldn't do enough cool things with it to be really interesting.
The first computer I could really get excited about was the Commodore 64, and it was all about the games, baby. (Although I did learn basic with that machine.)
At the risk of dating myself......
First system I learned to use was an IBM 360. It resided in my father's office (Data Programmer) and I remember keypunching my first program in basic on this machine. Playing music via paper tape on the rollers and of course we have tons of formfeed printouts... Still. The family always had a ton of confetti whenever we needed it. My Mom hated that. I went with my father for training on a weekend to IBM in Vermont to learn how to use the incredible IBM 370 series (It had a SCREEN!!!). Still used the keypunch cards as well though.
In 8th grade I worked on a Burroughs A10 machine. First time I had ever used a computer in an interactive manner. I could SEE the lines of code I was typing.
Teletypes were all over and I got a lot of time out of classes to fix those in the building.
In 9th grade the school I was in bought me (well, it was supposed to be a department purchase but I KNOW it was mine) a TRS 80 Model II with a 32kb expansion module 8 inch disks and a tape recorder. I found a way to alter the ROM on this machine about 3 weeks after they gave it to me. Always fun to remember the times I crashed that machine and had to go "fix" it during Social Studies class. Basically we had a faculty advisor and there were 4 of us that lived in the computer room. They had a collection of the 8kb machines in the room as well. For the Other People that used the lab to use.
I took a break to earn college money from Uncle Sam and when I returned to the world I bought myself a Zenith Z159 computer. Cutting Edge... State of the art.... 4044 chip with an 8088 daughtercard. DUAL 5.25 inch disks. Amber monitor (much better than the green ones). This little baby only cost me 3800 dollars (US). eventually I got a 1200 baud modem so I could program for college from home. It allowed me to connect to the Data General system our college had. Boy did I ever play a LOT of Rogue http://www.wichman.org/roguehistory.html back then.
This trip down memory lane goes on.. maybe I'll save it for my book.
Got an Atari 400 when I was 5 or 6. Mostly a game machine, but included a "Basic" cartridge. Processor was 1.7MHz. Typed in long programs from some magazine and sometimes saved them out to the tape drive using standard audio cassette tapes.
Then came my Apple IIc with its speedy 1.4MHz processor.
Commodore vic-20 with *two* tape drives and an *8k* memory expansion pack! I could run super leet amounts of basic code with that extra 8k.
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
I think a better qualified first computer was my GENIAC, also from the 1960s. It was a piece of peg-board-like stuff about the size of an average board game, with six places for large rotary switches (circular pieces of peg-board with a matching hole pattern. Each switch had four concentric rings of holes in it radiating outwards in spokes. You programmed it by placing jumpers on the movable switch plates and nuts and bolts with wires under the main board. There was a row of holes down the middle where you screwed down indicator lights and a battery clip. Based on the positions of the switches and what the lights told you, you could perform simple calculations. It was electric, but not electronic. The last time I remember playing with it was to use it as a fire controller for a pyrotechnic show.
I suppose my first "real" computer was a VIC-20. 4KB RAM, baby! I couldn't even port my BASIC games from our school computer to that tiny box! Amazing how I went from a three-flip-flop game to a six-disc-switch, but suddenly 4KB wasn't enough!
John
A TRS80 Pocket Computer Model 1. It had 1.4K of memory and was programmable in Tiny Basic. The odd part is that it still works.
My first computer was a Hazeltine 1410 terminal and an acoustic data coupler. I had a dialup account on the Columbia University PDP-11 mainframe.
First PC was an Apple ][
Oderint dum metuant
Not long after I started my 10th grade school year at Vo-Tech in the Electronics Curriculum, 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 type on 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 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 angels singing. 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 be compared to Chevy Chase'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 only a month 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 introducing the VIC-20 to it's readers and had a game 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.
:)
I still own this computer. My kids have a fun time playing with the 'ol relic, and the VIC-20 too.
Intel 486 DX-2 66, 8 MB of RAM, 500 MB hard drive, and a Jaton 1 MB VRAM video card with an extra 1 MB upgrade chip. I bought it in 1993, I think. $1100
My first computer was a TI-99/4A which I got for Christmas when I was 10. It was supposed to be a Christmas present, but I saw my mom carrying the box in the store (Sears maybe?), so my parents decided to give it to me a couple days later as an early Christmas present (even though it was my big gift).
:) So she has the ultimate blackmail pic revealing my true geek nature that she likes to share to embarrass me at various strategic moments.
My mom has a picture of me asleep on the bed with the computer lying there next to me (not connected to anything - just the console) the night I got it. I just couldn't part with it.
Each month I looked forward to getting the next edition of Compute! so I could spend hours typing in the various BASIC programs. Unfortunately the real cutting edge stuff was always on the C-64 (like the checksum tool that helped catch mistakes as each line was entered). It's no wonder I learned how to program, having typed in so many lines of code. My dad would often read the listings to me, and he was impressed that I would sometimes enter statements before he read them, as I learned the syntax of the language and general programming rudiments. Then there was the intense drive to make modifications - starting with the basic stuff like giving me more lives in a game, to advanced stuff, like creating new enemies and the like.
I've been wondering how to introduce my kids to programming in a similar way - exposing them to source code in a rewarding way. Unfortunately the scenario I was in is probably gone for good. Now they have dozens of GBA SP, DS and GameCube games (not to mention the stuff on PC), so the reward for messing around with an extremely simple game (ie one that they would even have a chance to make sense of the algorithms) is pretty much nil.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
My first one was a Microdigital TK90X, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k clone produced in Brazil.
:)
I still rememer that "the only one with 48kbytes of memory" written in the box.
After printing my name on the screen with the simplest program, I was totally hooked.
Great memories (except for the tape-waiting part).
-- SouNerd.com
My first program was written for the IBM 7090, later the SWAC both at UCLA. I remember that we had to find the answer in a core dump for the 7090 - the core dump was cut into several pieces for the various members of the class. 14 years later my brother and I started a new company with hypertext on the Apple II - Was trying to invent the Internet + eBay too far ahead of it's time.
Also known as the CADET (Can't Add Doesn't Even Try) because it didn't even have an adder. Did all it's arithmetic operations by table lookup. I didn't actually own one of these beasts but a friend of mine bought one surplus for $75. A bubble-pack calculator can run rings around it now.
My brother, who was seven years older than I, started out with a Vic-20. So, by default, I started with this as well. We then moved on to a Commadore 64 with a tape drive. The first computer that I actually 'used' was a Tandy 1000 with I believe an 8088 processor. The best part was the special Tandy 1000 graphics, somewhere between CGA and EGA, right? I would give anything to play Jumpman Junior again!
... back when DOS still came with the BASIC documentation in two big binders!
My first computer was as old as me, and I spent hours playing Karateka and Spy Hunter
All I remember about Karateka is that I never beat it as a kid, and I tried it again a couple years ago (Yes, my Apple IIe still works), and I made it to the princess, and BOOM! she kicks me in the head and I die... the sense of utter rejection I got from that has kept me from attempting to save her again.
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI99/4A. Ahh the joys of Munchman, Parsec, and Tunnels of Doom.
I still think Tunnels of Doom was an amazing Dungeon crawler game.
I used to fiddle around doing some programming too on that thing... My greatest accomplishment was "Mark's Game".
------- Mark
I went:
TI 99/4a
Atari 800
Atari 800xl (x2 or 3)
Atari 520ST which got frankenstein'd 10 ways from Sunday
Compaq 486sx/33, which got upgraded to an AMD 80Mhz 486
Then a bunch of homebuilts since then. I am most fond of the Atari 8bit and 16 bit machines. The 8-bit Atari's where where I spent the most time learning, and the 16-bit Ataris were my first launching for internet connectivity and BBS hosting.
Even with the Linux community being what it is, it still doesn't feel as much like a community as Atari fanatic groups I used to belong to. People had real passion about their platform back then and it was a point of pride to be able to hack your machine to do something nifty or out of spec.
I like music
My first box was a C-64, but I didn't really get into computers until I found an old (well really new then) 386 while dumpster diving. I didn't know much about computers at the time. Just what I had surmised from the schools computers and watching the techs work on those. Basically someone had thrown out a perfectly good 386 - the power cable had just come loose from the HD.
;-).
So now I had to get a modem. I found a huge stash (15) old cardinal 2400 baud industrial modems (big metal cases) and a couple of 9600s dumpster diving at an airport. I was the toast of all my geek friends because I had modems to give to everyone. We used them forever. We were all members on as many BBSes as we could find locally. We'd play LORD on every one of them. It was great.
We progressed to playing Warcraft on direct dial during the week, and on the weekends eveyone would bring their boxes over and we'd play over null modem cables. Pre-curser to the lan party I guess
Got it for my 12th birthday, 1982 (September). Didn't get the tape drive until
Christmas, which was okay because I was just learning Basic at the time and
wasn't typing anything long enough to bother saving anyway.
I still have it too. I also still have the C64 I got later on, and the 1541
floppy, all my Amigas... I just can't bring myself to throw away a computer.
I've been meaning to get the VIC up and running again for years. It just
needs a power supply.
My first computer was a Commodore 16. Got it back in 1986.
I was coding on it for almost 2 years before I got a storage device
My first computer was my dad's poor choice in a Price Club buy in 1988, a Packard Bell "PB500", XT with 640K RAM, 30MB MFM hard drive, and double density 5.25" floppy. It had an ATI video card capable of displaying 16 colors in 80x25 or 40x25 text mode or four colors in a graphical environment. It had MS-DOS 3.3 and GW Basic 3.22.
I added a modem to it and started BBSing when I got a shareware CD with Procomm in 1992 or so. I later added a 3.5" floppy drive, but I didn't realise the 1MB limitation on using it for long enough to be a pain.
I got a Cyrix 486-equivalent in 1994, finally replacing that dinosaur.
I miss BBSing...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
My first computer was an Apple IIe. I was about 10 and my mom got a bunch of books about programing in basic. About the only thing I ever did was program it so that when my little sister typed her name in it would respond by calling her names. I didn't mess with computers much for a while after that. In highschool my mom wanted me to join the CISCO program at my school (since it was free) but I wasn't into computers at the time. I ended up going to college for Mechanical Engineering, but after a year and a half I decided that it was not something I wanted to do for a living. So I ended up settling on computers. I am now an MCP working on my MCSE, CCNA, A+, and NET+, and about to complete my 2 year degree. My mom is always talking about "If you had listened to me in High School you could have skipped all this engineering stuff you did and gotten your CCNA for free." My mom is one of those "I told you so..." kind of people.
I was on 11+ at the time, anyone known what SIR stood for and what the machine might have been?
The big brother of the Salora Fellow. It is a rather obscure Finnish licensed copy of an equally obscure Hong Kong -built VideoTech Laser 2001 which was a copy of some Apple, IIRC. It was pretty much obsolete by the time it was brought to market during the heyday of the C64.
:)
I still have it in full working order. If only I had the floppy drive and could write the floppies somehow and knew how to write code for it, I would most certainly see how far I could push it now that I am a far more capable programmer than I was when I was six years old and typing in the BASIC examples from the manual
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
And I've still got mine, which I got when I was 8, with it's add-in multi-tasking(!!!) 8k FORTH ROM :-)
Stick Men
But I'm younger than most of the /. crowd! :-P
Seriously that thing was amazing... I learned BASIC in there so I could cheat on games.
My cousin couldn't understand how I got such a high score!! mwaaaa hahahahah aahaaahaahaha
I can't remember what I owned first, but I knew I had a Mac Plus, a Commodore, and a 64bit Tandy when I was small, and gathered up various other bits of hardware as time went on. Recently I read Fire in the Valley , Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine's story of the rise of the PC, and felt all nostalgic about all these little gadgets I haven't thought of in 15 years or more.
A few years later, as a sophmore in college, I purchased a Newtronics Explorer 8085 with hex keypad. To this I added an S-100 bus, 48K memory card (memory chips were reject Zialog 16Kx1 DRAMS), and an 80 column card. I had the first computers in any frat house at UF circa 1980 (300 baud dial-up to the Amdahl mainframe). All was in assembler, hand assembled and hand entered, backed up on an old mono open-reel tape unit.
An no, it does not run Linux today nor do I have a beowulf cluster of these.
My first computer (and I haven't seen it mentioned yet) was a BBC Model B, (yes BBC as in British Broadcasting Corp). It was the perfect machine for me to start with, at the age of 7. I could port BASIC code from the ZX-81, apple basic and the dragon.
Took about 50 lines of basic code. You could get an audio casette drive for it. ahh the memories!
iirc my first computer was a ZX81, in 1981, I was 10 years old... it was a Z80 at 1MHz with 1K of RAM, but we bought the 16K extension quickly. This is on this machine that I learned basic and assembly language.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I had the tape drive, the old disk drive with the push down not the flip down. Eventually got a flip down as well to copy disks. Lots and lots of games. Does anyone remember Public Domain games? Or the name of one of the hack programs used back then to copy games?
Lovely little device....learned basic on that machine at 12 years old. I hated rekeying programs every time I wanted to use them, so I got my parents to break down and buy me a tape drive. That was cool.
My parents probably had no idea they were shaping my carrer in CS/IT. They just thought they were buying me a video game system that was a little more useful than a dedicated gaming console.
-ted
First thing I played around with was the Apple ][ and later the ][+, those were in the Library when I was in sixth grade, but when my pops bought me a machine for home, it was the venerable Apple //e
/// monitor. I played around with BASIC and ran tons of "copied" games from friends. The first computer I really learned programming on was the Commadore PET
s on_plans/carbons/images/comp8t.gif
http://www.silicium.org/apple/apple2/apple2e.htm
64k, with the additionaly 80 columns "graphics" card, along with the shown Apple
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/les
with it's 'chicklet' style keyboard. programs were saved to Cassette tape!
Then, after Softmore year of High School I started my 10 year love affair with my art; pressed on until I got my BFA. Years of working in galleries I eventually wound up selling tickets for the saint louis symphony where I learned about the Unix ticket sales softare...and that led me to (back) to the tech/geek side to build a career on.
uhh...what was the question?
fak3r.com
Oh yeah, it was a badass back in its day.
A Psion series 3. Not the later 3a or 3c the original. It came with three books bigger than it was, one for programming, one for day to day use, and one for the spreadsheet. OPL was the inbuilt programming language and was my number 1 language for quite a few years. /me gets all misty eyed.
A Ti99-4/a. I've still got it and it works too!
I even have a few of the tapes I used to save my programs. To save a program we have to hook up a standard tape player to the computer and then press record then execute the save command. What a sound it made too...
It was that reason that I always liked to listen to the connection sounds on my modem on later computers; nostalgia.
Amiga 500 v1.2 with 14" Profex Screen with Stereo Sound. 512 kb RAM. Later a second 3.5" Drive and another 512 kb RAM to play Dungeon Master!
IAAL
You should try one of the TI99/4A simulators as well (google them, i am too lazy now). Now you can finaly try the speech simultor, the one thing you could never buy in your days because it was far too expensive.
The first computer I ever used was the almighty C64. Still works even to this day, although for some reason the color is shot (no, it's not the monitor). The first computer I ever OWNED was the family's box which they replaced with a 1.25 G4 tower. It was a PIII at 533, and just stopped working a few months ago. It has served me well as a file server and such after I got my Powerbook.
I loved it, even with just 1k of RAM
Y'all young-uns are making me feel old again.
I cut my teeth on a Terak 8510/a operating under the UCSD p-System. I had the monochrome graphics display and the dual 8" floppies. The thing was a beast, but was amazingly reliable. Sometimes, if it's really quiet, I can still hear the floppy drive going *ca-thunk* *ca-thunk*.
Now get the hell off my lawn before I spray you with the hose.
I remember it well. For my 12th Birthday, I wanted a computer. I went to the store (Montgomery Wards I think( and tried out several, and it became a bakeoff between the Sinclair and the Vic20. I chose the Vic in the end because it had a full-size keyboard. I thought the Sinclair would be difficult to type on.
Eventually I added a Commodor RGB monitor and a tape drive. I got the tape drive at Toys-r-Us (yeah, they used to sell home computers) and paid $60 for it. That was something like 1984.
Not long after I upgraded to the C64, and eventually a PC.
I remember my dad typing in a quick little BASIC program (an example from some book he got with the machine) that prompted for a name and then output "Hello, [name]!".
He sat me down and ran it for me, and when this "machine" then proceeded to greet me by name, well... let's just say my fate was sealed.
I can still remember listening to the sweet sounds of analog data cassette tapes on my walkman while going to sleep at night.
Intresting I haven't seen anyone mention the IBM PC XT! That was the very first system that I had the chance to use in my life, I was very very young, and my father had lucky enough to have this system given to him from work. The good ole' 8086 processor (not the 8088). Running DOS 3.10, even had the 3-ring binder hard-cover manuals with it. A 20 MB HDD with 640k of RAM and a 2400 bps internal modem. The first system I actually owned was a PC Express 286/16 with 8 MB's of RAM, with a Media Vision Multimedia pack, (Pro Audio Spectrum Plus and an external NEC 1x CD-ROM drive). That system I ran a BBS off of, Virtual BBS 7.00. That was in good ole' Junior High. (I was young when we got the XT system).
root@allevil:~#
The first computer I touched was an ole good Commodore 64, with tape player. My father bought it and hacked it like hell, adding a reset button IIRC.
Then I think the C64 died, and my dad bought a Schneider CPC6128, which consisted of a keyboard with an embedded 3" diskette drive (not a typo, it was 3") and a monochrome green screen. It talked BASIC and I was old enough (that is, I was 9 or 10) to build some tiny "programs". I remember playing quite a bunch of games on it (Sabotge, Zax...)when daddy bought his first killer PC: BEHOLD THE ATARI PC4!! It was a 286 12 MHz with an EGA (I think) card, a 10 MB HDD, a 5"25 diskette drive and...a COLOR 14" screen. I'm not sure but I think it was the ultimate beast with like 1MB of RAM. It was quite LOUD, like if a Hercules C-130 took off each time we powered it on.
Later we managed to sell the CPC6128 (which was TEH crap at that time) and with the money my father offered me my first real PC. It was a PC clone, an XT (for the young audience, that means it was less powerful than the aforementionned 286) with I think an 8 MHz and a very tiny (in capacity, not size) HDD, a CGA card linked to a 13" amber monochrome display. I played games like Xenon2 on it, and I remember clearly using PC-Tools and Paradox (so-called DBMS).
Later the 286 was dumped for the biggest PC in town at the time: the 486 DX2-66 which came with...TADAAAA a sound card (16-bit SoundBlaster clone because the original was WAY too expensive), and even a 1x CD-ROM reader. It has 4MB RAM and IIRC a 20MB HDD. Always a 5"25 floppy drive, with a 3"5 to hold company. We used to drill holes in the loppies to double their capacity (720KB -> 1.44 MB).
After that when I began my computer sciences studies in Sept. 96 I got a Pentium 75MHz greatly overclocked to run at 90 MHZ. 16MB of RAM was the standard at that time and that's all I got. I installed a powerful OS on it: Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and later Windows 95.
After that, I switched to AMD (K7) and I've been really happy with that ever since.
Today I run a AMD Athlon XP 3200+ with 512 MB of RAM and an 100 GB HDD...Thinking about the early days, if someone told me at that time the config I'd had today, it would have been like telling me I was going to fly to Pluto in 2 days today.
And then he said: "I'll tell you the meaning of life. It is" and then realized 120 chars are definitely not enough...
My father brought home a 9600 bps modem from work when probably 95% of people had 2400 bps modems. Literally a couple of high end BBSes in a major metro area had 14.4 modems, and I was able to watch as other users slowly caught up to me. It was amusing.
My last modem, which is still attached to my computer but rarely used, was a US Robotics Courier v.Everything. Great modem.
A mechanical "toy" computer from the late 1960s. Here's a pic:
http://www.doughtie.com/gavin/
No batteries required!
What?
Yo
HP65 when I was 12 or so, my father had one. What a wonderful calculator, with the magnetic strips for 100 program steps. Next a fake Apple][ when I was 18, that was sold in an electronics shop in Amsterdam, and then a Mac+. PDP11 in between at polytech.
The Apple was especially fun when I bought it, because I had no monitor (I didn't realize you couldn't connect it to a TV). First i figured out how to make it beep, and then I blindly typed a program so that it beeped. That was nice, it actually worked!. Then I started disassembling my portable TV, because it seemed that you could just connect the video from the Apple to the TV, provided you worked at signal voltage. So I connect some coax to some voltage somewhere within the TV, and voila, an computer display.
So next I learn to program in basic. That was nice, but bloody slow, so I want to use assembly. By then I'd used a real assembler on an 8051, so I knew what it should be able to do. But I had ZERO software for the Apple, and no one I knew has one either. What does one do? Well you write an assembler in SoftBasic (builtin in rom) ofcourse. This way I could finally program "Life" so that it ran fast enough to actually see the generations flip.
The rest is history. I've been a hacker since.
Bye
Bart
...so I started out before "home computers".
First because it's just way more cool and second cuz when I got a C64 later I had a background about what I was doing. Having keyed in opcodes and written my programs on paper had prepared me.
Looking at the guy with the TI-58 in the article, yes I was happy to have the magnetic card system of the TI-59. Even though quite often the cards would fail to read in for whatever reason.
My first computer was an old Tandy 286 that I inherited from my parents' workplace. I never did get the damned thing to work. The 10 Mb hard drive was toast, I had DOS 5.0 on 5" floppies, but that drive was toast and I didn't have the 3 1/2" disks. But man, that thing could spin its wheels fast at a blazing 25 MHz! And it had a whole megabyte of RAM. I took that thing apart so many times to try to make it work (even though I didn't know shit about computers at the time). I guess I did get something out of the whole deal since now the first thing I do when I get a new computer is open the thing up and mod it.
There has never been a machine as pretty at the TI-99 in it's brushed metal case. The keyboard was fantastic and, of course, it had a cartridge loading system so no waiting for tapes to load. I wish I had learnt more about it now.
After that I moved onto a BBC B and then a 386 (that was quite a leap).
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I paid for my first computer on my own. No xmas gift from parents, they could not see the use for an expensive toy like that. Aquarius were out at the same time as the Commodore but were much cheaper. Not much to it, only 4k Ram. It consisted of a blue keyboard with a cartridge slot on the back for games. Additional components like tape drive etc were supposed to come out for it but I don't ever remember them becoming available. My second was the Commodore 64. At first I paid for that one out of my own pocket too. I got my mother to go as far as giving me a tape drive. Then my Aunt got interested in using it for word processing and ended up buying me a printer, disk drive and even a desk as well as a lot of software. That thing lasted me over a decade. I can still remember doing college term papers on it my sophomore year.
First computer that I ever operated was a Commodore 64 that my parents bought for the whole family. First computer I ever opened was the IBM 25 MHz PS1 with "Intel Inside." I opened it to upgrade the modem to a 14.4 kbps. Under windows 3.1 this was no easy task. First computer I ever bought and was "mine" was a Packard Bell Pentium 150 MHz with a 14" monitor that I bought on sale at Sears. Say what you will about Packard Bell but I think it was a good little machine. I upgraded it several times until 1998 and haven't owned a "name brand" computer since then.
Did I ask you who was your first girl? and would you answer with a question: first girl I fooled around with or first girl I married?
Oh, this is about computers!
first computer owned was a TI-99. still have it. then a Mac I bought in March of 84...still have that and it runs.
First computer programmed? a SDS Sigma 7, 1969, writing Fortran IVh.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Not that C64s weren't popular in the UK as well - I had one myself (still do have one actually). But I had it after my Spectrum 48k.
So what other regional quirks exist? I've heard of something called the MicroBee for Australia? What about Germany - they normally went for Commodore hardware as far as I know. As for the rest of the world, I really don't know what the taste in computers was but would definitely be interested to find out.
Cheers,
Ian
OK, not my computer, but my father had a guy working in his accounts department many many years ago whos job it was to perform long arduous calculations to work out the monthly bonus' of the sales force. His job title was "Computer"
At highschool in Paris 30+ years ago. Two big cabinets making a lot of noise in a small air conditioned room with 5 or 6 teletypes. You had to propose something useful to the teacher in order to be allocated some printer paper (which you would use 4 times - both sides right and left). Punched tape to save your BASIC programs. Best way to get the teacher mad was to put a punched tape loop on the master teletype and fill the floor with printer paper.
Christmas, I always thought when I was ten, but looking back recently at when they were discontinued and some logic, it was earlier. (for both, I was 10 in 1987. The 99/4a was gone several years before, and "my" second computer was a crappy Zenith 8088 which the family bought in Feb 1988. I don't think the two overlapped) Anyway, I loved that thing. It's hard today raising my own kids getting them to understand how cool it can be to have a computer that really you have to program yourself to have any fun with (I never had a lot of software for my TI. It was annoying with the zenith at first that it didn't come with basic......what the hell good was it????) Sadly, I destroyed the thing thinking I could build a robot at one point....yeah, that was smart.
As a side note, my primary job today, I work on an IBM 370ish (newer, but basically) writing code for what is essentially 2 360's running in parallel (the 4pi....it's what the shuttle has on it, but that's not what I work on).....i probably wouldn't enjoy working on what I work on without the experience I had way back when on my TI....
Back in 1985, my uncle worked at IBM and got my family a discount.
Oh the hours of fun playing Kings Quest II.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The next day in class, the teacher informed us the university called that morning. Someone had burned up all the time alloted for the account. He suspected me -- it could have been my guilty conscience, or it could have been the way his eyes bored into my skull when he said "Someone". Anyway, he didn't bust me for it, and succeeded in getting more computer time.
Shortly after that, my dad co-signed my first loan and I bought an Apple ][+. It's been Apples ever since. (But I never did find a way to hook a DECWriter up to an Apple for that authentic Zork experience!)
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
16k ZX Spectrum. -- learned basic here.
48k ZX Spectrum.
128k Spectrum +3 -- learned assembly here. (z80)
Amiga 500 -- had to re-learn assembly (68000)
Amiga 4000
PII/400 (linux)
AthlonXP 1600 (linux)
Athlon64 3000 (linux)
Completely ms windows free so far. Woohoo!
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Got it my senior year of HS (1980-81).
Mine was the IBM PCjr. To this day, you can see the dent in the roof of my childhood home from where my old man hit it after learning that IBM was dropping software and support for it a year after they bought it.
From there on out until my junior year of college, it was hand-me-down machines from my Dad's office. Having an IBM PC boatanchor built character when your peers had fancy 286s and 386s with actual hard drives and 3.5" floppy drives.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
You could program it in "Atari Basic", which had to be loaded from a cartridge. Then you had to save your programs to a cassete tape recorder.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing now if he had given in and bought me a NES.
Obligatory Baseketball quote:
"You still hangin' out, playin' Nintendo?" "Well, if you must know, I'm in my second year of med school and I'm training for the Summer Games. What are you two up to?" "Just hanging out. Playing Nintendo. Cock."
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
It had a cool-looking black metallic case, but almost nobody owned one, so there were very few games available. If your reaction was "Memo-what?", it's about the same reaction I got back in the eighties, when it was on the heighth of it's popularity.
Lemon curry???
Yeah I was using a TI 994A back in the day. I later got a C64 and then my dad was issued an IBM XT by his job.
We both thought we'd never fill that 10MB hard drive.
WTF?!?
It was little more than a tech demonstrator for the chip, something with the number CDP1802 as I recall. I soldered all the parts onto the ~8"x10" mainboard. It had a Hex keypad and 2 digit 7 segment display. I added a video output to display on an old TV I had modified. I had a whopping 256 bytes of ram or something like that. I remember spending hours typing in machine code from a magazine (Popular Electronics?) to display a sillouette of the "enterprise" flying across the screen in glorious black and white. This would have been around 1975 or so?
:)
Years later I actually learned basic when I got a "real" computer - ti-99!, but also got into gaming (yeah, parsec with the speech module rocked!) on that machine.
Yeah, I predate dirt.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
First, a good ol' KayproII. I don't know which I used it for more, to use WordStar, or to play Adventure. (http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html)
Next, a Mattel Aquarius. What? It is a computer and has games with Atari-style graphics right on my TV?!?! That Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game ate away a lot of my early childhood. (http://oldcomputers.net/aquarius.html)
My favorite, though, is an Epson PX-8. BASIC was preloaded, and had a 1000 page book full of sample programs and language syntax. It was what get me interested in software development. Had it until only a couple of years ago. (http://oldcomputers.net/px-8.html)
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
64K RAM, programs stored on casette tape.
A VIC 20 was my first computer too, but my introduction to computing was reading the manual of my next door neighbour's ZX80, and then writing programs for it on paper. I expect like many slashdotters, I was an odd child...
Anybody remember "Attack of the blue meanies" or "biorhythms"?
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48K (Issue 3 board) when I was 5. My father heavily "modded" it during the years though. It was my main computer till 1988 when the keyboard finally died. I still have it on a shelf at home, though.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
My first box was a Cromemco Z-2 rackmount S-100 box with three, count 'em, THREE 8" floppy drives. Assembled the thing myself and had my first major geek experience seeing CP/M start up on the on-board video card. Whoo-hoo.
I got the Texas Instruments TI99A when I was 16 in 1980. I quickly learned how to program it using the built-in basic interpreter. It had some neat features; you could intercept key presses from within your application, and also manipulate screen sprites to build some interesting interfaces/games. I saved my programs to cassette tapes on the boom-box next to my desk - when it wasn't being used for blasting music (they actually used to make boom-boxes with a line-in back then...thank the RIAA for that, I suppose). I took my highschool's first computer science class that year - and spent less time waiting in the lab for console time as a result (I would debug programs at home, then transcribe them into a notebook, and only have to do data entry, then run them on the teleprinter to get credit).
I credit this machine with planting the seed that would become my career later on. I looked up the price of that machine one time -- it was somewhere in the region of $1500-$2000 in 1980 dollars! I don't know how my parents aforded it; I can't aford a $500 machine today...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The first computer I wrote some programs on was a Cyber main frame (using NOS/BE). I wrote programs in Algol 60, Fortran and Lisp. That was in 1978. The first home computer I wrote programs on was an Acorn Atom. It Basic language included operators for peek and pook and had a builtin assembler.
This is one rare story where there is not a missing poll option but the entire poll is missing.
Let me give it a try for fovrite poll options.
*ZX 80/81 or spectrum fanboy.
*C 64 or VIC20
*PC 8088 / 80286 or anything with a control alt delete
*ATARI XL 800 (or some other 6502 cpu)
*MSX (or some other Z80 clone)
*AMIGA
*Apple (I , ][ , lisa or mac)
*i still use a abacus.
My first computer was a Rockwell AIM 65 that used a 1 MHz 6502 CPU. It had 8 MB RAM (4 for the system and 4 for the user), paper tape such as used by a calculator for a printer and a one line LED readout for visual display. It came as a bare board to be used by engineers to learn how to use the CPU and I/O chips. Basic was included on a chip as well as assembly and later I purchased a FORTH chip. I had to make an interface and find a couple of tape recorders to implement the Kansas City format so that I could save programs. I also made an interface to a speaker to get sounds.
I tought myself assembly on it and wrote a program for Wampus and another board game whose name I can't reacall right now. Later I impoverished myself by ordering 32 MB of RAM for about $650. I had been programming in Fortran on a CDC 6500 and decided to take a course in data structures. The instructor was amused by my printouts on those paper tapes.
This would have been around 1979.
Nate
Got my ZX-81 when I was about 8 years old.. Had it hooked up to my parents' TV in the living room. I still remember a brief moment where I looked at it and knew that I would be a programmer.
-- jaf
First one I owned was a KIM-1 = 6502 processor, a whopping 256 bytes of RAM. 1977 or so...
/F
Next one was designed and built myself (using an 8085), ROM monitor I wrote myself, serial terminal. *2K*! of RAM !! Ahhhh, the good old days...
Originally learned on an IBM 1620.
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
This is a much more interesting topic. I first used an HP timeshare system in 1973 when I was in 5th grade.
Here in the UK the BBC launched a home computer. All their computer related TV programmes were then based around it - it actually made a lot of sense. All schools had them too.
It was all there. The computer was based around a 6502. It came with quite a reasonable Basic interpreter. You could buy extra ROMs to add all sorts of functionalitly (my school computers had Pascal ROMs), and even flash your own. The amazing thing about the BBC was the documentation. The User Guide and Advance User Guide described the whole operating system, in the kind of detail we'd love to get from Microsoft today. It was easy to have a go at a bit of assembly - the User Guide even had a brief tutorial. There was also a 'user port', meant for connecting your own stuff to the computer - the TV series had a project to build a turtle.
I never owned a BBC, but I spent hour after school, learning what those machines could do, fascinated. It really taught you to have a look inside and have a go. Happy memories!
My first computer was a KIM-1. Made by MOS Technologies, it was the predecessor to the Commodore VIC-20, touted as being the first single-board microcomputer. It had a 16 key hex kepad, and at 6 digit LED display. (4 for the address in memory, and 2 for the value stored there. Overall, it was a VIC-20 without the VIC chip, no case or keyboard, and a bit less RAM.
The Speccy arrived here in 1985, dubbed TK-90X (an illegal clone of the ZX Spectrum 48K). Right after it hit the shelves, my dad paid over Cr$ 1,790,000 (our currency back then - it was renamed and lost zeros a couple times after that) for it: 48 kB of RAM, 3.58 MHz, hi-res with 256x192 with 8 colors. I have fond memories of this beauty.
If you can read this, thank an english teacher.
I started with a ZX81 with 8KB ROM, 1KB RAM. The ZX can even as a kit that required assembly, but saved you about a 1/4 of the pre-assembled one... Worked all spring break for a 16KB RAM expansion, to be surprised by my parents with a 32(!!!)KB expansion board and a couple of games on tape. At school we had a Wang on wheels with an 8" floppy disc and a tape; the machine had an ABC-keyboard, and - I think - 64KB of magnetic bubble memory that wheighed in at 50kg. Then it was C64 and an Amstrad PC with 2(!!!) 5-1/4 floppies....
-- Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui
Actually it was OS-9. Microware created it as a real time version of unix. It was quick, nimble and the first multi-threaded operating system for a home computer.
Got it in '82. My mom said "the elves came early" and there it was, underneath a chair.
I had that computer for WAY too long(up until 1990). yes, I was one of the few people that actually got the Peripheral Expansion Box(disk drive, etc) that was built like a sherman tank. I wish I could find another one to make a PC case out of.
After that: Atari 800XL, Amiga 1000, Amiga 500, and then onto the regular PC where things got ho-hum. Magazines no longer offered programs for you to type in.
Those were the days. Kids nowadays with your AOl and your myspace don't know how good you have it. Meeting girls off of BBSes without ANY pictures to go off of? Heh. (BTW I'm 30 now).
Was the fileserver in my high school ... o ... you mean to own as in to buy?, well, in that case, it was a Commodore 64 with a huge 1571. Best.Machine.Ever.Period.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
...and then shortly after i swaped it for a DEC Rainbow Plus.
Damn did i love that machine. Later on i got into the whole Mac thing.
My first was an Amiga 1000 with the 512k extended RAM? That thing was a smoker in it day. We had it pimped out with two floppies and an extra 2MB ram later on.
The Sharp PC 1402 (PC for 'Pocket Computer') is one from the famous Sharp Pocket computer series. The 1402 came with 4 KB of RAM and 32 KB of ROM. I have it's successor right here with 32 KB RAM.
It's got Basic, a qwerty keyboard, a 24 symbol, 1-line dot-matrix LCD and a slew of buttons for scientific calculating. Way into the ninties I was fiddeling with these. I even programmed a full-range Shadowrun Character generator for the 1403. With Cash-Register Character Printout and all. (You could get a cash register type printer for it)
You could also get a 2.5" DiskDrive for it.
The 1402 and 1403 run approximately 200 hrs on a set of batteries - an off-grid uptime to date still unmatched by any other portable. Which is the prime reason I bought one.
I'd actually use it as a PDA today if the display and the memory where a bit larger.
IIRC the successor Sharp E-500s still is available and still used by engineers a lot. These babys totally rock.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What would really be funny is to see if you could run your 2400 baud modem over the VOIP connection to Sydney :) .
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Parsec and Pole Position of course! Voice synth and cassette backups, sweet! Wrote my first program ever in good ole TI-BASIC. Still have the system, RF modulator is dead, but otherwise good as day one.
A C=128 I always used in C=64 mode, both for learning BASIC and gaming (before that I had a Mattel Intellevision for games).
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Vic 20, then Coleco Adam, then in late 1990 a Packard Bell 386/16 with a whopping 125 MB HDD.
:D
A year later we bought an external (and rather large) 1x CD-ROM, and I performed my first upgrade by adding a $100 SoundBlaster Pro and another MB RAM (for a total of 2!)
In '94 we got an IBM 486/66 with (I think) a 425 MB hard drive and a 4x CD-ROM. Upgraded the RAM in that bad boy to 4 MB a year later.
Built my first in '96: a Cyrix 120 Mhz. It was thoroughly mid-range with a 1.6 GB hard drive, and nothing particularly special about it.
In '98, that got upgraded. A lot. 350 Mhz of AMD K6-2 goodness, overclocked to ~410 Mhz. A whopping 13 GB HDD, an AGP video card and a Diamond Monster 3D addon accelerator. Added a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW by the end of '99 and replaced the video setup with a Voodoo3 2000.
In early 2000, right after I bought a 750 Mhz Athlon (Slot A! Wooo!) I was the first kid on the block (actually, probably for quite a few miles) with a watercooled CPU. That K6-2 pushed over 520 Mhz running stable with a completely home-made watercooling setup.
I didn't dare attempt anything like that with my new and expensive Athlon box
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
For those wondering what the Aquarius was here is some linkage. I vaguely remember seeing one as a kid.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
My first was a TI99/4. My dad worked for a company that was a distributor for TI components so we got one of the first ones for a whopping $1100!
:-)
Besides playing games and fiddling with the speech emulator I programmed a lot of songs from my collection of sheet music -- Chariots of Fire, Brick House, Stairway... I remember my main hurdle being long pieces that didn't repeat much and thus would not fit into memory! I seem to remember a time where I was trying to figure out how to load data from the cassette data storage(!) as a song was playing. I think it was La Villa Strangiato I was working on...
The first one that I really used was an Atari ST running a GEM desktop GUI. It was way way ahead of its time. It was almost 10 years before windows did what Atari had done with GEM. I wonder why it lost out. it was a good machine.
I am just suprised at how many people started with the Sinclair (or Timex). It should be in a hall of fame somewhere. My second was a Sinclair QL, anyone remember those?
There is only one....
A Philips console better known by it's daughter company Magnavox's name of "Odessey 2".
It was sold many years ago for next to nothing.
Nowadays the console will apparently sell for quite a lot of money.
And I just discovered that I owned a $300 rare cartdridge.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The first computer I used extensively was the Sinclair Spectrum my parents bought around 1983. Upgrading its RAM (from 16 to 48 Kb) involved buying a set of RAM chips plus 4 other chips (essentially, an upgrade to the memory controller), then bodging one of the chips (pin 3 was connected to print socket 2, or something like that). Most convoluted upgrade ever.
Then, in 1987 or so, I came across the Mac for the first time (at a friend's house). One afternoon of playing was enough to convince me that this was the way to go. Several years later, the first machine I bought with my own money was a Macintosh LC II. I still use Macs at home.
Reading all you old farts who started with C64's and TRS-80's and the like. I started computing on a 286 PC clone running DOS, mainly playing Flight Simulator and the like. I started programming on my grandfather's Apple IIcx and Powerbook 150 in QuickBASIC, and I started shell/batch scripting on the Pentium-class Windows 95 system I received later.
The first computer I owned was a V-20 powered IBM Clone, circa 1986. It was so close in terms of compatibility I had it and used it on a daily basis for two years before I discovered it wasn't an 8086. (The V-20 processor was made by NEC, and has a built-in 8080 processor so it can run CP/M programs natively.)
We ran a version of Basic on the PDP that gave each user terminal a whopping 4KB of memory. I am amazed to think of some of the things we did there on a machine that had two floppy disks (8" sized) carrying, at most, about 240KB each. Disk 0 was generally unavailable because it had to hold the operating system, Basic and support programs, so stuff was stored on the second floppy. Single sided, and they cost about $8 apiece.
I will always think fondly about the PDP-11 and the amazing things I and other people at the college did with it.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Owned: :-), but I will count my Atari 1200XL! I learned LOGO and PILOT, and still got to play all of the games that were popular on the Atari 400/800!
//gs... that was schweet!
I'm not going to count my Atari 2600
Operated:
Now my Dad had a few Apples by then, mostly Apple ][ series (e, +), so I got to use those.
Once I got into high school, he gave me an Apple
Ramen
I created a random starfield generator and pretended like I was on the bridge of the Enterprise for hours!
Oh god! I was such a NERD! No wonder my first date stood me up.
Read any good sonnets lately?
I should break those Commodores out and show my kids.
hmm....the VIC-20 outputs a TV signal. My ATI AIW accepts a TV signal.
Using a 3Ghz P4 and dual 19" monitors as a display for a VIC-20 w/ 5k RAM. Now THAT is funny.
Mine was an Atari 400 with that horrible membrane keyboard. Then I moved up to an 800XL, and later a 130XE. I then skipped the ST models, and eventually moved into IBM PC compatibles.
-- $SIGNATURE
back in high school (70's) I did get a trs-80. it took over my life and taught me programming and computer logic that was core to how I think and see things, today. (yes, as a matter of fact, I DO often have to ask people to CLOAD? just to verify if I've heard them correctly..)
;)
in high school and learning with that trs-80 - in a year I had it upgraded to a whole 48K of ram - the most it could take; along with an rs-232 card, which I thought RS stood for Radio Shack! hey, I was just a kid at the time.) then finally I could afford disk drives (floppy only - for a good year I was stuck with cassette tapes!) and we had to figure out which brand: a seagate or shugart or MPI or siemens drive. and to double the 80K we could store, we'd look for 'flippy' drives - ones that had sensors on both 'sides' of the floppy - so you could actually write to both sides IF you ejected and reinserted the floppy. and back then, only 'business' people had printers. the rest of us had to upload our */bas (slash - not dot) files via 150baud modems to the local college where the DECsystem-10 was - where we could get our 'daily printouts'. (when you can only get 1 snapshot/printout of a program, per day, you tend to do a LOT more desk checking..)
trs-80 went out; atari ST went in. started out with 512K of ram and eventually there was a hack for a full megabyte (wow!). there was also the obligatory color AND b/w screens - you had higher resolution on the b/w but the color was more fun. yes, you had to reboot to change resolutions (well, some things haven't changed, I see..)
between then and now, I've had DECstations and microvaxes and other bigger toys. but the TRS-80 was so influential in getting me a career choice (early on) and getting my brain used to programming, debugging and understanding the whole 'computer thing' at a much deeper level than those who didn't have a very early exposure to home computers.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The most common by far, but I saved my lawn mowing money all Summer long to buy one. The I had to wait until Christmas to get a 1541 floppy drive. ;-)
With only 49 steps of programming memory, 8 data registers, and a 4-level stack, the HP-25 was an gentle introduction to programming in the small. The total lack of non-volatile RAM or secondary storage plus the 3-4 hour battery life sucked, but the machine was still my pride and joy in 1977.
I don't know how many different versions of a prime number generator I wrote or how many times I keyed in the Moon Landing Simulator program.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
How well I remember that first computer! I couldn't afford more RAM, or floppy disk drives, or a monitor (printer? you're kidding right). So, you'd load a program in from a regular cassette player, or write your own and save them to tape cassette. For a monitor, you plugged in a thingy that would talk to channel 3 on your TV.
I have to say that it wasn't until I saved my cash and bought an additional 48K of RAM, a monitor and dual floppy disks that I thought I had a REAL computer. The first affordable printers (Epson MX-80) and modems were still in the future... Not to mention hard disk drives.
The Amstrad CPC 464 was a Z80 based computer with a built-in tape deck and a colour (or green-screen) monitor. It was distantly related to the Spectrum in terms of machine code, so a lot of the games made for it were in crappy Speccy 4-colour, rather than in the glorious 16-colour it was capable of displaying (I think it actually had 32 colours, but it could only display 16 at a time). Eventually I also got the Light Pen and the 3" Disk Drive (Yes, I said 3". No not 3.5".) It was also sold in Germany in a slightly redisigned case as the Schneider, I believe.
God I loved that thing. Because it had it's own monitor, I didn't get in the way of the family's telly viewing, so it was definitely one up on my friends Spectrums and C64s. I played Elite for years on that thing.
This IS my first computer, you insensitive clod!
Now the 133 was the first PC I bought with my own money. At the time I was working as an after school care child-watcher for our church's elementary school. Yup... I actually DROVE to the Gateway factor to pick it up and dropped $2,999.96 on it. Wow I thought I was the shit then. 1.9 gigs of HD space, 64 mb of RAM, 8 mb videocard, 14.4 internal modem, and a 19inch monitor! I rearranged our kitchen table to hook everything up, with a crowed of friends around me ohhing and ahhing over the speed and beauty of the machine. I was the first one to continue my campaign of no-macs... everyone else had Macs and was bandwagoning them as the PC killers... becauase all the schools had them.. ptah I said.. Look at me! I can play full fledged games like Dark Forces! I was the king pimp at that point. Then I learned the joys of upgrading hardware with a bit more ram... wooh... then I dumped the machine and proceeded to make my own... ah.. and then the monkey never left my back and my machine has gone through multiple upgrades and updates...
Sadly, I just ended up finding (and throwing out) my WIN 3.11 and DOS disks just recently... oh.. and I am still using my original Altec Lansing speakers and sub from my 133... *sigh* those were the days.
Yup.®
;-)
;-)
Whopping 4k RAM and I still play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons on an Aquarius emulator
Next? Atari 800XL - when I was stationed in Germany I got a Eurospec model (faster clock speed since CPU speed was tied to graphics output - the Euro models were 25% faster).
You can do things with these machines you simply can't do with modern PCs - f'rinstance you can copy the floppy drive's ROM to system RAM, change a couple pointers and get the old 90k floppy drives reading and writing 180k per side.
How many people have actually seen (much less owned) a disk notcher?
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
.87Mh 6809, 32K Ram (64K with a hardware hack and disabling the ROM), 1500Baud tape deck, 32x16 display with no descenders or lower-case and a block cursor that flashed through all 8 colors each second to guarantee to trigger an epileptic fit if you were prone to such things; simple madness otherwise.
I was rocking with that baby!
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
With the 64kb memory pack and cassette tape adapter to play Telenguard. This computer came my way right about the same time I also got an Atari 800XL with 5.25in floppy drives and a printer. I still have both systems, hooked up and working.
ACK!
Same here - first computer at our house was an Apple ][+ in 1982 or 1983.
I was hooked - my first PC was the Packard Bell 286-12Mhz with a 60GB hard disk and 1MB of RAM. I picked it up at FedCo for $1,850.00. The salesman absentmindedly asked me cash or charge and I paid for it in cash (lawnmowing money). It was earlier than 1988 though, I think 1985...
http://www.bullnet.com
Around 1978... Red LED display hand-held calculator. Next was the Apple IIe in the very early eighties...this was when I introduced to BASIC. Was fun playing Space Invaders. Then the Commodore around 1982 or 1983... High school was back to the Apple IIe again through 1987... IBM XT in 1989... HP Vectra 286-12 in 1991...overclocked the sucker to play Wolfenstein. Pretty quick uphill ride speed-wise from there on... =8-)
Bought as a kit in 1979, still have it.
Great machine!
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
My father worked at Commodore's UK office in the early 1980s. His job was to 'approve' third-party software and peripherals for entry into a sales catalogue. He was at a meeting at the UK office when Jack Tramiel introduced the Vic-20 to the UK staff by taking it out of his briefcase and declaring that it 'was the future of home computing'. My father had one of the first Vics sent to the UK, in fact it had to have an NTSC-to-PAL converter fitted. He eventually gave it to me, as well as several carboard boxes full of tapes, disks and peripherals sent to him by various companies looking to get their gear approved. Sadly, the Vic is long gone now, which is a shame, as it was a pre-production model, and probably worth a bit today.
The TRS-80 came out in last year of high school. I had worked with the Sinclair Z80 and the best one I had was the Atari 500, I had a tape backup that would load programs when the 16k of memory would fill up. Man those were the days. One program I wrote was for graphics rendering, it took 10 minutes for it to render one object. It certainly been a long time.
1981...I coded for about 2 years on it with out a storage device. Before that I used a commordore PET, and after used Commore 64, Atari 400/800/1200 xl... I wrote a professional point of sale program on Atari 800 when I was 17... Those were the days.
Well, almost everyone so far has had interestings beginnings. Although I knew kids with cool systems like C-64's and Trash-80's, I started out on my dad's Zenith 4.77 Mhz 8088 "portable" computer. I put "portable" quotes because it was only portable in the sense that a suitcase full of lead bricks is portable. It had a handle. The CRT was built in.The keyboard and floppy drives folded up into the computer, but it was not very easy to carry around.
I did my share of BASIC programming and I wasted countless hours playing Rogue (where the term "rogue-like" came from). I did have to share it with my dad, however. It wasn't until a couple years later that I got an IBM PC XT of my own. Fortunately he let me have his 10 MB hard card (harddrive on an 8 bit expansion card) when he upgraded to a 40MB version. Yay! No more swapping out floppies!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
My first computer was an Atari 800. It was old even when i had it. A few years later when Pentiums came out we bought a P75 Acer Aspire. Mom and dad replaced it with a PII 450 Aspire (which they still use) and i got my first computer that was really mine, a Compaq Presario 1200 notebook.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
I started with an used Franklin Ace, then moved on to a used HP 110... I used that machine until 1996, and now I have a win2000 gaming box, and an Apple G4 powerbook, and a mac mini...
Still, I have fond memories of that Franklin ace...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
1st computer: Timex Sinclair ZX80 - membrane keyboard, 1K RAM
This thing was a nightmare, by today's standards, but a marvel at the time. Technically, it wasn't mine. A friend was given this by his dad, but said friend had no interest in it. I on the other hand was a born programmer and was always playing with it. Eventually, the friend told me to take it home and play with it on my own time...
- - - - - - - - -
2nd computer: Radio Shack Color Computer - chicklet keyboard, 4K RAM
(I know, you didn't ask, but it seemed notable)
I eventually hacked the CoCo to accept 16K RAM, added a real keyboard and an external floppy drive.
1972. High school. Teletype and acoustic modem to a PDP-8E with 8K of RAM and 256K disk. Learned BASIC, FOCAL and assembler on it. That machine wasn't "mine" though, because we had to share it, and access was at the whims of the phone company - we were in Spartanburg SC, and the machine was in the engineering department at Clemson, 70 miles away.
The first machine I got to sit in front of was a PDP-8. About the size of a small refrigerator, with a tape drive next to it about the same size. The peripheral I really liked, though was the 1024x1024 monochrome oscilloscope display. My senior science project in 1974 was a spacewar program, written at home on the timeshared machine, then punched to paper tape, driven to the stand alone 8, and debugged in Friday night marathons. The program actually displayed a moving, orbiting object the first time - I had no idea how astonishing that was!
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
~1983 : Commodore Vic-20, 3.5k ram, cassette drive
~1985 : Commodore 64, 64k ram, 360k 5.25" floppy drive
~1990 : clone 386SX-16Mhz, 2 meg ram, 40meg HD, MS-DOS
~1992 : clone 386DX-40Mhz, 4 meg ram, 40meg HD, GeoWorks PC/GEOS
~1995 : clone 486DX2-100Mhx, 8 meg ram, 120meg HD, Windows 95
~1997 : clone Pentium 100MHz, 16 meg ram, 2gig HD, Windows 95
~2000 : Dell P3-733Mhz, 128 meg ram, 20gig HD, Windows ME
~2004 : Sony VAIO P4-2.8GHz, 1 gig ram, 160gig HD, Window XP
and sometime this summer I plan on buying a Mac.
boxlight
My first computer was an Atari 800 maxed out with the external serial/parallel interface box, floppy drive, cassette tape drive and 300 baud modem. An Epson MX-80 with a graphics chip upgrade rounded out my rig.
AstroRoach - An expert is a person who knows enough about what's going on to be scared
I owned one for about a month, but I had very little software, and the cartridge port wasn't working very well.
My first computer: Sinclair ZX Spectrum+
...which probably explains why i am single now ;-)
:)
first basic instruction: plot
plot receives two coordinates and puts a dot on that location
on the screen.
second computer: Commodore Amiga 500
it took me several weeks to figure out how to put
a dot on the screen in 68000 assembler.
When the dot finally was there, i stared at it for ten minutes,
it was one of the best moments in my life.
pol
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
Sounds exactly like my experience... my cousins had a Collectovision ADAM that impressed the heck out of my dad (why cant these things be more than toys?).
My dad still cant work mouse. I cant fix a car. I didnt get a CollecoVision ADAM, my first machine was a C64 w/ 1541. I got a 300bd modem and discovered BBSs before I was in highschool.
Its funny that Ive never considered it, but how would my life have been different if my dad bought me a gocart (which I also lusted after) when I was a kid as opposed to that C64?
I recall it was like this for me, hopefully the chronology is correct: :-D ... and then it just kept on being PC's :-p
- Commodore VIC-20... borrowed from work
- Commodore 64... with a floppy drive that could sing Für Elise
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K... squishy rubber keys!
- Atari 520 STe
- Commodore Amiga 500+
- 486 DX/2... 66 MHz, later overclocked to an earth shattering 80 MHz.
-
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Back in da 80s the coco was the only way to roll for us cs gangstas. Every hardcore geek in my hood had one. We would hack on code, trade warez, and play tradewars over wildcat. Man them was good days. Hangin with the 1200 baud. Sending mail over Fidonet. Networking two or three together over serial wit OS-9. Punchin out holes in the floppies to make double sided disks. Those were the days. Men were men, women were women, and 128k of ram was enough for everyone. Damn I miss my coco.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
First one owned (as opposed to used) was an Acorn Atom. ... it was available before the 80's (1979 IIRC it was available).
Built from kit (DIY soldering) as it was the cheapest way (even cheaper as shop I got it from was closing down) to do it as a schoolkid with very limited cash.
The added fun(?) of saving up more cash for extras e.g. the final 6K of RAM doubled my memory to its 12K max, upgrading to "colour" graphics instead of monochrome (4 colour).
BASIC and assembler for coding, programs stored on (cassette) tape.
Despite what wikipedia implies
The small amount of memory meant that, if you wanted anything impressive, you soon went beyond basic and got your hands dirty with assembler.
At the time, the true geek kid on a budget option in the UK as more of a "real;" computer than the similar priced options such as the ZX80.
As we had an accountant in the house, we were one of the first people I know to get a PC. It was an old IBM, and I can't even remember the model. As I recall, it had what I now know was either Windows 1 or 2, a black and white monitor, and of course, all the "real" applications were in DOS. I think it had a 5MB harddisc.
What I used to play around with the most was Symphony, an old spreadsheet app. All I did with it was basically draw what I would now dub ASCII art, which quickly got to gargantuan proportions, across the whole spreadsheet. The file was enormous.
After it finally gave up the ghost, we upgraded to some machine whose specs escape me, though I do remember it having a 500MB hardisk which lasted for years. It ran a dual boot, win 3.11/ OS2 Warp system, but it was a 16bit machine, so OS2 crawled appallingly. All I did in the windows install was draw pictures in paint and play this puzzler game where you played some game involving multiple trap and hazard filled levels. It was addictive, but the name escapes me. The music for it is still on a lot of windows installs as canyon.mid.
When that one died, we got a pentium 2 compaq with Windows 98. The RAM just kept going up and up until at last all 4GB of harddisc were swallowed and an XP upgrade became inevitable. I later converted that box to a Samba network file share running Fedora Core 2, which worked out surprisingly well.
I only got into Linux about 18 months ago, but before that, I had basically tinkered with DOS and windows to the point that I was bored sick of it all.
Amid all this, my one regret is that I never saved that ASCII art. Tis lost to me forever.
May the Maths Be with you!
But do you remember:
And of course -- 3D0G!
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
I was 5. I remember writing lines after lines of code in basic to get it to do some silly little thing I could store on my casette drive. Maybe I should have become a programmer.
VZ-200
A Zilog Z80 CPU that screamed along at 3.6MHz (give or take...) and a whopping 8k of RAM! IIRC, my first 486 had 8k of on-chip primary cache...
Oh man, waiting for programs to load off audio tape or typing in piles of code and having the save-to-tape fail - arrrrgh!
It may have been 5 or 6 grand when my dad got it (back when it was cutting edge), but it was a good computer. A part of Apple's history that implemented the Finder, and I even learned used some precursor to AppleScript (HyperCard, through Hyperstudio in my case). Also had GEnie (GE's "internet" encyclopedia that used a modem), and a B/W pixely scanner cartridge that popped into the ImageWriter II (I think)....... Hate to see the total that went into that computer..... And it would even play non 16-bit games from the II (which provided a lot of fun at home through access to software at school (wink)). The good ol days....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
My older cousin was an Apple II evangelist--who convinced my dad we needed one--AND an EE guru. He made his own lowercase letter chips from scratch--including the hardware and embedded code. With that, and a 16K upgrade, my family's II+ became a IIe!
Thanks Cuz!
First machine that was 'mine' was an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P. A Superboard II in a metal case back in about 1982. I still have it and recently fired it up to write the nieces a 'dodge the rocks' game. Nothing like a nice simple memory mapped display and those character graphics. The C1P had 8K of RAM in 16 2114 chips and 1K of Video RAM ( 2 more 2114's). Along the way we expanded it by: Populated the RS-232 - A Leir Siegler ADM-1 terminal (80x24 UPPERCASE) - it rocked. A decwriter LA-120 as a printing terminal, an OSI 610 board - 24 more K (48 2114's) and we built up a data seperator and hooked up two Panasonic 5 1/4 floppy drives - OS 65DV3.3 It rocked. I still remember typing in listings from all over the place, and my favorite memory is when I managed to actually get a spaceship to move about under keyboard control... I spent hours staring at the src code - I could make the ship fly all the way left or all the way right (Two for loops), and then suddenly a light went off in my head and I realized... Hey if I change the for loop for A=A+1 for right shift, and A=A-1 for left shift... From there on it was a Hitachi Peach MB-6890 - Nice 6809 based machine, Atari 800XL (Graphics! - Display Lists, ANTIC, POKEY, GTIA) - It rocked, then I switched the dark-side and went for a 286. I ported black hole plotting programs I wrote in TurboBASIC XL from the atari800XL to the 286 in Turbo Pascal - and was astonished as the program that used to take about an hour to display an 80x192 blackhole displayed in about 60 seconds in 800x600x256 colors. Oh the memories!
Ah yes. Happy times. My first computer, given to me by my brother on my 7th birthday with a whole boxfull of games. Many happy memories of Quest, Kriegspiel, Crystal Castles, El Bandito and Space Wrek. I've still got it in my attic, although I've no idea if it still works. Might be time to dig it out and have a look.
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
New headline: "What is your age"
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Mine was a Radio Shack MC-10 bought on sale for $49.95. I started on a Cromemco using CP/M, and Tarbell 64K BASIC, though.
I'd used other computers for a bit before then, but the 128K Mac was the first one that I owned. I was trying to decide between that one, and an HP-150, which was a text-based touch-screen model. Suffice it to say that I am very happy I made the choice I did. When I first started using the Mac, I was amazed by the graphic nature of it, and the GUI in general. I still remember well the bluish tint of the screen phosphor. I'd messed around with programming before, but the first language I dove into was assembly, partly because there wasn't much else available. Fun times. Now I'm a linux zealot, and have been for several years. : )
My dad used to bring a Compaq Luggable home from work so I could play Rogue with my mom. I have fond memories of sitting at the dining room table, or in the den, debating the various advantages of a particular spell and a particular monster-filled situation. It was the best ever. DOS 1.0a was the order of the day too, before MS was big.
Ahh, the memories.
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
My second computer was built around an 8008 chip. Not as much fun. All the cool stuff was already on the chip.
My third computer was an SBC from National Semiconductor, using an SC/MP MPU. Nothing to build, so it was all about the programming. The SC/MP was a bit of an oddball, so I learned some new things.
Then I got a SWTPC 6800 "kit", which was really just a solder and screw assembly, then a Gimix 6809 (still have it, and it still works), then an IBM PC, then several Amigas, then several more PCs and RISC PCs (I have PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha machines on shelves, they ran RISC versions of Windows NT), then Linux, finally grabbed a Mac (mini.)
During the course of my career, I worked at IBM (Boca Raton) and got to use their ATOM uP, an old (at the time) punched card machine... the specifics of which have thankfully slipped my mind (punched cards are annoying, suffice it to say) and a scientific mini, the model of that is also fogged out, and I didn't use it that much, really.
I did a lot of hardware designs using the 6809 and its A/B variants when it was current; I liked (I still like) that MPU, it just seemed to have the best instruction balance of any 8-bitter I ever ran into. By comparison, the 68000 and family were pretty much of a dissapointment. I thought they'd be 6809's on steroids; Not so. They were a step wider (good), a step more orthogonal (also good) and a step simpler (backwards.) Fewer clever addressing modes mainly, but that was exactly what made programming the 6809 such a breeze.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Color Genie. Programmed it directly in machine language (not assembly language, couldn't afford an assembler), sitting in front of my parent's TV. The only thing I really remember is that the Z80 CPU was a lot better than the 6502 in my Atari I bought some years later. And the Atari was of course a lot better than everything from Commodore ;-) (even despite the fact that the Commodore Amiga essentially was the successor of the Atari 400/800 line and the Atari ST was the successor of the Commodore 64. But who dares to say that ...).
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
not the nasty 500+. Fantastic computer, still works although the monitor and power brick are a bit knackered now. If I start using it a lot again I could just use a TV for the screen I guess. About half of the floppys are corrupted now, absolutely loads of quality games that won't load. I used to love playing about with the Workbench Say application. I got a Pentium60 PC after that with Windows95, that computer barely works, only has a 500MB drive and can only manage 256 colours at the moment.
My Grandfather (RIP) retired from IBM (as a child I remember drawing on punch cards he always had laying around by the box full, but I digress). He bought my first computer. A VIC-20. I loved that thing. In no time at all I had got the 24k expansion cart and still remember needing to code without spaces and comments to get as much out of it as I could. Good times.
I still have it. I pulled it out about a year ago and loaded up some of my first programs. Very interesting seeing stuff I had coded at a young age (11 or 12). Actually, because of the way I had coded without comments, etc, it was very hard to even understand what I had done. Keep in mind, I'm a programmer now, so seeing this old code and having a hard time seeing what I had done so long ago was funny (and oddly humbling, because some of it seemed better than I can do now).
Aych tea tea pea colon slash slash slash dot dot org slash
Though I didn't own it myself the first computer I programmed on was Univac 9200 COS (that's right - CARD operating system) during high school. It used standard IBM 80 column punched cards and most of my programming at the time as in RPG-II.
And btw, those lights were most certainly NOT decorative. We actually used FPS (front panel switches) in conjunction with the lights to enter hex codes and memory locations to aid in debugging, as well as to start loading cards!
The first computer I actually owned was a Leading Edge XT clone that ran at a whopping 7 mhz.
For those who still remember holerith code...
0-3 11-9 2 11-6 11-3 12-4When I was in 10th grade. Membrane keyboard and all. Upgraded the keyboard. Smashed the cassette recorder to pieces when it wouldn't load a Space Invaders clone I had been working on the day before (about 20 hours straight).
Eventually got an 800XL then a 130XE. I remember standing on line behind someone buying a C64 (a mom, and I was... well.. practically an adult), as I was buying my 130XE, and she asked "I'm wondering why you don't spend a few dollars more to get the better computer."
So I asked "What makes you think it's better?"
She said "this one has 64k."
I said "this one has 128k."
That was the end of the conversation. Not that I think either one was better... in fact, I learned programming on PETs, so it would have been a natural step to get a Commodore. I liked them all. I remember when our brand new computer lab in high school (almost unheard of at the time) had a mix of Apple II, Frankline Aces, Commodore 64s and PETs.
Ah, the good old days... when one guy could sit down and write a whole game by himself in a couple of days.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The first computer in the house was a Commodore Business Machine - basically a PET with a large 80 column display and a better keyboard. It also had this dual 5.25" disk drive that was the size of a buick.
//e. Started with a monochrome monitor, one 5.25" drive and an ImageWriter printer. A second Disk ][ drive was quickly added.
The first computer that was completely my own was an Apple
Oh yeah, do I remember the days... This little baby back in 1981 was so super-pimp that it had a cassette recorder as a hard drive. I almost lost my life once or twice when I bumped the card table that my brother was using the ZX81 on to program a chess game. All of the data would just disappear. Poof! And then my brother would chase me around the house, red with rage.
Those were the days..
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
Heh, ditto. Funny thing was, I hated computers (and consoles), and my dad had been asking me if I wanted a computer since I was 5. I kept saying no, I *really* dont want one, but he got me one for my 7th birthday anyway. It came with a Neos mouse, and a terrible painting program called Mouse Cheese that you had to load and then start by typing 'SYS 4096'...but yeh, "10 INPUT NAME$" was the start of big things :)
Does anyone else remember going to the computer lab in elementary school and us learning vital computer knowledge, how to draw a box with that Turtle/triangle thing?
My first computer was an IBM PS/2 16 MHz 386 microchannel architecture machine. The price was $4000 with the IBM Employee discount and included a dot matrix printer and 13" color monitor.
The machine had no sound or network connectivity. A microchannel sound card was available for around $300. When the 60 meg hard drive filled upI bought a microchannel SCSI adapter from Future Domain for around $100 and paid $300 for a 200 meg hard drice which was a bargain at the time.
My secong machine was a Pentium class homebrew which cost less than $500. I decided I wasn't go put any more money into Microchannel which was a good decision at the time.
I got it in '76 and still have it. I also have a Visible Memory video interface for it. The processor is one of the early 6502s without the ROR instruction. Around the same time I had access to a IBM 5100, a desktop with 64k RAM, 3M data cartridge drive and APL/BASIC at the flip of a switch.
my fist comp was a WANG labs exec 3000 with 2 megs of ram and a massive 40 meg hdd. it did and still does run windows 3.0 i jus unburied it his weekend and proceded to play several very old games on it.
I got a C64 a few years later, but the VIC 20 was my first computer. I've got a lot of good memories of both of those machines, but the C64 was sooooo much cooler. I miss the games on that machine.
Free Scotland!
Better pictures.
PDP-8 was the first machine I ever came into contact with - I was 5. It typed out text on a green ribbon. It asked me my name. I nervously typed it in (at my dad's prodding) and it asked me if I wanted to play an adding game. My eyes went wide. It was all downhill since.
:(
First machine I had at home: someone's TRS-80 loaned over a weekend. Played Hamurabi all weekend and wrote my first basic programs (to draw rectangles on the screen).
First machine I bought with my own money: Atari 400, age 12. 16k of glorious RAM. Upped it to 48k eventually and even added a floppy drive later. Wrote my first 6502 code with the Mac/65 assembler - a hex/ascii disk editor that remains one of my proudest hacks.
27 years later, I still have my Atari 400 and it still works. The floppy drive is dead, though.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Summer of 1981(80)? I took a week long LOGO class on an Apple ][+.
//e as a gift. I liked the color monitors on the C64s (and playing Ghostbusters, Olympics, and Montezuma's Revenge), but I enjoyed programming BASIC and 6502 on the A//e. The response time of the display seemed so much cleaner and faster than the fat, blurry text of the C64.
Next year in 5th grade they had a bunch of Commodore PETs that no one knew how to use. So I'd hang out during recess and load every educational casette program to evaluate them for the teachers. Casettes took FOREVER to load.
Then came the Ti99a the same year, with a few lame plug-in games. I spent 4 hours punching in some program to play with the SFX chip in the ti99, and wasn't very impressed. Learned BASIC on it.
6th grade we had a C64 lab and I got an Apple
That summer I went to National Computer Camps at Westminster Prep School in Connecticut and learned how to use an assembler and simulator to write 6502 code. Dave Saltzberg was my awesome teacher. He now runs a 1TeV supercollider.
Didn't touch a PC until 1987 when I started dating some gal who's stepdad used to fly to China every year for his job, and would bring back spare parts. Mind you, this is when RAM came in DIP and cost $15 for a 64kbit chip! I built a 286, 10GB RLL hard drive and VGA card. Then upgraded to 386sx, then 486dx2 when I got a real job, then a free powermac 9500, then I didn't have a computer for 5 years, then a Pentium 2 300 MHz, P3 800 MHz, P4 2.8GHz... That brings us up to the Ibm T43a that I have today.
Wow... I still have the A//e, 286, 386, powermac, and mac SE.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
For those who want to know: wikipedia entry. It was a nice thing, software on tapes, vinyl records and even played in radio shows (yeah, imaging all the non-geeks listenening 1 h of bleepbleepcrnchcrnchbleep ;) )
;)
btw, just in case, greetings to lkcc
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
I bought it from "Sears Business Systems Center", and later upgraded it to a "XT", adding a 10 megabyte hard drive. The hard drive was one of the first 3-1/2 inch drives, which Compaq shock-mounted with rubber grommets inside of a 5-1/4 inch hard drive enclosure. Eventually, I upgraded it to 512K RAM and added an 8087 coprocessor to the 4.77 MHz 8088. The entire thing cost me about $7,000 in mid-80's dollars (That's about $12,500 in 2005 dollars). Today, I can build a decent PC for under $1,000 -- it won't be a great 3D gaming system, but it will be more that adequate for most people.
For about a year, I had a 16-MHz 386 "daughterboard" from Intel in this PC. It plugged into a PC-AT slot, had it's own RAM, and only used the I/O subsystem in the PC. It got me through a post-graduate class where I needed a lot of CPU for running logic simulations. I eventually sold the daughterboard when I replaced the system with a 486-33.
I still have the Compaq -- and it still works. Occassionally I pull it out of the closet and turn it on to show people one of the first IBM-PC clones.
Mine was a Commodore PET. Not bad for a DoD School in Germany.
Brian Cooley, Editor at Large, CNET 9-inch amber monitor (using a TV as a monitor made the thing feel like a toy). Unlike most C64 users, I couldn't care less about gaming; :)...well once you were in the program.
My first machine was a Commodore 64 (got it in the 1988 about). It had a color monitor and my dad bought it for me at, dum da da dum, Toys R Us. I got with it a cool tank simulator game (where you could play a Bradly, M1-A1 Abrams, and a few others...though non of them were worth it as they sucked). And I also got Apollo 13 and Apache Longbow Simulator....I also got a wicked word processing program that was something version 6.0....my friend have 5.1 which did not have a menuing system, but mine was a gui system
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I got my Raindow in 1981. Two 5 1/2s and no waiting. I even upgraded from 16k to 64k. Wow that CP/M rocked. I still have somewhere in my attic!
I fondly remember this computer. It cost around $1800 US when I purchased it (with $750 pitched in from my parents) in 1991. Endless hours playing Wing Commander I & II, Civilization (DOS version, of course), SimCity. Wackier stuff from the $5 bin too. Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Roadwar 2000 (which I still think of whenever I play an old "Lush" CD), Darkseed (still one of the creepier games I have ever played). I even remembered the night I learned you should turn your computer off before installing a sound card. As I recall, that was also the night I destroyed the math coprocessor of that same computer. Oh well, live and learn. I was highly motivated and in a hurry, you see. I had to install the voice pack for Wing Commander! It was important!
My dad bought a TI 99/4A way back in the early 80's. I remember writing TI BASIC when I was eight years old. The language was slow and limited, but the Speech Synthesizer was fun to play with. Well ahead of its time. And of course every TI 99/4A owner played Parsec.
;), and Athlon 64 3000+ (my current machine). But they just don't have the character of the old '80s boxen.
The first computer that was mine was an AMD DX4-100 with a whopping 12MB of RAM and 540MB hard drive. Since then, I've owned a Celeron 400MHz, PIII 1.2GHz, Athlon XP 1800+ (OC'd to 2400+ speed
...complete with cassette tape drive and flaky 16K memory expansion pack, which had the bad habit of freezing up the system right as I was about to (finally) beat it at Chess.
I learned all sorts of bad programming habits on that thing. (Not only line-numbered BASIC, but LET statements, for cryin' out loud.) I loved it.
Our next box was an original 4.77MHz IBM PC (pre-XT). With 128K of memory, since the store didn't have the second bank in stock yet. It took all of a week for my parents to go from "don't touch the computer unless we're there" to "how do you make this work?" 8-)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Wicked ascii art on this baby :)
. html
http://www.gondolin.org.uk/hchof/machines/pet3032
My very first computer was a single-floppy Macintosh 512K (wish I still had it)... It got me started with lots of things, not the least of which was the joy of figuring out how computers work. MacPaint, MacWrite, and Mac OS 1.x on a single 400K floppy, baby!
My dad then gave me his rockin' 8086 AT&T boat anchor^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H computer with a 10-meg-HDD and a 5 1/4 floppy. Gem desktop rocks, baby! Also included was the very first release of what became Microsoft Office... The pinball game was the best, though...
A Passionate Independent Musician
I got it in 5th grade. Booting to floppy - swapping out internal cards to add printers/drives. Ahh memories!
TI 99/4A, when I was 5 years old. (1987) Still got it, still works, doesn't suffer from the inherent slowdowns and problems of today's computers. Learned how to program in BASIC on that machine when I was a little kid. Totally awesome system. Like a Nintendo and a PC somewhat smashed together.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Similar story for me, but roll time back a few years such that "C64" becomes "VIC-20", "Rambo" becomes "VIC Invaders and Super Slither", "NES" becomes "Atari" (or similar). Also, it was shortly after I turned twelve. Mind you, I had been bugging dear old dad since I was seven, or thereabouts, but he took a while to crack. It was his idea to get a computer rather than a console, though. I got a lot of value out of that crappy old VIC-20. Thanks to it, I had a pretty good idea (at the tender age of twelve) in which general direction my future career lay. Not everyone gets that.
I feel so left out. I started with a Pentium 133. My dad hated computers until I was in High School. The only hatred more than that was his hatred for video games so I was consoless as well =*(
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
My first computer was a Laser 128GX I ordered out of a Sears catalog back around 1985. It was some sort of Apple II compatible computer with 128k of RAM. It didn't come with any software to speak of so I ended up learning how to program using the AppleSoft BASIC workalike that was on the system ROM. Most of the programs I wrote were silly little text adventure type games and I eventually messed around with some simple graphics programming but it was nothing to really get excited about I suppose. My friends and I eventually discovered the NES and it was all downhill from there for the next four or five years. I finally got back into computers and programming because I needed a way to keep track of my rapidly growing music collection.
Depends on what your definition of a computer is.
If it's pretty loose then mine was a TI-55 programmable calculator. I quickly upgraded to the TI-58. My first computer with a traditional screen was the Timex Sinclair 1000. Learned Z80 assembler on that. Also learned how important making frequent backups are. Static would give the Sinclair a heart attack. I actually bought a flight simulator for it. Took a long time to load from tape.
Moved on to the C64 from there. Oddly enough my first calculator was a Commodore. --
Q
In India, we had an influx of cheap computers relatively late. for me it was the HCL Beanstalk, a pentium 100 MHz processor computer preloaded with Windows 3.1. I played floppydisk games on it to my heart's content. some stupid racing game with 3 other cars on the road that i would knock off as soon as go was announced, and drive alone the rest of the way...
My first was a C64. I had the tape drive.. Later, the 1541 disk drive was added. My first PC was a "Corona" brand PC-compatible. It had a 4.77mhz 8088, 640k ram.. The motherboard had an onboard text-display adapter. Dual 360k drives! Much later, I scored a 10mb Hardcard.. Then a 1200 baud Hayes Smartmodem. I discovered MUDs and was hooked (No graphics card, remember).. It was a long time before I ended up with that CGA card..
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
My first computer was a 64kB Apple ][+, built by Bell & Howell, because Apple didn't have sufficient production capacity at the time. These computers were identical to Apple-produced machines, except they were black and the name plate said Bell & Howell in big letters, and Apple in small letters. It also had two black drives.
...like my men.
I like my Apple ][+'s black
My first computer was a Z80 based Northstar Horizon - came in a pretty wooden case and cost about $2500 in 1978. Also had a buggy, expensive Intertube terminal and a teletype for a printer. I remember my father paid about $350 for an additional 16KB of RAM (a kit - he had to solder in the chips himself) so we could run UCSD Pascal. My mother wrote a book using the Pascal's built in editor (though she asked for help every five minutes). The big event for me was when we installed CP/M which let me run Micro-soft BASIC which was way better than Northstar BASIC.
Now if you ask my older brother, he'd say a 6800 processor kit. He programmed in machine language, wrote his own operating system and a pretty good Mastermind game.
Never pet a burning dog.
2 things I'll always remember about that thing was loading data from basically a standard audio cassette tape drive, and upgrading the Ram to 16k so I could play Zaxxon. Also like most kids my age that had the same machine, the first game I played on it was Poltergeist off a cart. That was the first I owned, sometime in the early 80's. The first PC I ever used was an Apple ][ One of my favorite games I got to play on it was called Cycle Jump. I think that was in 1979 or so, I was 5 or 6. I remember it was just so cool to watch my cousin do all this 'neat stuff' to the machine to get that game to run.. That was my (older) cousin's dad's PC, later I found out that my cousin was a software pirate which I didn't quite understand to the point where I knew that was a bad thing to do. Later I did the same, breaking copy protection was just like a fun challenge to figure out as a kid. Ah good memories, now I'm a UNIX sys admin which is pretty cool. I ought to call them up and say thanks to my uncle. He pushed my dad to get us our first PC. Too bad he didn't push him farther than Radio Shack though! Hehe :)
-Ep
My Dad had a ZX-80 and ZX-81. It had a cassete drive and he let me play some cat and mouse game on it. This was some time in the early 80s.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
An Amstrad PPC 512 (I think.. it MIGHT have been a 640, I don't remember) 2 floppies, no hard drive, shitty 9" monochrome screen... and it was "portable".. despite being about 3 feet long. I did have a CGA monitor for it though, but finding the DIP switch settings to make it work was a pain.
Fun times. :-)
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I saved up for a long time to pay CDN$300 for a ZX-80. Finally, I had a computer that could do the stuff I was reading about in books for years and that a few of my more moneyed friends could do with their Comodore PET computers, but at a fraction of the cost!
It was loads of fun and could even be programmed in assembly language once you got beyond BASIC. I was so proud of this program I 'invented' to draw patterns on the screen based on nested loops and self modifying code to dynamically generate a random formula that produced pleasing patterns on the screen when evaluated for each pixel. Damn! I could've patented the screen saver back in 1980.
Of course, the machine had problems. The keyboard was a nightmare, and the 16KB memory module (external) had a habit of crashing the machine when aggressive typing caused a contact or two to momentarily open. Even worse, the way that the Sinclair managed to keep the cost down was something like the modern winmodem... he had the CPU do ALL of the work. The CPU did everything from scan and debounce the keyboard to generating the TV Video signal. My bouncing ball program with a black square on a white background was like watching a strobe light!!!
Then again, the lesson of setting the limits of the boundaries incorrecty so that a 45 degree hit right on the screen corner didn't trigger a rebound stuck with me. It was amazing to see the code listing after the crash... the ball had actually bounced through the code and you could see bits of the ball graphic character scattered throughout the code until it got to running code and crashed.
When the Acorn Atom came out, I quickly put my ZX-80 up for sale and managed to sell it for CDN$250. Even the modern Macs can't offer a 1.5 year TCO of $50. Sometimes I wish I had kept it, but I kept the Acorn for years and never used it and it was never much of a collector's item, so I guess I'm glad that I was shrewd enough to recover most of my hard earned money when it was still possible.
A few years later, when the price came down, a friend bought a ZX-81 for practically nothing and nailed it to the wall just to irk me, but I had moved on to more exciting things by then.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
This minicomputer was showing its age in 1973 as we started using PDP11 and DG Nova. However I kept it going. It had been much travelled around the UK for demos etc. One Easter I decided to take it home, with the Teletype. I set it up in the spare bedroom. Unfortuantely I didn't take the High Speed optical tape reader, so had to load programs via the teletype paper tape reader. 10 c.p.s. The whole house shook as each character was read. I was not allowed to bring it home anymore.
I even had the RAM expander. I didn't use the datasette drive much once I got Gorf, though. Hmm. Maybe Gorf would rock pretty hard, multi-player.
My first computer was the Sharp MZ-80K, which was the first machine in the MZ-series. It was a great machine at the time (1979).
I must be the real oldster here. I started on an IBM/360 mainframe with punchcard machine and reader. I was taking a university course and there was a separate room available to us which had the punchcard machine and the reader. We were quite fortunate that we did not have to wait for operators to run our decks since we had the reader right there. It made for great turnaround time.
Years later my first home computer was an Atari 400 which I retrofitted with a better keyboard. I learned C on that machine.
My other Slashdot ID is much lower.
I remember meaning to type 'input football' (get a variable entry from the user and store it using the name football), but typing 'input foot ball' by mistake and getting prompted for two variables!
That was the moment I 'got it' - this box would remember, perfectly, as much stuff as I needed and manipulated it. Holy cow! Never looked back ;-)
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
nuff said
I posted this on my blog a while ago:
I was reminiscing with some of the younger developers at my workplace about the systems that they grew up with, and rather predictably it seems that most of them have grown up knowing nothing else but x86 architecture (with possibly the odd Amiga or Atari ST thrown in for good measure).
All this got me thinking about the 8-bit machines I cut my teeth on, and started to make me feel really old in the process!
ZX80
This is the first computer I ever laid my hands on while I was at The Pilgrims School in Winchester. I must have been about 10 when our Maths teacher (a certain Captain Roberts if I remember correctly) showed us this wondrous machine at the end of the summer term in 1981. I remember blagging a couple of hours on the unit and working through some of the BASIC examples in the manual.
ZX81
But when we came back for the winter term 1981, miracle of miracles, instead of the one lonely ZX80 the maths lab was now equipped with an entire room of ZX81s!
As the intention was to use these machines for educational purposes, there was the issue of loading the maths quiz du jour (written by Captain Roberts) on each machine. The solution that the school came up with was to have one cassette player by the teachers' desk with the output signal split to all ten ZX81s via cables trunked around the room. All the machines would therefore load from the same tape at exactly the same time. Ingenious!
ZX Spectrum
My initial Speccy was a 16k unit (I'd gone halves with my Dad to buy the machine, and I couldn't afford the far superior 48k machine). However, after enduring the chronic wait for the machine to arrive it eventually turned out to be faulty - part of the onboard RAM wasn't functioning and I was only left with approximately 13k usable.
This machine was sent back to Sinclair Research, and arrived back about three months later with a full complement of 48k. After quickly getting bored with "Hungry Horace" and "Penetrator" what else was left to do with rubber keyed wonder? Well, learn BASIC of course.
BBC Micro Model B
A new school brought new computers; the Beeb was the ultimate educational machine - just about anything that you could imagine at the time could be attached and controlled. But the coup de grace with the machine was the quality of the onboard BASIC interpreter. Not only was the dialect ahead of its' time (DEFPROC and DEFFN anyone?), but it also included a full 6502 assembler.
BBC Micro Model B+ 128
This is probably my favourite 8 bit system of all; the B+ 128 had Sideways RAM (ROM images could be loaded into memory and behave as though they were physically installed in the machine), the more advanced 1770 DFS (which caused no end of problems with some of the more 'interesting' disc copy protection systems). This was coupled with my very first personal non-tape based storage medium; a Pace Electronics 5.25" 40/80 track switchable unit. The luxury!
I kept my beloved Beeb until about 1994 by which time I'd collected the Z80 Second Processor (which allowed you to run CP/M) and the Teletext Adapter. Of course, by this stage I'd already been firmly entrenched in x86 development.
Ahh, memories...
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
Januuary 1984. Spent about $1,700 total for a Sanyo MBC-555 with 64K memory and twin 160K 5.25 inch floppies and a Juki 6100 daisy wheel printer. And it had a cool amber character-based monitor.
It was cheap because they didn't even attempt to make it a PC clone. It could run only the most vanilla of MS-DOS programs; forget about Flight Simulator and dBase.
We've come a long way in 22 years.
Insert witty sig here.
First computer I actually bought was an Apple ][+.
I don't miss any of them for a second...
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? --Abraham Lincoln
My first owned computer ever was a Texas Instrument 99/4a (TI99/4A). My parents bought it for me to improve my communication skills and for education when I was a kid (7? years old). I was actually scared at it first. I was only interested in gaming (e.g., Atari 2600). Then, I found out games on it like TI Invaders, Alpiner, Tomb City, The Amazing Maze, etc.) ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I still have my Vic 20, yes, it still works, I have the original box, manual, cords etc./.. After "Moving on" My next computer was a ColeecoVision Adam. I still have fond memories of playing games from it's super fast (at the time) tape drive. The games to me at the time seemed as good as the Arcade, I had gotten Dragonslair for it, it looked exactly like the arcade... man was I happy. I learn the hell out of it. For some strange reason, I decieded to trade my adam for a stand-up arcade version of Star Wars, that died less than 5 months after I had traded. After that is when I got my first x86, it was an Everex 286, I had a WHOPPING 1mb Ram, and a HUGE 40MB HD. I was in heaven. Almost every computer since then has just been basically an upgraded 286.
Learned BASIC on it, then Forth with fig Forth, then C with Deep Blue C.
Ran a BBS for a while.
I had two Indus GT disk drives.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
One weekend, when I was about 6, a box arrived at our door from Apple. It was the Mac my dad had ordered for his work. He couldn't resist trying it out. I think it was an SE, since it was 1989. I remember playing Tetris on it. The computer went to his office a few days later. In '92 we went to Costco and bought a Packard Bell 386. It ran at 25mhz, had a whopping 2MB of RAM, and ran the state-of-the-art Windows 3.1. My dad's office mates would bring home copies of (I didn't know this at the time) pirated games, a practice which stopped after our PC caught a virus! Today my primary computer is a PowerBook G4.
There's no place like ~.
I had one of the old Atari 400s, with the single cartridge slot and vinyl keyboard. My parents also bought me the cassette deck that was used to save and load basic programs. I wish I still had it -- I think my parents sold it in a garage sale when I was in college or something.
I was jealous of all of you Commodore 64 people because you had better games. However, your creme-colored Commodore 64 would look wicked dirty, a problem I did not have with my all-black Commodore 16. In addition to the unit, I used to own a Blue Chip 5.25" drive, a Datasette tape deck, two joysticks, and a dozen tapes with games ran through High Speed Turbo for compression. Then my father gave me a 64k memory expansion, which bumped me up to the likes of Commodore +4 and Commodore 64.
I remember writing music with commands like SOUND1 for clean sound, SOUND3 for noise, good for fake drums, and SOUND2 for harmonies. I remember playing SABOTEURE, getting obsessed with ninjas, and drawing my own ninjas like so: DRAW1, 10, 10 TO 120, 10. Ah, the olden days ...
You youngun's with your fancy microchips. I started out on an IBM 1620 using FORTRAN on punch cards. You'd load a huge deck of cards that was the first pass of the compiler, follow it with your program, it would punch an "intermediate deck" that you would reload after feeding in the second pass of the compiler. The result was a deck of machine code that you could then load and run anytime...provided you got the program right.
I was about 15, and was taking a night school class with my dad at the time.
Science-Fair Projects all:
... and then was stupid enough to throw them out ... wish I had them now.
... unless you were using the CRAY, in which case you were in an entirely different league.)
1965 8th grade - analog computer ( a glorified wheatstone bridge, with selectable linear or log pots to add, subtract, multiple divide); I was 14 and my Uncle had dropped 7 years of back-issues of Popular Electronics on me the previous year; I thought this stuff was way cool, and couldn't get enough of it.
1966 9th grade - 5-stage counting circuit (discrete D flip-flops), driven by a Bell telephone dial; add/subtract only
1967 10th grade - 4-bit ALU w/ carry, two 4- bit parallel input buffers, one 5-bit parallel output buffer; discrete DTL for all; add/subtract only
1968 11th grade - added manually controlled recirculation logic to provide multiplication
1969 12th grade - automated the ALU control using a punched-card system I put together from a cut-down type-writter roller.
I kept them until I was 22 and graduated from college
I never got a 'real' computer of my own until I bought a 128-k MAC in 1984; my work provided all the computing I needed in the interim, from PDP-8's, -11's, HP-desktop computers (in 1977, 64k RAM and two, count-em, two! 1/4 tape drives on the desk was something where I worked
-don k
Mine was a kit called the ELF II, based on the RCA COSMAC processor. That was a sweet little 8-bit CPU that had 16 16-bit registers. Each could be designeated as the accumulator, X register, Y register, or program counter, which made for some wicked cool programs. Mine had 256 bytes (yes, bytes!) of RAM. I eventually built an additional 1K memory board, and hacked together a seven-digit 7-segment display for side-scrolling Hunt the Wumpus action, just like my buddy Dave's KIM-II. The ELF project was originally published in Popular Electronics. I still have the issues it appeared in.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
The first computers I used were a TRS-80 model 3 and a Vic-20 at school. I programmed in Basic on both of these. Before these, I used (ran one or two applications on) an Apple-2, but I really don't consider that since I only used it a handful of times. The TRS-80 and Vic-20 I used on a daily basis for at least 4 months during a school year.
A couple years later I bought a C-64, where I programmed in Basic and assembler.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Bought my first memory expansion card - 16K board (with about 16K chips on it!) - from Godbout Electronics for $385. Used Michael Shrayer's Electric Pencil, which doubled my productivity as a writer (all supsequent productivity increases have added perhaps another 40%). Learned to program in Z80 Assembler; BASIC was second language. Tom Pittman's Tiny BASIC loaded from cassette tape, was full-featured integer BASIC with integrated program editor, that ran in 5K memory. Bought it in 1978; founded WBK ad agency in '79 (by that time, computer had been upgraded with 2 8" floppy disk drives); switched to Heath/Zenith Z89 a year or so later; by 1991, when I sold out, we had 75 Macs networked, all under control of one guy who spent 25% of his time on net management and the rest doing graphic design.
Richard
Everything possible to be believ'd is an Image of Truth - Wm. Blake
My dad had an Epson Equity I. I still remember when he got an EGA card for it and Bard's Tale was in glorious 16 colors!
As for actual computers, my 1st was a Commodore 64, then a Mac 128K.
I didn't own it, but i did feel very proprietary about it. My high school got its very first computer when i was a junior; a TRS-80 Model One, with cassettte drive for storage. They couldn't decide where to put the thing, eventually deciding on letting the math teacher have it, even though he knew absolutely nothing about computers.
A friend and I got permission to fool around with it as a kind of independant learning program, so every day we would go into his classroom and take it out of the closet and set it up on a table in the back, where we would sit and figure things out while an Algebra I class went on in the front. We worked through the manual, discovered the joys of POKE and PEEK commands, made lots of really clunky graphics and played a lot of Backgammon. It was by far the most enjoyable and the most educational time I had in high school.
In later years I got my first home computer, a handmedown from my brother, who came back from being stationed in South Korea. He brought a box with a name I now forget, but that booted up with a nice official Apple II screen. I pretty much killed that poor thing, doing my first hardware hacking. Ah, the good ole days:)
Nobody else had an Osborne 1? Ah, the days when 24lbs was considered portable...
Blank until
First computer ever, I remember it like it was yesterday (flashback 1989):
386 16MhzSX (intel)
40mb HD (western digital i think)
Western Digital Paradise ISA video
512kb ram (not sure about this, but it was under 1mb)
Okidata Okilaser (fist consumer oki laser printer)
CTX 14" monitor(could do 640x480!!!)
DOS 4.x
Windows 3.0 (upgraded to 3.1)
I also got it with a few games:
Crime Wave (Access)
TV Sports Football (Cinemaware)
ABC Monday Night Football (Data East)
I would ultimately upgrade the video ram to play links386 in svga and install the first soundblaster card for sound in ultima6.
My parents bought the machine at a computer show from a company called Greentree computers. Funny thing is the town I moved into this past year is where Greentree computers runs out of. I was shocked to find they were still in business.
LOL TW2002.... I used to love that game! along with all the other turn based "door" games located on various BBS's back in the day... Getting a 2400bps modem also forced my parents to get a 2nd phone line... Parents were constantly picking up line upstairs, and getting the "WIIIRRRR SCCCCHHHHHKKKKKK GAAAHHHHH" noise on the phone, while they could here me or my sister saying "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" screeming as we get kicked off whatever we were doing... They never quite got why we HAD to logon at a certain time of day (to get our turns in).
I also started on the TRS "Trash" 80, even got the 64k (!!!!) extra memory, and the tape drive (that we could never get to work properly)... We also briefly had a VIC20 for awhile, but It wasn't very impressive, particulary when I had a friend that had a C64... which was more of a console to us than a real computer, all we did was play video games on it constantly. The first "Real" computer I would say I got was a 286 clone, as it was the first computer that you could really do stuff with! We used a dos shell with it, and later upgrated the amber monitor to a color one. We had a dot matrix printer with it, and a 2400 baud modem, that that was what got me interested in computers really. Was A) going onto BBS's and B) trying to get games to run on the stupid thing (Remember EMS and XMS memory, and all the crazy bat files etc...) I distinctly remember downloading this one game that was OVER 500k in size, and that was like amazinly huge! TW2002 was like WOW today I think.....
Ahhhhh good times.....
... and I still have 2 of them!
1983 - BBC Model B 32k + tape deck + 5 Acornsoft games.
1985 - Added DFS ROMS + Opus 40/80 switchable 5.25 FDD.
1990 - Acorn A3000, 1MB RAM, RISCOS 2
1990 - Added RISCOS 3.1 ROMS. Still running.
1994 - 2nd hand 386SX/25Mhz, 4MB, died quickly.
1994 - 486DX4/100, 8MB, 540MB Quantum HDD. Shelved.
1996 - Cyrix 686, 16MB, same HDD. Cooked itself.
1997 - Pentium 166 @ 200Mhz, 32MB. Shelved.
1998 - Upgraded P166 to 128MB. Shelved.
1999 - Celeron 300A @ 450Mhz on Abit BH6, 128MB.
2002 - Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) on Soltek 75FRN-R2, 512MB.
The GeForce2 is no good for any current games. Next upgrade will likely be to add a GeForce 6600 AGP card and wait out a generation or so of PCI-E kit.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
My first computer was an IBM 1401 with plug-boards, my first micro was a z80 Poly 88. I take this thread to mean first personal computer. I had an early ALTOS with a 10Meg disk and XENIX and COBOL. It also had five ports for multiuser use all run by seperate z80 chips. It was given to me in barter for a side consulting job in 1981 I believe.
My first machine was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Pocket Computer 1 'cause it was the only machine I could afford (or find!) which was portable and had a printer --- somehow the desirability of printing on cash register tape strips is lost on me now.... In retrospect I wish I'd wound up w/ a Model 100 or one of the small Epson machines like to it.
Then I got a VIC-20, then a Commodore-64, then a 128KB Mac, then a GRiD Compass III plus which firmly brought me back to portables. Since then I've gotten an NEC Ultralite (the first one, w/ 4 or 8MB flash memory), Toshiba T1200XE, Sharp PC-6220 (just about a perfect machine), Epson ActionNote 500C, ThinkPad 755C, NCR-3125, Newton MessagePad 100, NeXT Cube, Fujitsu Point 510 and Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 (which I'm still using).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
My first was Boroughs 5000, the oldest one that I programmed on was Bendix G15
My dad wouldn't buy me a console or a computer. He honestly believed that the personal computer was a dead-end product that would never find a market. Its the only thing he has ever admitted he was wrong about to me. That said, the first computers I worked with (in school) were a Wang 2200 and a TRS-80. I long lusted over Atari 800's and Apple II's but the first computer I ever bought was a Macintosh 7100/80.
The first computer I ever used was a TRS-80 (model 4 I believe) that my dad brought home for the summer of '84, before 4th grade. I mostly played games but also did some very basic, basic programming. Eventually my dad purchased an Apple IIe, which was stolen, and then we upgraded to an Apple IIgs. While I used each of those comptuers a fair amount, playing games and writing many hello world programs.
My first computer that I owned was an Amiga 600 which I bought in high school sometime, maybe in 92/93 or so with 2 megs of chip ram, and eventually a hard drive. I bought it after seeing my friend's Amiga 1000 and all the great games it could do. Plus, I could hook this computer up to my TV so I didn't have to buy a monitor, which I couldn't afford. I still have this computer to this day and last time I used it a few years back, it worked great still. I only had a 2400 baud modem at the time, and my Mom complained constantly about me tying up the phone line, downloading junk off the Amiga Atrium, a local BBS. Oh, and jpegs, it would take literally minutes to render them, one line at a time.
I was always the odd ball guy with an Amiga, as pretty much everyone else I knew had PC's. But I always had the coolest and most fun games with the smoothest graphics--even in college--until my roomate showed me Doom, damn it. I knew then I had to have a PC, bought a DIGITAL P90 with my hard earned money for the low low price of $2400, complete with 15 inch monitor. This computer is long gone, it's junk. But my Amiga 600... what can I say, I hope to have it forever, it was my first love.
A Bulgarian clone of the Apple2. Nice stuff.
not that anyone cares, but:
1982: VIC-20
1985: Atari 800XL
1990: Mac Plus
1996: Power Computing 150 (that's a Mac clone, for those who remember those)
2000: Power Mac G4 dual processor
2001: HP Pavilion laptop
2004: IBM R51 Thinkpad
2005: Power Mac G5 dual processor
wow, it seems like there should be more....
For 8th birthday in 1980 (February 14th--I'll be 34 tomorrow), they bought me an Atari 800 computer, Atari 410 tape drive, and a bunch of games on cartridge. That was followed by an Atari 850 interface module and Atari 830 modem that Christmas. I was a pretty cool kid, I suppose.
Yup, My parents saw the future coming so gave me one for christmas when I was 8 :) There were games for it tho. Not very many as I recall, but they did buy one that was like pacman. Can't remember the specific name of it now though. It was cartridge based.
Either rate, you couldn't have a v20 or a c64 without learning atleast to program a little bit...well, you could, just not use it very much.
My First computer was a TC-500 from Burroughs. I actually worked for Burroughs as a Field Engineer. The TC-500 was based on the L-2000. It only had a keyboard and a ball printer, driven by thin metal straps. The hard drive was 40K head-per-track (5) ceramic disc. The memory was 2K and the computer was loaded with paper tape, connected to the keyboard. The modem was a 1200 baud unit, that was the size of a shoe box and cost $2000.
First computer used was my brothers Sinclar ZX80 which was traded up to a ZX81 a year later. Then our parents got a VideoGenie and then finally I got my own computer, a Memotech MTX512 in 1984.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing now if he had given in and bought me a NES.
I wonder the exact same thing. I was the only person I knew who didn't have some form of video-game system (there was a distinct rift at some points between the "nintendo kids" and the "sony kids," and then those rich bastards who had both); the first video game system that came into our house was an NES I bought at a yard sale. I still have it around.
The tradeoff for not having an NES was that we were one of the first families to have a computer that wasn't there for some sort of business purpose.
The OP asked what people's first computer was that they actually considered theirs, and for me that was a certain Macintosh Quadra 605. In retrospect a quite miserable computer; no internal expansion bays, no way to upgrade the video, a 68LC040 processor (no FPU and buggy so that it wouldn't run the FPU emulators, either)...but it was actually mine and I did well by it for a number of years. In fact until the computer I'm using now, it was the longest-lived system I'd owned. Not too bad for a beige pizzabox.
By the time I upgraded, it sat at the center of a deskful of peripherals and addons: modem, Zip drive, CD-Rom, external hard drive, serial-port switchbox (how else are you going to attach a modem and a local printer and a network?), and about a half-dozen things daisy-chained off of the ADB ports.
That computer is gone now (although I did attempt to use it as a webserver for a while, but without built-in Ethernet it's a bit of a pain), and the only thing that's still in use from my original purchase is the keyboard: an Apple Extended Keyboard II. Even in the 1990s, Apple still did a few things right, and keyboards were one of them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
my first box was an Acer 486sx 25mhz running Windows 3.11 and MS DOS 6.22, with Doublespace/Drivespace installed and 16MB of RAM and 1MB of video card memory. that was around '93
I don't remember a time that I did not have a computer. A "first computer" is not special anymore. This is a good thing.
Do you remember your first pair of shoes? Your first book?
Of course, I remember my first modem (1kbps! woo!), but hopefully the next generation won't have fond memories of that, either.
Do you remember your first implant?
Do you remember the first time you entered the global superconciousness?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
First CoCo posting I saw. This was the first that I (my mom) owned. No memory upgrade. (Press Play on tape).
By the time the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, Apple had established itself as the market leader in home computing. Aside from the problems with the Apple III and the Lisa, they'd had an extraordinarily successful run; the expandability of Apple II systems put them in a league of their own, well above the VIC-20, TRS-80, and Atari 800. After the PC came out, Apple and IBM ran neck-and-neck for a couple of years; if you look at photos of the West Coast Computer Faire from that period, you see Apple IIs all over the place, and post-PC introduction, you see the Apple II running neck-and-neck with the PC. Giant booths advertising products "For the Apple II and IBM PC!", often with the Apple II getting first billing, and with both machines prominently displayed side by side. Businesses quickly took to the PC of course due to the IBM name, but in many other areas of computing it was Apple vs. IBM for at least a couple of years, and the outcome was far from clear at the time.
...
...
My first computer was an Apple II Plus that we used for word processing, home finances, games, BBS calls, recipes, everything you can think of. Boxes and boxes of 5.25" disks that I still have to this day - hundreds of programs. It was amazingly useful and it seemed eternal.
Here's an interesting excerpt from an article from Creative Computing magazine, March 1984:
Lisa, long heralded as the next step in microcomputing, was expensive ($9995) when first introduced in February 1983 and had relatively little software. The fact that Apple allowed more than six months to elapse between the announcement of the product and first shipments also hurt sales. It may have captured the world's imagination, but as John Sculley, said, "IBM captured corporate America's desktops."
There are two important questions about Macintosh. First, will it undermine sales of Lisa, since it essentially does what Lisa does at a lower cost; and second, will it cannibalize IIe sales? Macintosh probably will not hurt Lisa sales in the long run. True, it does look like a low-end Lisa, but Lisa can do more and has more expansion capability. Nor is it likely to harm sales of the IIe since Macintosh is not designed as a home machine. It can't use proDOS or DOS 3.3 based software, does not support a color display, and most important, is not being marketed by the Personal Computer Division.
Apple faces many problems. 1984 will be the most critical year in the company's history. If Macintosh does not make the impact for which its builders hope, if Lisa sales do not pick up, and if IIe/III sales remain sluggish in the face of competition from IBM, then Apple could become just another microcomputer manufacturer. But with the new direction and new blood at Apple, the company stands an excellent chance of regaining its position as an industry leader. Apple is growing up, and the process won't be easy. With the dedication of John Sculley and with Steve Wozniak back in the picture, it looks as if there will be an Apple in our future.
Notice the perspective with which this article was written: people were already used to Apple IIs in their homes, and so, to them, it followed that the Mac was not a home machine. It was perceived first as Apple's entry into the professional/business market, but the Apple IIe was, in the words of a later article, "the machine that just won't fade away." Sales of Apple IIe machines stubbornly persisted despite the fact that Apple had shifted its focus elsewhere.
I wish that Apple had taken this as a clue to put some real effort into quickly evolving the II line. If it had gotten a GUI long before the IIGS, who knows what might have happened? The expandability and flexibility of the Apple II combined with a slick GUI would have done wonders, perhaps even made it a real threat to I
The coolest voice ever.
EXPLORER-85 VER 1.4
COPYRIGHT 1979
NETRONICS R&D
NEW MILFORD, CT.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I started out messing around with an old 8086 back in the day. It was the family computer, but my mom had no qualms about showing me how to do things and get around. I don't remember a whole lot about the machine except that most, if not all, of the software had to be loaded from a boot disk. The family went through several computers after that (Epson 286, Packard Bell(!) 486sx/33, Compaq(!) P200MMX), but it wasn't until I graduated high school in 1999 that I finally got a computer that was all mine. It's kind of funny becuase I still remember that in those days "using the computer" was still a bit of an event. It was something I did all in and of itself. Now, I have one in every room (OK, well not the bathroom) and use them constantly throughout my time at home.
It was a CTX branded K62/400 with only 128MB of RAM. It certainly wasn't top of the line, but I remember the "blazing fast" 56k modem was one of the coolest things about it. And best of all, it was mine. I still remember, right after I got home I set it up to download the latest Star Wars trailer (Episode 1?) on that blazing fast modem while I went out to buy upgrades. I bought a 13GB Hard Drive to complement the 4GB that came with the PC and to use to dual boot Linux. I also bought another 128MB of RAM.
The sad truth, however, was that the machine is really kind of a piece of junk. It was cheap and for good reason since CTX was getting out of the PC business and concentrating on making monitors. No matter what OS I was running (Linux, Windows, BeOS) the machine had a nasty tendency to restart for no apparent reason. I took advantage of the warranty support (thankfully before CTX was finally purchased by Proview) and despite the fact that virtually every part has been replaced in the machine, including the motherboard and processor, the computer is still not reliable. It now sits in my closet under a pile of junk so that I can occasionally raid it for parts for a customer machine.
Still it was the first computer that was mine and mine alone.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Yeah, baby. I had the 8088 upgrade module in there, too. And a 10MB hard disk drive that was 2x bigger than my whole mid-tower PC case today.
//c!
//c when it's keyboard started to fail, I bought another on ebay, and still fire it up just for old-time's sake. I don't even have any working floppies anymore, but my second programming language after AppleSoft BASIC was 65C02 assembler, and so I'll occasionally hack up something silly just for fun.
Okay, it was a hand-me-down from my dad's business when he discovered the Macintosh 128K was *way* better than the PCs of that time (I think he used Great Plains for the accounting). After buying a Mac SE/30 for my stepmother (who was a graphic designer) I also got their Apple
Man, that NCR was close to useless. CP/M and MS-DOS 1.0. But we had the full library of technical manuals and assembler dumps of the ROMs and such. While I never did any programming with it, I learned a lot from that system before it caught fire. (yes, you read that right)
And though my parents threw out the Apple
Ah, those were the days - when you could simply memorize an entire ISA.
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
A Tandy 1000HX, inherited from my grandfather.
I got started on an 8086, but the first one that was really mine to play with was an 8088. We even had an EGA monitor, so I played a lot of games. My dad deleted a bunch of them (after the install disks had been damaged) when I got behind on my homework, but fortunately I had already learned how to hide files and directories in DOS. I've moved on, but he's addicted to one of them to this day.
There was also a wireframe F-14 flight simulator, with practically unplayably poor graphics, that was clock-timed for the 4.77 MHz 8086 processor. It ran fine on the 10 MHz 8088 thanks to the turbo button, but it was physically impossible to send it keyboard input fast enough on a 133 MHz 486 to play it, no matter how much caffeine you were on. Maybe it's playable in qemu now...
What really got me started though was a little dabbling with GW-BASIC, and using WordPerfect 5.1 with CGA graphics. Since WYSIWYG was impossible, managing your formatting carefully required using the Reveal Codes feature. It seems silly, but viewing that showed me how computers think. That was back in second grade, when you're still capable of learning languages easily. I learned how to think recursively in second grade thanks to that lousy interface, and I've been doing it ever since. For most people, it seems to be a concept they'll never truly understand.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Since I can't count the IBM 1401 and the IBM 360 that I got to use in 1974 or the PDP-8e that I used in college, since I did not own them; my first "owned" computer was the Telcon Zorba.
The Zorba was a Osborne clone but with a much bigger screen (7") and two 400KB disks. Came with all the *Star software (WordStar, CalcStar,...)
It also had a disk clone program that allowed it to read a large number of other disk formats. This made it much easier to exchange software with other people
And it had the butterfly drives, too!
Jory
My story is not so much different... but my parents bought me a Commodore VIC-20... ;-)
After some courses, my father did a game, a 3D maze (well 3D as in 2D) and he fills all the memory in one day... so he gave me the computer, the book and translated me some sentance like print, goto, etc (i'm french speaking)
and it was it... I did have a lot of fun with this computer.
My favorite code was the jumping jack done with the graphical characters...
My second computer was an XT, 4 colors instead of 16 and no easy graphical characters... that was rough
First used - PDP-11/10 Still ran last time we booted it a year or two ago.
First owned - NEC PC-8901a Also still runs.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
i guess the first pc i got was from my grandad when i was about 4. it was on old TI. one of those keyboards that use expansion cartridges. around 5 or 6 i landed the motherload. i got my com64 and my tandy 2000. i programmed till they both caught fire. then i got my first 386 and crashed win 3.11. Then i got my first pentium 120. Its still being used as a router in my apartment.
My family's first computer was a Macintosh 512k. The problem with the Mac was two-fold... first it's GUI and integration made it a reasonably seemless appliance. I spent hours on macpaint, writing book-reports, etc... Since there were so few games, I got things done.
My friend, however, had an IBM compatible. He would battle for days trying to get some game running. And through battle, he learned about text based shells, directories, tweaking parameters, reconciling hardware conflicts and what not. In other words, the IBM compatible and especially the software, was such junk that my friend was forced to LEARN about the computer's dark underbelly if he was to gain the reward of some random war game.
What was the result? Well I remember when I first opened up an internet browser... suddenly, I had to enter in an address! I had no idea what http: meant, I just knew I had to enter it. ftp: freaked me out. I had essentially gone back to the future. My friend is now a succesful computer programmer. I'm now comfortable with basic shell commands, upgrading my computer, and what not. But I can't help but think that my computer skills would have been vastly accelerated if my parents had purchased a crappy IBM compatible and a copy of space war. Twenty five years later, I love OS X. But I intend to introduce a little struggle into my son's computer experience. You know...like forcing him to trouble-shoot the video card settings before he can play Hunt the Wumpus.
It used a Basic semi-compiler: it interpreted a line of code into a kind of bytecode, executed the bytecode and kept the interpreted bytecode in memory - 'real' interpreters in the early 80ies trew away the bytecode after they ran it, but the NewBrain kept it memory. As a result the first execution of a loop was as 'fast' as any other Basic interpreter, and the next executions of the loop where a lot faster - almost as fast as a Basic compiler.
And it could be programmed to alter a running program - write lines of new code to a device, then MERGE the new code from that device into the running code, and you had changed your program during runtime. Nice if you wanted to plot an arbitrary mathematical function: enter the min and max values for both x and y axis, enter the equation, and the program merges the equation into the running program and plots it.
My first computer was a TI-99/4A that we got when I was 6 or 7 (Kindergarten or 1st grade). That's what I learned to program BASIC on before we got our XT and I moved to QBASIC. The first *useful* computer I had all to myself was a 486 sx/33 which I moved into my room at about 13 (7th grade) when my dad got a 300MHz AMD. Almost immediately, I installed this new operating system I had been reading about in Boot magazine... Almost 8 years later and I'm still a Debian girl...
Do you work at Domino's?
Great computer, still use it for the games ;)
I got nothin'
The first computer I had the chance to try was the microbee (http://www.thepcmuseum.com/appliedtechnology/seri es2/default.htm) a nice little fellow with builtin monitor (memory hexediting tool).. The real monitor, the brown and yellow one was not as nice, and the fact that I didnt have floppydiscs was even worse, but hey a storing everything one tapes actually worked.. the first computer I could realy call my own tho, was the C128.
ancient but fun for avoiding math classes. i think the first example if i remember correctly was 'pirates', an angle-range game. a negative number was too close, positive too far... image: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/calc/h/ti57 .jpg
My first computer was a Digicomp. It had a hand operated clock and not much RAM (3 bits), but it was lots of fun. Never ever got a BSOD, either.
Lost: one sig, witty, 120 chars, sentimental value. Reward offered.
I remember spending HOURS in the electronics department at Kmart poking and peeking on the display VIC 20 and C64 machines. I was pretty young, about 7 or so, and would copy code from the manual and end up creating sounds and graphics. At the time, it seemed like a lot of work just to get oscillating tones. I ended up having a lot more fun with the word processors... The managers at Kmart would kick me out for using up all of the ribbon and eraser tape.
After that, I met a friend with and 8086 and flight simulator on an amber screen. That was the bomb. I've since become a network engineer and student pilot.
Aaron"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -
I got the go-kart. It was fun. But then it broke and I didn't know anything about engine repair at age 8. So I went back inside and started programming again.
I doubt that your career path would have ended at NASCAR hero anyway.
Yup, I started out with the great Vic 20 too (that my parents got for attending one of those timeshare seminars). We had it for about half a year before the power supply suddenly started smoking and begin to MELT. Fast forward to today, where I continue the trend and have now started to melt processors. Some things never change
I started using Apple II's in high school and even wrote a game.
In college starting in 1982, I spent a ton of time using the IBM PC's (good old model 5150, dual floppy) and wrote some BASIC stuff and a ton in Turbo Pascal.
I never actually had my _own_ machine until I picked up an Amiga 500 in late 1988. What a wonderful machine. AmigaDOS was "the slowest disk-based operating system ever written" but boy was it ever cool (but the Amiga also the beginning of games that featured cool graphics over good design). I even tried some ray-tracing on it, but even after days of processing, it could never get far enough to give usable results.
In '89 I got a '386 20. In '92 I picked up a 486DX rather than an SX just so I could run POV-Ray. It's been uphill since then.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
A Nascom 1, in kit form. This was 1978 yet it still sported a keyboard, a z80 proccessor & used a b&w TV as a display. Programmed in Hex later assembler.
Commodore 64 when I sold it piece meal I got 1000.00 back from all the accessories.
And Amiga 500 with a full meg ram and side card scsi drive. And Syquest 45 removable.
Amiga 2500 and Video Toaster. Thats back when NewTEk Rocked!!!
Then a 4000 Amiga Flyer
Then PC's and MAc's
made by hand, hand-soldered the boards myself.
Shortly followed a few years later by buying an Apple II+ with dual floppies and 172K of RAM (shipped with 48K, used it for a RAM disk to load my programs disk written in Apple Basic into RAM, where they ran 1000 times faster).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I had a TRS-80 with a two digit serial number. I was upset when I had it upgraded to "Level II" and they replaced the case and the serial number stamp :-(
I had the horrible noisy electrostatic "Screen Printer", and then later I had a Telex-branded ASR teletype and paper tape reader. Learned a whole lot about the serial interface, early on, since it was DIY all the way.
At one point, a guy whose name I have forgotten, gave me a software System Monitor that he had coded for TRS-80, and that changed my life.
I got into the first generation of TRS-80 pocket computer for a long time. I loved that thing! But when someone stole it and I couldn't replace it with the same model, I got my first Color Computer 2. Ran OS/9 on it, spend some time learning the BASIC and 6809 asm, wrote my own editor, modified a UCSD Pascal interpreter, and started a whole lot of projects that I never finished. (The reasons were laziness and also, I could never afford to upgrade my drives, so my old busted disc drives were slow unreliable.)
By that time most of my friends had Apples or Commodores. We all thought the first generation of IBM-compatables sucked, and then we all pretty much got 80286's with VGA. Life got interesting again when I got my first 386 and could run Desqview. And then the first public releases of Linux were available, and it's been smooth sailing from then, to now.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
And I had newstand access to the British ZX magazine, which had some pretty impressive stuff using a few K.
But the first _useful_ computer was a Commodore Plus/4 with printers, floppies and dial-up to CompusServe and GEnie. Buying a Plus/4 during one of the about three months it was sold retail turned out to be a pretty good thing. The fact that programs were generally incompatible with the 64 was somewhat balanced by the built-in assembler/disassembler. Learned a lot.
Also my first cracking. Discovered that all the small business accounting programs could be consolidated onto one 3-1/2" floppy so you only had to swap the 5-1/4" data floppies.
Maybe I was slow, but my first was a 50 pound Osborne "portable"... 4" screen with two 5" floppy drives!
I'm half surprised of the lack of mention of any old thomson 8 bit machines.
Granted, it was probably non existant and totally unheard of outside France.
The TO7/70 was built around a 6809 and had a lightpen aswell as a pretty crappy video chip which was really just a crappy framebuffer where you could only have two colors selected among a fixed palette per horizontal 8 pixel rows.
Still, it was what made me discover what a computer was, when I went from thinking that a computer was a mysterious machine to think that it was something that was used to draw on a screen with a lightpen (I was seven at the time, give me a break).
Then the french government launched a big "computer science for all" operation that same year that involved installing a bunch networks of MO5 computers (very similar to the TO7) in schools and high schools. It was pretty neat, they were teaching kids rudiments of programming using logo. That's how I first discovered programming, and I then began coding in basic.
When my father bought an amiga 500 three years later I got really hooked to computer science though, and started doing some assembly programming.
Zilog Z80 running CP/M. I ported CP/M+ to it.
--
Tom LaStrange
I grew up in Brazil an my dad bought me a Sharp HotBit when I was about 10 years old (1988 or so). It had a kassete drive, and a couple video-game like slots for games and expansions. It booted in a "BASIC" shell and you could run basic commands or write actual code...neat stuff!
Does anyone know anything about this machine? I would like to get one just for the heck of it.
I didn't know much, but I got around playing with the drawing functions in basic and playing lots of games.
It's amazing the influence it had on me. I am now a full-time engineer who codes embedded C most of the time and I don't see myself doing anything else.
Moral of the story, encourage your kids on these kind of (brain) activities.
Anyone else?
:-)
I eventually got tired of writing games in Z-80 assembly "under" LDOS (TRS-DOS), and graduated to CP/M. Had great fun writing a new BIOS and a hard disk driver for a 40MB SASI drive.
When's the last time you wrote complete, useful code that occupied less than 512 bytes?
- Brain.
"Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching." - Dogbert.
Intellec 8, ASR-33 teletype, and DUAL 8" Frugal Floppies (The first floppy drive under $1000. WooHoo!)
s t=1&c=754
I did add the 8080 upgrade card. Unfortunately, the PROM programmer card smoked several years ago. Anyone have a spare?
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?
My first own computer was Nokia MikroMikko 2. Pretty weird beast. It had two 720kB floppy drives, no hard drive, 720kB memory (or so I has been told), black text on white monitor and 80186 processor with MS-DOS 2.[something].
This machine was good only for text processing. However, this was the machine that gave me the spark to start my programming hobby and to learn x86 assembler with DOS debugger.
Features :
In my (un)biased view, the best computer ever devised.
In junior high I had a TRS-80 and then I built myself a Timex Sinclair kit. There was an Apple II in there as well.
Brian
My
Multics via a DecWriter Dot-matrix terminal and 300-baud modem. Still think it was a fantastic system. It was the general-purpose "utility" for everyone at MIT when I was a freshman. Email, "Arpanet" access, shell scripts, 40 years ago they solved the spyware problem. Just no one else thought security was important enough to bother.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. --Thomas Jefferson
Looks like I'm the first to say Nascom II. This came as a kit - a bag of components, IC sockets, a blank motherboard and photocopied assemply instructions. Z80(B) CPU, 2K of static RAM, and connectors for power, a TV monitor and a cassette recorder. The ROM had a basic interpreter built in that allowed 1 or 2-character variable names.
You had to supply your own PSU, monitor and recorder.
Cyrix 486 66Mhz (which died after 2 weeks of usage and was replaced for free for an AMD K5-80Mhz), 4 megs of RAM, 420 megs Samsung HDD and a 1 Mb Trident videocard that was as large as a keyboard. I then didn't understand the difference between RAM and HDD and thought "How can Dos, Norton, Warcraft, Doom all the other stuff fit in 4 megs?".
The thing was in an AT case with a power switch that occasionally sparked when the system was turned on. And later the case cover screws loosened and when I installed a 48x cdrom the case cover made a really loud noise when the cdrom was spinning at full speed.
The 14-inch no-name (Tystar) monitor was surprisingly good and had far better focus than many Samsung monitors at the time.
Yep, the first computer I used was a PDP-10, followed by a PDP-11, followed in 1977/78 by a Vax!
g'damn Vaxen are the best damn systems I've ever used (Indexed files still don't exist anywhere else).
Then I used Atari 400s and 800s, the Vic-20, TRS-80, and Commodore 64.
I owned a vic-20 briefly (by which I mean about 2 weeks) then got a c-64!
c64 was the best personal computer ever! really. gdamn it was fun hacking those!
the Amiga is another system I used, but didn't own until much later.
Commodore made the best systems of those times.
but still, VMS rules
I can still remember the pain in my fingers from pushing the "keyboard" whose keys did not spring back. Touch typing was not possible. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?s t=1&c=1004
Got the Vic 20 (5K version) for christmas one year after I had taken a computer class in Jr High. The High School wouldn't let me take their class until I was actually in High School (losers). So Dad bought me the Vic 20. Plugged it into the TV, and my parents couldn't watch TV anymore. I had no tape drive, or disk drive .. so I'd write a program (usually games or animations), get mad at the "out of memory" error, then get mad that I couldn't save anything :)
... so Dad bought me the C64 on the spot (Suh-Weet!)
.. no computer class. Wait, it gets worse. The principle decides to go to the local Vo-Tech and get a computer certification so he can teach the class. I help him with his homework ... they won't let me take the class (losers).
Got a disk drive for my following birthday, and got the C1702 monitor for the following Christmas. Unfortunately the adapter only worked for the C64 (darn it all), and Dillards (heh) didn't have the Vic 20 adapter, and it would take 6 weeks to get one in (you don't say!)
Now, instead of going to the public high school, I ended up going to a small private school
My first actual computer (not counting programmable calculators) was a MOS KIM-1, a 6502 based single board with 1K of RAM, a 6 digit LED display, and an on board hex keypad. It was programmed in 6502 machine code (I still remember that opcode x2 where x=anything other than A crashed the processor). Bought it in 1976. Within 2 years, I upgraded to a PET 2001 with 8K of RAM, and that's where I first began to make money programming (I was 14 at the time). The PET came with Microsoft BASIC built in, so I can actually say I've got 28 years of experience with Microsoft products (and look what it did to me ;)
Oh, to work at a pizza hut. I got a NES and now i work as a Windows sysadmin.
I curse every day of my miserable existence.
And yes, every day is the worst day of my life, thanks for asking.
My first PC that I actually owned was a Tandy 100, could have been 100 it was ages ago. Although my grandfather had a commodore 64 that I loved. I was lucky my grandfather was a computer programmer from the first PCs that used punch cards and continued that work until he retired for the second time a few years ago. I was in geek heaven with all the disgarded hardware I got from him.
WTF?
My experience was the exact opposite. We had a computer lying around that my uncle gave to us as a payment for something (I'm not sure exacltly what) but I never tried to use it until my NES broke. My buddies and I wanted to play some of the games that came with the computer so we fired the PC up and I started scanning the manuals. A Basic manual came as part of the documentation and once I discovered that, I was hooked. I often wonder what would have happened if my NES hadn't broken that day.
I started using an IBM 360 model 67 in 67-68 or so. With a desk-sized keypunch machine. It was an awwesome site to watch my deck get eaten and have the printer spit back something I did. I eventually got my own Commodore 46, a 128, and later an Atari ST which I upgraded to a whole Megabyte of Ram! I got my first AT-compatible 286 in 1987 and have been moving right along in the intel world until the AMD came out with 386-40's. I haven't owned an intel-based box since then.
There's a photo of my dad sat with me on his knee, aged a few days old, in front of a BBC Micro. Those were the days...
95% of all computer errors occur between chair and keyboard (TM)
My first MODEM was a 300 baud device for the C=64. I had a blast with that thing, dialing into the local BBS's. I was participating on the chat boards, downloading stories and pics. Of course, my parents weren't going to get a second phone line. No, they went from unlimited local service to pay-as-you-go service. That sucked, but that didn't stop me.
My dad brought home a Texas Instruments box one day, and sat down with a little black and white television and write the sample "Make Mr. Bojangles Dance" program. I was absolutely fascinated, and ate through the two manuals that came with it.
In between games of Blasto, I was busy learning hexadecimal in order to draw 8x8 characters on the screen. Most of my programs weren't terribly interesting, they were more in the way of little movies. A Mr. Bojangles lookalike would wander across the screen, then fall off of a cliff and land on a bomb and print *boom*! End of program.
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
My first computer was a Motorola 6800 evaluation module. It came with 128bytes of SRAM, and a LED/hex keypad, _plus_ a tape interface... My second computer was a Sinclair ZX80 I built from a kit. My third, a Apple II+, and then a list of CP/M based computers.
-ingo
What a great machine. Lovely rubbery keys. I miss it. Wrote my very first programs on there, and if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be doing what I do now. Manic Miner, BMX Simulator, Elite, Match Day, JetPac! Great games. Used the UDG (User Defined Graphics) characters to put together a wiggly worm who could wiggle across the screen. Wrote a James Bond cartoon with UDG characters that ran for about 30 minutes. Skydiving, skiing, ski-jumping, trains, planes and automobiles. Marvellous.
The oddest thing. I could only ever get MatchDay to load from tape when the TV was turned off........ Bizarre, but it worked.
Ahh, thanks guys, I feel much younger now. Or at the very least I was a veritable late-bloomer. The first machine my family owned was a Packard Bell 486SX/25 w/4MB RAM (Windows 3.11), which we got when I was in 6th grade. I eventually played around with QBASIC and later wrote some nifty programs to do my geometry homework with. Since then: Acer Aspire Pentium/100Mhz/16MB RAM (Win95) DIY Pentium/120Mhz 64MB RAM (Win98) DIY PentiumII/300Mhz 256MB RAM (Win2K/Many versions of Redhat 5.2 on up & SuSE 7.3 on up) *eMachines Athlon/2.2Ghz 512Mb RAM (WinXP Home, Latest version of SuSE) But, FWIW, my first experience with the internet was on a VT100 terminal using lynx. I thought it was about the coolest thing in the world when we went to the college one day and played on the computers with Netscape 3. The rest, of course, is history.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
IBM 7070 -- 5000 words of ten decimal digits each, with a cycle time of ten microseconds (0.0001 GHz). Disk storage: we don' need no stink'n disks. It had an attached IBM 1401 I/O processor so that it wouldn't have to use its blinding speed to do paper tape reading and printing. Cost maybe $5 million in today's dollars. (Brown University, 1965)
My first computer was the Apple IIc. It being portable was awesome. I would take it to my room, downstairs, etc... wherever I needed it. I would also connect it to my parents old color TV for my color monitor needs.
I would fall asleep at the desk writing silly basic programs in between playing Ultima IV, Burgertime, DigDug, Lemmings, Lemonade Stand, Bolo, all the favorites. I still have it and boot it once in a while to ensure that all of my floppies are truly magged out. However, one that did work was a game called Sherwood Forest. A Robin Hood puzzle game. Good times...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
1982.. 5K of RAM, casette tape drive, 22 colum screen!
My 2nd of course was a Commodore 64, then a 128, then it pained me greatly (because I saw Commodore was going down the tubes) to not replace with with an Amiga, but instead, I went with a `286 clone as my first PC...
Commodore was a computer company that was easy to love. They were innovative and made powerful machines that they sold far cheaper than the other guys.
Corporatism != Free Market
...through modern microcontrollers. I have a great time playing with Microchip's offerings (PIC series) - although Freescale, Atmel, etc. have equally good equivalents.
n entside.html
:-)
You get seriously fast little CPUs in very self-contained packages (I use the DIP packages - easier to hold, solder and plug into breadboards). The old magic returns.
As an aside, a couple of years ago I put together a NIBL basic microcontroller using a SC/MP II (INS8060) CPU I had from decades ago! If you want to see it, here's the URL:
http://home.austin.rr.com/broadb/chris/SCMP_Compo
Since that image, I have loaded the ROM image onto an EPROM (rewiring the board a bit for it) - and have applied a tweak I saw in an old Elektor magazine - speeding up the serial communication to 2400Baud (much more comfortable than it's original speed).
On the main topic, my first programmable machine was an HP 25 calculator (1976ish). The first real computer on which I wrote a running program was a Univac 1100 (punch cards, no less!). My first home machine was an Apple II+ - with the 16K expansion card and UCSD Pascal system - oh was I ever king of the hill!
Heh - the memories of an old fart.
My first computer was the Heathkit ET-3400 which had a hexadecimal keypad and 4K of memory (http://www.vintage-computer.com/heathkit3400.shtm l)
;) I applied at the Heathkit store, and the device was delivered about a week later. THEN I had to solder it all together. Piece of cake; all the several hundreds of parts were exactly there as indicated in the clear instruction book and the diagrams left nothing in question. A real masterpiece of user-friendly engineering.
This was also my first credit account
The instruction manual was a home-study course in digital electronics and programming covering things like addressing LED numerals, binary arithmetic and so on. I got my first real job (electronics bench tech) after completing this and working with the components on the ET-3400 breadboard. This following on years of electronics hobbying, though.
I agree whole-heartedly with other posters' sentiments that today's PS/XBox/GC game console users are really missing out from the lack of user-programmability.
But then again, all you who only *programmed* your computers really should have had the experience of *building* them too!
It was a single board with 1K, yes one single kilobyte of RAM. Program storage was a tape recorder, of course, and it used an ascii teletype machine as the I/O device. I actually had a chess program that ran on it, but mostly used it to develop software for some score-keeping devices I designed for a customer of my side business.
Mostek sold those kits to employees for $25 and fortunately I had a friend who worked there so I twisted his arm to get me one. The F-8 was a miserable processor with an arcane command set, but it worked. Everything I wrote was in assembly language and hand assembled and loaded as hex code through the terminal. Great fun!!
My next home computer was an Ohio Scientific with a 6502 processor and a whopping 16K of precious memory. Same I/O device and storage. Again it was mostly used to develop assembly language software for the next generation score keeping machines.
Following that was an IBM PC-junior with a single floppy, 128K of memory, running DOS 2.1 and a CGA monitor. That was the big time. Remember those funky optical mice that you had to use on a special mouse pad with a grid on it?
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I still own my the first computer I ever owned. An AMD 2300+ 1.58 GHZ Sempron from 2004.
The first computer I ever used was an old bondwell (I don't even remember the specs), with (BOOO!) DOS. That thing still runs today too.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!! chown -r us
... My school got like 3 of them when I was in kindergarten, and I started learning BASIC then.. It's taken a lifetime to unlearn!
Seriously though, after the PET arrived, and my folks saw how much fun I had making it do things, they got a pension loan and bought a newly-released Apple ][+.. They even let me upgrade it from 16k to 48k, then they let me install the Disk ][ and Micro-Soft 64k card (for integer BASIC), and I got to go to summer computer courses at a local community college when I was 10-11.. I'm a member of the generation between those who wrote their term papers using typewriters and those who've never seen a typewriter outside of museums or media... ScreenWriter and C.Itoh escape codes ftw!!!
Enough reminiscing and procrastinating, back to the mines...
My first was an Apple II+ with 48k on the motherboard and a 16k expansion card. It also had an Z-80 processor card made by Microsoft (wierd huh?) that would allow it to run CP/M.
It also had an 80 column card--the built in 40-column mode didn't even have lower-case characters. There was a little wire that ran from the keyboard to one of the pins for the joystick that would actually allow the shift key to be read separate from the characters. Kind of a wierd set up.
The cost of the computer, 2 160k floppy drives, 10" green-screen monochrome monitor, and dot matrix printer came to somewhere between $5000-$6000. (Not sure if that included the Wordstar and VisiCalc software that came with it.)
Later on added a 10MB hard drive for $499 and 300bps modem for $120. The modem was the type where you had to dial the number on the phone, then flip a switch to turn on the carrier when the other end answered.
One thing I distinctly remember was the great documentation that came with the computer. Not just for the operating system, but for BASIC and Assembly languange programming as well. Even had the actual schematics for the machine in one of the manuals.
With dual floppies, later upgraded with the hard drive option. As I recall,
it ran MP/OS. It was free, they discontinued the project & it was lying around in the lab.
Before that, I built my own 6802-based micro, but it never had an OS
but I make a practice of never commenting on websites that try to force me to sign up with them just to make a simple post. Especially since I know their sole reason for existance is to get me to opt-in to some newletter so they can claim I actually wanted them to send me offers for crappy stuff.
My first computer was a Color Genie. I loved it!!
The family's first computer ran on an 8088 (I still have the chip). I was too young to remember anything about it other than it had a wicked awesome hangman game my dad and I used to play. My first (at age 8) was a Macintosh Classic. That puppy ran on 32K of RAM with an enourmous 32MiB HD. Oh the memories. Now my Cisco phone at work runs on a 386, and the flash drive in my watch holds 512M. My $20 calculator has more computing power than an Apollo space flight. I think we may have lost sight of the simpler things in life like when a phone was a phone not a personal organiser, portable entertainment unit, and a camera. I should not have to wait for my cell phone to boot. I'll probably get torn to shreds for suggesting technology might be getting ridiculous, but that's how I feel. Maybe I'm just a person out of time.
Kit form, bought for 79 quid. Didn't take long to build. It was interesting as it was advertised as a Zilog 80 chip, which it wasn't. It was some NEC Z80 compatible knock-off. I'm guessing Sir Clive bought a backlot of these on the cheap and then designed the rest of the electronics around whatever he got. It did actually have 1Kb of RAM and 4Kb of ROM space. I still have the ROM reference manuals for the ZX-80, ZX-81, and the 48K ZX-Spectrum on my bookshelf!
My dentist owned a C5. He was mad about it, driving around his carpark. Quite an intuitive three wheeler, steered well, a little bit of power.
Task Mangler
My first computer was a Quest Super Elf, based on RCA's 1802 CPU. The 1802 has a RISC-like architecture with 16 general purpose 16 bit wide registers and a nice, simple, logical instruction set where the lower 4 bits represent a register. That makes it very easy to hand-assemble machine code, which was the only way you could write code for it, since I was never able to get my ASCII keyboard & display working so I could use Tiny Basic.
It was a Kaypro II running CP/M. Wordstar, EasyCalc, BASIC, Ladder, Castle and Catch-um. Nice!
My dad brought home an Apple ][ c for us (me) when I was in kindergarten. I took to it like a (insert metaphor here). Thanks, Dad!
(My mom still hasn't stored a recipe on any computer that's ever been in her house....are they still using that as a reason for families to buy computers?)
My first PC was an XT clone, it ran at 4.77mhz, had 640k ram, CGA (crap graphics array) graphics and two 5 1/4 inch 360k floppy drives.
I ran a utility that increased the memory refresh rate so the PC ran a tad faster, I used zansi.sys to make the screen scroll much faster, and I used something else called smax that forced the drive heads to the outermost disk regions making my floppies 420k.
I sometimes ran a small ram disk and copied command.com into it, this allowed me to keep the DOS disk out of one of the drives. I really pushed that beast to its limits...
I also experimented with DoubleDos and eventually, Deskqview, which allowed me to surf BBSes (at 2400 baud) and do other stuff at the same time without getting knocked offline - it was true preemtive multitasking, something I didn't see again on the PC until windows95 some 10 years (or so) later.
But I loved all of the platform choices at the time, computing was so much fun. I had access to all kinds of systems/platforms. At school we used Comodore PETs (32K, no real graphics modes) and Apple2s, and my friends had Tandys (PC clones from RadioShack with better than CGA graphics, (but not as good as EGA) and 3 channel sound), and one even had a PCjr (similar to a Tandy, earlier, a somewhat less than 100% PC clone, much more expensive, that actually came with a wireless keyboard and a catridge slot). Another friend had a c64 which was lots of fun and an atari 400 something or other - also loads of fun.
Most games that were released on multiple platforms in the day were the lamest on my box, lol. Lode Runner and Katareka, for example, were better for the apple and atari than it was for the PC - they looked better (more colors). Lode Runner had one less tile column on the PC, which annoyed the hell out of me since I could't re-create some of the appel2 levels I made at school and Karateka was actually more responsive on the 8 bit machines. Eventually, games came out that took advantage of the extra speed and ram and floppy capacity - Starflight is a good example, the father of Starcontrol2.
Of course, arcades were actually fun in those days, giving you an experience you couldn't easily reproduce at home like you can today - I wasted oodles of money that way...
Later, Amigas and STs further made my setup stink - my next pc was a 166mhz Pentim w95 box with a 1 gig HD and one of the first 3D cards (diamond stealth 3D). In between, I used PCs at school witn windows31 and HP UX which is where I fell in love with unix. Now it's linux all the way, bay-bee.
Yes! It WAS called "new brain". A box the size of a phone book with a single line 20 character display should one not have a monitor.
OK, it wasn't mine, it was my father's first computer, but also the first I was introduced to. I think we programmed basic on it.
You could move one jumper on the board and overclock that puppy. I got it all the way up to 33 mhz.
And why do I still remember commands like:
POKE 49232,0
and
CALL -151
My first computer was an IBM PS/1 (286) with one 3 1/2" floppy drive, no hard drive, but it did have a modem which was sufficient for prodigy. It was on this machine that I got introduced to ZZT (and BASIC). So I got networking and Object-Oriented programming all in one go.
Why not fork?
I never had a C64. We started out with a TI 99/4A. I just wasted all my time playing Parsec while my mom tried to learn BASIC. The first computer *I* technically owned was a Timex Sinclair 1000 with the 16K upgrade. I got it at a garage sale for like $5. I played with it for about 30 minutes and got bored with it. Then we got an AT&T 6300+. I miss that computer. It was KIND OF a 286 [and yet not], but was one of the first PC's that could run Unix and DOS. Unfortunately I never got Unix for it so I'm way behind where I should be with *nix's.
:)
The progression goes like this.
TI-99/4A --> Timex Sinclair 1000 [16KB] --> AT&T 6300 [286ish - 1MB RAM] --> 286 [1MB] --> 386SX-16Mhz [4MB] --> P90 [16MB] --> K6-300 --> K6/2-350 --> K6/2-500 --> Athlon 700 --> P4 1.8Ghz [512MB] --> Athlon 64 2800+ [1GB RAM].
At first glance, it seems like a nice progression but what you can't tell is that A: I was WAY behind. We got the 6300+ when 486's were out. I didn't get the P90 until the P2's were out. And I was still using 2 40MB MFM HD's from the 286 with that P90! Those drives were SO FREAKIN' SLOW! I did a test on them a few times and I think I averaged like 200kb/s transfers from those drives. I was still using those and people had parallel port zip-drives that were larger [100MB] and FASTER!
So happy to have my Athlon 64 with SATA HD's now
Nothing to see here
You beat me by a full generation!
The first computer I have ever used was a TI-99/4A. I learned on my own some basic coding skills. I still remember the high I had when I had first built a computer, it lasted for weeks.
The Sequence for me was
Got a C-64 when I was 12 (someone get me a walker and some Geritol, please...and GET OFF MY LAWN, DAMMIT!). I still have it, although it doesn't work. I currently own:
/me is TEH Commodore Geek. ;)
1. 3 C-64s (total) - 2 original 64s and 1 C-64C 2. 1 VIC-20 (ROM burnt, but cartridges still work) 3. 1 C-128 4. Damned near every peripheral known to man for all of the above (including modems, multiple floppy drives, cassette drives and dot-matrix printers).
and the pièce de résistance...
5. A fully-functional Commodore PET 4032.
1 is the square root of all evil.
My dad did a similar thing for me as well. When we got our first computer (also the incredible Commordore 64), my dad decreed that he would not purchase games. If we wanted games, we had to create them ourselves. So I started playing around with programs starting with copying code from computer magazines and moving into creating my own games from scratch. My dad later changed his mind, and bought us some games, but by that time, I was already hooked on programming.
I also remember when Windows 3.0 came out, my dad purchased the early buggy version because he knew that it was going to be big someday, and he was definitely right (Linux/Unix's technical superiority granted, Windows has had a stranglehold on home and business use for the past 10+ years). Looking back, even though he was not himself a programmer my dad was actually pretty savvy when it came to computers -- something that has helped me tremendously in getting a jumpstart on my career.
Too bad it isn't Father's Day. Our dad's are getting quite the endorsement today. ;-)
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
The first computer I actually owned was an Acorn Atom, the precursor to the BBC Micro, which I got in May 1982. It had a 1MHz 6502 and shipped with 2K of RAM. I upgraded it myself to 12K, the maximum that the board was built to take, and by the time I stopped using it two years later I had upgraded the ROM to 16K from the 8K it shipped with.
I loved that machine. The worst part was undoubtedly the storage: cassette tape is a rotten mechanism for saving your data. But I learnt assembler within a year, which if I had bought a Spectrum (they were announced shortly after I bought the Atom) I don't think would have happened - I would simply have spent too much time playing games.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
I always felt my early addiction to Pong and the Atari 2600 led to needing a computer. So my father had a POng unit way back when... then we got the Atari 2600... shortly afterwards, I snagged a Vic 20, which my father hated and kept on using the Atari 2600. We used the Vic 20 and discovered the magic of BBS's and modems... I invested a summers worth of yard work into a 120 baud modem. (might have been slower...). We figure dout the Vic 209 was too slow and limited... then another summers worth of yard work went into a Commodore 64 with a blazzing 300 baud modem. Shortly afterwards, we discovered the reality of phone bills while running up $500 in phone bills calling something called "Quantum BBS" and the "Twilight Zone"... I can't remember the full name. By the next summer, we started running a BBS (The Power Outlet) on a second C-64 with 3 1541's and 3 1581's hooked up to a blazzing 2400 baud modem. Oh yes... we wuz 3l33t.
C64
Of course, in order to tell them, they want you to sign up for their service. Good one.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
First: TI-99/4A
Second: 66MHz 486 w/4MB ram, 240MB HDD
That was a big jump, I was in heaven
I still have my TI-99/4A (well 2 of em).
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When I was a freshman in HS I was involved in a motorcycle accident that laid me out for an entire semester (the whole tutor from home and doctors comtemplating taking my leg before it rotted away). Well, that money I was saving up for a new cycle just seemed rather foolish.
I got a Computer Shopper magazine (when it was good) and purchased a C64, 5.25 belt driven disk drive, 9-pin Star Micronics Printer, 300baud modem, and a 13" television. That machine and CompuServe opened up a whole new world for me.
Programming: Its not just a job - its an indenture.
This was my first computer - couldn't afford a ZX!
A rather cute programmable calculator with about 250 steps, including elementary loops. It could also write programs to magnetic strips. I wrote my first game for it - a crude version of battleships.
My first proper PC was an Apricot - it ran DOS, had 2 floppy drives, 64k of memory, and a monochrome screen. It wasn't IBM PC compatible - but it was close enough. I learnt BASIC very quickly! I also wrote statistical programs for the spreadsheet which came with it.
I also used North Star machines running CP/M (Control Program for Microprocessors). I programed these in QBASIc adn DBASE. This was Gary Kildall's program, which IBM nearly used as the OS on their first PC. Instead Microsoft bought in an OS, and the rest is history...
My first exposure to minis was programming in PL/1 on TOPS-20 machines (pre-Vax DEC machines) in Trinity College Dublin with a punch card reader. There was a TTY interface, but we weren't allowed to use it.
-- Anthony Staines
Agreed.
Although my first actual, purchased system was too 'modern' to have a native command interpreter mode, I spent a lot of hours in the Apple II BASIC mode and will always have a soft spot for it (and will probably also never be fully comfortable with BASIC that doesn't begin each line with a number).
You don't -- or at least, I don't -- get that same 'blank page' feeling on turning on a modern desktop'ed system. Especially on my office Windows machine, where it always seems as though the hard drive is churning and clicking, for no particular reason. It's irrational, but it gives me the impression I don't have the computer's full and complete attention, and damnit -- I want that. (Besides which, it's distracting.)
I still do a lot of personal correspondance on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. Actual, physical paper letters. (Yes, the Post Office does still do things besides eBay shipments and junk mail.) If I had to pin down the one thing that keeps me coming back to the Selectric, it's the "user experience" you get when you switch it on. You sit down, you take off the cover, you insert a piece of paper. You turn the switch "On." There's a nice heavy clunking sound, the carriage twitches a bit, and then there's nothing but a low humming, and sometimes a faint whiff of ozone. If you put your hand against it, you can feel a slight vibration. And then it does nothing else, except wait for you to do something. That's its equivalent of "READY."
As much as I appreciate a good preemptively-multitasking OS and the ability to schedule things with my crontab and otherwise have the computer just 'deal with things' for me, I can't deny that there's something reassuring from time to time about using a machine that doesn't try to out-think you.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I can beat this. Not only did I not get a console, I got a ZX Spectrum 48K one Christmas and was hooked from day one. The kicker is though, I had no tape recorder to load any games into it because my parents were too poor to buy one (honest story). My only entertainment with it for the first year was to write silly Basic programs. I still had a ball with it. Clive Sinclair is a wizard.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
TI-99+. I had several source codes that could be manually typed in to create various games or programs, but I mostly just played Q-Bert.
Circa 1966, a wire and plastic toy computing device, presumably from Edmund-Scientific. It would do "and" "or" and "and/or" statements, determined by where on the side panel you put the control pin, then the little plastic "punch cards" would process through the little computer and fall into the appropriate slot. It was fairly interesting at the time (I was elevenish.)
1970s, had a programmable calculator that got a considerable amount of use. A TI model but not the 56, think it was a 54 or something like that -- great for doing maths.
Vic-20 in early 1980's but it wasn't much use other than to make me know that the BASIC progamming language was/is crap.
1986, Atari 520 ST! Now this was a real computer and I'd have to say this is where the hobbist was created. Loved those Atari machines, very capable at a decent price. At the end it had been upgraded to 4 MB RAM and a higher speed, third-party CPU and case-modded into a PC tower case with a custom daughter board to provide power to the case lights and a really nifty security-cum-lock device that fit into the case in a floppy slot.
2006, Sager 9860, 2 GB RAM, 3.6 GHz hyperthreaded CPU, Slackware Linux, folds up and fits into my backpack. Yes, this is some very serious progress, but best of all is all the free and highly capable software.
1966 to 2006: Wonderful progress, the only bad experiences being any time I had to have anything to do with Microsoft -- how those people get away with selling such crap and not doing jail time I just don't know. Any other industry, they'd be ripped them apart at the seams by government and non-government lawyers, but I guess that's just a bad reflection on our government and the power of political money.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Followed a year later by a Ace Franklin 1000 in kit form. I had saved up to buy the parts at a HamFest and had a keyboard seperate from the case which made the machine real cool while I was in HS/College.
I was blessed with a lab full of Apple ][+ linked to a Corvus Constellation 10MB hard drive in 9th grade. My first computer of note was a ][+ clone, called a Linden Series III that had both 6502 and Z/80 processors on board so you could boot Apple DOS or CP/M (the latter of which I never actually really used, but was cool nonetheless).
I was an Apple shill of the highest order - the other competitors (Commodore, Atari, TRS) were in my opinion junky machines good only for games.
Ah, the memories of Choplifter and SkyFox, of Locksmith and Bag Of Tricks, of getting an 80-column card, of making my first NMI card...
My first PC was a home built 166MHZ Cyrix w/MMX running Windows 95! First machine I used was a HP Pentium 90, Win95.
Check out my site: IM User Directory
An Atari 800, followed almost immediately by an Atari 800XL. Nothing like it, before or since. I'd kill for that game selection today.
trustedworlds.net - gaming, security, and the gunk that lives in between
My first computer was an old TI-99 Cart based w/ Basic!
Wrote my first print out that drew a stick figure (based on documentation) when I was 7 years old.
Thanks for bringing up the good ole days!
Brad
.. I may never have actually gotten my first computer at the age I did.
;)
My father bought a VIC 20 and subscribed to Commodore magazine, and immediately set to work keying in one of those enclosed source listings in the back.. I think I already saw a post about the old "biorhithims" program.
He became so angry and frustrated with debugging it, it was given to me, at age 10, mostly in pieces. I reassembled the VIC 20, and debugged his program. Instantly, hooked, life was never the same.
I still remember nagging Mom to buy me a floppy drive for Christmas.
Commodore Vic 20. 4 hours of tinkering to make a winking ASCII face. Only to lose it all when powering off the 13 inch B&W TV. things were so much less compplicated then.
Totally weird beast of a machine - Sega SC-3000.
Z-80 based with the ti graphics chip (reasonable rez and color, and 32 sprites)
I remember that it had some god-awful rubber keyboard where each key had half a dozen meanings depending on what 'mode' you were in.
Pathetic selection of games, and zero documentation on the ROM internals.
later upgraded to a SC-3000H (with a real keyboard, not the rubber crap), and the most bizarre SC-70000 3inch hard disk, which was contained in a HUGE box that sat under the keyboard, and made further typing impossible.
Oh yeah - had a marvy little 3 color plotter that came with it too.
Kept that machine for years, but rarely used it.
Dealing with C64 fanboys
Next machine after that was a monstrous great NCR 'Tower' - 68010 based with Unix Sys III, and a wyse-50 terminal. That was a cool machine. Loved the big orange button on the front.
Traded in the tower for a Wicat 150 going real cheap. I think the Wicat machines were sold through Amway or something - cant remember, it was a really weird time in my life. I do remember though that the Wicat salesman was a mormon, and he was really keen on getting me up to his farm on the weekend to stay a few days and meet his wife. Like I said - it was a weird time in my life back then.
Other weirdness :
DEC Rainbow running CP/M
Microport unix on 286 AT machines
teaching secretaries to do 'wordprocessing' using vi and embedding nroff commands in their 'documents'.
Something about wasting a month of my life debugging a very ancient 'Databasic' application on a Nixdorf 8870 machine for the lotteries commision, where all the comments and documentation was written in german. WTF ?
PICK - the very popular OS written by a guy called Dick. Dick Pick - no shit.
I used the AppleII at the junior high and high school... 1982 it would have been (I would guess I was 15 or 16 at the time)... MY first computer would have been the TI-99/4A with all the trimmings... sprite pack, extra memory, external console, tape drive (woooot)... i remember writing what i thought was the best game in the world at the time and it was just a 'snake' type game where you issued up/left/right/down key commands and a trail of blocks would be drawn on the screen and two people could play... i remember that was when the idea of an array came into play and clarity in my head... i had to have a way to quickly sub through the x/y from a given 'snake' to figure if the 2nd player had touched the other one and also added an option to have the tail 'disappear' after 20 moves so it appeared to 'slither' or move.. oh, man... those were the days... http://www.99er.net/ti.shtml
sig goes here!
I had an Atari 800 (non-XL version) for my first computer. It had the RAM upgrade so it was maxed out at like 24KB or something. Had the 5-1/4" floppy drive and the printer too, along with the serial interface hub and the analog modem which required you to set your telephone receiver on top of it...old-skooly.
Kaypro-4
Z80 at 2 Mhz? 64K memory, two floppy drives and CP/M
No hard drive.
My first computer was the "Computer Module" attachment to the IntelliVision game console. I spent hours, and sometimes even days at a time, tinkering on it with its pretty much useless version of BASIC, with almost no access at all to its game API. But boy, was I into it.
Luckily, some time later, my parents bought me my first Commodore 64 (first of many, as I kept burning them out!) That I consider my very first computer, as I actually learned to program on it, and did some real fun stuff. I hacked away on that li'l machine for days at a time, and used it for so much more than just playing games (though, I played my fair share of games!) I even ran a local, single-line, BBS on it, like many other Commodore enthusiasts of the time.
Ah, the memories...
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
and 3 terminals!! woohooo
The zx-81 was my first computer, got it for christmas 1981. The best memory of the ZX-81 for me was the first time I saw 3D Monster Maze!!! This game above all others inspired me to learn exactly how these games were constructed and to create my own. Soon after I started my upgrades with the 16K RAM pack of wobbly doom, that thing cost me some time lol. I then progressed through the following hardware path Sinclair zx-81, Sinclar ZX Spectrum 48K, Acorn BBC Master B, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga and finally onto the IBM PC family when they finally supported enough interesting features and performance!
Now I collect opperation vintage computing hardware and frequently fire them up and go oooooooooo
First computer was 6809-based "FLEX" made by The Computerist of Chelmsford, MA. A whopping 2 MHz and 64K of DRAM. Running the OS/9 operating system. I used it to write my college essays, and my father used it for some analog design work (RF CAD). Started with a cassette tape interface before adding two 5.25" floppies. Actually re-wrote parts of the O/S I/O level drivers, and wrote a 6809 disassembler.
You young whippersnappers have it so easy. The ALWAC IIIE had 512 bytes of memory and 32K of drum storage. So much that one wonder what one could do with it all. When someone finally introduced an assembler, I wondered why? The assembler wouldn't let you use the same storage for instructions and data and made it difficult to access memory in an optimal way. (The memory was interleaved on the drum, and if the memory was in the wrong place it was a long wait to access it.) There was floating point, but that of course was software thus using it meant giving up 128 bytes of that valuable memory.
I was solving differential equations, getting rational solutions to linear systems with rational coefficients, and getting root locus plots on this wonderful machine. (I don't want to go back!)
Fred
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K, in primary school...
.... I still do not know if it is a black date in my calendar or a red one ....
Then a C-64.
I loved the ZX and that caused me some early programming addiction, however the C-64 did not get me interested at all, I played on it, and that's it.
Then came a 8 mhz PC-XT... and life changed
Since then I do not remember not having a computer around me
- Altair
- TRS-80 Model 1 with the extender
After, while in the USAF:- Kaypro II
Followed by a long line of named and no-name PC clones.Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Mainframe with 64K Quadwords (*4) bytes!!. However did contain BIAX that could microcode machine ( Biax made by Ford (the motor company)). V to U, nop, 620, reset start - baby!! Went on to C8500 (1968) DS714 (Philips holland - 1971) OLE Quapa anyone??. Built 4044 system with 128 (note not k - just 128!!) bytes (1974). Finally went commercial and bought 8085 Explorer with - gasp!! - another 128 bytes 1979. Did upgrade to 4k *static* ram - Had editor/assembler/basic (yes - in 4k) running way before Gates et al - never did capitalize - oh well... Have pretty well everything since ( Remember S100 bus anyone??) except Apple. Way overpriced!! - keep computing ye young whippersnappers!! - *old geezer* still is!!
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
The first computer I used was a Philips P2000T.
The first computer I owned was a Timex Sinclair 1000.
My first computer was a 5-slot original IBM PC. It was maxed to 640K, with two half-height 5.25" floppy drives. Eventually it got a 32MB (yes, Megabyte) floppy drive which was rescued from a fried "hard card" and mated with a RLL controller. My uncle was moving his CPA practice from Sherman Oaks to the Westside, and didn't want to move "a broken computer." The thing needed about $200 of fixes when I got it. He gave me a brand new Tandon orange-screen monitor with it. Anyone remember Hercules monochrome graphics? ^_^ Anyone remember 1200bps Everex internal ISA modems? Got myself in big trouble hanging out on BBSes that were enough distance to be toll calls.
If I hadn't made the damn fool mistake of trading the 5150 for a no-name XT clone with a Sanyo proc, I suspect it would still be in working order today.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
ZX-81 memories include games of space invaders made up of letters and characters. ie: the alien ammo would show up as $ signs wtc.
The TI99-4A with Speach Synthisizer was GREAT! I wanted an Atari 2600, but my parents were just getting into programming.
I wrote my first computer program on a TI99-4a at age 7. Thats right 1st grade. The program was called Spelling Bee, and I could give give it the spelling list for that week, and it woiuld output the word to the speach synthesizer, so it would say "Spell college" and you would type in c-o-l-l-e-g-e and be rewarded with a small sprite graphic and a short tune. Very fond memories indeed.
As you can tell, I can still not spell, and I dont code either.
And in mississippi, my Dad came across an apple IIe for dirt cheap, If I remember correct he got it at an office that had upgraded years ago. I remember thinking, when I went to the little public library and checked out a beginners guide to programming, how much space those huge floppy discs held. After i learned the apple, I got stepped up to an 8086 laptop, complete with dock, then up to a 286 running, among other things, OS/2. Then, through some wierd fluke, I was handed a Mac PowerPC, that coul switch modes between PC and Mac, that was awesome.
Shots: A Populist Parable
This was my first computer.
Same here, only replace "Commodore 64" for "Sinclair ZX 81" and "NES" for "Atari 2600".
To be precise, the Sinclair ZX 81 was a clone made in Brazil called TK 82-C. Exact clone, down to the membrane keyboard. Oh the memories. Z80 processor, 2 kilobytes memory shared for video -- video was max resolution 44 by 64 pixels (screen was 32 characters wide by 22 characters tall). Today you can have the whole thing on a browser... See it here:
http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/ts1000/
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Timex Sinclair 1000
Built it from a kit too. The first machine I lusted after was an SC/MP project described in an electronics magazine (Elektor).
My first computer was an Imsai 8080 with a Teletype ASR33. 110 baud, rotary dial modem on the right side, paper tape/punch on the left. 8K of RAM... I eventually upgraded to a full 64K of RAM, a used DEC terminal, and one 8" disk drive. Then I sold the whole thing to make money for college... Sigh... I wish I still had that Imsai... Sweet machine... Taught me a LOT about computers and programming...
The number 1 problem of working in a cubicle - 23 power cords, 1 outlet...
Ah, those were the days - remember Masken? :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
486DX4 100Mhz w/32mb of ram and a 200mb hard drive.
On my professional life, I have owned 3 Silicon Graphics, first I landed my hands on an O2, I made friends with a local SGI dealer whom lent me a copy of Maya 1, and I did an awesome demo for them which landed them lots of sales. One day the guy calls me and tells me, "Hey G. your computer is here pick it up...", I was like "my what?" So I head over there and they got me a brand new O2. The machine ran in the $5K plain.. mine had the works. Later on I sold it for $6,000 and with $4,000 more i had saved I bought myself an Octane, which I got it souped up too thanks to my friends in SGI, then a coupel of years later SGI was announcing their DREADED Visual Station, and I got the mofo one.. with all the SCSI and Dual P3 (sloted CPU) 600Mhz. In paper and theoretically it kicked ass, but when it finally launched it SUCKED big time. MS never delivered the FireWire options.. it was a shit. Then I got stuck with that machine till I bought an AMD Athlon... My last computer, and the one I like the most was the one I aquired this last fall. I love it. Its the QuadMac with 4gb of ram... hopefully it should last me a lifetime...
Servers on the other hand, I managed to lowlevel hack the local university's Digital VAX and eventually landed on their Digital Unix DEC's. Ahh the wonderful days of mosaic... ;)
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
But the real computer, the real thing, was the Amiga 500. It's extremely hard (impossible?) to describe to newcomers what this computer was for a whole generation of geeks. It was not the 3D, the multichannel music, the blitter, the strange hardware design with several custom chips, etc. It was the spirit. Almost every hacker in Europe had an Amiga. The demos, the intros, the cracktros, the disk magazines, the european diskswappers, all the groups -with their musicians, coders, gfx-artists-. The demo-parties -and even copy-parties-, the demoscene spirit. Well, what can I say? Has any other computer in history had this background ?
For a brief time there was a computer designed by and for geeks and it ruled over all the other computers (unfortunately this meant that it crashed economically later, but that's another history).
Names to remember here ? Too many to mention. Quartex, Paranoimina, Vogue and Mr.H (of course!), Defender of the Crown, Shadow of the Beast, X-Copy, Spaceballs, Nine Fingers, SoundTracker, AMOS and everyone's favorite: Guru meditation.
Is it just me or am I the only one here who wasn't magically bestowed a multi-thousand-dollar machine by the parents when I was a child?
My family had an 8MHz 80286 Tandy 1000TX in 1988 when I was a kid. But in order to answer the posed question accurately, I'll have to admint that I didn't have a computer that was "mine" until well after I moved out and had my first full-time job (circa 2000). In fact, it's my main workstation even today. Except for a recent motherboard upgrade, I suppose you could say that I'm still using "my" first computer to post this very comment, despite having 18 years of experience (hardware, software, programming) under my belt.
Don't remember the date, but must have been some time around 1978, after High School, but before I graduated from college. This was a couple of years after the 6800 was introduced (1975), so it was probably an older eval board that my father picked up and brought home for me to play around with. I had actually done some programming a couple of years earlier in High School (1973) on a HP system (unknown model) with a card reader and TTY terminal, running BASIC. This was the only High School that I knew of in the area where students could actually physically get their hands on the computer (as opposed to simple batch terminals linked to a larger system off site somewhere).
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Big old clunker, only had dual 8 inch floppy drives.
I had a VT-52 terminal, ASCII only, no graphics.
The box itself had 16k words of core memory and no boot ROM card, so each time I started it I had to toggle in the boot code on the front panel switches. Fortunately I figured out a VERY short routine which worked. The core memory consisted of two 8K by 18 bit (2 parity bits) planes, each of which was a quad wide card for the Unibus backplane, and two logic cards each of which was hex wide. The RX-01 floppy drive required an interface card, as did the serial interface for the VT-52. IIRC those two were quad width. This thing pulled well over 1000 watts of power.
RT-11 was very much like DOS. A friendly DEC field service person gave me the full software distribution, which operated quite differently than the way Microsoft does. What you get is a bootable OS which brings you into a SYSGEN procedure. In this, you specify exactly what you have for peripherals, what their bus addresses and interrupts are, and the code essentially assembles and links up a custom version of the OS for you. That's right, you actually had the source code right there. I took advantage of this to add my own "extensions" and later, device drivers (tricky until you got the hang of it).
RT-11 ran BASIC, which I used for most quicky stuff, and of course ASM.
Later on I acquired a Xerox Diablo removable cartridge hard drive (5 MB fixed, 5 MB removable) but still no boot card, they were still expensive. Eventually I picked up a Qbus box from where I worked (they used the cards in their own custom backplanes and boxes) and found a full set of 11/23 cards for $5 each (!!!) at some surplus place up in Woburn. There was even an AMD 2901 based math coprocessor which had a guaranteed maximum speed of 1 Mflop. Picked up a NEC spinwriter real cheap due to being only for 230 volts (big deal, sit a $5 autotransformer behind it).
Wrote my own checkbook balancing and accounting package, ran a small business from the system for years.
Switched to an IBM compatible AT clone at 10 MHz when I needed to run a PC board layout package (don't remember the name but it had a dongle) and this machine was slightly faster than the 11/23. Almost went Mac route but it was the availability of software that I needed that made the decision.
Timex Sinclair 1000 - hated the keyboard.
Toyed w/ it for a week or so and the magazine that came w/ it (programs to type in) - then sent it back - I cut a few million more lawns and saved my $$ for a vic20 - bought a few months before the C64 officially came out (@#%!$^@%).
I remember riding my bike 2 towns over to the Toys R Us, drooling at the 1541 floppy drive and the C64 strapped to a pegboard with bungee cords and hanging from the ceiling. All that speed and whopping storage - I prolly had a woody.
Get your tagline off my lawn.
had a whole 16k of ram
IBM PC Junior baby! Hacked up to have 640k total. Those memory sidecars were bigger than the XBox 360 power supply!! Imagine that!!
The first computer I had access to was a DEC-20 as part of my town's rec dept program, which introduced me to BASIC programming, which I blame for my ongoing programming fascination. But in high school I took the money I'd saved for a car and bought an Apple ][+, springing for the 64k RAM package but not a floppy drive. My parents finally gave in to my whining about the cassette loading and bought me a drive. I used that computer for quite a while, and taught myself 6502, Pascal, and even C on it. Being a high-schooler in the early 80s, I learned all about 6502 and disk operating systems in the process of figuring out how to crack and copy games. Oddly enough, I probably owe a lot of my early programming education to the feeble copy protection schemes used back then (and the Apple's wonderful ROM-based disk bootstrapper).
Why must we have a retrospective on computer history every 3 days? It seems like a computer history story is on slashdot or some other tech website almost CONSTANTLY. It wasn't even last WEEK that the founders of Sun got together to discuss the early history of Sun and Unix, ad infinitum.
I already KNOW that computers have advanced tremendously. I already KNOW that everyone started programming on a machine that had a clock speed of less than 1MHz and the memory capacity of an earthworm. I already KNOW that we all started off with 110 baud modems and acoustic couplers. ENOUGH ALREADY!!
Unless you started programming on something older than a 360, your history babbling will be of NO INTEREST to ANYBODY.
My parents borrowed TRS-80s periodically from Motorola, but the first machine they bought for my exclusive use was a MEK6800D2, or D2 Kit, as we affectionately called it. My dad must have got it around 1977 when I was 7 and my brother was 6. My dad had to assemble it, and when he was done soldering, we were confronted with two raw breadboards, a homebrew powersupply, a hex keypad, and 6 segmented LEDs. It wasn't exactly the TRS-80 we'd hoped for. My mom taught my brother and I how to write assembler and translate it by hand into machine code. I still clearly remember her describing the accumulator. My dad joined some sort of club for the thing and got the code to play music on a speaker he hacked on. My brother and I spent hours typing it in on the hex keypad and writing our own songs in hex. We had a drawing of a piano with the corresponding notes translated into frequencies and their hex values. My brother ultimately got it to play the Star Wars theme. Our efforts on the D2 Kit convinced my parents to blow the big money on a Vic-20 when they came out, and we forgot the D2 Kit for another 15 years. I took a senior-level microcontroller class at Arizona State University, and I ended up spending a semester programming it again. My brother took the same class a year later. That was enough for me, but my brother still spends his spare time coding assembler.
http://daveandvalerie.com/pictures/weddingcar/wedd ingcar-Pages/Image3.html
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
It depends what is meant by first computer. First computer I actually used was an IBM 1130 - with REAL core memory :)
First computer that was mine, was a Kaypro, a metal luggable, ala Osborne, but imho better.
Am I the only one who wants to slap all the young fools who claim to have worked on some computer when they were 3? Look, you didn't use punch cards. You've never seen a punch card.
Isn't it enough that I have to deal with these guys at work who are 25 and claim they have been email administrators for 15 years?! Watching your daddy hook up a modem to his computer doesn't make you an administrator!
Cause everyone wants a free Xbox360
Wow... 60GB for $1850 in 1985, that is one heck of a deal. ;) Your typo really says a lot about how far technology has come, though. 60MB just looks wrong today, it's hard to believe that was once considered tons of room.
My first PC was the next iteration of that Packard Bell, I think. I got it circa 1988, and it was switchable between 12 and 16mHz. It only had a 20 or 40MB hard drive as I recall, though.
TI-99/4A with the tape drive (who needs stinkin' cartridges!)
Commodore 64 with dual 1594 floppy drives(I think they were 1594's)
Sperry HT with dual 360k floppy drives (originally monochrome, upgraded to cga!)
and the list goes on and on...
My first computer was an Apple II+ (my dad had passed it down to me after he upgraded to a IIe). Hour and hours and hours of Three Mile Island later I was a born computer nerd.
My first real machine was PC clone 486sx25 with 80megabyte HDD. That computer got me into PC upgrades and repair that became a career. I remember waiting hours for morph to run...
Apple free since 1990!
Amazing. I was sure I was the only one who'd be posting a 2200.
I also had access to a first generation PDP-11/70 at the same time, but I never wrote any code on it because paper terminals seemed, well, uncool compared to the Wang's TTL greenscreen and audio-cassette program storage. I still have a cassette of my programs somewhere, but I would imagine it's lost some gauss since I last used it in 1975.
...for the record, I did get a 100cc kawasaki a few years later.... and didnt end up a stadium motorcross racer. cheers.
A true piece of history, being the first microcomputer with Microsoft BASIC in ROM.
Visualize Whirled P.'s
You should never buy the first generation of anything
--- What?
Oh man, that took me straight back to high school... starting at about 11, so you could double your turns at midnight on TW. Flirting with Violet in the Inn. Good Times (tm).
Did I mention I still have that machine?
Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
Yep the TI99/4-A was my first.
Like all my computers I kept it in use long after it should have been retired. I even found some company that sold old TI99/4-A stuff in the early 90's that helped me keep it has my primary computer until I got to college.
In the late 80's I go a 2nd computer. An old Corona Portable (it is bigger than my desktop is now). This was my first introduction to DOS and a 1200 baud modem!
The 90's began and I went to college. I got a sickly old IBM PS2 for that. About the only use I ever had for it was to play a dos bridge program. I was so happy the college's computer lab let me in. I don't even know what was in the lab but they were "real" computers.
College ended and I ended up buying an eMachine 400 off of the home shopping network. It was great. For $1000 I got not only the computer and monitor, but also the scanner and printer (both of which I still use today) and tons of software. The eMachine lasted without any problems until 2005 when both the powersupply and harddrive died.
About 2000, I got a new portable computer. One that was actually smaller than my desktop. This was some old CompUSA refubrished over at ubid.com. That lasted about a year, as I gave it rather heavy use.
I replaced the portable in 2002 with an old Dell Latitude also off of ubid.com. That saw heavy use as well. It was also the first computer I put Linux on. It finally died after an unfortunate incident with a can of Dr. Pepper.
I again replaced the portable in 2004, this time with a new Toshiba Satellite. Every stat on this thing was at least 10x better than my desktop. Heck every stat was at least 5-10x better than the previous portable. This quickly became my main computer. My only regret so far is that I have not installed Linux on it yet.
Finally last year, I had to buy a new desktop. After researching, I found a good deal on a spiffy new Compaq Presario from Sam's Club. For about $1000, I got about 3x more computer than my laptop. Only mistake I made was not getting the DVD burner (what was I smoking that day?!?). I quickly ripped out WinXP and installed Linux again. The great news was that my old printer and scanner worked with this new computer.
Anyway I found my both of my first two computers in the garage the other day. I've got to come up with some use for them. Any suggestions?
...my first proper machine was a 486 (dx2 no less WITH maths co-processor). Yes that's right folks; I've allways been used to having CPU cycles to piss away. Perhaps this is why I'm now a .NET programmer.
/coat
I don't wipe my arse with any less than 2Gb RAM.
throw new NoSignatureException();
compared to other people's. The first computer I used was in school in 3rd grade. It was an Apple IIe. By 7th-8th grade we had a Mac Classic (with a HD!). Then in Nov of 1993 my family ordered their first computer, a Gateway 486SX, 33MHz, 212MB HD, 4MB RAM, 3.5 FDD, 1MB Video RAM (on board) and a 15" crystal scan monitor. It ran Win 3.1. We upgraded this pc in 95 to include a 6X CD-ROM (8x wouldn't work for some reason) and an ensonic sound card.
In 1997 we upgraded again to a Gateway 233MHz PII, 32MB RAM, 4.3GB HD (ATA 33), 3.5FDD 24X CD-ROM, 4MB video card, external 100MB ZIP, soundblaster card, USB, 33.6 modem (flashable to 56k) and it ran Win 95b.
My first system was Aug of 99. Gateway P3 500MHz, 128MB RAM, 20GB HD (ATA 66), 24/4/4 CDR/W, DVD-ROM, 3.5 FDD, internal 100MB ZIP, 10/100 NIC, 56k modem, 17" flat crt monitor. This system totally kicked ass and is still in use today (with major upgrades).
Current system was bought in April of 2004. Gateway M675XL notebook P4 3.2GHz (desktop processor), 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, DVD/CD-RW, 17" wide screen lcd, 10/100/1000 NIC, 56k modem, 128MB ATI Mobility 9600. Very nice system and it still smokes some of the newer notebooks even though it's almost 2 years old.
I have serveral other systems at home (desktops & servers) from different manufacturers (Dell, Gateway, Compaq) but I don't need to list them here. This was a fun thread.
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
150 BC.
beat that mofo's
VIC 20 -> 64 -> Amiga -> PC -> Still waiting for my MacBook Pro
In terms of impact, the VIC 20 will always have the advantage of being the first time I could sit down alone and let my imagination run riot, but the Amiga still remains my firm favourite.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
I started out in the 6th grade on our old school computers (Apple ][ and Apple ][c) until I found an apple-clone (something ending in 128) at a garage sale.
I enjoyed programming in BASIC, and my first x86 machine was much of a let-down. The first computer I bought first-hand was a 133mhz Micron with 1.2 GB HD, when top-of-the-line was 166mhz with 1.6 GB HD. Ahh how things have bloated.
Anyone heard of the Sony MSX? I guess it must have been contemporary to the C64, etc... It booted straight to a BASIC prompt. You could load up programs through an external tape machine or with ROM cartridges, which cost a fortune.
Good times those...
Tapes played up at 1x, so you might have to wait for about an hour for a game to load up. (And no guarantee at all that it would actually work the first time around).
One of the things that come to mind now is that it actually had a functional (printing-wise) parallel port.
I saw some later models come with disk drives.
My parents bought me a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16KB of RAM and a tape drive. circa 1981. about 1 month after that I did my 1st hardware mod by upgrading to 64KB of ram. I used that machine up to '88 when I retired it and got a CoCo3 with 512KB of RAM. That's when I started using OS/9 Level 2, the best OS I've ever had the pleasure of working with. When the CoCo3 died in '92 (while I was writing a term paper for integrated devices class in college) my parents bought my 1st x86 machine for me. An AMD 386DX-40MHz with 4MB of RAM, an 80MB hard drive running Stacker and a SVGA card that would display up to 800x600 with 16 colors.
I got my 1st modem in '84. A 300 baud beast that had a switch to select answer or originate, and a button to turn it on after you dialed the phone by hand.
To this day I tell my mom the money she spent on that CoCo2 was the best money she ever spent on me.
Mmmmm, old.
James P. Barrett
But that was only in school. Starting at age 9 in 1978, TRS-80 model III. When I was 12 or so my grandfather bought me one of the first TRS-80 color computers. Upgraded to an Apple II when I was 15, didn't own a PC until I was about 21 or so.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
My first computer was an Ohio Scientific Superboard II. It had 4K of RAM. It cost me $110 to add another 4K. The big kicker ... it had a Microsoft Basic in ROM ... and it had a bug in it that I could never fix. Bill's bugs have been around for 25 years! The other day I realized that I was an overclocker way back then ... I found plans and upgraded to clock speed to 2mhz from 1mhz ... doubled the speed of the computer! It used a tape deck to save / read data at 300 baud. The data displayed on the screen as it loaded. I used to play an adventure game called pyramid. I had to turn the monitor (tv) off when loading the game so that I did not read the code (basic) and figure it out as it loaded.
I still have the computer. It still works, Bill's bugs and all!
My first computer was a Exidy Sorcerer http://oldcomputers.net/sorcerer.html and I used it to type up a school report about whale's. My father brought it home one day. We had it hooked up to a electronic daisy wheel typewriter from brother.
I still have the computer, with the (Very) large disk reader.
From then I went on to a zx-81, various MSX computers, a philips yes and than a "proper" PC.
Now I'm typing this on a Dell D800 widescreen (1920x1200) notebook.
My first computer. Oh man those were the days. My first computer was an Ohio Scientific C1P. It had a 6502 microprocessor, 8K RAM, 8K ROM. It had no clock. I had to use a casette recorder to load or save programs. If I wanted a cursor to be able to backspace I had to load a BASIC program first. I used an RF modulator so I could hook it to a portable black & white TV for a monitor.
I paid $450 for it in 1979 and I managed to sell it in 1990 for $50 to someone who thought it was the bomb. Otherwise, it would have made a very expensive boat anchor. By that time I had a Mac Plus.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I learned BASIC on various TRS-80s (m I, m III, Coco) at Radio Shack - back in those days, for some reason they didn't mind a 10 year old sitting at the computer for hours, day after day. The first computer my parents actually bought for me was an Atari 800, though, and I consider that the machine I learned to program on for real. It was the best of the 8 bits, IMO - Jay Miner, who later went on to do the Amiga design, was a genius.
To provide a time frame, the first computer I COULD have owned was an Apple ][. However, my family couldn't afford a computer so, I'd check out books on BASIC from the library, write programs on notebook paper, and then debug them in my head. (the first non-virtual computer I owned was a pentium)
With a tape drive! My father taught computer science and electronics at the high school level... which brought home every flavour of computing device that was institutionalized...
yummy QNX terminals with the amber monitors! I still miss that stability.
My father and I worked on rudimentary networks with C64s and a whopping 120 MB fileserver! Networked C64s! Muppet controller fun! Back then you couldn't hotplug a dongle...
Naturally, my first love was art as a result. I have since been fully assimilated and have worked professionally in IT for 12 years, using anything x86, PPC, Motorolla 68K... I am Locutus (with more hair).
I would have an RFID chip inserted if I didn't need to carry any ID in the future, but then again... with the recent Verichip fiasco, I think I'll hold off until we can get something a bit more robust...
Pablo Picasso said it best: 'Computers are useless, they only give you answers.'if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
I don't have a computer, you insensitive clod!
Here's a shoutout for the Atari 1040ST... I had a computer with a megabyte of memory in 1987 that cost about the same amount of money as an Apple IIe decked out. I really wish it would have caught on more here the States because none of my own friends - outside of the local Atari computer club - had one. They all had Commodore 128s with the exception of another friend who had an Apple IIc.
My cousins got my 1040ST when I migrated up to the Falcon before the death spiral of Atari Corp.'s computer line. I then transitioned over to the PC - because it looked like the Mac was doomed - in 1996 with a Pentium clone built at a "screwdriver shop". In mid 2003, when my parents finally wanted to learn how to use computers and the internet, I insisted they buy a Mac (an eMac in fact) because their prior experience with one of the PCs I built turned out to be a nightmare. I intend to fully switch over to OSX myself this year, perhaps when the Intel powered iBook replacements arrive...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
IBM PCjr, 80186, 80286, 386sx16 (did a lot of yardwork to get the mobo/proc/4mb ram from a neighbor who had upgraded). at this point i started dumspter diving and had all kinds of neat parts. now, as a netadmin/maincomputerguy/1man IT i give all my old parts to a coworker's neighbor kid who is beside himself with joy.
e
The first computer I played with was MANIAC, a tube machine with persistent CRT memory and paper tape input. It lived across the street from my home on the campus of the University of New Mexico. But I never actually programmed it.
First computer programmed - IBM 7094.
First computer whose operating system I hacked into - GE-635/GECOS-III (later Honeywell 6000).
The only good weather is bad weather.
My first experiments in computing were done using a Sinclair ZX81. Just 1K of RAM and a terrible keyboard -- but it was the start of the revolution! I ended up adding a 16K RAM pack {the original upright one -- soon to be replaced with a better-shaped one that actually stayed in contact with the motherboard}, and even that infernal printer that seemed to spend more time jammed than printing {which it did by burning a coating off the paper, thereby producing some disagreeable fumes ..... and all my mates thought I was weird for refusing the Evo Stik .....} Eventually upgraded it with a proper keyboard, and soldered the memory expansion in place while I was at it.
..... think what I could have done with it, if only electronics had not been so expensive in those days!
When I had exhausted the potential of the ZX81, I upgraded to a BBC model B. Now that really was truly a classic machine
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Built it from kit. Couldn't afford the case or power supply so built those myself and housed it in the top drawer of a filing cabinet. 16K of memory and read programs from a tape recorder (no not a tape drive...an old fashion cassette recorder). http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?s t=1&c=567.
Around 1984 when I was in hi skool, I discovered the Apple 2e. There was also a few ][+ models too. By making friends with some computer nerds, I acquired disks of cracked games and whatever else was being traded around. I remember carrying that plastic flip n file disk box around! I used the computers at skool, and played with a neighbor's 800XL with disk drives. I typed in programs from COMPUTE! I did not get my own computer util around 1987. There was an apple ][+ in the paper for $150 so I managed to get the money and bought it. Unfortunately, it did not have a disk drive so I didnt do much with it until I bought a controller card and Mitac disk drive from JAMECO. This computer had an aftermarket encoder board which allowed lower case characters, autorepeat and macros too. Around 1988 I paid $150 for the AE viewmaster 80 card which allowed me to run Appleworks on my plus! I also remember getting a Zoom 300bps modem and actually making a connection to a local BBS. I was proud to be one of the few that owned a computer. The only problem I had was that I could not run programs that required an enhanced //e and required 128k and mousetext. It would also crash sometimes or lose the DOS connection. Running with the lid off seemed to help. I still have the computer safely stashed away. I replaced the RAM chips, but was still unstable. Over the years, I have acquired multiple Apple // series computers. The only one I dont have yet is an original ][ without autostart ROM
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
My first was a fully configured TI-99/4A. It wasn't mine though. It belonged to a TI executive-type who had the $'s and connections to get all the cool sh*t. This thing had every accessory made at the time plus a few that TI hadn't released.
The first one that was actually mine was an Amiga 1000. After that I had an assortment of Kaypros, Compaqs, and assorted pc clones. When I started coding for a living I had a AST 386 box and a Mac SE/30. I loved that SE/30.
This sig kills fascists.
Addiator was a mechanical computer for adding and subtracting.
Test 1 2 3 4
My first computer experience was in 1977, using a Univac 70/7 mainframe running the TSOS operating system. It was really a relabeled RCA Spectra/70 machine. In a sense, this box was the first "Amdahl" in the sense it was machine instruction compatible with an IBM 360. We even used IBM 360 green cards for programming in BAL (the assembly language.
I don't know the specs for the 70/7, but the newer/faster replacement mainframe was a Univac 90/80, with 3 megabytes of memory--a huge amount of memory in 1978.
80386 SX/16 MHz
VGA
Mouse
60MB MRE Hard Drive
5.25 and 3.5 Disk Drives
DOS 4
Turbo button
Only $2000
When I was 11 (in 1962) my Father started reading books on computers and what they could do. I did too and started teaching myself what computer languages were and I started writing small programs on paper. I could't of course run them.
In 1968 he got a Honeywell 516, a machine the size of 2 washing machines and a microwave (one washing machine box held the processor, the other the memory and the microwave on top held a paper tape reader and punch). There was a standalone teletype. He set out to prove you could automate a coal mine with it (he worked in the research department of the UK Coal Board). I went to his office in the school holidays and wrote programs for it.
First computer used: Atari 800 playing Space Raiders during the 1st shuttle liftoff.
First computer owned: Atari 1200xl in 1983 or so, bought and paid for with my own paper route money saved up over several years. Initially I had no backup, so I hand typed just about every BASIC program in, played it for a while, only to be deleted when I turned the machine off. I can remember spending hours and hours creating adventure/dungeons and dragons games by typing in lots of If...then statements. Even my Mom was impressed when I typed in a program from a magazine that produced a picture of a turkey. My best friend at the time had even had the honor of being published! Oh, how jealous I was that he had an Apple II with a cassette tape recorder that his parents had bought him, and it allowed him to create these programs and actually save them.
To think that I just bought a $450 eMachines that is so capable... but there is no programming language unless I install Linux or purchase software. BASIC was so simple, so fun... so much joy at typing '10 print "Lalalalalal" 20 goto 10 run'.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
a 186 (or a clone i don't remember) which had a CGA card and played games such as wizball,pacman and lunar patrol. ,486,
I learned to use DOS on it.It had 2 floppy drives 1.used for os(dos 2/3) and/or games which boot without it
2. for other stuff that requires dos(i had a stack of 5" floppies with games and few progs),
The bios on it had a funny test program that filled pixels on the screem randomly.After it i used a 286
a celeron 333,and now typing this from
AMD duron 2300 running my trusty win98.
Southwest Technical Prod's 6800. 14 minutes to load BASIC from cassette. And we had both A$ and B$ to play with!
http://www.swtpc.com/
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I started playing around with the mainframe at the college where my dad was a security guard. I was the only nine-year-old with a user account. Heh heh. From there I went on to hanging out in Radio Shaft and playing around with the TRS-80 Level I (before they called it the Model I.)
The first computer of my own was the Atari 800. Apple was nice, but I avoided it because Atari had the best graphics and sound hardware in its day. Besides, Star Raiders was the killer app, and I still play it with the free Atari800Win Plus emu every now and then.
I did a little hacking too, thanks to Omnimon. It was a circuit board that plugged into one of the ROM chip sockets, and it filled the unused $C000-$CFFF block of memory with a program that allowed one to interrupt anything with a press of Select and System Reset. It was now possible to take the machine code of a program that's running (even game carts) and do some simple disassembly. It also had a mini assembler that worked one instruction at a time. The Omnimon board also had one wire patched into the ROM that held the top of memory (to $FFFF) which is how it interrupts the boot process. (The last few bytes were pointers used by warm and cold starts.) There was also a three-position toggle switch that I added to the case. If I remember right, one setting allowed interruption, one restored the original ROM pointers, and the last position made the $C000 block disappear so the machine looked unaltered. Unfortunately, the later models used that memory area (probably for the rainbow logo and that sophisticated "self-test.") I think I saw a mention of a version of Omnimon designed for the newer machines, but I had the original.
Oh yeah, I also added a little switch in the bottom to silence the internal speaker since I would be writing programs through the night. At one point I upgraded the beast from a CTIA to GTIA chip and enjoyed the extra graphics modes that were in the later models, and I took out the power LEDs and replaced them with green ones. Ahh, the memories!
I remember being in awe of the bank switching technique used in the macro assembler cartridge I owned. I wasn't to shabby at speaking 6502 and Antic display list instructions. Heh heh.
That old computer died eventually. The keyboard needed to be replaced, and by that time they were impossible to find and cost over $100. After using a driver I wrote that made the escape key a space bar substitute (unless shift was pressed,) the computer was fried by a power surge. It died slowly over the course of a month, and towards the end started rebooting spontaneously. I laid it to rest and got myself a 65XE. A few years down the road that computer was stolen from storage, but they didn't get my carts and disks. I hope they had fun with it, and the high-pitched whine my poor old 13" TV had. Heh heh heh.
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
Atari XL800 was my first computer too. The first computer I touched (or was touched by) was a Salora Fellow though - brought from the States by an airline pilot relative of a friend. I think I was 5 or 6 at the time. We didn't know what to do with it, but we had loads of fun anyway. The first couple of hours we just typed in stuff and took turns "eating" the text with backspace. Those were the days.
My grandfather bought me the XL800. He was around 75 at the time, but he understood that computers were the way to go - a smart man. I just saw it in the window of the computer store and liked the module port on the top of the thing. The XL800 was a good computer and served for many years.
I also got a C64 (because everyone else had one), then Amiga 500, then the first PC (25 MHz), a Pentium (66MHz), a Pentium Pro (200MHz), a Thunderbid (800MHz upgraded later to 1,2 GHz), now TB 2600+.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
My first computer was an apple IIe (2nd hand, Apple equipment was hugely expensive in the UK at that time)primarily as it was required to run a Greengate DS3 card to give, at that time, the only affordable musical sampling instrument. Green screen & two 5 and a quarter floppy drives all to give a massive 1.2 secs of sampling time.I looked at a IIgs but went down the Amiga path some years later via the Atari 1040st.
The first computer I owned was a Commodore VIC-20. I had no storage capability, so I'd spend all day typing in some horrid game from a magazine. Then I'd have to leave the computer on or I'd lose it. Well, that eventually killed the thing. By that point my school had an Apple, and a few years later I got an Atari 130 XE.
My real start, though, was on Trash 80s *at* Radio Shack. That's right, I learned to program sitting at the display model. The clerks hated my guts:
10 PRINT "FUCK!"
20 GOTO 10
// This is not a sig.
up up down down left right left right b a select start
My first computing experience, I believe, was on a good old Tandy in kindergarten back around '87 or so. The first computer that was actually mine was a Mac LCII purchased around '90. Don't worry. That's the only Mac I ever had. (aside from those I pickud up for nostalgic purposes) -Yoweigh
Vax 730 or 750 not quite sure which. First 'Personal' computer was a DECMate II.
Well, actually, it was my dad's. He bought it and assembled it, us kids used it to play Star Trek on the TV Typewriter. Actually there was something wrong with the TV Typewriter, so we knew the game as "Star Vrek".
The first computer that was MINE, ALL MINE! was an Atari 800. I also had a Sinclair ZX-80, an Atari 520 STm, and a TRaSh-80.
My dad still has the IMSAI stored somwhere under a pile of Kilobaud, DDJ, and Byte magazines.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I didn't even know what computer programming WAS at the time!
LOL!
Just get a box that you can load Linux or *BSD on. Not quite out of the box, but the installs aren't that hard these days.
After that you can program in many languages: C, C++, sh, Perl, etc.
The first computer I used was some GE timesharing system back in 1972.
:-)
The first computer I owned was an IMSAI 8080 that I built from the kit in 1976. And I bought an 8K RAM board (that I also had to build) for only $200!
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
With a 40 meg HD and 4megs of RAM. My college advisor (chair of the education dept.-I was studying to be a teacher) said a "40 meg hard drive will be plenty"
Which actually is true if all you're doing is creating documents in MacWrite.
http://www.gondolin.org.uk/hchof/machines/pet2001- 8.html
:)
It took about 8 weeks to deliver but they sent us the manual right away and I used it to learn basic and wrote 4 game programs on paper before it arrived
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
A friend of my dad's copied me over 150 games for it when I got it. I was the most popular geek around.
And another one starting with this awesome 1MB-RAM machine! Floppies only in my case, hardly credible today, that this was possible...
Although the first computer I spend time on was a C64 which belonged to a friend. Ah, I feel all nostalgic reading this thread!
I had the pimpinest RS Pocket computer back in the day, complete with thermal printer, expanded memory and all the accessories.
it was TEH BOMB!! I could play one line text games on it! I could add, subtract, multiply AND DEVIDE!!
man I miss that pos..
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
I had an atari 400 with a tape drive / BASIC cart. in '80 and then upgraded to an 800xl in 85. My first PC clone was a 386sx-16 in '91
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
The P.C. I used was my dad's. He'd got it from his dad after he had died. It was an 286 and it didn't even have a hard drive 'cause the one in there had broken. We had to load MS-DOS from a diskette, and then load any program we wanted to use from a diskette. I knew no different though, so when we got an old 386 from a friend of my dad's, I was so happy I didn't have to fiddle around with disks. I'm 18, and my friends never understand why I "come from the days of DOS". They all had GUIs on their first computers.
A block of code, sufficiently well-written, is indistinguishable from magick.
was the first system I ever worked with, followed by an IBM 7080, 360/40, 370/165,and so on, up until the 3090's. After that it was into the storage world..
First system I ever owned on my own was an Altair 8080
33 years in IT and counting...
Technically my first computer was a TI-89. The kind you hook up to a TV. But I consider my first one to be the Kaypro II since I could actually save my Basic programs to floppy instead of leaving the computer on and hoping my little siblings don't shut the power off losing the 4 pages of code I had tediously typed in the day before on my TI-89.
Good times.
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
A Vax 11/780 at the DEC office in Ottawa, ON circa 1978. :-)
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
Star Trek Calendars, Tax Tables, and Snoopy Games. Oh, and a Wumpus.
Shortly thereafter, I messed around with a Sinclair ZX80. I was hooked. I love the smell of solder flux in the morning.
Moved through a second-hand HP calculator (desk sized) that included a thermal printer and a 'magnetic card reader' for storage. It used RPN and it was addictive. (Noisy, and gave the impression it was working hard when it calculated.)
I didn't see an x86 until the early 90s. A feat that likely helped me quite a bit.
I got my first computer 20 years ago. It was a Atari 600XL, which i recieved for my birthday. I remember typing listing from magazines on it, but since i've had no tape or disk drive i've let the computer run all night so i wouldn't lose the program :-) After working all summer i had enough money to buy a tape drive.
:-)
:-)
The computer also had 2 cartridges with games (ala Atari 2600, one was Star Raiders 2), which i couldn't get to work. I've exchanged the first 600XL thinking it was broken. A few months later i discovered by accident that you had to first insert the cartridge before turning on the machine (*duh*)
After 4 years i traded it in for a C64, a decision i still regret to this day. Some years later i bought a 130XE just for the sentimental value
Great times....
..hello ?..is this thing on ?...
My very first computer was an Atari 800. I got it in 9th grade and was still using it in 12th grade to type papers. I was a BASIC writing, PEEKing POKEing fool!
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
My first computer was an EXL-100, from Exelvision of France, in 6th grade I believe which was, like, 1985. The company was started I believe by one or more French TI engineers who built their stuff from a TI chipset (rather than a single uproc). Its remarkable features were a "pro" form factor with a wireless (IR) keyboard separate from the CPU and some sound DAC used as a "voice synthetizer" giving pretty amazing results for the era.
One of a flurry of simple home computers from European companies in the early 80s, it didn't benefit from the government support (in the form of education sales) of its compatriots TO-7 and MO-5 from state-owned company Thomson. It didn't have the "cool games" and one year later I switched to a CPC-464 from Amstrad of the UK.
With a 12" green screen monitor! Woo.
:(
I learnt to program on that - my parents wouldn't give me any games until I had 'learned' to use it.
So I typed in games from magazines, back when they did type-ins. Usually BASIC programs, sometimes with embedded machine code. I learnt by a process of osmosis, from adding new levels to games, to new features, then writing my own games.
Specs: 4MHz Z80A CPU, 64KB RAM, 32KB ROM, tape storage (built in), good keyboard - albeit colourful (ripped off of the Enterprise 64 I found out later). They were good times - computers with souls. My friend had a C64 which I thought sucked for programming but the games and sound were cool. At school I used RM Nimbus PC-kinda-compatibles. I remember playing an adventure game called 'L', which I quite liked. I managed to miss the BBC micro days though
My first system was a TI-99/4a that my dad got in the early early 80s (1982 or 1983). He's a EE and was doing some amount of microcontroller programming @ work, and thought this would be a cool toy computer. We had a tape drive hooked up so we could use the BASIC interpreter and run programs from tape... I remember typing in programs from magazines and even whole books of code ("BASIC games" and stuff like that, it's still sitting in my parents' basement), and getting hooked on programming that way.
:)
We had some game cartridges too (Parsec, woo woo!), and my dad & brother & I all spent time playing those, but it was the idea that you could type in your programs and RUN them that amazed me. We got an NES later, but the idea of programmable computers stuck with me. Guess that's why I like using Linux/BSD/open-source operating systems instead of Windows.
We later got an IBM Model 8180 PC (with CGA graphics!) in 1985 that my mom used to run her own business, and a bastard 386 clone with a VGA card around 1991 or 1992. The first computer that was actually mine, all mine, was a Compaq Presario CDS 524 - all-in-one box, 14" monitor, 4MB RAM, Cirrus Logic VGA chipset with 512K VRAM - took it to college, and had all sorts of fun with it until I bought a Gateway Pentium Pro box a few years later.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
My progression from 1986/97 - present
/w Basic & max RAM -> Comodore 128 + external ram module & Comodore 80c col monitor -> Packard Bell PB 500 (8088 w/turbo mode, 640K/80mb) -> Packard Bell (frogot model#) Pentium I 60mhz, 8mb RAM (sodderd on MB), 540MB HD -> Compaq Pentium I 166mhz w/ MMX, 24mb/2.1GB -> AMD k6-2 400,(custom, frogot rest), -> AMD Athlon 1440 Mhz (frogot rest) -> Dual G4 867, 1.5gb RAM, 2 X 80GB HD.
NES -> Atari 800
Wouldn't that be 60 MB?
60 Gigabytes hard drives came several years later. I remember working on the school computers and complaining on the small hard drives (8086 IBM's with 5 Mb hard drives, 640 Kb RAM and Microsoft's Quikbasic in the firmware)
For me 5 Mb was small because my first computer was a Magnavox 286 - 12 MHz wit an 80 MEGABYTES hard drive and 1 MB of RAM for $1200; small letters: "does not include monitor".
I spend the 1990 Xmas with a mint in box computer without monitor, my parents where more down than me bacause of the mistake, I was happy to own a computer nevertheless. The 14" Phillips VGA display was $400 a month latter, a very good price if you consider that I used it in 3 systems for more than 7 years until it finally died arround my last year in college.
16,777,216 comments ought to be enough for any forum!
My first computer was a MITS Altair 8800, followed by a TRS-80 Model II, an Atari 800 and then an early Apple, IIe I think it was. I played around with a C64, but found the Amigas to be a better choice as far as gaming went. I also remember playing with light pens and color ribbon printers around this time...
Then I got a Tandy 1000SL (with its clown-red power button and TGA 640x220x16 graphics...), and from there straight to a 350 MHz Pentium-based mashup box, after that a Compaq P3 800 MHz, and then several Heinz-57 boxes with various processors from Intel and AMD, and now a few Dells (Optiplex and Dimension series) and now I am putting together a new system (AMD-based, as it will be mainly used for gaming).
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Am I the first person in this thread to mention the Science of Cambridge MK14?
8 digits of LED display, hex keyboard, 256 bytes of RAM.
I kind of inherited it from my school (they were replacing two faulty ones, and I managed to cobble together one working one from the two). It was the expanded version, with I/O lines and an extra 128 bytes of RAM.
A working emulator can be found at http://users.aol.com/mk14emu/index.htm.
Then ZX81, Jupiter Ace (another obscure Cambridge-originated computer that used Forth), Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, then a succession of PCs.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
I remember my first modem. I bought it second hand. It was a 9600 Baud ISA modem, right when the 14.4 modems were the fastest. This was in my sophomore year of high school.
The things I learned from it. IRQ conflicts after I figured out how to get it inserted correctly, my mouse was on COM1 & I used it on COM3, I switched the mouse to COM2 as that was easier to do then open the case again. Oh yes that was fun, the other lesson it taught me is that when adding new hardware don't close the case until you are 100% sure it works, because opening the case several times is really annoying.
One other thing that computer was the first computer I could truly call mine. Before the family had owned several computers starting with a commodore 64. They still had a computer I had just bought an old one from Mom & Dad.
Well I built an OSI400 series from bare boards and a chip set
purchased from Mos Technology (6502 and a TIM monitor).
It had 16k of ram (surplus 2102 chips) and ran tiny basic.
I had a single board terminal (forget who made it, but it
was a little better than a tv typewriter).
My second computer was a DEC PDP11/03 which I built out of
thrown out circuit boards (I was working for DEC at the time).
It had 64kb of ram and a dual floppy disk drive (rx01 also
stolen from the scrap heap). I did have to repair a few of the
boards, but most were tossed because they were simply "out of rev".
I also found a KIM-1 at a hamfest fleamarket. Didn't do much with it.
I then bought a z80 single board ("big board") kit, and finally
a PC clone. Since then it's been nothing but pc clones running
Linux.
I didn't get my own until a secondhand TRS-80 in 1989. Actually typed in a quiz program once that exhausted the memory, but my masterpiece was of course a tetris variation. I don't know what happened to that computer, but my dad found me a TRS-80 laptop secondhand somewhere a few years ago. Ironically, the battery time is an order of magnitude better than my year-old pentium laptop.
This space intentionally left blank.
The first computer I programmed was a Monroebot XI (circa 1964).
The first computer I owned was a Heath H-8 (circa 1977).
The first computer I bought was a Data General MicroNova. It was the size of a dishwasher, had 256MB RAM, an 8" floppy and 10MB storage, 5MB fixed and a 12" 5MB cartridge. I had to refinance my house to buy it.
The first application I wrote on it was an inventory and production control system for a vitamin manufacturer.
$sig not found
We poked through BASIC on TRS-80's in the school's gifted ed program, but not much.
:)
My brother actually got first turn at the new box when it came in. Instead, I read the manual. By the time he finally gave up in frustration, I had actually learned something about how to use it.
My first computer was a Commodore 64, though I remember a friend of mine have having a Ti-99 that I used to love to play with. Started with old Dataset drive, but later on I got one of the 1541 disk drives. Best of all, my friend's Commodore 64 died, and they gave me their old drive, so I had two! When I was in elementary school, I remember that I took an after school class at the middle school on the TRS-80. Like most folks here, I also would find copies of Compute! and other rags at the library and try their programs at home.
I actually kept the C=64 using GEOS until about 1990, when we bought a 286/12, and decided to upgrade to 2MB of RAM (instead of 1) and to add the 3.5" floppy drive in addition to the 5 1/4".
It's "no one," not "noone." Who the hell is noone anyway?
The first computer I ever owned was a Basis 108 - an Apple ][ Plus close with a built-in Z-80 card, that I bought in 1982. The first I ever used was UCLA's IBM 360 back in 1975 when I was taking my first (and only) programming class - PL/1
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
But my first computer (circa 1965) was a mechanical plastic job with springs and rods that only had three "bits" to work with. Each bit was a plastic tab which slid back and forth so that either a zero or one would display in the window. Programming was done with plastic straws that blocked movement of the rods. You could input data by sliding the numbered tabs manually. You ran one "cycle" by pushing in and pulling out another tab. It came with a few simple programs, including one game (Nim).
What can I say? Dad was kind of a geek.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Using a terminal (TTY Model 33, IIRC) to connect to an IBM 360/67 at U Michigan in 1970. The computer had 1.5 megabytes of core memory (little electromagnets for you newbies) and cost $14 Million (maybe $70 Million in 2006 money). It occupied two floors of a building.
My first PC was an IBM PC XT, 8088 with a 5 meg hard disk. Green monochrome monitor. I bought it from my employer around 1988.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I got my first computer when I started college all the way back in the year 2000. It was a 1GHz, errr, CPU with 64MB of RAM (which I later upgraded to 512), a video card with 16MB of RAM and a HD with 15GB capacity. It was a shit, noisy computer. Actually, I dunno why I'm talking in the past tense, it's in the room next to mine, happily chugging away with Ubuntu on it....
The first PC I owned was an XT. It had an NEC V20 CPU, which was essentially a 8088, but faster. (8Mhz instead of 4.77Mhz) 640K of RAM. It had a Hercules Monochrome Graphics Adapter, which could emulate 4-color CGA graphics in b/w. A 1200bps modem, which I used for all the local BBSes. A 20MB MFM HDD, and a 360k 5-1/4 Floppy drive. There was also some kind of speech synth card in there. It came with DOS 3.3, though I upgraded to 5.0 later.
:)
It's the machine that I learned all the basics on. I have fond memories of Space Quest 2, Leisure Suit Larry, Sopwith, SimCity, and many other PC classics. I've hung onto it all these years for the sentimental value it has.
My first owned computer was the Grundy Newbrain with 32 k of RAM, Basic, RS-232 port, cassette interface and quite a decent 80 character monocrome display when connected to a TV. It also came with a 16 character one-line display on the unit. It could even run CP/M and had an architecture that supported up to 2 MB of main memory.
I even wrote some assembly embedded in a Basic text processing application to output Norwegian characters in graphics mode on an Epson printer that did not support anything but 7-bit ASCII. It was a fun machine to use, and quite impressive at the time.
Otherwise my first real computer experience was on the Univac university mainframe and the Norsk Data NORD-10 multiuser minicomputer that could support up to 30 concurrent terminals in up to a whopping 256 kilo-words of main memory.
The future is in beta
Complete with big red stop button, front panel register switches, core memory, banks of spinning 9 track tapes, and card reader input. Back when computers really let you know they were computing. After I showed competency with that, then I got to move up to the CDC 6600.
From comments here and asking friends, why is more interesting than what... I got into computers because of an article in a 1977 Games magazine: "From Spacewar to the Oregon Trail". I'm coming up on 30 years and still can't imagine ever getting bored with computers and the dozen hours a day I spend around 'em.
Oh, and to let Irony drag me a few miles off topic, I flunked typing in '78. Couldn't get past 30wpm with >20 years of computer-jockeying, Mavis Beacon said I clock in between 90 and 130 wpm, but I still hammer the everlovin' shit out of the backspace key.
My first computer was a Heathkit Zenith Z-100 i got from my dad. it had 2 8088 cpus, 512k of ram, 2 360k 5 1/4" floppy drives, and an external 300 baud modem. one cpu was used for running cpm in z-100 mode, and the other was used for running dos 3.1 in ibm mode. funny how the thing would frustrate the hell out of me but i only have fond memories of it now. i taught myself dos and basic on it. those were the days...
The first computer I programmed was the Elliot 803 (and, yes, that was in 1963), then I moved on to Atlas - and after that - well, you know the way things go. Now - I program the NEC SX6 (amongst others). But I did not (and do not) own any of these. Does anyone else remember the Superbrain, or the GRI 909? Sigh. Time to go back to my hot cocoa and biscuits now.
Ian D. K. Kelly
idkk Consultancy Ltd.
"Quality through Thought"
My first computer was a NEC 386 SX 20Mhz with 2mb or RAM which we upgraded to 4 and it had a NEC monitor and NEC Dot Matrix Printer.
Yeah, it was after Timex bought out the original Sinclair and put a little "Timex" sticker on it. Man I loved that thing... even though without the 16KB expansion pack, it didn't have enough memory to fill the entire screen in black (!) -- it would run out on the last line with about an inch to go and give a "out of memory" error, which was just a number at the bottom left of the screen. I got the expansion pack though :)
:)
It had this clever idea of using full basic keywords, but having them mapped to single ascii-range characters, so it was more memory efficient. The result was that you'd hit "Function P" and the whole word "PRINT" would appear in your program, but it was actually stored internally as a small number, not a full character sequence of P-R-I-N-T. It also made typing out long programs on it's awful membrane keyboard almost bearable... for a geeky 12 year old anyways.
Tape drive with regular audio inputs that seemed to work about 40% of the time, resulting in lost data the rest of the time. Black on white character-only TV display. No official sound -- though a clever guy published a program that played "music" -- by having you detune your TV to be halfway off the correct channel, and then creating tones by changing the (now scrambled) video display, which would then be incorrectly modulated back into the audio channel by the TV. Ingenious, if not truly listenable.
But it's where I learned to program, and it was great. Until I got my C64 and then I really saw the power
Cheers.
A tandy calculator that could take programming in BASIC. My 2nd was an IBM-XT with an 8088 in it and 640k RAM that we had to install chip-by-chip in 1986. By 1988 we figured out how to OC it to a screaming 8MHz ;)
I wrote many many programs on those machines. Strangely enough, my first completed project was an X rated game on the calculator...
Your imagination just "remembered" a 2x2 pixel font...
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
There were PDP-8s and PDP-11s around that I had exclusive access to, but the very first that was =MINE= was an Altair 8800, built with my own two hands. I still have a running Altar 680b. There was a Southwest Techinical Products 6800 in there somewhere, but I don't know where it went. When I got a Teletype ASR-33 (paper tape reader and punch) connected to the 6800 I only had to key in a loader through the front pannel, and the loader would load the real program. Yea! Before that it was hours of flipping switches.
The two pass 6800 assembler was interesting when using paper tape as the intermediate storage between passes.
young whipersnappers
But I was only born in 1982, so what do you want from me.
My dad and I shared it. We started out with just the console, a tape recorder and an RF modulator hooked up to an old 13" B&W TV set. We eventually ended up with the expansion chassis, twin 5.25 drives and a GARGANTUAN 32K memory expansion card. 32K. In a steel clad case the size of a paper back and you had to pop it into a box the size of two bread boxes. I remember mowing a hell of a lot of lawns to get that silly card.
With 8k of memory!! Ahh the joy of coding FORTRAN on punch cards - first home computer was Atari 800 XL w/ a 13" color TV as a monitor - first Atari BASIC program plotted Sierpinski Triangles.
A friend built my family a Heathkit Z100 around 1984/5. It was supposed to be for my mom's business, but I ended up using it more than her after discovering ZBASIC. Twenty years later I'm still her primary technical support department.
We started out with two 5.25 floppies (single sided, single density) and eventually swapped out one drive for an amazing Winchester Drive (10 meg hard disk). The startup sequence was a little duet of floppy grinding noises, winchester chirps and the Epson MX80 head moving side to side as if waving at me. My computers no longer speak to me.
I've still got Microsoft Windows 1.0 on 5.25 inch floppes for the Z100. And the CPM install disks. And Zork I. For reasons I don't understand they never quite make it into the trash or onto ebay.
Bought with my lawn-mowing earnings for $80 at Musicland. My uncle gave me his 16K RAM pack that Christmas, as his TS/1000 melted somehow. Grandpa gave me an old black and white TV to use as a monitor, as the TS/1000 had NTSC out.
Only bought one commercial application for it: a cassette of Chess, which took about 10 minutes to load, and heaven forbid you pushed the keyboard too hard, because that would jostle the RAM pack and you'd lose your game, getting a...well, a WHITE screen of death.
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
Me too.
;)
I started programming on a Vic 20 when I was 7 years old. I delved into the spiral bound manual on programming in BASIC and was hooked. Unfortunately, some component burned out on that Vic 20 and I never got all that far, but I loved it nonetheless and from then on, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I proudly said computer programmer.
My dad bought an 8088 many years later and in high school I took Computer Science and AP Computer Science, and I fell in love with a new language: Pascal. I used to sit in front of that 8088 for hours on end making games and programming BBS doors. On weekends, I would literally get up in the morning and start programming, with short breaks to eat, continuing until I went to sleep. I had a 3.9 GPA and was 12th in my class, so I had high hopes for college... maybe I could get a scholarship? But I didn't. And, not wanting to go into debt, I opted for enlisting into the Air Force. GI Bill, right?
I tried for comm-prog as a career field, but when I went up to the MEPS in Oakland, I missed taking the EDPT, since I spent all day trying to pee in a cup (I have a bit of a mental hangup when it comes to someone watching). I ended up in avionics instead of proagramming, hoping to retrain later in my enlistment. I programmed off and on for fun in my off-duty hours, but came to do so less and less as time wore on. Eventually I wasn't much programming at all.
Still, I tried retraining at my 3 year mark. I was a bit worried about the EDPT, since I had a friend who was a decent programmer and he had failed it (and gone on to work for Microsoft). I passed alright, but it didn't matter. I didn't get to retrain anyway. And, lacking the confidence to leave the military and venture out into the real world, I reenlisted anyway right before the IT boom. Over the years, I churned out some personal projects with C, Visual Basic, Delphi, PHP and even Miva, but each time things became less fun and more tedious... like work.
And so, mixed in with nostalgia is some bitterness whenever I think of that fantastic little compy known as the Commodore Vic 20. Not that I'm blaming it for my woes
First computer: Sinclair ZX-80. 1k, memory and screen-memory shared, so it blinked when it thinked. Funny quirk. Membrane keys sucked. I returned it under the free money-back period, though I forget specifically why.
I didn't have much money, and a few years earlier, the only thing I ever saved enough to afford was a Cosmac Elf, which would have been a catastrophic choice given what I wanted to do, and I'm glad I didn't buy it. I bought a baseball mitt. Still have the mitt. Oh, and during the first hobbyist years I wanted an Apple II or a Sol. Or that Cromenco with the huge palette of colors. Hell, I still want a Sol.
I learned to program in '78 at Radio Shack, standing there for an hour after school and plonkin' away on a TRS-80. In return for them letting me stand around for an hour there, I'd leave them some cute demo loop when I bolted on home to watch 4 pm's Star Trek rerun.
First computer I mastered: Apple II. At high school. Also the *last* computer I feel I ever mastered.
First computer I used: timeshare access to a server with a dozen or so text games like blackjack and wumpus.
First computer I owned for very long? A Radio Shack Color Computer. The early one with chiclet keys. Eew, nasty icky poo. My parents bought it, and I tried for years to wreak some semblance of usability out of that POS.
The one that still makes me sigh wistfully? Amiga 1000. I almost sold it several yrs ago on Classifieds2000. COD and the buyer didn't pay when the boxes got to him. I was a bit relieved and tucked it away, still in those boxes.
and about 5 years later, an atari 400 came home with me, replete with an Oki 82a printer. first hack was putting a real keyboard on it, haywiring an old Univac keyboard to the Atari matrix and bringing it in on a DB-25 connector. second was putting in a 48K ram overlay board kit. ran that thing until I got my first 286. the atari's box still holds my audio cables ;)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
In 1984, my dad brought...well, lugged...home an Apple Lisa from work, and it stayed in my room (which was also the temporary office...) for a while. I guess it kinda hindered me in certain ways because it was very easy to use. Command line? What was that?! Actually, I had been using Apple IIe's at school and I wasn't unfamiliar with "RUN blah blah blah." But in my mind, the Lisa made a much bigger impression...I can barely remember using other computers and the mouse was so cool! Which is why I enjoyed the LisaDraw program the most (and why I'm so l33t in FPS's..I've been precision mousing for 22 years!)! Using a mouse to paint was a blast and it was something I couldn't do at school or elsewhere!
Yup. I had a Timex Sinclair 1000. Remember setting the mode to "fast"? It basically stopped sending anything to the TV so that the processor could spend more time running code. The only thing that made BASIC programming possible in 2K was the fact that each BASIC command was stored as a single byte, requiring only a single keypress. That is, "PRINT" was the same as "A" as far as the TS1000 was concerned. The Commodore 64 was such a luxury in comparison.
Make cheese not war 8:)
I was also angling for a NES for Christmas when I was 7 or 8, but my Dad thought the same way as yours and so I ended up with a second-hand ZX Spectrum 128 with a dodgy power supply and an ancient black-and-white TV. I only remember having had a single 128k game, which was the infuriating "NeverEnding Story" adventure game that came with the machine ("east". "Atreyu has fallen down a hole and been savaged by a giant spider. Play again?". "piss off i've just spent 4 hours getting to that point!". "Sorry, I don't understand the command 'piss'").
Thanks to older friends and the columns in Your Sinclair magazine, I soon became quite adept at writing my own simple programs in BASIC, and it all went from there, really. Given that I'm of a fairly lazy disposition, dropped out of uni because I couldn't be bothered attending lectures, but am now a well paid IT consultant travelling round the world on expenses, I think I can safely say "cheers for the Speccy, Dad!" :-)
"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired" ~Jules Renard
It wasn't mine alone, but it was for the moments I had purchased time to use it.
Great dual purpose machine especially at producing heat during those cold winter evenings.
In your face C64!! 6809E microprocessor. Deal!
The first computer I ever owned was a Macintosh Classic my parents got me for Christmas one year. That was probably the best Christmas present I've ever gotten, and is probably responsible for my love of computers and my current career.
As for the cassette thing, it went more or less like this:
Actually, I used a Brazilian MSX (we're stuck with MSX 1.1b, MSX 2.0 and up was only available via hardware hacking and some cartridges). This was around 1987. I had a huge library of tape games and I remember spending hours cleaning the cassette deck using some special alcohol. Copying apps and games was relatively easy, all you needed was a double-deck cassette unit.
Then, I got my first 3 1/2" disk drive. 720kb! MSX-DOS! It took me a long, long time to grasp the concept of a disk operating system (why can't I do a for loop in this DOS thing?) and there were special commands that allowed you to switch to and from DOS and BASIC enviroments. You couldn't directly run games from the DOS enviroment, unless they were made specifically for it, so maybe that was the reason I never got the concept of DOS until I got my first 386.
At the same time, I got my first dot-matrix printer. 8-pin printhead, 40 characters per second. Impressive graphics (at 72 DPI). The ribbon cable was really new, never had seen a flat cable before.
MSX audio (with its 3 channel PSG unit) also delivered much superior sound than the extant Apple ][. MSX was the machine of the future. Or so I thought.
I still remember in the early 80's, day my dad bought an Apple ][e with not one, but two 5.25 inch floppy drives and a green tinted monitor.
;)
At school they started teaching us Applesoft BASIC in 3rd grade. By middle school I was writing my own "action" video games in low resolution graphics. In early high school I continued onward with Beagle Brothers BASIC compiler, which gave me significant speed increases for my games.
In the early 90's I eventually gave up the Apple ][2 and switched to 80386 (my first PC) and switched to programming games in Turbo Pascal, utilizing Michael Abrash's Mode X. I have stayed with PCs since then, except for my Mac Mini hooked up to my TV.
Started with a C= Vic20 then jumped to a C=64... Ran a bbs and ended up shelling out $1200 for a LT. KERNAL (for those who still live with their parents heres the writeup)
http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/ltk/ I actually chucked reading the article.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Mine (in 1987) was a Talent- msx dcp-200, with a Z80a@3.6 MHZ processor gigant 64 kb of ram, about 38 kb free after booting. A 16 colors graphics processor basen on TMS9918. and a 3 channels audio processor. This machines comes with a rs-232 and a parallel port.
Sinclair ZX-81 was the first computer I used at home. At first it wasn't really mine (my father borrowed it from someone) but they never wanted it back, so it became mine :) Because of the limited RAM, I couldn't write BASIC programs longer than about 2-3 screens (and I'm not exactly talking 80x25 screens here..). I think I was around 9 at this time, around 1982.
:)
:)
Then I got hold of a Vic-20. Whoa! Took me a while to fill that RAM. (A text adventure game finally did the trick though. The color was a nice addition too. Centipede, here I come
After that is was a C-64, and I started a little with assembler. Never got really good though. Then followed Atari ST, then an STe (yep, never went Amiga).
I wanted to run a BBS, and didn't want my Atari occupied all the time, so I got hold of an old 286, learned DOS, started programming (BBS doors mainly in the beginning, in Pascal). The rest is history
Connection closed by foreign host.
Yeah, baby! I was 11. I saved up my money for a 3k memory expansion cartidge and a cassette tape drive.
After this, getting my first Apple ][, I remember being thrilled by looking at BASIC and saying: "What ? you can really use _all_ those variables ?"
[Pruneau
I still remember loading WordStar on our Osborne-1 from 5-1/4 floppies.
What a machine!
http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.htmlWindows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
I got my brothers' Commodore 64 in 1985. Within weeks I learned assembly language, created my own assembler and desktop system. Finally I joined two machines using a joystick port. I used these until around 1994.
cb
Why mention ENIAC? It wasn't the world's first computer. Germans beat the Americans in that area by almost couple years actually. There's nothing really special about ENIAC.
ca. 1959, although I didn't get my hands on it until 1975.
/. to /. itself. What's next, "What is your favorite masturbation fantasy?"
Sheesh, what an obvious way for
Most people don't even think inside the box.
Although the first computers I used were the Apple IIEs at my elementary school and my friends' Commodore 64s, the first computer my parents bought for the family was a 286 machine from VTech when I was in grade 4. The 286 had PC GEOS installed, which was actually not bad as an alternative to Windows 3.1, compatibility issues aside. The first computer I bought myself (when I was 16) was a 166MHz/16MB machine running Windows 95. It took me many hours working at a fast-food joint to pay my parents back the ~$1500 I borrowed to buy it. When I went away to university, I gave that computer to my parents who upgraded the memory on it and used it for a few more years.
1984 Commodore Vic-20
1987 Commodore C-64
1989 Apple IIc
1992 Apple Proforma ??
--------
1994...got out of computers...1998
--------
1998 white box Pentium 166mmx
1999 IBM Thinkpad 760
2000 HP Pavilion 533 Celeron
2001 white box AMD 1ghz
2002 white box PIII 1.3ghz
2003 Apple Powerbook 867 titanium
2004 Apple eMac 1ghz
2004 white box AMD 2.4ghz Barton
2005 Apple Powerbook 1.67 HR
I remember starting college in 1990 that my Comp-Sci professor was so excited about this new/state-of-the-art os called Windows...coming from GEOS on Commodore I thought Windows was a piece of crap. needless to say, my professor was less than thrilled with my enthusiasm.
the history of the world
A set of four hearing aid batteries powered the damn thing for about 5 years. How long do your PDA's batteries last?
Of course I had been writing programs for years before I saw my first computer. I taught myself BASIC about 2 years before I sat down at a computer keyboard. That computer was a TRS-80 Model 1 with level 1 BASIC. Then again, I taught myself FORTRAN about 7 years before I got to use a computer with a FORTRAN compiler (a VAX 11/730).
Support SETI@home
I had a TRS-80 model III, followed by a model 4P (portable only because of the handle bolted to it) and then a 100. Somewhere in there I had a TI99-4a, as well. After that, I got my first old PC XT and progressed to where I am today (with about three Windows machines, two Linux boxes [both KubunTu], and a couple of Macs [both running Tiger]).
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Came with 2 5.25" floppy drives and 256K of memory. Upgraded to 640K a year later and it cost me $300. I wanted an Apple IIc but my parents got me the Compaq instead.
My first computer was a Model 100 from TRS. My parents bought it used for me. I had a lot of fun with it, but, it was pretty limited in scope for me. I wanted to play games, and it only had 1 game available... I DID play the heck out of that game, though. :-)
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =233
... a casio calculater it could compute numbers in seconds!
Game console had a "Computer Programming" cartridge that allowed simple 8048 assembler/machine code. That's what I learned to program on, writing a hangman game.
Followed by a Timex Sinclair 1000, a TI-99/4A, and then an Amiga 1000 when they shipped.
And that was it until college. Since I lived in the terminal room I didn't need my own.
-- Cerebus
After years of begging for an Apple ][, Atari 800, or Vic 20, my parents finally gave in and bought me a Franklin Ace 1000. I still remember hearing "Men at Work" on the radio on the way to the computer store. For those that don't remember, a Franklin Ace 1000 was an Apple ][+ clone with a 6502 and 64KB of RAM, and an (illegal) copy of Apple BASIC in ROM. Franklin was sued out of business by Apple for this.
My parents even sprang for a color monitor (Amdek), and a 5.25" floppy disk drive (Rana), and an Okidata printer. I played around with Logo, Basic, and 6502 assembler on that machine. That machine also served as my word processor through high school. I played all sorts of great games, many of them shareware, some of them cracked, and only a few purchased with my meager income from lawn-mowing. Roughly a quarter century later, the Franklin still works. I just packed it up and moved it into my attic after cleaning out my Dad's house when he died in December. He was still using the computer for simple word processing and numerical calculations 25 years later.
I've been a sysadmin, and OS researcher, and now I do network device drivers and firmware for a living. I wonder what I'd be doing right now if my parents had bought the other item I was begging for -- a moto-cross style off-road motorcycle.
This sounds so familiar! In my case we picked up a Vic-20. I WAS lucky enough to catch a big sale and ended up with four carts: Omega Race, Gorf, Radar Ratrace and Super Alien at K-mart.
The objects of my desire (to be never purchased until adulthood) were the datasette drive, a Vicmon machine language cartridge, the programmer's reference manual, and the unobtainable (for me) 8k memory expander. They never sold the last three through the department stores where I lived and the datasette was just too expensive.
As soon as I was old enough I bought an Atari 130XE with a 1050 floppy and thought I was on top of the world.. until I met the neighborhood drug dealer who had a modded 800xl (Rambo) with quad "Happy Enhanced" (not Enzyte!) 1050 drives and every piece of pirated software imaginable.. including cracked games that actually originated on the Atari 5200 video game console.
I think moved on to the C128.. which IMO was a mistake. I SHOULD have bought a Coco 3 with OS9.
http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/1200xl/ 600.html
You could play games, write code etc. Really really cool!
Ahh, the good ol'days playing BC's Quest for Tires, Miner 49er and other classixs.
My first computer was a wonderful piece at the time, vastly superior to the more or less contemporary more popular VIC-20, Commodore-64 and Spectrum.
It was a Philips VG-8000, a machine manufactured by Philips that was compliant with the MSX standard, a standard designed by the japanese ASCII corporation in collaboration with Microsoft for home computers.
Microsoft wrote the BASIC interpreter for it (we are speaking of about 1982-1983), and it was _very_ similar to other BASICs like gwbasic, QBasic and QuickBasic.
Countrary to the C-64, for example, which required a lot of low level functions like peek and poke to access interesting functionality, the MSX BASIC had a very good (but slow) high level graphics API, accessible with functions like circle, paint, pset, draw, line, with a syntax more or less identical to the one QBasic programmers probably remember.
Below, it had an easy to understand architecture, with memory mapped video memory if I remember correctly, and some special memory to hold sprite data. Sprite functions were also really easy to access from BASIC, and the same functionality remained in the later GW-BASIC (on PC), while it was dropped from QBASIC IIRC.
It was very useful for small kids (like me), who could learn useful and fun programming without much effort.
Kudos to Kazuhiro "Kay" Nishi for the architecture, and possibly Bill Gates himself for MSX BASIC. Microsoft is great at writing BASIC interpreters, why didn't they stick to it?
One of the best people in the world, my uncle Bill (an IBM employee since WAY back), bought a TRS-80 for me when I graduated Jr. High. We didn't have much money and we never would have been able to afford it otherwise.
I didn't even know I wanted it because I never thought about stuff I knew we couldn't afford, he certianly knew me better than I knew myself.
After playing with it for a year or two, I was fairly well versed at Basic, and had written some "Fast" assembly routines by figuring out Z-80 opcodes from a book and forming strings, then executing the strings or poking them into high memory.
Eventually I bought a floppy drive and got into trading games. Some nice older scoutmaster from the boy scouts (Probably not much older than I am now) used to take my brother and I and a couple other kids to a college room that had been rented for the purpose. One of the first "Wares" communities I suppose. I learned how to use different DOSes, some script programming and a little bit of compiled C.
After a while I even experimented with the hardware a little. Learned to replace ram chips (helped with my first computer job--building PCs), wrote driver code, etc.
One very important thing to consider: If there had been ANY decent games available, especially MMORPGs, I NEVER would have learned any of this and probably would be sweeping floors today. I became addicted to muds a little later--luckally after learning the basics! This is probably the most significant shaping event in my life and I kinda feel sorry for kids today because they are not forced to play the hard way.
My mom claims her brother, my Uncle Bill, was one of the top 10 people at IBM when he retired.
She also says that they didn't know smoking was bad for you back then.
I love you UB, RIP.
My first computer was an Atari 800XL, and I got it sometime in the mid to late 80's. I still have the 800XL, etc. This is the computer I began programming on, and I learned from looking at code examples in books and magazines. At some point my older brother had a C64, and this was probably before I got the 800XL. I'm not sure though. Although I spent a lot of time using Apple II's in Junior High and High School as well, I never did own one.
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
Too poor for the sixty four: http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/c16/
For completeness and in case no one else has mentioned it, we had a Microtan 65 from Tangerine systems. We had to build it ourselves and it lived in an old tupperware box. It had 1k of memory but moved up to 8k I seem to remember. It didn't even come with an assembler - you had to hack hex codes - but we did eventually get a version of Basic, and you could do limited things with peek and poke. A nice nostalgia trip, though, this thread... quite a few machines I'd simply forgotten about.
Bally (pinball company) way back when, marketed a home game machine with game cartridges. One you could get let you program in 'Palo Alto Tiny Basic'; your maximum program size was 1800 bytes; you could plug in a modem and save or load your programs on a cassette tape. Keypad had 0-9 keys plus I think 4 modifier keys so you 50 key combinations to select from. In programming mode, each key would be a basic command such as GoTO. You could create some pretty sophisticated graphic games with only 1800 bytes using the built in game functions. Alas, it was never very successful. Mine still works!
My first real computer was a TI-99/4A, bought when they were expensive. I remember being pissed at my friend, because his parents shelled out for the whole deal (monitor, expansion chassis -- 32 whopping KB of RAM, disk drives, seial interface). I had to settle for the TV and a cassette tape. But oh the joy of coding music and sprite graphics. I remember getting "Mini Memory" which gave you an assembler. I was SO confused by the assembly mnemonics! It was like reading ancient sanskrit.
....
:-)
Next up was an Apple IIc. I liked it better than the IIe because is was so much more compact. I remember my girlfriend at the time had written a massive term paper on her IIe, and in order to get it over to a PC, we loaded it on my IIc, then "printed" it to a serial port, and used a comm program on the PC to capture it. Then endless hours on the PC reformatting with WordPerfect.
Next was a 386SX-16 that I built out of parts. 4MB RAM and 40MB hard drive! What a screamer! By then, the PC era was upon us, and I only owned PCs for a long time
Recently, however, I have owned a IIgs, IIc, IIc+, TI-99, C128, VIC20, a few S-100 CP/M machines, an original 5150 (black power supply), Zenith Z-100 and other assorted bits... Ahhhh, eBay!
The first computer I owned all by my little lonesome was an old Commodore PET 2001. This was back when I was about twelve years old, outside of a small town in Washington, early '80s. The PET was a big ugly lump of metal with chiclet keys and a built-in cassette tape drive. Woo hoo, big time computing, baby! I still have some of those tapes, though I suspect none of them are any good (not that I have a PET around to test them on). To this day, almost all of the programming "from scratch" I've done in my life was on that machine.
No, I don't remember what happened to it. Ah well.
I'm only wearing black until they come out with something darker.
Judging from most of the posts in this thread, the majority of /. types started out on a C-64 or a Vic20.
To my fellow former Apple ][+ users and I, this explains everything.
Breakfast served all day!
Haven't booted it in ages but it was my first.
Trebor sux
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It was a pen and a large notebook. Not the kind of notebook that has a battery, a keyboard and an LCD, but the kind that has paper pages in it.
My grandmother gave me a story-book as a present when I was about 10, with a story that taught me how to program in Basic. To characters in the story explained programming syntax in simple terms and to progress in the story I had to solve various puzzles by writing correct programs and producing correct results, outputs, that in some cases for example gave me the next page number in the book (the pages were not consecutive,) in some cases gave me code to be able to read parts of the story (the text was encoded) etc. It was probably the most involved book I have ever read in my life. Thank you Grandma Anna.
So my first computer was a pen and some paper, on which I wrote my first computer games and then later retyped them to Atari 600 at school.
You can't handle the truth.
The first computer I personally bought was a //gs. Still have that one as well. It's keeping the //e company. Most recent card I bought for any of my computers (linux world now) was a CompactFlash adapter for the //gs. If your interested (he's still making them) do a google search for CFFA apple. He should be the first listing. Didn't want to kill his server with a direct link.
Still love the // computers. Same as everybody else it seems, they were my real intro to programming.
I just about had a heart attack upon poking the thing into a true bitmapped high-res graphics mode (256x192 mono, ZOMG!!!1) and drawing some lines and circles. Then they released the "Extended BASIC" upgrade with high-res support built in....
My first computer was an Amiga 500 that i mostly used to play games, after that i got a 286 stationary and a 286 "laptop" (it was huge! about the size of a small suitecase) that only had red and white colors. After a while i bought a 2400bps modem and started surfing bbs. ahh, remember when i upgraded my stationary with 4mb ram and a 80mb hard disk (had a 20meg first), i had the best computer in the whole neighbourhood! ;)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Had a Lambda 8300 as a first computer. Black and White display, 2K ram and an extra 16k as a cartridge.
I really have another userid as well
First computer I ever messed with was some minicomputer that they set up at my school to show all the science classes. It had Lunar Lander, text version. I didn't get to actually *touch* it, of course, but I remember thinking it was really cool. That would be circa 1974.
In 1977 a friend in high school had dial-in access to the school district computer system. 300 baud acoustic, thermal printer. Then we discovered that UTD had video terminals set up and we could sneak in and dial the school district from there.
In college, the Micro Club had a couple of Commodore Pets, 8K, chiclet keyboard, built in tape drive. I wasted way too much time playing with those.
First computer I bought myself was a Commodore Pet, 32K. Full sized keyboard, outboard cassette drive. $1350 + tax.
Sold that a couple of years later, bought an Apple ][... not a +, a ][ with an Applesoft card. 48K! Dual floppy drives! Woah! Of course, floppy discs cost $30 or $40 for a box of 10. Better notch 'em and use both sides.
Then came the ][e, then a cheap NEC-20 IBM clone (20 meg hard drive!), IBM PS-2 Model 60 with a 286-12, then a 386sx, a 486/33... after that I was working as a tech, and upgraded pretty much every time something new came out.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
I do not know why the ENIAC myth still pops up from time to time. Anyway, Konrad Zuse built the first computer, called the Z1. Even his famous Z3 was completed two years before the ENIAC.
e chner_Z1.html
http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/Konrad_Zuse/en/R
http://www.computerhope.com/history/194060.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3
He upgraded that to a beefier gemini later on, but apart from playing around in Z80 assembler I never really got to use that one. After that he got a compaq 8086 which was destined to be my first computer. I remember it well, 2 * 5 1/4 " floppies. In fact I still have that machine and (AFAIK) it still runs (I must dig it out and try it). That's back when Norton actually made some useful software !
After that I had a brief fling with a 286 and windows 3.1 before upgrading to a 386 and the same OS.
After the Pentium had been around for a while (50, 60 and 66 mhz) I built my first machine - A whopping 75mhz cpu with 32MB ram and an 850 MB hard disk. That damn hard disk cost me £350 back then ! ('95 ?). I couldn't afford a cd drive so I had to get win95 on floppies - 14 of them ! When I did get a cd drive and speakers Doom was cool though, especially with Rob Zombie playing as the game music.
After that, I upgraded to a 200 mhz cpu and then on to a cyrix 300mhz socket 7. That chip and various upgrades lasted me until 2000 (!) when I splashed out and got an AMD 1400 T-bird with new everything (and a flashy Elsa Gladiac 920 Nvidia based graphics card). I still have that box, although it is on an AMD XP2200 chip now and is only used for games and TV (windows 98se). I still have the T-bird 1400 on a board somewhere, I was using it for running a FBSD web server.
My next box will have a bit more beef though -
Tyan K8WE (S2895) Dual Opteron DDR400 SLI with dual 246 Opterons and 4 GB RAM and 1TB SATA goodness. I am trying to get more into video editing so I need a bit of muscle. Interestingly, this machine will cost roughly the same as the the P75 system cost back in 95/96.
Ooops, I seemed to have drifted off topic slightly, but as all this has taken place in around 20 years, it is amazing what we take for granted these days. Likewise the internet. I built my first web page using Netscape Composer using dial up when 1 meg download took 7 minutes. Now I get around 70MB in that time, and thats not stretching the technology even slightly.
Memories eh...
had a whopping 256 bytes of RAM and an 8 character single line display... you can get an emulator here...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Flirting with Violet? With my charm, she smiles invitingly!
My First computer was a ZX Sinclair Spectrum 128. Good old days.
Sounds very familiar. My dad is a PhD M.E., who bought a TI-99/4a as a Christmas present to my brothers and I. So we come running out Christmas morning to see who had the biggest presents, and lo-and-behold the tags each had just a number on them. WTF??
:)
Then Dad wheeled out the TV cart with this beige box on it, and we got down to business. He had written a BASIC program (ok so it was probably just a handful of IF statements with a GOTO at the end) that took the number on the tag and printed out "This present is for _____". That little beige box sent me down the road to a CompSci degree and a career in IT, and the tendency to make Wumpus jokes whenever the family visits a cavern.
In high school I got an IBM XT 8088 that I ran at 4.77Mhz for almost a year until I accidentally found the undocumented Ctrl-Alt-Minus combination that activated the 10Mhz Turbo. Boy, was I pissed. Even though I had essentially commandeered the TI from my younger brothers, this was really my first IT'S MINE! computer. My graduation present from high school was a humongous 20MB hard drive which I managed to install myself...the new 40MB's were out but "you won't need that much space, son".
Interesting sidenote: My 30th birthday card from my father had a picture on the front showing me on Christmas Day complete with bowl-haircut, corduroy trousers, and Buster Brown shoes...lying on the living room floor teaching myself BASIC from a book in front of the TV cart and TI-99/4a. The caption read "Every Saga Has A First Step".
Brought a tear to me eye, sure'n it did.
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
Actually, the first computers I poked at were a Prologica PC-500 (the Brasilian TRS-80, the year was 1981 and I was in 5th grade) and some unix behemoth on the US which I used thru the Telex machine in my dad's office.
In 1985, when I began high school, I worked in a bank for a year and saved enough to buy a PC-400 (that was the Brasilian TRS CoCo, 6809-based). On _that_ computer I did a lot of stuff. It had two 32kb memory banks, which one had to switch manually in assembly, to take advantage of the extra memory. Its BASIC interpreter was fairly hackable if you knew what you were doing.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Hey Taco, I also started out with a TRS-80! I started programming on that thing in BASIC when I was young. I am still into programming and technology, so I would say it did me well as a kid.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
It was also bundled with GeoWorks Ensemble. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I worked all summer and came up short on the money needed for a C64. The CoCo was on sale at RadioShack, and the rest is part of my personal history.
In the CoCo's defense, it did have a more or less legitimate RS-232 port on it.
Green screen of course.
I was only 6 or 7 years old at the time. We didn't have enough money after buying the computer to buy any games for it, so my parents bought me this Marvel oriented book that let you type in your own BASIC games to play. (Chains of Loki, etc).
And thats why I am... the way I am today!
-Matt
viderage@gmail.com
Serial number 000006. Someone had donated it to my junior high school, and since they had a bunch of perfectly good Commodore 64's, they were happy to have it taken off their hands. It had a big cabinet containing a small display and a couple 5.25" floppy drives, built-in keyboard on the front. Was a backplane design; mine had 3 memory boards for a total of 48K of RAM. I never did much with it other than play around in BASIC. Within a year or two I wound up using a Commodore 64 instead. (And then a Commodore 128, a 286, 386, 486, then OS X Macs.)
I've never seen anyone else on the web ever mention having used an Outpost...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
My absolute first computer was an IBM mainframe about which I can give you no details. I never saw it. I would submit my FORTRAN programs punched on cards to the college professor, and a day or two later, I'd get back the printout (and the program deck). Made for a slow debugging cycle, I can tell you.
The first computer I sat down and used interactively was an IBM 4341 at another college. It ran VM/370 as the base OS. We used an academic time-sharing program called MUSIC. I can remember playing Adventure on it. I actually got to interact directly with CMS a little later on.
The first PC I got to use was an Osborne 1 at that same college. Ran CP/M. 64K floppies were so *tiny* (and so was the screen)...
The first computer I *owned* was an IBM PC/XT, which I got beefed up with a 20 meg hard disk (instead of the standard 10) and two floppy drives. Ran PC-DOS 3.21.
Chris Mattern
It had about 16 or 32k RAM and some odd DOS system that later came MSX-DOS I think. Not sure had it anything to with Gates, but looked and sounded similar than MS-DOS I think.
Bought it in 1984 because it came with cool ski jump game.
Later bought few Spectravideo and Yamaha MSX computers with pluggable ROM cards and played first Metal Gear game. First console game stations, before world knew about Playstations.
Still have all them of somewhere.
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows has the trouble seen me, even I sometimes wonder why I write these line
The one and only. A beautiful machine that got me started (along with an old TRS) in programming way back in 197DSFhee,...#@$!
CARRIER LOST, CONNECTION DROPPED
http://oldcomputers.net/imsai8080.html
Hehe..
Took a class in Fortran programming. Really got going on programming on an IBM 360/45 using a WATFOR compiler. First PC that was mine was an Apple IIe. First PC at work was an IBM PC. Of course, we had access to IBM 360's, 370's and later on, had the run of a PDP 11/70 where we could do our development programming.
Same reason I'm glad I had a Sanyo MBC-1000 (CP/M, yeah baby!) The text based games were cool and all, but it was way cooler to make the hero "Captain Boobs" when you're 7 years old.
My first computer was the Tandy TSR-80 Color Computer II with 64k of RAM, tape data drive, two joysticks, and a dot-matrix printer. It connected to my television using the same videogame switchbox used on the old Atari 2600. Remember the one you had to switch manually? Man that seems like so long ago.
I had a few games on cartridge: Dino Wars and Polaris. I had a game on tape called "Temple of Apshi" or something like that. It was a text adventure and took a while to load from tape. I used to write all kinds od BASIC programs on the thing and save them to tape. I still have that tape drive BTW!
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Apple ][e, bought used out of the newspaper for $2500 in 1983, loaded! I saved lawn mowing money for 2 years to buy this thing.
Hardware:
- 64K RAM standard
- 80 Col Card w/ 64K memory expansion
- CP/M card
- Hayes 300 baud modem (expansion card w/ breakout box)
- floppy disk controller
- 2 5 1/4" floppy disk drives
- 13" amber monitor
- Parallel printer interface card
- Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer
- Kensington joystick w/ orange button on top of shaft
- 2 game paddles (pong-style)
Software:
- Ultima I w/ original packaging
- Bank Street Writer (word processor)
- Various CP/M crap I never used much
- Lode Runner
- Visicalc
My brother found all this stuff recently, I had packed it up all nice and stuck it in Mom's basement. Brought to my house a few months ago, plugged it all in. It still works! A few disks don't work but 90% do. Super nostalgic fun!
Yeah my family had a PET 4032 model. 32KB RAM, 40 column green screen, tape drive. Woot!
I wrote my first little basic programs on that computer.
Later we got a Commodore 64 thankfully with a disk drive. Then a Commodore 128 (80 column!).
Later an Amiga 500. The first computer I personally owned was an Amiga 500, which I traded in for an Amiga 2000 and decked out with a 68030 and all the trimmings.
I credit the Amiga with helping me learn about command line shells. This helped a lot when I moved to using univeristy Sparcs and later Linux. Even with MSDOS. I remember thinking "that's it?" when I first learned the MSDOS command set. It seemed so primative after AmigaDOS and UNIX.
Then well Commodore died and my next computers were PCs running everything from DOS to Linux to Windows.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
...Complete with awesome audio tape storage setup.
I wrote little basic games where the X has to avoid bouncing O's. Then I moved up to a TRS-80 (lovingly called the trash 80, and wrote games where an ASCII tank avoided bouncing O's, but also had the ability to shoot. I even wrote a long adventure game with dirty sequences, and got in trouble. 7.5 floppies forever baby!!!
rhY
PS I just put together a new machine (AMD x64, 1 gb ram, 6600gt, DVD burner, and x-fi soundcard). Technology has definitely moved along over the course of my short life. (Remember BBS? FIDOnet? LOL)
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
It was a good computer for it's time. I upgraded the memory in it and I upgraded the two floppies. It was a fun machine. It was sort of a lunchbox computer. You could stow away the keyboard under the monitor and put a cap on the front, flip it monitor down and it had a handle in the back. You just picked it up and walk off with it. I took it to school and to friend's houses.
Oh, and Taipan ruled.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
My interest in computers actually started a couple years earlier. I had been playing my Atari 2600 and saw an ad for the Programmer cartridge. The box showed somebody writing "Dear computer", and I thought it would be so cool to program my Atari like that. I got the cartridge and was pretty disappointed in how clumsy and limited it was, but then again it just sparked my interest more and so I got started on TRS-80's at my elementary school.
My next computer after the TI was a Commodore 128 at age thirteen. It had bitmap graphics, a PLAY command that understood musical notation (QD4 = quarter note of 4th-octave D), and a built-in assembler. I also got my first modem for dialing up Q-Link at 1200 baud. That was my first exposure to public domain software and the joys of sharing my programs online.
By age 16 I had an Amiga 500. That baby was sweet! A window GUI, 4-channel sound, thousands of colors, and a spacious 512 kB of memory. I started writing scientific programs, like a physics simulator and an artificial neural network. I didn't discover until a few years later that I had been solving differential equations numerically before even reaching calculus in high school.
I didn't use my Amiga much in college. There was still a social stigma for having a computer in your dorm room in 1991. But I used Macs and PCs in the computer labs for writing reports and running chemical engineering simulations. During my senior year, I noticed Netscape running on a lab computer. I had been using Gopher for a while, but it was cool to have graphics and mouse control. I bought a second-hand 14.4 modem so I could surf the Web on my Amiga.
After graduation, I used PCs at work. But I didn't own one myself until going to grad school. Linux was just getting popular, which was convenient since I was a poor student and couldn't afford software otherwise. With easy access to a compiler and decent computational power, I started writing more simulations and eventually switched my thesis from experimental to computational work.
Now I am a postdoctoral researcher, writing atomistic simulations of materials. I use Linux at work and Mac OS X at home. And since one doesn't meet many ladies in my field of work, I met my girlfriend through Match.com. So it's pretty amazing to think how much different my life would be if the home computer boom hadn't coincided with my adolescence.
AlpineR
Believe it or not, in the old days, we once learned how to "compute" sums, differences, products, even quotients using only a #2 pencil, paper and our very own brains (OK, some folks cheated and used fingers and toes, too)! It turned out that this style computing was often very adaptable to many different types of computing problems, typically with very little actual programming required. In fact, sometimes we'd arrive at the correct answer without any idea how we actually arrived!
That said, my first electricity driven, silicon-based computer was a TI/99a that I got on sale for $49.95 (with a $50.00 rebate from TI) in 1982 or '83. It had a whopping 16K of RAM, the ultra-intuitive ANSI BASIC and a casette tape drive interface for saving/restoring programs. Wow!
For Christmas in, I think, 1987, when I was 6, I had a choice between a Commodore 64 and a bike.
To this day I can't ride a bike.
They even have C, C++, Perl and UNIX shells on Windows now. I think you can also use Java, PHP,
Who'd have thunk!
Maybe even on Macs too!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
My first was a Mac plus 1024 KB, and really the only thing i did on it was play microsoft flight sim and a golf game :)
second pc was a Mac LC II 8mb
then a p1 133mhz 64 mb
then a amd athlon 1400 512mb
and now an athlonxp 3200+ 1gb and a 3 ghz p4 laptop/heater.
We have a very similar past. I had a 486 dx-40 or something and used to be on the modem all the time. My parents got 'concerned' about it and took away my computer, but then I found it hidden in the garage and set it up in my closet, and would use it at 3 in the morning. I learned how to use AT M0 to deaden the connection noise ;)
Those were magical times... Of course, after they took that away, I had no recourse so I would go to school half an hour early and hop on their PC-XT with 2400 baud modem to play L.O.R.D. good times....
Hahaha, Vic-20, the wonder computer of the 1980's said William Shatner -
was also my first foray into computing.
It had a big whooping 3.5K worth of memory, and I expanded that for over
$100 to 16K. Never got a tape recorder, but on a trip to Washington DC
I picked up a 160K single-sided single density 5 3/4 inch floppy drive
for over $500.
I cannot believe how much money sank into that little system over time,
but it was the perfect learning platform
forth, sound, basic, light pen.
I loved it and I am sorry I ever threw it away when I got my first B&W
8088 PC & 64K of RAM with the 1200 baud modem.
Brings back a lot of memories for sure.
The IMSAI 8080 was my first exposure to a computer, back in the days when everyone who saw it asked, "What good is a computer? Why would anyone ever want one?" Boy have times changed. :)
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
was the first computer I owned. When I was'nt playing Donkey Kong, I learned BASIC.
My dad still has it I believe. After that it was a Tandy TL/2 (286 8mhz) with whopping 512k memory upgradable to 640k. :)
PIII 450 with 128MB of RAM. Those were the good ol' days.
My first machine was a ZX Spectrum 48K back in 1984. After getting bored with the first batch of games, I wrote my first BASIC program, a telephone directory application. String arrays! Saving to/load from tape! Yay!
The Speccy is also responsible for introducing me to Tolkien, via The Hobbit.
Since then... Amstrad CPCs (Sorcery!), 286, Sun workstations (in college), 486, etc. My current main machine is a Thinkpad X31 which is just the right size (and color!) to run spectemu on.
By the way, the Spectrum is, as far as I know, the only machine to have had a song written about it.
I never owned a C64 personally, however my school was well stocked with them (they were used for the most part by grades I through IX). When I started in Grade I, my school was equipped with two Apple IIs for use by "gifted" elementary school students, and a number of Commodore PETs for use by high-school students. When the C64 came out a few years later they replaced the Apple IIs for the most part (though they continued to be used to teach programming in some grades--they were even upgraded..one to a II+ and the other to a IIe). Commodores were a popular choice for Canadian schools, since Commodore was founded and headquartered in Canada (although it was actually an offshore corporation as it seems to be tradition amongst many Canadian investors to avoid our sometimes repressive taxation).
The Apple II and C64 therefore make up my first serious experience with computers. The first computer I owned myself was a Colecovision ADAM. I had learned LOGO on the C64 but knew BASIC from the Apple IIs and Coleco "SmartBASIC" shared its syntax with Applesoft BASIC. It was also sold as an "all in one" package (printer, tape drive, etc--just hook up to a TV or monitor and go) and could run all the ColecoVision carts (the hottest system at the time!). All of that sealed the deal, plus the fact that my savings were not large enough to buy a C64 or Apple II system. Canadian Tire had ADAMs on special for a great price so I got one (yes Canadian Tire sold home computers...they were official dealers for Commodore and Coleco)...days before Coleco announced it was halting production of the ADAM....d'OH!
Things turned out pretty OK though...the ADAM enjoyed support from Coleco for a few more months, and 3rd parties continued to produce software and hardware. ADAM user groups provided good support for many years thereafter (I believe a group of enthusiasts persists to this day!). I actually liked to mock C64 owners over the slowness of the C64 whenever they bragged about their sound and graphics capabilities (C64 BASIC not only didn't have commands to support the sound and graphics capabilities, it was also dog slow compared to SmartBASIC, and the C1541 floppy drive was significantly slower than the ADAM's *TAPE* drive!).
Not to say I didn't like the C64, because it was a great machine. I enjoyed "hacking" the C64 machines on display at Canadian Tire (because Canadian Tire salespeople barely had a clue at best)...I'd warm boot the machine out of the demo and typing in silly BASIC programs that said things like show a screen saying "ATARI RULES!"
Other favourite pastimes included typing in games from COMPUTE! (Apple listings often worked with little or no translation, and I later got an Atari which I ended up using for this purpose) and doing animation (using MovieMaker on the Atari, and SmartLOGO on the ADAM...I even manually drew still pictures on the ADAM and animated them by filming onto super 8 film frame-by-frame).
Those were the days...computers did so much less than they do now, but they were usually so much more fun to use.
While I was using 4004's at work I bought a $300 6800 kit from Motorola that included the CPU, a parallel port, a UART, and some support chips. I wire-wrapped those parts together with I think either 16 or 32 2102 RAM chips. It had a set of toggle switches on the front so you could program the battery backed up RAM with a bootloader that could read the hand assembled programs from cassette tape. I think this was sometime in 1975. I also built a video display unit using TTL parts. I wrote a number of programs for Ham radio use and used a model 15 teletype for hard copy. I later got a floppy drive unit and wrote an operating system. I also recall dis-assembling someone's Basic interpreter and porting to that OS. Ahhh, the good old days :)
Oh wow, nothing like drudging up an old debate from the days when vector graphics, walkmans, and EGA was cool. Hey, if America can be friends with those Ruskies, we can forget how Atari was so much better, right? ;) BTW I have no real points to contend; I was too young to care at the time. I sure miss that tape drive though. When's the last time you've listened to your data?
BTW My computer timeline:
Atari 400 -> 800XL -> 1040ST -> Mac LC III -> Power Mac 6100/486 -> PIII 450 -> Athlon 2400
Boy it's time to upgrade tho.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
Then, I worked through a whole summer to buy myself a Texas Instruments SR-56, which was half the price of a HP-25... Eventually, after going through an TI-58 and an HP-29C, I got myself my first computer, a hand-made wire-wrapped motorola 6809 system running UNIX in 168K of RAM and two 8 inch floppies. Yes, sir, nothing less than UNIX!!!
It was not until 1986 that I got myself a PC compatible machine. And the rest is history...
In the third grade on an AppleII - after I learned:
10 print "Hello Master"
20 goto 10
I was mesmerized. Playing with the machine and BASIC was my escapism from real studies. Since I basically ended up semi-illiterate I had only one logical choice in life.
However all the programs I build, that I like, all say "Hello Master" when you login to them. Its just the main loop does more stuff than that first one I did. Its all just variations of the same theme that I think most of us are suckers for: 'Control'
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Despite not having a lot of money at the time, my dad found the resources to get a TRS-80 "COCO 2" computer when I was a kid. I poured over the little green BASIC programming book that came with the system, and wrote dozens of monolithic, procedural beasts, all of which were unretrieveable from my crappy tape backups.
Still, it taught me the basics of "thinking computerese": variables, loops, conditionals, etc, that stuck with me over the years (and various bad habits that took a while to unlearn). Of the many educational domains that I've been exposed to, programming always made total sense to me, though somehow I've never managed to get too deep into mathematics.
I fondly remember my dog-eared copy of the yearly Tandy computer catalog that I would drool over, dreaming of the "Extended BASIC" and 128K RAM options that cost several hunded dollars. Everything back then was at least $200, and usually more. Makes the outrageous price of new video cards seem less unprecedented.
After the CoCo gave up the ghost, I went on to several flaky C64s, and then finally a 286 that I got at a garage sale for $3! (the owner thought it was broken). Who knows how many motherboard/CPUs I've been through since then.
It had a 6 MHz 68000 processor,512K of RAM, a 20meg hard drive ($4000 extra!) and a couple of dumb terminals in addition to the console. It ran a variant of System 7 Unix with a very primitive menu-driven interface. Software was quite limited and shockingly expensive. I seem to remember the C compiler being something like $700, and not near as good as the gcc you can get for free today. But it was good enough for me to learn C quite thoroughly. I also taught myself relational DBMS programming with Informix on it.
Total cost was about $15,000,or perhaps $30,000 in today's money, so it was a lot of computer for a teenage boy to be in charge of. Nevertheless, I made it pay for itself, with some custom Basic, C and Informix applications that were quite useful to my folks. It gave good service for a decade. We still have it in some forgotten closet.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Other than that, my first electrical computer was an Apple Performa 6200 with Mac OS 7.5.1.
And you know what was so great with that computer? the hard disk was so small (512 MB) that I plug it to my PC, took the image of its content, burnt it on a CD and use it in SheepShaver to emulate it.
The one less great thing was when my 512 MB were full and that I had to download 32 kbps MP3's of Napster on floppy disks.
You just got troll'd!
I consisder my father the grandfather of case modding. Our Sinclair had a full size keyboard (I think he got it out of a Teletype or a VT 100..), a wooden case, The printer (Wow, that was impressive) and two of the 16k (?) expansion adapters hooked to some sort of homemade switching device.. I think he worked out how to switch the adapters programatically, but I wasn't old enough to be able to comprehend how that worked. He also made this DAC the size of a toaster oven to allow him to drive motors and other gizmos with the Sinclair, including a modified Radio Shack "Armitron" and some large wheels to make a simple robot that ran on motorcycle batteries. The case-mod part comes from the fact that the DAC was smoked lucite on one side with 100s of LEDs and 7 segment displays that means something to him, probably memory states and registers or something, but to me it was just "Bling" and fun as hell to watch. I always begged him to make it beep...
:) tick tick tick ti-ti-tick tick slam tick ti-ti-tick-ti tick...
The first computer that was specificly set aside as "mine" was a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1 hooked to a teletype for a printer.. I was 4 or 5. I could only do a 10 PRINT "Hello" 20 GOTO 10 but that would entertain me for hours making different patterns and things. I managed to get it onto my shell account at a local ISP once at 300 baud via accoustic coupling, and used the teletype for output. IRC actually worked fairly well, but used a lot of paper.. but man, it felt like I was tapped into NORAD
My first machine was the VIC-20 in the 8th grade or so...1980. That machine was great! Graduated to the C-64 a couple years later, and I used that until 1988 or so.
I never managed to own any of the common machines, until I got a PC. I think it has had a serious impact on my personality...
0 .html
t m
;-)
1. Philips G7000 (Magnavox)
This was actually a game console, but it had a (horrible) membrane keyboard, and there was a programming cartridge! Some variant of Intel 8048 assembler was my first attempt at programming. It didn't go so well, I was nine.
http://www.sothius.com/hypertxt/welcome.html?g700
2. ZX81
My first "real" computer. 1KB of memory. I had no tape recorder, so if I wanted to run a program, I had to type it in first... Programming Sinclair computers was odd, since you every command was printed on a button, and pressing that one button entered the whole command.
http://www.honneamise.u-net.com/zx81/
3. TI 99/4A
Okay, if you're American, this is not a very odd home computer. But here in Europe it was rare. Everyone had a Commodore 64 or a Sinclair Spectrum. Except me. I got beat up a lot by the other nerds for that. Well, they can blow themselves, my computer was 16 bit! (It was the first 16b personal computer.) Coming from the ZX81, I was blown away by its awesome color graphics (16 colors!) and huge memory (16KB). With the Extended Basic cartridge, sprites and sound could be programmed using high-level Basic commands, which rocked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A
4. Commodore plus/4
Again I manage to find the odd duck. The +4 was big brother to the Commodore 16, and descendant of the C64. "Plus/4" referred to four built-in office applications. They of course sucked frozen goats through a straw. What was really cool though was that it had a built-in machine code monitor with a mini-assembler/disassembler. I actually learned some 6510 assembler this time around. And I knew I had entered the Space Age when I saw the +4's 128 colors(!!). It also had a better Basic than the C64, you could program graphics using what we called "Logo" commands, or "turtle graphics," basically vector drawing commands.
http://www.myoldcomputers.com/museum/comp/plus4.h
5. Ericsson PC
My first PC was an Ericsson 286 with a 9-pin printer in matching color. Since then I have owned and built countless PCs.
6. DECpc AXP/150
I still have the Jensen with some old Red Hat version on it. This was the first Alpha PC, and it was 64 bit even back then. Pretty cool stuff.
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/axp150/
7. Tandem Integrity s/2
This is the undisputed king of the computers I have owned. It cost around $250,000 when it was new in '91. Yes, that's two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It consisted of a system cabinet and a disk cabinet (you could add up to four) with 6 1GB SCSI-2 disks. Every piece of hardware in it was doubled (except the CPU board which was tripled, one running checksums on the other two), including the fans and built-in battery backup. It was completely modular and every module could be changed while the machine was running (including CPU modules). It had a console with "smooth scrolling." It ran Tandem's Nonstop UX. It ran for four years without reboot before I got it from an insurance company. What can I tell you? It's cooler than any computer you've had.
http://www.speed-pac.com/i_shook/comp.jpg
Excerpt from novella "Fast Times at Stuyvesant High" by Jonathan Vos Post [Stuyvesant Class of 1968, Caltech Class of 1972/72] Stuyvesant High School, by 1968, didn't just have a cyclotron. It also had a mainframe computer. My life had been transformed by Stuyvesant's IBM 1130, the first transistorized mainframe, which came in 2 models -- one with 4 K of core memory, one with 8 K of core. That is, its basic configuration, had memory capacity of 4,096 16-bit words, with memory cycle time of 3.6 microseconds, a paper tape reader and punch, for a monthly rental of $695. People asked "who could use 8 K?" However much memory a computer had, I could use it all. As Vladimir Nabokov said: "Memory, you have the key." The IBM 1130 Computing System had been introduced to the world on 11 February 1965. It was IBM's least-expensive computer so far, targeted at price-sensitive, computing-intensive technical markets such as education and engineering. The 1130 was the first IBM computer to rent for less than $1,000 a month (it could be purchased for $32,280), to gave schools and small business firms a versatile, economical data processing facility for a wide variety of applications. Designed for use by engineers, scientists and mathematicians, the 1130's range of peripheral units enabled it also to be used in such diverse fields as publishing, construction, finance, manufacturing and distribution. At first, I was annoyed by the presence of the 1130. Perfectly respectable Chemistry and Physics majors, colored pens in the pocket-protectors on their chests, were suddenly stumbling through the halls with big cardboard boxes of punch cards, muttering about the Disk Monitor System, stacked jobs, Assembler Language, utility functions, and the Commercial Subroutine Package. Good minds gone bad. The poor bastards had forgotten that the computer was supposed to be a tool to help them do Science. Instead, they began to worship it as a false God, and solving problems that dealt only with the computer itself, solving problems that it had itself created. But, little bit at a time, I was seduced. Desk-sized, if you were a CEO with a huge desk, the 1130 combined ease of operation with big computer performance and features, including high-speed arithmetic capability, stored program flexibility and a wide variety of input and output devices. Users could access stored data directly via the 1130 console's typewriter. It became quite popular, and along with its non-IBM clones, gave many people their first feel of what we later called "personal computing." Its price-performance ratio was good, and it notably included inexpensive interchangeable magnetic disks for secondary storage, but otherwise it broke no new ground technically. The 1130 holds a place in computing history primarily because of the fondness we former users hold for it. The 1130 in Stuyvesant's computer lab ran FORTRAN IV, booted up either by running 2 decks of cards through 3 times, or 3 decks of cards through 2 times, I don't recall. Card input and output was achieved through two models of the IBM 1442 card read punch. Model 6 read at 300 cards a minute and punches at 80 columns a second. The rate at which cards are punched depends on the number of columns punched in each card. For faster processing of cards, Model 7 provided reading at 400 cards a minute and punching at 160 columns a second. By now, I was carrying a box of cards which included the poems I composed at the card punch, and dreams that I'd scribbled on awakening and transcribed to punch cards in the lab. I had printouts of poems and dreams, and did my primitive word processing by replacing corrected cards for ones with typos, one card to a printed line. Sometimes I constrained myself to the structure of sonnets, triolets, or villanelles. Other times I wrote long-line poems, constrained only by the 80-characters per line. I'd started programming in 1966, and later (though I did not know in 1968) I would get to participate in several revolutions in computing rather closely, with personal contacts with (for
yep, a C=64 in 1985. i remember i started programming straight away.
i was born in 1981.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
The first computer I bought in one piece for myself was a SGI Power Indigo^2 with a whopping 75MHz and Extreme Graphics. Before that, I about 10 years before that, I had done lots of upgrades to a computer (initially a 286) technically, though later probalbly more ship of Theseus-style owned by my Father. The latter still exists, with all parts including the case upgraded at least twice, as a AMD K6-III 450.
It's still my the attic. :)
This space available.
A Wang 2200 in the mid-1970 in the eleventh grade trig class.
This, by the way, was a life changing moment for me. Up until this point, I was convinced I would be an auto mechanic. It was strange for me, but I was in honors math, but taking shop classes. However, once I had my hands on that computer, my whole career outlook changed forever.
This is why I go to school district meetings (where my kids are currently going to) and pushing them not to cancel technology or GATE program. Because you just never know when you change one student's outlook through introducing them to new things coming out...
*bangs femur on floor*
*points to big monolith*
Like many 8-bits (Sinclair, BBC, etc) the Amstrad CPC series was, as far as I know, completely unknown outside the UK. It was a great machine though - 64k RAM, built in tape drive and a trippy multi-coloured keyboard. I had previously written a little code on my stepfather's BBC but it was all go once I got the 464 (my crowning glory was a program which read audio from the tapedrive and plotted the waveform on the screen). Progressed onto an Atari ST a few years later, then the STE and Falcon030 before finally hitting my first PC during my first year of university.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
My first computer was a Z80, built on a piece of plywood, since working at Digital Group, I couldnt afford the case, 16K of ram, PHI Deck computer controlled tape transport too. Even a DOS for the first disk drive that came into the company, that one of the brillant hardware techs wrote in 1 weekend in 2K of ram, which also included a program relocator. God those were great times.
That was 1975 or 1976, and when I brought it home to show my parents, I announced this was the future. Dad said "Is that a fact". Cracks me up to think of it now.
I also remember one time going into my dad's office and wanting to play "math blaster". I saw that something was running so I just killed the process with good ol ^c and started up my game. About 15 minutes later my dad woke up from a nap and let out the most heart-rending scream I've ever heard from him to date. Apparently he'd been compiling some class project for the last few hours and had passed out waiting for it to finish. I of course blew it all away and he had to start the compile over from scratch.
Ahh.. The memories, like the corners of my mind....
Sig 'em boy!
My story is almost identical to yours. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair ZX-80, followed by a C-64, then an Amiga 1200, then a PC.
I've since switched from the PC to an Apple PowerBook as my primary computer. What's funny is that I still own all of those machines (as well as a few other historical relics I've picked up along the way), and have emulators for each of them on the PowerBook.
I recently (2 weeks ago) upgraded to a newer PowerBook. Just for kicks, over this past weekend I set up the older PB as a "Commodore G4". It auto-logs in with an account that runs the excellent Power64 emulator full-screen at startup, has a screen shot of the 64's startup screen as the desktop wallpaper, and hides everything non-Commodore until you need it. With a couple of Stelladaptors I can even use my old Atari CX40 joysticks. Just hit the power button and in less than a minute you're looking at
COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY.
I would've killed for a machine like this when I was a kid- a 12" portable C-64 with a built-in display and my entire 64 games library that can run at least 16 C-64s simultaneously at full speed, to say nothing of running every arcade game I loved back then through MAME and every Atari 2600 cartridge ever made through Stella.
It's truly a beautiful thing.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
My dad gave me a C-64 as well. I spent the first few weeks playing games. Once he saw this, he took it away. Thus, I never really got to use a computer until I was about 17 (a Gateway - back when they were "good").
I was basically not going to high school - spent my senior year working (construction) - and wound up getting a GED. The magic was gone.
One day it would only boot to a command prompt. I messed around a bit not knowing what I was doing, eventually I got it to boot to 95. The magic returned. I started getting into html. Time for college.
Got the highest score they'd ever seen on the entrance exam I took to get into a certain University program. This program mandated that I go full-time in order to get financial aid. Living on my own with no help from dear old dad. Working full time and taking 12-credits (full time, in order to get financial aid) wasn't going to work. Dropped out. Kept working construction for a while, moved to a pizza shop job, then to a residential/commercial painting job. Bills to pay.
Got an A+ cert. for fun. Made an attempt at getting a job in tech support after that. Nada. I have bills to pay. I can't spend time/money "volunteering" until I get "enough experience" to get a job that pays more than $10/hr.
Sure, I have experience with Windows and Linux. I have set up home networks and have experience troubleshooting for friends and family. None of it does me any good $ wise.
Now, the gaming industry is HUGE. Now, the IT industry is HUGE. At this point, all my hardware is outdated (as in, 1998 outdated) and I can't afford to replace it at the moment. It's depressing. I hate my life.
1) Let your kids play video games.
2) Help them pay for the cost(s) of going to university.
3) ???
4) Profit!
When _I_ was a kid in high school, we had to dial the phone to some university's mainframe, wait for the screech, and put the handset in the cradel of the acoustic modem (I think it was 300 baud).
Then, we sat down at a DECWriter terminal, which had a keyboard, and a box of fan-fold paper underneath it.
Oh, and the games were WONDERFUL:AND WE LIKED IT.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I don't want to spoil your memory, but I think the 128K Mac was not out in january 1984, either it is not your first box, or you bought it later.
my first system was a Laser 386-SX 25 Mhz with 2 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive. We got it at a pawn shop when I was in high school. Came with Amstrad DOS 3.22... which of course meant the hard drive had to be partitioned into two segments. It later got MS-DOS 6.22 and then, much later when I got a bigger HD, it also got an OEM copy of Windows 3.1 that I got at a computer show.
Mostly I just used it for BBSing (I bought a 2400 baud modem from a friend) and playing with qbasic.
16KB -- it was too easy to have programs designed with more features than what it had memory for -- typing in machine-language programs from magazines was fun back then
My first black hardware. It took 18 years until my NeXT arrived.
... astounding 16K of memory. Equipped with a tape-drive (Datasette) it was practically useless for any real application, but fun to write code for and capable of running some simple video-games.
Anyway: the C116 was a pretty toy. Featurning 121 colors, assembler/monitor, Basic with graphics and sound commands and a very uhm
This is an important part of my geek heritage. My parents were both engineers at Motorola. In 1977, they brought home a Motorola MEK6800D2 Evaluation Kit II. (Click the link to see a pretty picture of the eval board.) No computer case, and no monitor, just a 6-digit 7-segment display. The keyboard was a 16-key hexpad, with 8 control keys for data entry, code execution, and debug.
;)
My dad hooked up a speaker to this beast, and got a program from work that could play Beethoven's Fur Elise though the speaker. I learned how to use the hex keypad to enter in the microcode, and then modified the hex song data to play the Star Wars theme. I was 6 years old at the time, and this had a fundamental influence on my geek career.
Here's my computer ownership history:
D2 Kit
TRS 80 (on loan from Motorola)
Vic 20
Commodore 64
Mac Classic
Amiga 1000
Powerbook 100
A variety of 286 and 386 laptops (from an amateur used-laptop business during college)
And then a series of AMD-based 486/Pentium/Athlon desktops
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
I am still kicking myself for getting rid of it.
Actually still in highschool.....my first computer was a Macintosh Classic...sweet machine and still running today!
i agree
The first computer I ever used was an HP 2000E, via a crt and acoustic coupler at the Rolling Meadows, Illinois, library. My first computer was an Ohio Scientific single-board trainer, with a 6502 using an RC oscillator, 128 *bytes* of RAM, discrete LEDs and slide switches. That taught me to think in hex and binary, program in machine code, and write VERY tight code. Well worth it, IMHO.
Lemon curry?
First machine I ever used was a CDC 6600 at the university. I was one of several high school students that would rummage through card recycle bins for account cards to gain access to the machine. eventually the university put a stop to this by creating a special account for us all to use.
Used an array of other machines for work, first machine I ever owned was a SarpcStation 1+ I bought off of usenet. I had usenet access via a 2400 bps modem and ADM and Televideo terminals purchased surplus from the University.
First computer that was truly mine was a Commodore 64, but I used my sister's Timex Sinclair 1000 to program Basic before I got the Commodore 64. I used it more than she did, so does that count as ownership?
You'd probably be doing the same thing.
:)
:)
I got an Atari 2600 and later an NES. Computers were much too expensive for my family to own. However, I did work on computers every chance I got. There were Apple II's at school, at the local community college, and my great uncle owned one as well. The local library also had a Commodore 64 they loaned out for a week or so, and I got that a few times.
In the end, I still became a programmer. I got a degree in Computer Science (and Spanish Literature) at the university. The difference is that I'm a game developer these days instead of working on business apps.
But, maybe you would have worked at Pizza Hut in high school. That's what I did for a bit of extra cash to buy NES games.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
A Microprofessor I with a 1.79 MHz Z80 and 2K RAM, back in 1982. I wrote programs to produce morse code, and to make the red led blink (which wasn't easy, since it was directly attached to the Z80's paused pin).
I got an Amiga 1000 as a hand-me-down in like 1989 or 1990 I believe. So that would make me 12 or 13. I had only ever written DOS batch files and a little DOS BASIC but nothing much. I loved programming in Amiga BASIC, though. It was so easy to draw a sprite and write a quick game to use it. Collisions were made so easy to detect. I wrote a side scrolling action game which was the only graphical game I have ever written. I also wrote several other games on this system. I have written very few games since. I also had a couple of flight simulators that rocked for the day. I remember, in one, flying under the Golden Gate Bridge just to see if I could. I was pissed when my parents threw it away along with all my disks and my Nintendo Power magazine collection (I had every copy of the first 5 years or so in good condition) when I went to college. I had put a lot of work into those programs. Such memories.
When I was in high school, I had one of the first programmable TI calculator that was marketed to the masses. I also had access to the only terminal in the building that had a dial-up connection to the U of MN mainframe. (anyone else remember fighting acoustic couplers?)
:)
The first PC that I bought for myself was the original gray case, chiclet key Color Computer. I bought it initially with a little ink jet printer that used 4 inch wide rolls and a tape player/recorder for storage. I later upgraded the RAM from 64 K to 256K, added an Okidate Microline 82 dot matrix printer, and added a 5 1/4" floppy drive (double sided, I think).
So far as I know, the thing still runs. I saw it sitting on the shelf at my Dad's a few years ago. Tough old beast. The PC, not my Dad.
Tons of fun. Lots of notalgia.
The first computer I ever programmed on was a TRS-80 in elementary school. The first computer I ever owned was an Apple ][+
"Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."
with the advanced BASIC cartridge.
It was about 1983 when my family was moving away to a small rural town, and my dad had a 'surprise' for us waiting at the new place. My sister and I spent the trip speculating what toy awaited us. For me, I really wanted a big Lego set.
When I saw it, I literally said something like "It's nothing by an old Vic 20". Which my dad then said "Hey, we can take it back". I was excited to see it, but what I *really* wanted was a ColecoVision. At that point I knew it would never happen. Depressing.
It only took me a few days before we had a few games and I was typing in programs from the manual. The rest is history. C64 2 years later, Amiga 500 in 1991, Amiga 2000 in 1994, and finally to the dark side of a Windows Pentium II in 1997. And a computer science degree and a great job.
Just remember sometimes your parents knew what they were doing when you didn't get what you wanted.
Microdata made multi-user 16 bit business minicomputers that ran the Pick operating system. I started working for them in the late 1970's and built a system out of spare parts we had in the repair shop.
It had a built in relational database with 'English' as the retrieval language. It also had Basic, and even came with a few demo games. I spent a lot of time extending the games to do more and then playing them with the other guys in the office. Each person had their own dumb terminal attached via serial port to the computer.
When the Commodore 64 arrived, and finally came down in price to about $250, I got one of those. Then I had to get another one because the first one ended up running a game BBS I had written, so it was tied up all the time and I needed another 'development' machine.
I got an Amiga 1000 in 1985 and used that until my employer gave me an Epson laptop PC (no hard drive). At that point I decided the PC was going to win out and sold the Amiga.
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
I actually got a programmer-cartridge - the programming language was pure assembler (e.g. LDA 05). However it was difficult to keep motivated, because it was not possible to store my "creative" work.
My next computer was the legendary C=64 - with a tape station only. I was sold when I started to type in the sample programs from the manual - like Guess a Number game. Also the sprite samples was facinating.. And the obvious one: With only the tape station I soon learned to have Turbo ABC or was it ABC Turbo? handy for fast loading of programs
Over time I also bought a used 1570 disk station. A matrix printer was added - at that time, manuals for printers included entire descriptions of character sets and escape codes and all that stuff. Today this kind of manual would be called a "Developers Reference Manual"
My first IBM PC compatible, was a 286, 1MB RAM, 40MB harddrive and super VGA! wild stuff. However a few months after I bought it, Intel declared the processer for dead/depreciated - That was hard to handle for a young proud man! - well I had a lot of fun with games, hacking fractal programs in Turbo Pascal... Oh - and I discovered fidonet as well
After a couple of years it was time to move on to new adventures - I went back to Commodore - The Amiga 1200 with AGA chipset - need to say more? - OK I added a 68030, more memory and harddrive - like everybody else. I remember there was a great "Intel outside" campaign going on - We were truly Motorola fans at that time.
When the 3D games took over in the gaming world and faster PC's came to the market, it became more and more difficult to stay with old Amiga hardware - but that is another story.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 as well, back when I was 10 years old. I taught myself to program in BASIC on that thing. It had a tendency to overheat and crash on hot summer days, so I took to cooling it with a baggie of ice sitting over the hot spot on the case. The case was molded plastic and the keyboard was a membrane-type, so the condensation from the baggie didn't really bother the computer any. And I never had a crash as long as that ice was there. Kids these days, they think they're so 1337 with their water-cooling rigs...
It had a 2MHz 6502 processor, plus 32K RAM, the OS and BASIC were in ROM. The micro ran BASIC 5 times faster than an Apple II or Commodore 64. It also had PROCcedures with arguments and WHILE loops, as well as long variable names - never needed to use GOTO's or GOSUB's. At the time 1982, I was A COBOL programmer on ICL mainframes (roughly IBM 360 compatibles.
The first computer I ever programmed was an HP mini the size of a filing cabinet with about 5K of core memory, this was 1968. I was graphing the results of passing complex numbers into trig functions for fun, my university Maths was up to that level until 2 years later.
My favourite computer was the Acorn Archimedes with a 32 bit ARM2 chip running at 8MHz, it could out perform an Intel 386 running at 25MHz. It had the best GUI I had ever seen, even now some of its features are better than what I can access now. ARM2 assembler was the nicest low level language I have ever used.
Now I run a Linux/Intel box at home.
-Nivag
- Inherited C=64 from Dad, who had upgraded ot a C=128
- Bought my own C=128
- Bought Amiga 500
- Bought Amiga 1200
- Bought an Amiga CDTV to use as a CD-ROM drive
- Sold A1200 in 1995 or so, went in with a roommate on a Pentium 90 (100s were tops at the time). I bought the 17" monitor ($650) and vid card (ATI 4MB for $250)
- Added 2 32MB sticks of RAM to the P90 for ~$200 each after the first big RAM price drop (16MB sticks were $500 3 months earlier)
- Built my own Cyrix P166 PC (with my scavenged RAM, vid card, and monitor)
- Built my own Athlon XP 1800+ system about 4 years ago
I still play some C=64 games on emulator once in a while. My all-time faves are: M.U.L.E, Archon, Yie ar Kung Fu, Bruce Lee, 4th and Inches, Skate or Die, and Druid. I miss the old days. ^_^I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
The strangest feeling keyboard I have ever used, but still a cool machine. Even looked good - nice sleek lines (until I got a 32K RAM pack that sort of spoiled the effect).
The power adaptor is still in use, powering an alarm system on our garage although the machine is living in the attic.
I'll never forget the day that I got a kempston interface so that I could actually use a !!joystick!! with my speccy...
Getting games for 2.99 from the corner store was also pretty cool (although the waiting for the tape to load wasn't as much fun - nice scrolly lines though).
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
My grandmother got me an Atari 400 for Christmas 1979, when they were fresh on the market. My dad wrote the company to get a manuscript of their BASIC manual (which wasn't out in stores yet), which served as a great learning tool. Besides the main text there were notes scribbled in the margins, hand-drawn diagrams, etc. It was a great introduction to computing for a nine year-old kid.
Heck, the thing came with 8K of RAM - when I wanted to upgrade to 16K, I had to leave it at a store for 2 weeks, and it cost $200!.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
First computer I owned was a speccy, but first computers I used was TRS-80 model I and III at school. :-)
I loved my spectrum so much as a kid.
I learnt Z80 assembler at age 11, and I program for it today.
Even though I program "Windows" and embedded software for a "living", programming the spectrum makes me feel "alive"
It has also made my collect some of my old favorite computers of yester-year that as I kid I couldn't afford.
So now I have almost 50 old micro computers in my collection.
I had a Atari 800XL and in fact my mom and dad still have it! Up until they got thier own machine, they used ot for printing resumes on a nice letter quality printer. I miss that thing. As far as I know it still works.
Gorkman
A good friend of mine shelled out around 1,000 DM for a state of the art zx81 with a real keyboard and 16kb RAM which we used to hack to death, but the first computer I owned personally was a Dragon 64. It's strange nobody else seems to have mentioned it yet, as it used to be rather popular and even ran a subset of OS9 in a mere 64 kbytes (yep, multi-user / multitasking, but also plain text passwords in /etc/passwd ;)) from two floppies.
I learned a lot on that machine as not too much software was available at the time, and the little thingy still sits on the shelf in my room. Memories!
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
The Babbage Difference Engine, what else?
(I have a feeling it's been said before, but I'm not going to read through all seven pages.)
IBM XT with a CGA monitor.
By then I had been playing with other computers for a year or so that friends/schools/stores had: a VIC-20, TI99/4A, Timex Sinclair, Commodore PET, Odyssey 2 (more of a game machine) and some unnamed mainframe/teletype system that I still don't know what it was -- "Login/attach" anyone?
I was one of those geek kids used to program computers on displays in stores before I owned one. Even after, I remember writing graphics & music demos at home, bringing them in on floppy, loading them up, and leaving them run. I stitched together a bunch of ones that I wrote, plus others I had traded, into a one big program -- sort of like a screen saver with lots of changing modes does today.
Now that I think of it, I imagine it must have been kind of funny working at one of those stores like Sears. You have a computer on display that shows nothing but "READY"... and when you come back from your break, an animated keyboard is playing "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" in 4-part harmony. Not faked, either - a musician could tell the right keys were lit up. With all of David Lee Roth's improvisations and the sax solo transcribed note for note.
Ha! While I'm in old fart mode, I remember the day when I discovered I could get the Atari to control the tape drive for playing audio. (IIRC, they had a little program that was a foreign language tutor that would take advantage of this.) So hacked up a program and brought it in to my summer computer class, along with a program that would print out the song's lyrics in time.
Since it wasn't obvious the tape was running, it gave the impression that I wrote a program that was actually playing it. Wow, that punk fit 3 minutes of encoded music into an 8K address space!
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
I drooled over the ZX80 brochures, but didn't fancy my chances at building one successfully. I got my ZX81 a couple of years after. I bought my 16K RAM pack for £50 a year after that... the world was my oyster. If I ever have to use Tippex to mark the appropriate volume control on a portable audio cassette player again, it'll be too bloody soon.
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
Anyone else used these? I got mine in 1987, you could compare it to something like Commodore 16, though it used a Z80. I wrote a little page about my computing timeline for occasions like this, so I don't have to repeat everything here :)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
My first computer was a plastic and metal mechanical computer called the "Digi-Comp 1". Got it for Christmas in 1963 or 64 See http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/Digicomp-Kit -1963.htm and http://www.csparks.com/gallery/Digi-comp for pictures. It was a 3 bit machine and could do all the basic operations via mechanical connections of flip flops.
I later worked on a PDP-10 and PDP-8 in high school and PDP-11, IBM 1103, 360 and 370 series in college. Moved up to job programming PDP-11s. Later bought a Sinclair ZX-81, but it SUX0R3D, so I got an original IBM PC.
My parents got me an Atari 400 with a staggering 16K of RAM, and an Atari 410 tape recorder, with the BASIC language cartridge.
The first computer we had at home was a Video Genie, which we borrowed for a couple of weekends. Enough to write my first program, anyway.
The first computer we owned was a ZX81, complete with dodgy rampak and even more dodgy cassette storage. No need to elaborate there, I hope. I got half-way through writing a space-invader game, but gave up.
But the first real computer we owned was a Beeb, a machine which seems little known in the US, but was amazingly well-designed in both software and hardware -- as evidenced by its amazing expandability and longevity. We got it when I was about 9; by the time I went off to uni almost a decade later, it was still in constant use, and had disk drives, printers, an external sound system, a synthesiser module, a full-size musical keyboard, a speech synth (bought just before a software-based one came out and made it obsolete), analogue and digital joysticks, a real-time clock, and massive expansion of RAM and ROM. It also had a new OS EPROM with a few tweaks of my own, and an additional EPROM I wrote adding stuff like extended cursor editing and a new screen mode. Amongst the hundreds of floppy disks were some education programs I had published, an album's worth of original music and another of covers, hundreds of pirated games, languages like FORTH, BCPL, and Pascal, fonts, WP and DTP software, and loads more I've forgotten.
(And if you think that's good, I helped turn a friend's one into a fully-working laser harp!)
<sigh> A wonderful machine. When it came out in 1981, I doubt anyone knew just how rich, how ingenious, and how long it would outlast its contemporaries. It was the last machine I knew absolutely inside-out; probably the last one you could know to that level of detail. I could list most of the OS calls, interrupts used, locations of indirection vectors... Ah well. .
Since then I've owned an Atari STE, an Atari Falcon, and then this 'ere Mac, plus several Psions. But I'm pleased to say I've never owned a PC, nor even lived in a house with one!
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
My first computer was a Gateway 2000. :-) :-)
I'm not sure what the exact model was, but it ran Windows 95.
In 2002 I got my old Emachines T2245.
Last December I got my iMac G5.
I plan to start collecting old computers as a "hobby".
I'd like to be able to program an old VIC-20 or something.
I think it would be a great learning experience, because the VIC-20s and Commodore 64s of yesteryear were so much simpler than the computers they sell now. Had I gotten a chance to mess with one, I would probably have a better understanding of how computers function, because I would have a much simpler knowledge to build upon.
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
I started in 7th grade with a VIC20. By high school I had two of them. But I had made it a habit of collecting old computers by the time I graduated high school; I had two VIC20s, a TRS-80, an atari 6200, an 8088, and a 286SX. If that last one didn't date me; when I graduated, 486's were just starting to be replaced by pentiums. Ok. Ok. It only seems like it was ages ago..
I played around a bit with a 4-bit 'computer' that had 16-key keypad and 8-LED display. I don't remember what it was, but one of my senior in Junior high showed it to me.
Later, I found a similar device but with 8-bit CPU. I was able to program a ping-pong in machine code where a ball (actually a dash) moves left and right and each player would press a key at the precise moment when the 'ball' reaches the edge to make it bounce back.
The first computer I actually owned was a TRS-80 Model I when I was 14. After finding out that games I bought couldn't have been programmed in BASIC, I started learning assembly language on my own and wrote a slot machine game.
I eventually bought an Atari 800 at 10th grade but since I didn't have a disk drive or any development software, I coded initial tools using machine code (assembly, disassembly, what have you) and also reverse-engineered most of the BIOS and graphics and audio I/O ports. I even found a secret boot loader from tape drives in BIOS and wrote my own autoboot program that will load all my development programs from the tape. I started creating a lot of games in assembly for fun, using all my custom-made development tools and bootstrap loaders.
After that, I moved to Apple II, then Mac IIcx, then to 486 with linux. I never touched any of the 8086, 286, or 386 since the CPU design was so bad for assembly programming, what with limitations on register usage and memory access, not to mention the horrible kludge of DOS and Windows programming.
I felt that programming should be fun, and the hardware, OS, and tools should be very flexible for creative software design rather than learning weird idiosyncracies of badly designed (in the name of compatibility and marketing I guess) hardware and software.
First computer was an Ohio Scientific Superboard II. The alternate, a fully assembled device was called the "C1P". 8K of RAM, 8K of ROM, and read/wrote to cassette at 1KB per minute. Eventually expanded it to have 128KB of RAM, with an 8" RX01 floppy drive ripped from an old Digital PDP-11. Modified a 21" B&W TV to be the monitor, and converted a thermal printer from an adding machine into a printer for the thing. It required 4 power supplies and drew almost 20 amps in total. Oh, and yeah, we overclocked it from 1MHz to 2MHz. This meant having to install a heatsink on the CPU and 2 fans in the case. To this day, still the fastest booting computer I've ever owned. Bring on M-RAM boot times!
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
at 11 the first computer I touched was the zx-81 and fell in love with programming. 2 months later I got an atari400. Subsequently went through the atari 800, 130XE, amiga500, amiga1000 (hacked to bits) took a partying break, then 386dx40 and etc... But most of my programming was at school on an XT with 640K, it was the only one without 320K and it was reserved for me because I was the only one that wrote programs that required the memory. I loved to show off my ataris to C64 people, the graphics would blow themm away, especially when I would program them from scratch in front of them. good times, good times print#6 for the blind :-)
When i was a kid, we built ours out of stone tabl..... umm ok... they were 8080's... pretty close..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I guess I'm an old-timer here.
c =191
Back in '77 my dad bought me a Commodore Personal Electronic Terminal (PET) while I was still in Elementary school. It was a PET 2001-4N with a whopping 1mHz processor, 4kB RAM, and a cassette tape drive! It had a BASIC compiler and was really fun for a kid learning programming. I learned how to program on it in a few days and eventually made my own "hunt the wumpus" game complete with ASCII graphics.
Great pictures of these dinosaurs are at: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?
I bought my kids laptops last year. They are at the same age where I learned programming, but haven't picked it up yet- they've seem too distracted by all of the pre-packaged apps and games, "infotainment", and GUI features on their PCs. My son says "for loops" are "Sooooo boring"
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
First computer I ever touched and programmed was this Commodore PET
;) It was magic, that thing. Digital sound long before Soundblaster on the PC's... a mouse that didn't flicker across the screen like it STILL sometimes does on Windows... Printing papers on the ImageWriter, the professional look of which far outstripped the fledgling Print Shop type stuff coming from my friends' Apple II's... MacGolf, Dark Castle, MacPaint, a nice Apple training disk (with the cassette audio tape to accompany it!), Copy II Mac, Font Mover, figuring out why they called it the "Finder", HFS filesystem, gigantic 80mb SCSI hard disks, Microsoft BASIC, using ResEdit to edit the graphics, menu and sound resources of any Mac program (in 1985!)...
;)
http://www.zimmers.net/cbmpics/cepets.html
I was in the midst of bugging my parents to get a C-64 like "everyone else on the block" but then we walked into an Apple store on a fateful December day in 1984. After seeing a Macintosh 128k demo, I don't think to this day that I've ever been so dumbstruck in my whole life. After the demo was done, during which I completely lost track of time, we asked what time it was and the guy pulls down the Alarm Clock desk accessory from the Apple menu. Brilliant.
I stepped up my parental bugging (I was 12) and next thing I knew we had the first Macintosh on the block (perhaps even the town) for Christmas
OK it totally makes sense that there are 1200 replies to this "story", ya geeks
Although my first toy was a Commode 64, which was replaced by the 128, then the 386SX, then the (watch out) Pentium, my first computer was an SGI Indy. Sure, before that I called those toys computers, but this was a superior machine. The rear windows lept up with the touch of a button like frogs in a dynamite pond. Well, not the Windows, but you get the idea. That was my first taste of a real operating system, and hardware beefy enough to run it. I dont use SGI hardware anymore, but I've been hooked on *nix ever since.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
I had a fairly enlightened dad, and while we couldn't afford the then-brand-new Macintosh, we could afford a PC clone. So he bought a Leading Edge model 'D' computer. 8088 (with toggle switch in the back to swich between 'normal' 4.77 MHz and 'fast' 8 MHz,) 640 KB of RAM, dual 5.25", 360 KB floppy drives, CGA with a composite monitor, and a Microsoft Mouse. Came with MS-DOS 3.1, and we got 'Microsoft Paint' for DOS, which was pretty much identical in look and feel to 'Paint' that's still included with every copy of Windows.
A couple years later, he got a surplus IBM PC/XT from his work. It was almost the same specs, but had a 30 MB hard drive, and a Hercules monochrome graphics card. So in 1986 (or thereabouts) we became a 2 PC household. Then in 1989, my mom got a surplus Compaq Portable II from her work. Again, same basic specs, CGA card with a built-in 3-or-4 inch greenscale monitor, but this had a modem! I sat in my room BBSing all night through high school. Ah, the joy of downloading naked lady pics at 2400 baud illicitly... Waiting half an hour to view a grany pic on a tiny greenscale screen. And having chat-sex with someone that really did turn out to be female!!! (Albiet 40-something years old and pushing 300 pounds, as I later found out.) Good thing I got my own phone line, because I can't count the number of times my Freshman and Sophmore years I heard "GET OFF THE COMPUTER!" at 2 AM when my dad picked up the phone to hear modem static...
Ah, the nostalgia.
But, the first computer I bought with my own money was the Cyrix 6x86/90 just out of high school. Don't remember all of its specs, but I do remember that it replaced the Leading Edge 486/66 my dad bought later my Junior year in high school. I had spent money upgrading that 486 (Sound Blaster Pro, better VGA card, bigger hard drive, 16 MB of RAM!!!) making it essentially mine, but the Cyrix was the first one that every penny was mine.
I still have the XT and Compaq Portable, and I wish I had kept my Leading Edge 'D'. It would make a nice addition to my old computer collection. (Mostly Macs.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
My high school had a Teletype connected to a university HP 2000 in 1974, but unfortunately, all we had access to was a BASIC interpreter.
A few years later a friend's dad let me run jobs on a CDC Cyber 70-something (may have been a 74). I actually saw that machine on a tour, in 1976.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
The Siemens PC 16/11 was the first computer I used when my father brought one home from work. It had two 12.5 inch floppy drives and was running CPM. The monitor was monochrome green and it took about a second for the lines to fade when the screen scrolled. The disks deserved to be called "floppies". There was a disk with some simple games (Chess, worms, a crappy text adventure etc). I also remember using WordStar on it. I guess it's a pretty rare thing nowadays. It's still up in the attic of my parents house, and I really need to try to run it some day.
My first owned computer was a C64 a few years later.
The first computer that was mine, and not my mother's, was a TI 99/4A. IIRC, Bill Cosby was the spokesman for it. It was a pretty cool system for the time. It had a cartridge bay in the front, so you could slip in a game like on the Atari 2600, but if you booted it without one you could still write and run BASIC programs. The coolest accessory was the Speech Synthesizer, which plugged into the side and certain software could use it to speak out loud. It was surprisingly good for the early 80s, Mac OS X's Fred voice isn't that much better. You could also load software off of audio tape, but it was a supreme pain in the ass. You had to tell the computer to start loading the software, then push play on the tape which played an analog audio signal with the program data that was demodulated back into binary data on the computer, but the trick was getting the audio levels right that the signal to noise ratio didn't get all messed up. I had a particularly cool game about fighting spiders that was only available on audio tape because it was too big for a cartridge.
My mother had a Digtial Rainbow, which was DEC's competitor to the IBM PC. It had two disk drives, but only one read/write head positioned between the drives so the lower disk had to be put in upside down (this was long before double sided disks, IIRC.) My mother showed her leet tech skills by upgrading it to have 128k of RAM, which maxed it out.
For those who are feeling nostalgic for old-skool computers check out glTerminal. It uses OpenGL to make your terminal look like an old CRT screen; white, green or amber. Options for flicker and screen curvature.
Here's the link for OS X.[ldopa.net]
With a Z80. I even got the bank to lend me some money for it. Thank god I lived in my parents' basement.
The first computer I learned to program was a Vector MZ ( along with a similar "Vector 3" ) made by a company called Vector Graphics. It ran CP/M and I learned to program in a version of BASIC made by some company called Microsoft. This was equipment I managed to talk a high school teacher into letting me use at weird hours, since I was in sixth grade, not high school.
True story: I briefly considered taking my summer work check and buying Microsoft stock, then realized I had no idea how to do so ( didn't know anyone, even an adult, who bought stock in any company ), so I bought a jacket instead. Sucks to be me, huh?
Later, after being exposed to many, many other kinds of computers, my parents were finally able to buy a TI-99/4A. Despite having 'color', I learned a lot more from the CP/M machines than I ever learned from the TI-99 ( except that using a tape to store data *sucks* ).
Yes that's exactly what the ZX-81(woohoo!) had.
I can't remember exactly how many "pixels" there were, but the text font was as you described.
GP was too quick to pounce.
My Dad brought it home from work when I was in 5th grade (ca. 1975/1976). I taught myself assembly language by simply reading thru the KIM manuals, in conjunction with a Rockwell 6502 databook.
I still have all that stuff in my junk drawer at home...
The Timex/Sinclair 1000, with 2K RAM, 16K RAM Pack (Replaced with a 32K Memotech RAM Pack), 1040 Printer, and a Panasonic cassette player/recorder were all my first computer and associated hardware. I eventually got the Timex/Sinclair 2068 as a Christmas gift a year or two later. I spent hours playing the Psion Flight Simulators on both of the computers, enjoyed the excitement of getting the occasional COMPUTE magazine with Timex/Sinclair programs, typing in the all the various "graphics" characters in the REM statements for later machine language programming, hoping that they would work after saving to tape.
After reading some of the posts, these first 8-bit (Timex/Sinclair) and 16-bit (Apple IIGS) computers inspired much creativity because turning them on resulted being placed in a BASIC language interpretor. The Apple IIGS was a transition machine between the old days of programming and the more recent days of computing as an appliance/exploration tool.
The list and order of every computer I've ever owned (still have them all, all still work):
1. Timex/Sinclair 1000, 4 MHz Zilog Z80A, 2K internal RAM, 16K or 32K RAM Packs
2. Timex/Sinclair 2068, 4 MHz Zilog Z80A, 64K RAM
3. Apple IIGS, 3.75 MB RAM, Apple RGB color monitor, 3.5" 800K floppy drive, 5.25" floppy drive, ImageWriter II Printer, Apple 300/1200 Baud Modem.
4. Macintosh PowerBook 520C, 25MHz Motorola 68LC040, 32MB RAM
5. Blue & White Power Macintosh G3, 500MHz IBM PowerPC G3/1MB L3 Cache, internal Iomega 100MB Zip Drive, 768MB RAM
6. Power Macintosh G5, dual 2.7 GHz PowerPC G5, 2.5GB RAM
A Vic 20 was the first, followed by the C64, an Apple II where I really dug my teeth into BASIC, then an 8086 and every Intel x86 from then on to the Pentium III, before switching to AMD. Now running an AMD64 X2 4400+ with Debian Linux... quite a long way from the trusty old Vic.
My first puter was a commodore Vic20 in order to one up my elementary school buddies on their brand new atari 2600's. Nya Nya mine has a keyboard and I can finger poke my own games into it. LOL!!!
:) At which time i began to learn 8 bit assembly language via the infamous "data" statement. :/
:) however it became a nightmare having to pad with NOPS in case i screwed up and had to insert code directly into the address space requiring me to rewrite everything further up.
I learned the basics about basic typing in programs from books. Games of course...
Then came the commodore 64.
Then came the 128 which had a disassembler.
Then came a magic article in ahoy magazine with the BASIC source code for something called an assembler that actually let me code ASM in a funky text editor and let me use names instead of addresses for referencing stuff. WOW!!!! That in conjunction with the book "mapping the commodore 64" literally changed my world.
Until the Commodore Amiga came around and the book "Mapping the Commodore Amiga". ASM All the way.
And then Commodore died.
And I discovered the 386. Ditched assembly language for C/C++
Then the 486
Then the pentium
P2
P3
P4
Will it ever end?
I started out in 1981 with a TRS-80 Model III, Level II BASIC with 48k and a tape deck. Eventually it got a 5.25" floppy drive and a 7-pin line printer. I had a lot of the crappy games for it, some of which I actually saved money to buy. Within a year or two I was doing some advanced Z-80 assembly coding, first as embedded basic strings poked into RAM, and then as EDTASM compiled programs. Everything I wrote on that computer was "fast"! My second computer was a Tandy 1000SX with two floppy drives, which lasted me until 1990 and then I got an accelerated 16MHz 286 with 640K of RAM, Windows 3.1, and an ATI VGA Wonder video card. After that, I graduated to a 486-66DX2 and Windows 95, 33kbps modem, and a Creative VideoBlaster capture card. In 1998 I finally got a pentium II. I've always been a bit behind the times - I still use a PIII-866MHz with 512MB, but with 370GB of hard drive storage. Have collected/still have: TRS-80 Model III, Apple IIe, C64, CocoII, various x86 with linux on them, various ppc, sa1110, coldfire development boards.
My first was a Quest Super Elf, which I believe was supposed to be a knock-off of (or follow-on to?) the Elf. I worked all summer 1981 to save up the $106.95 for the kit ... which had a nice hex keypad and display so you could program it directly in machine code. I later got a bunch of the options (power supply, super expansion, S-100 memory card as a bare board, and I should still have the Super BASIC cassette in this mess somewhere although I never had tapes working with the machine so I never got to run it) and made a nice cube case for it out of redwood. Too bad the 1802 was such a lame processor. I think its claim to fame was lower power usage, since it was CMOS and also static so you could slow it down as much as you want, not very important for desktop use, so the clumsy instruction set was the main thing you noticed. But any CPU that has a SEX instruction is OK with me!
My first one was a very obscure machine called the Comx-35. You couldn't get much software for it, but on the plus side, it had a radiation-hardened CPU. (It was the same one used in the Voyager, Viking and Galileo spacecraft.)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
My first computer was and Amiga 500 with a 20MB HDD, 2 MB of ram and a 2400 bps modem. I used to sit for hours programming games with the AMOS programming environment. Sigh.....happier times.
My brother and I got an Amstrad (may have to hand in my geek card, as I don't remember any more detail than that) for christmas 1986. He learnt how to program games in basic - I learnt how to program knock knock jokes in basic. Guess which one of us is richer now. :(
With tape deck, i remember CRC errors, and having to rewind and replay. Best of all though you could copy things using your boom box with high speed dubbing - haha.
Later upgraded to dual 5" disk drive, and an extra 32k of sideways ram.
loved chuckie egg, elite (line drawn) , star defender, frak!
good time, great machine - still runs after 25 odd years.
At least I believe that was the number. It's been a long time. It had a tape drive instead of a floppy.
I learned BASIC at the age of 6 or 7 as well as Wumpus, Trek, and others.
Then I moved and went to public school and promptly forgot everything I learned until Junior High. B-(
"Bah!" - Dogbert
The first computer that I actually owned? A hand wire-wrapped S100 board from college, sporting a 1MHz 8080, 1KB static RAM, 1KB EPROM, and a 40mA current loop serial port. A bare-bones monitor program took up almost every byte of the EPROM. I still have the assembly language programs that I wrote for it, if only I could read them off the 8" floppies that were used by the development system.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I think the pacman type game I had was called Jellymonsters.
Or something similar.
The HP2100A, with 5 teleltypes and a high-speed photocell paper tape reader. It had 32K words (16 bits per word) of core memory and ran the Dartmouth Basic system.
My first computer was an Amiga 1000 (PAL version). Ah, endless afternoons (I was about 8 at that time, so I was told to sleep during night) of hacking BASIC. Creating animations with DPaint was fun too. Or writing Amiga-DOS scripts, to automate what ever small task. And sometimes recreation with the FlightSimulator. Oh, the days!
Amiga (A1000 in particular) was my *second* platform - and, in fact, I still have all the hardware! Remember AREXX? Or your startup-script? df0? Soldering in a socket to use Amiga 500/2000 Kickstart ROMs? [happy smile, remembering the good old days when my e-mail address was a spam-free UUCP account...]
My first was the TI-99/4A. (And of course I still have that hardware!)
(I should note at this point that I still have every computer I've ever cared about: my TI-99/4A with its many expansions and modifications, and my Amiga 1000. The rest (x86) are soulless and disposable commodities with no unique architectural features.)
Now, aside from its popularity, the C-64 was about as mundane as any computer could possibly be and so I eschewed it as the Jack Tramiel cardboard-RF-shield garbage that it was. The TI-99/4 series was downright *weird* but capable of great power in the right hands; getting to know it means relatively capable multitasking on hardware introduced in 1979. (The TI was exceptionally powerful for its day by virtue of its TMS9900 16-bit CPU and registers in RAM, though its BASIC *really* sucked.) Getting *really* familiar with it meant adding 80-column graphics boards, hard disk controllers, and whipping out the soldering iron to circumvent the RAM's 16/8 bus multiplexer. 1979 hardware with a slight revision in 1981, and I was multitasking.
When finally I could no longer cope with 40-column text in Funylwriter (about my third year of high school), I scooped a used Amiga 1000. A few hacks later and I had WYSIWYG text editing with horrible MOD files playing in the background (ah, but it was so neat in an era when Sidekick was just starting to become popular on the 386s my classmates had).
Choice of the TI-99/4A? I was *ten years old*; combining paper route, birthday and Christmas money, I could have had a TI-99/4A, a Timex-Sinclair 1000 or a Commodore VIC-20. I chose the TI because their machine did more than either (even though they didn't know how to advertise or market that to the public!), and their logo was on most of the chips in old stuff I'd taken apart.
Choice of an Amiga? I got used to having power with the TI, and the small and tight-knit usergroups of an unusual platform. In terms of bang for the buck, I don't think too many intelligent or informed people would put a 1985 Amiga 1000 up against any PC until at least a 1990 486 with 1993's Windows 3.1. Yah, Microsoft was writing busines apps for the PC, but since when have they actually been a harbinger of quality, power, or reliability? And here we are in 2006 - the competition is old enough to drink in Utah but the Wintel platform still can't do two screen resolutions simultaneously on the same display.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
My parents bought me a Commodore 64/128 around 1987. I used it to play games mostly and learned a little bit of very simplistic BASIC programming then. To give you perspective I'm 24 now.
My school system (Seminole County, FL) was actually quite advanced and wealthy at the time and had an Apple Lab. I learned how to program on the Apple IIe, and IIGS in a public school. I also learned how to use a Mac in elementary school before age 11.
My parents bought a series of PCs in the 90s the first one of which contained PC-GEOS a well developed DOS-based 16bit GUI. Eventually we got on Prodigy and I did the BBS thing too.
When I was a teenage at age 14 I paid for broadband cable in my house. I then began to create websites for various small businesses and that kept me from ever having to have a "job" in high school. In fact I did so well with that I didn't have to have a "job" until my 3rd year in college because school kept me too busy to work on my other income-producing products.
So yes I am very greatful for the computers I was given access to as a kid, they have helped paved the way for me later on in life.
Libertas in infinitum
When I was in junior high, circa 1978, we used 300 baud acoustic coupler modems to dial up to an HP minicomputer with our 3 (three!) rocking teletypes (and I mean teletypes - these printed on rolls of paper). Acoustic couplers were what we used back when it was difficult to hook things up directly with the phone wiring (RJ-11 jacks were still pretty new back then - most phones were hardwire to the wall). Picture a small white box with two round black rubber cuffs. You picked up the handset, dialed (I think these phones actually had rotary dials, too :-) ), listened for the tone and then stuffed the handset into those two cuffs. A few random characters on the paper and then you get a prompt and you're off.
Those WERE the days! I remember getting the Amiga 500 for Christmas in wha...
Hey Will! Rainbow Computers in Ottawa for me.
tic.......tic.......tic.......tic.......tic..... ..tic.......tic.......
Yah, there was a running Amiga in my bedroom for *far* too many years.
(Hey, all you Latinos who know what "Amiga" actually means, STFU; I'm gay, and even the friggin' Amiga disk checks had nothing to do with it!)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
First computer I used was my grandparents' Apple IIe, in 1984 or so.
But my family's first computer was an Amiga 2000, in 1988. Oh, the weekends spent toying with Deluxe Paint or creating horrendous melodies in DMCS. Taking over the world in Empire, and trying to get a higher score than my sister in Mousetrap. Being introduced to the CLI, programming in BASIC, and helping upgrade our computers through the years...
For a few years I had an Amiga 1000 as my own computer, though I eventually inherited the old (upgraded) A2k and used it as my primary computer until '97. That's when I went to eollege, and had to choose - buy an '060 upgrade and a graphics card for the dead-end Amiga, or get with the program and buy a Pentium. I chose the Pentium, and have regretted it ever since. I would have missed a few great games, but I also would have missed countless days, weeks, months of frustration.
10 POKE 144,88
20 ?CHR((RND(1)*255)+1): GOTO 10
used to do that to as many of the PET and CBM machines as I could in the computer lab right before the bell rang...
At the Apple Center --> on as many macs as possible before being spotted --> full-screen Darwin terminal --> type at the prompt
while true
do
ls -lr /
done
An apple salesman once looked at six screens and said "I think they've all crashed. We'll have to do a reboot."
Mine still works, I have the ADAM and Coleco Vision. I'm not sure if they were sold as different versions. Mine has the tape drive (Buck Rogers anyone?) as well as cartidges (Donkey Kong - phear). I also have a 300 baud modem in it with a free subscription to Compuserve from like 1980. I believe it has some BASIC compiler in it as well. I can still remember what it sounds like, though I haven't hooked it up on more than 5 years. I also had an old WANG. It was a server/dumb terminal type computer. Sounded like 2 industrial air conditioners when it started up. It was about 130lbs and the terminal was 65-70lbs. Goodtimes ;)
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
My first computer was the cute girl that sat next to me on the bus, she was a pro at helping me with math, and quality study time.
dual 8080. Output to model 15 teletype for hardcopy, composite video to crt.t ent/sitebuilderpictures/ht_pictures_012.jpg
http://railroad-signaling.com/tty/m15.jpg
http://mysite.verizon.net/res02dad/sitebuildercon
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
When I was in 8th grade, my school had an IMSAI 8080 http://oldcomputers.net/imsai8080.html that had 8K of RAM, ran BASIC, and had 2 TTY's with paper tape punch/readers. When it crashed, the teacher had to reload the OS with a paper tape that took about 30-45 mins to load.
Then, in high school, we had an Interdata something or other. It had 36K, 2 8.5 inch floppy drives, 7 TTY's and 3 CRTs, ran BASIC and had a Centronix dot matrix printer, and man, that printer was fast. The TTY's had paper tape punch/readers, so you could punch your program and take it home with you! To boot the Interdata, you had to enter a series of codes into an octal keypad on the front panel, the last of which caused the read/write head to move into position on the floppy drive, with a loud clunk. I always that that was really cool!
The first computer I actually owned was an ATARI 800XL that when you entered "print SQRT(4)," it said 1.9. I don't recall the exact details, but it was some goofy bug in the built-in BASIC. In those days, there were magazines that had programs in them that you entered into your computer by keying thousands of (decimal) machine codes into some little BASIC program. I keyed in a word processing program that worked pretty darn well--it got me through my first college career--for the cost of a $2.00 magazine.
A feature of the SOL-20 (my first computer too) was that you could plug in "personality modules" (containing EPROMS IIRC) to configure the machine for different applications. Wasn't one of the PMs a terminal emulator?
A buddy got a subscription to a computer magazine that had code for different machines (Atari, Commodore, and TRS) for games. We would spend our weekends in junior high typing in games one line at a time. Of course, we would make a mistake and spend the next weekend debugging. We ended up with about 4 or 5 cassette tapes worth of programs (we hooked the tape recorder directly to the computer back then since we didn't yet have a floppy). These days, he runs a technology consuntancy and I do bit work for him and many others.
Before the CoCo; before the Trash-80; we had this home computer. You programmed it by wire wrapping, more or less. The keyboard consisted of 10 sliding switches. The monitor was a set of 10 flashlight bulbs. RAM, what's that?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
First you had to buy all the parts and then build it, then you got to program it using toggle switches and LED's. The "ELF" was featured in Popular Electronics back in the mid 70's -- way before the VIC-20 became popular...
As I recall, 8 rows of 7 stone beads. 1st grade. I tried eating the red ones and ended up with orange lips all day.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I don't know which is more sad: the fact that a joke about a modem over VoIP made me laugh, or the fact that for a second, a brief second, I actually considered doing it.
The only consolation I get is that I know at least 3 moderators did the same thing.
Timex Sinclair ZX80 with 1k of memory. Stored Basic programs on audio cassette.
Then it was the Commodore Vic 20 with 4k... Man what a screamer.
After that we got the C-64. Made my own joystick to play Gorf.
Man those were the days... Now if I can only loose my virginity.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Mine was the PET 2001 with the chicklet keys and whopping speedy mass storage device known as a cassette tape.
Still have it and it still works.
Ready.
qz
Bought it second hand for A$6000 with a Hazeltine 1500 terminal in 1980. Had 64K of RAM and two 1MB 8" floppy disk drives. Got upgraded to the SB1600 board with 128K of RAM after a couple of years. This system implemented p-code in 16bit hardware and ran the UCSD Pascal operating system. So I had program level multitasking processes available via signal & wait, and used it, before the IBM PC was released and set things back ten years. It would compile Pascal source at about 1600 lines/minute.
Why did I spend about twice what my 3 year old car was worth? Because at the time I was programming COBOL on an IBM 370/138 via punch cards. I wanted a machine that would *never* *ever* be able to run COBOL to go home to. There was a BASIC interpreter available (written in Pascal of course), but why would you bother with it. One of the earliest Ada compilers was released for it, but I didn't feel the need to pay the A$10,000 asked.
Well, I did not own it. It was Sept 1980 and this computer which used magnetic core memory and octal coding was used to teach beginning computer programming concepts of machine language programming. teletypes was used for input/output. The control panel could also be used, and for the first program it was. Paper tape was used for long term program storage using a baudit 5 bit code. Synificant programs using this interface was like integer multiple and divide.
I have been on a number if historical sites but I never hear of this computer.
First computer owned was in May 1982 and it was a ZX81, later upgraded with 16k memory pack from Sinclair and a 32k memory pack from memtech. I also had a high-res graphics pack from memtech. It was like 512x200. But it required a upgraded power supply. You had to have at least a 1 amp power supply. The stock unit was like 750Ma. I had to wire that up myself and I got the wiring wrong and shot 110 A/C into the sinclair box. It did not last long at all. There was a pop some smoke and that was over.
The earliest computer I can remember our family owning is an Olivetti of some sort. After that, we had various PCs like a 286 and stuff.
The first machine I remember that was mine was a 486SLC33 (which I believe was a clone chip) and since then I have moved through a 486DX266, a HyperRace 586 upgrade chip, a Pentium 166 MMX, a clone 300MHz chip that was one of the worst computer-purchasing decisions I have ever made then on to a Pentium III 800, a Pentium IV 2.4 and now I have a Pentium IV 3.4 with HT technology.
The first computer I ever had was a Vic 20, which ran games from cassettes (always fun) and helped me learn how to program in BASIC. Not so useful these days, but it was a great time for a 5-year-old, and it brought me into the computer world at a young age.
a bit like asking the jock if he remembers his first touchdown....
didn't the machines back then seem to have a little more magic in them?
learnt BASIC with it, did some graphics programming e.g. draw simple shapes like an orbitting circle. learnt how to use a word processor. but I guess the biggest achievement was I got sick of playing PC games and I never played computer games again (except for a couple of MAME games I still play every now and then). I reckon I have saved myself thousands of hours.
I remember typing in programs from magazines and even whole books of code ("BASIC games" and stuff like that, it's still sitting in my parents' basement), and getting hooked on programming that way.
I remember typing in HEX games from Compute! magazine, when it was a C64 magazine. The first thing you had to do is type in the BASIC program which would prompt you for the HEX characters, including a checksum pair at the end of the line. If you made a mistake, it would tell you and you would have to type that line in again. Those games were great, but of course some were literally pages and pages of HEX. The end result were often sprite based games which ran as fast as you would expect from assembler.
Just recently I found an old PC related magazine (Australian Personal Computer) which details how to write filters (lower2upper and stripping line feeds for example) in debug scripts. So I tried them and it has gotten me back into assembler.
Out of interest, can anyone recommend a good PPC assembler book which includes Altivec reference and examples?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Mine was a 128 too. It could go at 2MHz (with the screen blanking) - wow what a speed!!!! It drew those CAD drawings in minutes if not seconds!! Unfortunately someone thought it was a PC and stole it! Aaah the good old days!
double penetration;
My first computer was probably my brain.
My first computer was in my first year of college (1976). This was IBM 1130 enclosed in a glass-house with a big line printer and a card reader as its companions. A number of card punch machines were housed in a separate room for us students. The print-outs of the FORTRAN programs were given out of a separate room that had an "interaction" window for this purpose.
Getting in the room that housed the IBM 1130 was a privilege -- I managed that in 1978 when I was able to book a "block" time for using it for one of my projects in a course.
-- Raj
1970 -- NCR 500 1980 -- IBM 3032 and 370-168, Burroughs 4800 Oh -- you mean personal computer? 1983 Atari 1200XL
I was sad to see that a search for CPM in this thread came up empty. Oh well.
My first computer was a CPM system called a "Big Board" -- a single-board Z80 computer with a whopping 64k RAM and TWO 8-inch floppies. I got the parts from a more advanced enthusiast who was putting them together in kits with semi-complete instructions. I hand soldered the whole thing in a few evenings. It worked the first time I turned it on, after a moment of panic before realizing that the brightness control on the monitor was turned all the way down. The massive, cube-shaped case is an artless combination of 3/4" particle board with imitation woodgrain vinyl finish and sheet aluminum.
I still have the computer and a box of 8" floppies, and have been thinking about firing the thing up again, but it hasn't run in more than 20 years since the old monochrome monitor burned out. And if I recall correctly the floppies have rubber drive belts, which are probably rotten by now.
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/rebuild.h tm/
The Colossus celebrates its 62nd birthday this year. Another case of Yankees trying to re-write history! It's bad enough when Hollywood get away with it for 'artistic reasons' but /. and CNet should know better... :-)
When I was a freshman in high school, my father and I built a Heathkit computer system. It was based on the S-1000 bus, if I recall correctly. That was the same year I was introduced to teletypes, modems and the ARPANET. Then came my OSBORNE 01, which I still own. After that came the Commodore 64, which I also still possess. Then a string of PC's. I still have the CPUs of all of those, for some strange reason...
I bought a Commodore 64 to use as a prop keyboard. Back then a 64 was cheaper than a real keyboard. I fired it up but didn't really do much with it. In the late 1980s I bought a Brother word processor. It could store documents on 3 1/2 disks. It was an all in one machine and came with a built in daisey wheel printer. Worked fairly well but you couldn't store more than 20 or 30 pages on a disk. The first real machine I had was an 8086. I used it for word processing. I had an early version of Microsoft Word. Unlike later versions it worked quite well. Anything global took forever but it was still a huge jump up from a typewriter. I paid $200 to have 20 meg hard drive put in it. I now have a pen drive that holds 50X that and it cost less than $100 when I bought it. My PDA also holds a gig and the card for it was less than $100. The first decent machine was a 386 SX notebook with a whopping 4 meg of ram. I actually used it for Playmation, an early CG software. It's now called Animation Master. Hard to beleive I use to do animation on a machine like that.
My first computer was a Heathkit ET-3400 educational system with an 8 bit microprocessor, as few bytes of ram and a LED display.
Next came a Sinclair ZX81, and after that a Commodore C64.
I wonder how many others here have had such a system as a child?
In Korea, all your base are Only For Old People
"The difference is that I'm a game developer these days instead of working on business apps."
//e, and attempted to make the giant leap from BASIC to 68K assembler on the Amiga. My heroes were the guys in the "demo scene" who created those amazing animations that fit on 640K floppy disks. It was a huge learning curve, but I loved it. I got to the point where I could create some nice looking graphical animations using the Amiga hardware (The "Blitter" chip if I recall correctly) and started to play around with collision detection and that kind of stuff.
Wow, good on you. I was talking to a friend about this a couple of days ago. We were both talking about getting out of IT, but neither of us have anything else we can do.
When I was in high school, I had an Amiga 500. I'd previously taught myself BASIC on an Apple
At school I was learning Pascal on one of those boring IBM PC things(VGA? - bah!). I hated it. Then the time came to decide what kind of job I wanted. I saw a job advertised for "computer operator". All I knew about it was it had nothing to do with Pascal, and it was working on *Mainframes*!!! I didn't even know what a mainframe was. But it wasn't Pascal, and surely there couldn't be any career path in coding games.
Needless to say, the job was primarily loading tape drives and printers. 16 years later I'm a well paid "consultant" in a relatively specialised, but generally boring, part of corporate IT. Really a glorified System Administrator. I haven't written a single line of code, other than Perl and similar interpreted languages, since my school days.
The point of this long disjointed story is that these days I really, really, wish I'd seen the future of "computer games" and stuck with 68k assembler.
Serving Suggestion: Defrost
The first computer I used was in 1975. We would ship off our 'mark-sense" cards with APL encoded to the Angle Park Computing Centre in South Australia. A week later we would get our output and see if it ran or not.
The first computer I bought was an Osbourne 1 in 1982. What incredible value for money! Twin floppies, 64k RAM, CP/M, MBASIC, Business Basic, WordStar and Supercalc. I bought one with my first job (COBOL programming on a 370/168) before I bought a car. I should have spent money on a decent programming language, but I got a car and that is when the savings became spendings.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Lovely machine. Not really my own, but hey, it had a built-in thermo printer, two (!) metal tape drives, a lovely graphical display (it could do 80 cols!), and was blazingly fast: scrolling your code was so fast that the line numbers were unreadable.
:)
:)
Friends had ZX 81 and C64 - it was fun writing your own games on there.
Next system was a Sperry/Univac 1100/11 (yeah, yeah, I'm an old fart). We had access to one at school
Followed by a VAX 785 and - finally! - my very own PC: the Olivetti M24.
These days my little Palm TX is more powerful then all of them combined
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
The Microtan 65 home built with a massive 1k (yes, 1024 bytes!) of memory that occupied a whole Eurocard. You cannot imagine the exitement when programming in machine code we actually MOVED a pixel from one part of the TV screen to another. It used the 6052 processor and was sold by the Tangerine company in the UK.
My first computer was P3. I wend to polytechnics (university level) and I got money from my parents. Computer served me well and few years ago I bought my second computer, Thunderbird. Although I have used my brother's C64 when I was a child mostly for gaming and I loaned my god father's computer (486) for learn programming when I was eighteen. I think it's all most funny how late I really get to together with my own computer. But considering that my girlfriend used computer first time when she was seventeen is hilarious. Now she uses computer better than I.
I had one of these! http://www.trs-80.com/images/computer-m80.gif Was the FIRST computer my father bought for his factory and ended up at home around 1989 (for the kids, you know)... Compatibility: TRS-80 Model III / IV CPU: Z 80A Clock: 2 MHz RAM : 48 Kbytes ROM: 16 Kbytes Screen: 16 lines x 64 columns (80 x 24 when running SO-08, CP/M 2.2 compatible OS)
\m/
Posting this late in the thread and as an AC? Gotta get in my 2 cents too... :)
:) They were told to get me a real computer, an Apple // or an IBM PC.
First computer I used was a TI 99/4A my elementary school had. So naturally I would've loved to get one of those, but I would've been just as happy with an Atari 800, a Commodore 64, or a Timex Sinclair 2048. Never saw one around here, but I had a product brochure that I would read cover to cover over and over. Hell, I would've been happy with any computer, even that Sinclair 1000 that showed up in the Long's Drugstore ad for $40.
My parents were ready to break down and buy me an Atari or Commdore, but someone told them not to; saying I'd quickly tire of it, (dunno, I still have my original Atari 2600.
They chose the prior and I've prety much never swayed since. I did have a 486 for a year, but it's primarily been Apple// machines and Macs all the way.
... but with a big, for those days, TV as a monitor which was supposed to also double as a TV, and a modified IBM Selectric typewriter as a printer.
Also got the extra 16K for Pascal but never got into it. Used Electric Pencil as a word processor. And at least we had got into Macs before my mother started writing her books.
All up the North Star cost me as much as a new car would have cost at the time ($A7K). Wouldn't mind having todays equivalent to spend on a bunch of new gear.
Of course my real first computer was an IBM 1440, but I let them keep it in the big airconditioned room.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I've probably re-installed Windows and Linux +30 times on this damn machine.
Never get RIMM RAM.
-- I'm 22, and not a coder. :)
take that!
Woot.. I had a dumbed down version of the Trash 80.... the MC-10! It was a small and very sleek little unit.... couldn't do to much with it. THen got a Vic-20.. and then a second Vic-20 and fuck I loved them... I hand entered so many games from those magazines... and when you misplaced just ONE digit... ka-boom! Then came my first 8086 and the rest is history...
That thing was a hoot!! However I soon got tired of counting from 0 to 7 (and from 7 to zero, the famous "missile countdown"). Likewise, the addition and subtraction got boring, also. After that, I didn't do much computing until high school and college. In 1982 I built a Sinclair ZX from a kit; still have that up in the attic somewhere. It was very tempermental, used to overheat all the time and if you pressed on the membrane keyboard too hard the heatsink would touch the metallized interior of the plastic housing and short out the whole thing.
I even found a picture online. I made mine from a copy of Electronics Australia. That was replaced by a Z80 S100 based system 9that I built myself. I also had a home built 2650 for a while.
Here's the SC/MP image
http://eddiem.com/micros/micros.htm
There they are a conga line of suck holes. On the conservative side of Australian politics. - Mark Latham
My first computer was C64 and I had the Maniac Mansion in a floppy disk, and my friends and me, spent a whole year to finish this game without the solutions in the hand, it were our first treasure.
Although the first machine I used was an HP 2000 TSB system in the early 70's the first one I owned was a SWTPC 6800. It was sold in kit form and I bought it while I was in college. It has a Motorola 6800 processor running just under 1 Mhz clock speed. 4K! of memory and a serial interface to plug in a teletype or VT100 or some such terminal. Later I added diskette drives (85k) and memory (48k or so). I still have the machine and it still works just fine when I fire it up every few years just for entertainment. Funny thing is I use a PC for a terminal that is probably 5-5000 times faster than the old beast.
Dad bought it for me when I turned 14, and it was fascinating. Played F-117, Silent Service, and Kampfgruppe to my heart's content . . .
I fell in love with the command line (to this day, it feels "real") and computer manuals in general, yet it wasn't until years later that I developed my fascination with programming - I somehow intuited that there was something wrong with BASIC . . . just felt wrong. Glad I felt that way too, after reading what Dijkstra wrote about that language.
Now I want to know what CowBoy Neal had as a kid . . .
Moe
SARAVA!
In 1982, my father bought us a Commodore Vic20 with his tax return. He bought me a new bike that year too, so I didn't spend too much time on it. Didn't help. We had the total package, color - connected to our floor model while we moved the Atari to the 21" black & white! We had the cassette tape hard drive so that we could save and store our programs.
:\
:P
Immediately, I began programming in BASIC by copying the programs for the Vic20 out of the back of BYTE. I learned quickly how to type... and began writing my own stories on the computer - I was and still am a great creative writer. Did I mention that I was only 9? *giggle* Within a year, I had written (ok, copied) several game programs, including Omega, Asteroids, and a few others that I can't remember... and a word processor, a home checkbook system, and a vinyl catalog database! Hey... I didn't understand what it all was until they were done, but when they were done and Dad showed me, I was amazed what I had done.
The bad thing was that tragedy struck and I was sent to live with my real mother, who didn't even know what a computer was. I didn't see another machine again until I was 14 - a sophomore in high school. My Jr. High didn't have them. But I knew what I loved, and I started over. By the 2nd semester my sr. year, I was student leading the HP3000 class and the WP5.1/DOS class, and had gotten my mom into computers..... Macs. But I never again could program properly. I can write algorithms like a mofo... but translating it into code is impossible.
But the knowledge set me on the path where I am today, and I love it, and have loved every moment of my career. Just not some of the employers!
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
...when I sold my go-cart to a friend so I could buy a VIC-20.
My dad brought home our first PC, back in the early 80's, which was a Tandy 1000 with CGA color and an internal speaker with 128K conventional memory. The OS was DOS 2.0 on 5 1/4 floppy disk. Some games I loved to play were: DigDug, Stargate, Ghostbusters, Ninja Gaiden, TestDrive, and Qubert. We programmed and played some Basic games too: Gorillas, Artillery, Castle, etc. ...Some very fond memories indeed.
"To err is human, doing it again is downright stupidity!"
In 1990 (or maybe 91?), for my birthday, I received a monster of a computer. Genuine Intel 386SX-25, 1MB of RAM, a 40MB hard drive, Tseng 512k video card, a 1.2MB Teac floppy drive, and an 8-bit Sound Blaster. I had what I think was a Logitech joystick as well. It was running MS-DOS 5.0. A year or two later, I upgraded it to 8MB of RAM, so I could play Aces over Europe.
I upgraded it several years later to a 486DX2-66, and man was it fast! 16MB of RAM as well, which was a huge amount of RAM. Somewhere along the way, I had added a 340MB hard drive, so I had a big disk, and a fast computer.
Parts of that computer I ended up using for almost 10 years, finally retiring the keyboard when I purchased my first ATX motherboard, an Abit-BP6.
Last year, I finally threw away the motherboard, although I still have the hard drives in a box collecting dust. I've always meant to pull them out and grab all the data off of them, but I'm not sure they'd even spin up any more.
Basic model w/ cassette. Presumably like many others wrote a program to catalog what was on the cassette. Didn't have the patience to type in the monstrous code for the game programs in the magazines, however I *do* have an original Wumpus book. I tried selling it on Amazon, but they don't have a listing for Wumpus! What I really wanted was a Sage http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c =607 . Advertised in Byte, it supported a phenominal amount of languages, including FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, and others. However, it was way out of my price range!
Next machine was IBM PC, complete w/ monochrome monitor. I wish terminals today were as good as that monitor. Lovely to look at!
Of course, I also recall Wang computers having monitors that could display a complete 8 1/2 x 11 inch. Truly a pity that never caught on!
We never had a fullsize keyboard, what he did have was an aftermarket hard key keyboard for it, you stuck it over the membrane keyboard and you could type on the little calculator size keyboard
I still have my Sinclair, it's still in working order, so is the 8K RAM cartridge and my slot machine tape.
I also have an Aquarius computer, I forget, I believe they were made by Coleco or Intellevision, it too is still in working order
So is my atari 2600 and my commie for that matter.
Good times
OK, I grew up in the 60s around people encoraging artsy organic crap, and I tried to submerge my inate geekness. After some college it finally broke free and I signed up for a FORTRAN course. Before I could punch my first card, though, a physics prof taught me enough about the school's interactive BASIC system so that I could write myself my own Blackjack game.
My dad had started with computers in the '40s. When he heard I'd started trying out programming, he sat me down for a serious talk - "Rick, realize this: you'll work really hard on your first program, you'll think it's perfect, but then it WON'T WORK." He was right, but I kept at it anyway.
My first "own" computer was a Heath H89 that I bought from a guy who was given an early model by Heath to see if its assembly was in fact possible. After several months I essentially discarded the Heath operating system and replaced it with my own version of Forth.
A few years later my grad school advisor let me her 128K Mac (upgraded to 512) and I got the phonebook edition of Inside Macintosh. I was hooked, again, and I bought myself a Mac Plus.
They get a bad rap, mostly because of the lousy keyboard that came with the early models...but they fixed the keyboard (real keys instead of chicklets...and still wireless!) and it was a great machine. I had the sidecars on mine for parallel port, but also added a Tecmar jrCaptain with an extra 512k of RAM bringing it up to 640k, which was more than my dad's office machines! It ran Lotus 1-2-3 fine, and anything else I could throw at it. Plus, it had 16 color graphics before EGA was even available (and when it finally was, an EGA card cost as much as an entire PCjr!)...great games, too. The only problem was lack of expansion space, not that many of us could afford harddrives anyway (5 1/4", full height 10MB in my Compaq Plus! 8 pounds of harddrive). But you were fine as long as you didn't mind swapping diskettes all the time... Great machine, very under-rated...
You would be married by now
LOL I always wondered what happened to the modems we built. I was a repair technician at Cardinal in the early 90s. Glad to hear you got some good use out of them.
Back in the day (late 70's...yikes) we built a home model RCA Cosmac Elf. You could actually get the schematics, etc. (I think in a Popular Electronics mag), without having to buy the system, so my buddy and I built our own version of this beast. Those were the days, 2 banks (8 and 8) of SPDT toggle switches arranged as BCH (binary coded hex), with up being 1 and down being 0, and a momentary push-button INPUT. 256 bytes of RAM. The feeling of joy when we wrote a machine code to make an LED blink at a specified rate was amazing. Also amaaaazing was how quickly you began to think in BCH when that was how you had to program! Then later came such beauties as the KIM 1, the SYM 1, Ohio Scientific, Altair, Imsai, and much later Coleco, Adam, Wizard. Then power of power came VIC 20, Atari, C64, C128, and the glorious Amigas, A1000, A500, A2000, A3000, and A4000. My present system (apart from the PIV 3.2GHz 2GB RAM laptops, PIII and PIV servers in my front room) that I love most is an A4000 with a 68060 accelerator, Newtek Toaster/Flyer, vectorscope, dual TBCs, that I use for NLE. Some fun!