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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.)
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
An emulated IBM 370 on VM/370. Running WATFIV. happy days.
mine was an Amiga 500+ - ah, those were the days.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing now if he had given in and bought me a NES.
...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.
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!
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.
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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"
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
No, its like, you know, he was just chillin'' with the California Raisins. No sour grapes :-)
No batteries required!
What?
One of my fondest memories of that computer was when I bought the CRPG "Megatraveller" and discovered that it required a hard drive. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to copy all of the files onto 4 DD 5.25 disks and use each one under certain circumstances (startup, space, first half of planets, second half of planets). It was great.
I also remember asking a guy a few years later how much it would cost to upgrade to a couple of 3.5 drives, but he just laughed at me. Bastard figured it wasn't worth the money to do so. Oh well.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
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
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,
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.
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.
Fun times. :-)
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Whatever. Like, get over it or something.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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.
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."
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.
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.
http://daveandvalerie.com/pictures/weddingcar/wedd ingcar-Pages/Image3.html
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
Did I mention I still have that machine?
Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
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.
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
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.