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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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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.
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.
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. ;-)
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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, 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?
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.
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
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.
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,
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.
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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.