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Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Home Computer?
We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:
Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you remember your first home computer? This usually provokes a flood of fond memories about primitive specs -- limited RAM, bad graphics, and early versions of long-since-abandoned operating systems. Now I'd like to pose the same question to Slashdot's readers.
Use the comments to share details about your own first home computer. Was it a back-to-school present from your parents? Did it come with a modem? Did you lovingly upgrade its hardware for years to come? Was it a Commodore 64 or a BeBox?
It seems like there should be some good stories, so leave your best answers in the comments. What was your first home computer?
Use the comments to share details about your own first home computer. Was it a back-to-school present from your parents? Did it come with a modem? Did you lovingly upgrade its hardware for years to come? Was it a Commodore 64 or a BeBox?
It seems like there should be some good stories, so leave your best answers in the comments. What was your first home computer?
A wire-wrapped homemade 6809 system, bought from a friend when he got his first IBM PC The thing had 168K of RAM, two floppies and managed to run Unix with 3 users The computer was built aound 1980.
Atari 800
Commodore Vic 20 Connected to a black and white tv.
Sinclair ZX-81 kit
My first computer was a Apple IIe, picked it up from a family friend. Great first computer.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 back in '82. I still have it in the basement... Unfortunately it didn't work any more after an attempt to solder the infamously wobbly 16k RAM pack in place with a ribbon cable.
48KB RAM + 16KB extended, two floppy disk drives, green monochrome CRT display, and a joystick. It was amazing at the time, at least to me.
My parents bought it for their business, but they never really used it, and it eventually became mine. I learned how to program on that computer using AppleBASIC. I also learned that line numbers suck for programming, and only went to 32767 (one of my bigger projects). I eventually learned why there was such a "strange" limit like that after I learned about binary numbers.
Favorite games: Choplifter, Wizardry, Karateka, Aztek, and a few adventure games I can't remember the names of.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Awesome little computer, unfortunately with little 3rd party support, because TI were greedy bastards.
I used others many other ones my parents had. I purchased a Packard Bell 386 16Mhz, 1MB RAM, 16 MB HDD for $850 from Montgomery Ward. God I'm old.
Radio Shack TRS-80 first model. Expansion interface, 2 floppies, ran TRS-DOS. 1978.
TI-99/4a....
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
TI 94/A
I think Bill Cosby endorsed it, which is probably why it failed.
My first computer is a Pentium 166 with a few MB of RAM and hard drive.
It started with Windows 95 and then goes to Windows 98. When I bought a new hard drive I installed Debian Slink alongside Windows 98.
It used a 28.800 bps modem. But I upgraded it to a 56kbps.
The same from the sound board. It started with a simple one, then goes to Sound Blaster 16.
I still have it and it still in perfect conditions.
Spectrum all the way baby
Atari 800.
Actually, the first part I bought was an expansion interface. I had access to a model 1 at the store and access to floppy drives, but the expansion interfaces would fly out the door and having a floppy drive was of no use without one.
So I first bought an expansion interface so that I could keep it at the store, then when I could afford it, I bought the model one, a floppy drive and took it home.
Purchased an Altair 8800 because I did *NOT* buy a hang glider for the same price ~$500
My first home computer: A hand-me-down Apple ][ Plus in 1985 (on a loan).
The first computer in which I did serious work: A Sanyo MBC-555 (WordStar, CalcStar) 1984
The first Computer I programmed: Commodore 64 (Basic and Logo) 1984-1985.
The first computer which was my own: A comodore PC-10 1988 (yes, with MS-DOS 3.2 and an 4.77 Mhz 8088 CPU).
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
An Apple ][e clone with 2 processors. I could boot to Applesoft or to CP/M. Circa 1985.
A Gateway PC in 1996. My parents still believe today that computers are just a fad, so we didn't have one until I was in high school. It had a 200MHz Pentium Pro, I don't even remember how much RAM, a 3.8GB HDD, and a 100MB Zip drive.
4MB of ram. Had to buy 4 more at 55 dollars per to run Ultima 8. Being a lab assistant wasn't so bad :)
Those qemm days amirite?
1983, an Epson QX-10 and printer. $3000! Dot matrix printer that barely passed the school standards, since computer output meant that a parent did it. I did have 15 years experience on IBM mainframes, so I had "home" computer access, just not at home.
With a TV Typewriter II. 4KB SRAM. Audio tape storage. MIKBUG monitor.
Gradually upgraded to a 6809 with 16KB DRAM. Multitasking OS implemented in a homebrew Algol-68-based programming language.
Still have the thing in a box in the basement.
... my Commodore 64!
My first computer was a Tandy MC-10 in 1983 or so, but only for about a week or two. I played around on it and my Dad took it back to Radio Shack for me and got me a Color Computer 2. I did not have a modem for it, but I did get a cassette player that I could save programs onto and use as a tape drive. I also had a little printer that printed on receipt size paper.
A Heathkit H8 with the hexadecimal keypad. Then a TRS-80, I think model 3, then a commodore 128, and then the first PC was an ITT 8086 based machine with DOS and I want to say 5MB hard drive. *BUT* it had the amber monitor instead of green, so it was awesomely cool. Added a color card,and really went nuts.
Bought in March 1976 in Berkely. 2Mhz 8080, and 4K RAM with only the front panel for about 2 months. Then added the Processor technology VDM-1 16X 64 Video card, 3P+S I/O card and a CUTS casette tape interface. When I added the GPM memory board with a 2K byte ROM Monitor, it was actually easy to read a game in from casette and actually use the computer for something. (Target and TREK-80 for the win!) I eventually added some more RAM - 16 K Dynabyte cards and a North Star micro-disk floppy system. The system eventually evolved to a Z-80, CP/M 80, 60K RAM and a Morrow 16 Megabyte Hard disk.
enough is too much
...Washington a Columbia portable, that in 1984 Washington lime 20 pounds. It had 2 51/2 dosis and a 10 Meg Heard drive
Pet purchased about 1980 (extremely expensive in Australia). Followed later by a System 80 (TRS-80 clone)
I was five when Dad came home with the Apple II Plus, it changed our lives.
Had no memory what so ever but I programmed it to win at tic-tac-toe.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geniac
...VIC-20. Purchased at a garage sale for $20. Later I upgraded to the C-64... and even later an Amiga 500. These days, computers can do anything and the primary difference between my current Windows 7 Pro machine and the next PC i buy will be the horrible Windows 10 UI. But back in the 80's and 90's every new computer was different and NEW and EXCITING. I miss that feeling. Much like my first run through Ashron's Call.
The first computer in the home was the Commodore 64. Had a tape drive and it hooked up to a small color tv. Used to spend hours typing in programs from I think Byte magazines, but maybe it was called something else.
Still have 2 C64's and a C128. =)
Be seeing you...
Apple IIgs, 1990, I was 5 years old at the time (technically it was my dad's)
My first home computer was a slide rule.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I bought a Commodore VIC-20 "The Friendly Computer" during the autumn of 1982. I would have bought a PET or SuperPET but those computers were too expensive for a high school student. I still have my Commodore VIC-20 along with a plethora of accessories. I wonder if the cassette tapes remain readable after all these years.
Family's first was an Apple II GS -- came in handy for my high school term papers.
First I paid my own money for was a Pentium 100 Mhz, 8 Mb of RAM, upgraded to 12 Mb... came with Windows 3.11, upgraded to Win95 shortly after.
The first PC that was truly mine (as opposed to really being my dad's computer, on which I occasionally played games or used drawing software) was an Atari ST - sadly I don't remember which model exactly. I got it for my 7th birthday. It had a small monochrome gray monitor, an "odd" two-button mouse (as most IBM PC mice at the time I had seen were "standard" three-button models), no hard drive and two external 3.5'' floppy drives.
I once hooked it up to my small colour TV in order to play some of the games in colour (although not all of them were "compatible" - some just used a monochrome palette). I had some word processing program (forget the name) which was in fact for Macintosh - so loading it was a lengthy procedure of several floppy disks whereby first a Macintosh emulator for Atari was loaded, and then the program itself on top of that. The mouse cursor would turn into a bomb when things went wrong. I was afraid of that as I thought my computer would literally burn out or something unless I shut it down fast enough :)
I had a strange emotional attachment to the Atari brand because of this, and I kept hoping throughout the 90s that they would make a come-back out of the blue (I mean, that someone who owned/bought the Atari brand would do so) using some blazing line of PowerPC processors or something like that. :)
The funny thing is that years later at university, I would first learn assembly programming on a Motorola 68k, the same CPU that powered my first PC.
yes an Apple Lisa, with an Mac mod chip, for the display. still in my attic.
Any offers?
um, jr. I spent a lot of time with Crossfire, Adventures in Math, Gato, and Kings Quest II. I learned to type playing Kings Quest II. My wife doesn't want our son to play video games, but I've already told her he's going to learn to type on Kings Quest games.
I didn't get in on the game until the C=128 came out. Had the 5-1/4" drive... what was it the 5128? No, that was the power supply... the 1541 was the disk drive.
But my favorite add-on was the Covox Voicemaster -- it did speech synthesis and voice recognition. Horribly. But it was awesome.
An Apple II clone with a tape drive - it was called Pravets 82 (8c) also known as Pravetz 82 (IMKO-2) It has a BASIC interpreter, RAM/ROM - 48/12 KB; CPU Synertek 6502 /1 MHz.
The ROM and schematics were practically not changed and were identical to Apple 2's. A lot of the chips used were in fact Bulgarian and Soviet substitutes (clones) of the original chips, perhaps reverse engineered.
I still have the box it came in; it holds Christmas ornaments out in the garage.
A 8086 machine with 640kB RAM, single 5-1/4" floppy drive, CGA graphics adapter.
When I bought it I was torn between spending extra to upgrade to a 20MB hard drive or getting an EGA graphics card (16 colors!). I went with the 20MB hard drive; a wise choice in hindsight.
A month or so later I bought a real time clock adapter which came as a socket that plugged in underneath the BIOS ROM (?). It was great not having to set the date & time every time you turned on the computer.
Some time later I bought a math co-processor. The mother board had a socket for it so all you had to was plug it in and suddenly floating point math could be done at blazing speeds.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
...was a TRS-80 Color Computer at a community programming class. I was hooked! Unfortunately, at the time, there was no way I could afford such a thing on my own. I received the David H. Ahl's BASIC Computer Games books as a Christmas gift, and I would pore over the code pretending to run the programs in my head. I guess those books were the first computer I ever owned. To help ease my computer cravings, I could book time at the local public library on their TRS-80 Model III, which was a lousy computer in all respects, but at least I had some access to it. I had to plan things out carefully, since I only had an hour, and that included cassette loading/saving time. Finally, I was able to get a computer that was affordable enough to acquire, since it was dirt cheap--a clearance sale model Timex Sinclair 1000 (the US version of the ZX81). I think I paid $35 for the computer and another $15 for the 16K RAM pack and some game cassettes. Without color or sound or even an on/off switch, it was certainly a piece of junk, but it was *MY* piece of junk which I could use anytime and any way I wished. Unlike in the UK, the US market had a dearth of software, but we did have a lot of books available, so I programmed as much as I could. I still have it, and it still works (I had to repair the voltage regulator a few years ago), and it still has those same horrid RF interference screen patterns that make it unusable on a modern TV. Fortunately, I have a few old B&W CRT TV's laying around...
Later on I was able to snag an Atari 1200XL on clearance and was finally able to move onto "real" computing. That Atari was by far my favorite computer, but that lousy Sinclair still holds a special place in my heart. After all, you never forget your first! :-)
IBM PC with IBM DOS 1.1 - Upgraded memory (I think to 64kb), 2 Floppy Drives, a dot matrix printer, CGA graphics card with Electrohome CGA Monitor - no support for hard drives at this point, directory structure only had root (no subdirectory).
Retail Price: $8,400 CAD (with a 20% discount - $6,800).
Year -- 1981 I think.
I used TRS-80s at school - but this was the first computer at home.
You spoiled brats with your C64s with floppy drives and your VIC-20s... you had it too easy. The original Commodore PET had 8K of RAM, a 40x25 character display, and storage on a cassette tape.
Fun memories:
Good times! My roommate in college did get a C64. He had to keep two 1541 floppy drives, because they tended to overheat so he'd keep one in the freezer and swap it out with the one that was overheating.
My father was a teacher and we typically had an Apple II home for the summer. A could of my friends at the time had Commodore 64s. The first one my family actually bought was a Macintosh Classic which I remember fucking up royally as a kid by running some screensaver program which let you overlay different screensavers - I ran them all overlaid at once and that computer never did fully recover.
The first one I bought myself was an audio workstation with a Pentium III at 800 MHz and 512 MB of RAM. It was worth like 2000 bucks and was high-end shit at the time.
$800
Tech PC IBM-AT (80286) clone. Can't remember the details. But great for Lotus, early C compilers (Eco-c), Pascal, etc.
Yes, cause I wanted to (learn to) write a game like existed on the VCS.
It had 8k of "static" memory - I forget how much I paid, but pretty sure it
was over $1,000. Of course you had to get a (cassette) tape drive for
saving to even begin to develop any BASIC programs. Later, after the
untimely demise of several piggy banks, I bought an 810 floppy drive.
The system continued to grow from there.
Never wrote any "games", but did manage to write an assembler / editor
for O.S.S. to write a game. Simpler / innocent times and memories I will
always hold dear.
I learned basic and fortran in the late 70s, and worked on them both in school and as a job - but the tech kept improving so rapidly, and I was a cheapskate, so I kept putting it off. Finally my wife told me to just by a damn computer already, so I bought the components and built my own 486-based computer.
So basically I procrastinated for something like 15 years...
#DeleteChrome
Bought it in '79. Figured out how to upgrade it to 64k by way of RAM readily available at work, um, I mean, Radio Shack. Had to fold out a couple pins and solder wires to them but it worked. Also bought a PC board for the expansion interface (disc drives, printer, other stuff), then bought the parts and soldered everything together.
Learned BASIC and Z-80 assembly, the Z-80 got me a job writing 8080 assembly at work, the rest is history.
In order: 1. Vic-20 2. Commodore 64 3. Amiga 500 4. Amiga 2000 5. Amiga 1200 6. 486 PC (Zzz)
It was a self-designed wire wrapped 8068 with 20k of RAM and a 2k EEPROM into which fit a bootstrapped operating system I wrote in assembler. Its one program (to generate front and rear "gates" to track a simulated radar pulse) was loaded via an ordinary tape recorder via a simple ADC and controller (also self-authored).
Later that was traded for a 1200xl and all the extra's for programming it. I still have that 1200 with the whole programmer kit in a closet.
Made by Mattel and with built-in BASIC by Microsoft! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My first computer didn't use electronic components, but it was battery powered and had lights to display the next move. I used a cigar box from my grandpa as the case. I made it myself back in the 1950's, and all it could do was play the game of Nim.
It always won if it got to move second as is the case with a judicious choice of an initial number. Against those who didn't know the game of Nim, it usually won if it took the first move.
I "won" some coins, less than 50 cents, from the other kids. I think they knew better than to trust me; they just wanted to see it work.
National Semiconductor had an 8-bit CPU called the SC/MP II, with a 12-bit program counter. I used it in 1977 to implement a computer with a hex keypad, 256 *bytes* of static RAM, a 1 MHz clock, an acoustic modem, and an alphanumeric LED display with 16 characters. This was enough to implement a telephone communication device for those with hearing disabilities. Forty years later, it still works!
A second generation AT&T iPhone handed to him in lieu of a pacifier.
I had a Cyrix '200' and it took me DAYS to figure out why i couldn't get it to run at 200 Mhz. In reality it was a 150 Mhz part and the '200' was its 'Performance rating'
Good-bye
"Brief specifications of the Z-100 series is: a S-100 or IEEE-696 standard motherboard backplane but with on-board dual processor (8088 and 8085) and memory (256K or 768Kbytes), and "daughterboard" video (32K or 64K of RGB color or monochrome). S-100 cards from Heath included a floppy disk controller, additional memory, a hard drive controller, 4-port serial card. Many other S-100 companies offered add on cards."
-- http://retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/z100.html
I remember writing QBasic to play games but I was too young to do much else. Used a Tandy 2000 after that.
That's the first computer I really had at my disposition. Floppy drive, full keyboard, basic. And a beautiful manual with the schematics of the system!
Sadly, English was only translatable through 5000 words translation dictionaries. Reading those was extremely tedious. But I learned to code. And the magazines dedicated to it were also full of useful information in my mother tongue!
Osborne
My first computer wasn't really mine. My father purchased a Tandy 1000 SX with two 5-1/4" floppy drives, 384k of RAM, a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 (with no math co-processor), and a Tandy 16-color monitor for his construction business for $1200. (Yeow!) I was 8 or 10 years old. It included MS-DOS 3.3, GW-BASIC, and Deskmate. I didn't realize it had BASIC with it until a few months later I asked a friend of my father, "What's this manual for?" He wrote down two lines of code for me to type into the computer. I typed them in and pressed the "RUN" key, not really knowing what I was doing. The computer asked me for my name, which I typed, and upon pressing ENTER, it displayed, "Hello, Scott."
"You just programmed the computer," my father's friend told me...and I immediately fell in love.
The first upgrade were DIP chips to upgrade the RAM from 384k to 640k, so my father could use Microsoft Works. A few years later, I got a SoundBlaster 2.0 and my Dad purchased a 20 MB hard drive for $400. A dot-matrix printer was purchased along the way, too. The greatest memories I have of using that computer are when I got QuickBASIC 4.5 for Christmas and later I got a used 2400 baud external modem (the size of a hardback book) that connected through the DB25 on an expansion card. My dad got a serial A-B switch to switch between using a mouse or the modem (he used the mouse....I used the modem.) Not until many years later did I come to realize that I got a kind of natural high every time I heard those special scratchy modem connection sounds, realizing the connection was successful.
I am old
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
My first computer was a Commodore 64, which my parents gave me for Christmas in 1985 when I was in fifth grade. My grandfather bought me a matching disk drive. I was a lucky kid to get these gifts because my parents were and still are working poor. I now suspect that my grandfather also paid for the computer. In 2017 dollars, it was something like a $1,000 Christmas for me.
I didn't set aside my gifts after a few months like many kids do. A year and a half later I was published in RUN Magazine and received a royalty check for my efforts at the ripe old age of 12. I spent virtually every dollar I had on programming books and magazines. I managed to get on the Internet with my first post to Usenet in 1992 but otherwise I was isolated from any other programmer. I was and continue to be a self-taught, natural programmer. I took all of the requisite computer science classes at the university, but more often than not they managed to suck out all of the enjoyment I had been experiencing programming since I was a pre-teen.
More than three decades later, I'm still doing programming. I switched to 100% Linux in 1994, so I've been doing Linux development for almost exactly 23 years. I still remember those early days.
http://oldcomputers.net/pet4032.html
Best part was the ASCII symbols printed on the lower sides of the keys.
This is the machine that taught me the magic of PEEK and POKE. It's turtles all the way down--until you reach PEEK/POKE.
The first one we owned at home was an IBM PC Jr.
The first one I ever used was an Apple I, at school.
From Radio Shack...5 1/4 floppy drive on the side Booted into dos 2 something and then into worthless deskmate software But it had a decent manual with dos internal and external commands plus how to load gw basic
with a whopping 11K of memory; wrote a version of BASIC for it. Then the first store bought was an Atari 400, then moved up to the 800.
Z80 machine, rom basic, tape drive: great machine to learn on!
Compudyne 386 (SX, 33MHz) with 4MB RAM (later upgraded to 20MB) and a 512KB VGA card... 119MB HDD, Winders 3.1 ... a bit late to the party compared to some of the cool stuff people are listing out here.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
256 bytes RAM, hex keypad, 7-segment displays, CDP1802 processor, no OS at all. $106.99 in 1981 as a kit from Quest Electronics. I later got the Super Expansion (adds 4 KB of SRAM and a couple of sort-of-S-100 slots) and finally a 64 KB S-100 DRAM card as a bare board (remember bare boards?).
Just looking at the other responses and I just realized that my first "home computer" (ie something that plugged into the TV and you could program and play games on) was actually my third.
I started with a Sharp PC1211 which was a large BASIC programmable calculator with a QWERTY keyboard, 2k of program memory and a thermal printer base station that allowed you to store programs on cassette: http://www.rskey.org/pc1211 I think it was purchased in 1979.
Then went to a CPM computer I designed/wire-wrapped myself: https://slashdot.org/comments....
And, because games were limited on CPM, mono-chrome text based machines in the early 1980s, I got myself an Atari 400 because it had the most sophisticated graphics and sound at the time (I still have the ANTIC chip manual) which is what you would consider a "home computer".
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It was good for... well, pretty much nothing, even by the undemanding standards of the time.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
A z80 based thing from around 1990 with an office suite, a couple typing games and a basic interpreter. Oh, and a paint program that couldn't save due to lack of memory. Hooked up to your tv or could use a tiny built in lcd. I was too young to really understand what I was doing but I remember making the basic print dumb crap and that's about it.
and a pleasure to program, as it had an advanced BASIC interpreter.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Toshiba Satellite 5200, with a Pentium 4-M and I think 512MB RAM At 1600x1200 its higher resolution than my current laptop, and also the monitor I used up until about a year and a half ago. I had it set to 640x480 at all times because the graphics chip was dead, it had about 5 minutes of battery life and could barely run Nesticle. The HDD died after a year and I was too dumb to know to just replace it. Went without a PC for a while until I got a Core 2 Duo with Vista... that's when I switched to Linux, for good.
I put together an Ampro Little Board with 64K of RAM. It ran CP/M and mounted directly on a surplus 5-1/4 inch floppy. I added a second floppy to double the storage and used a surplus HP dumb terminal that had a thermal printer built in and a 300 baud acoustic modem for I/O. It was good enough to run Turbo Pascal and got me through a college CS degree back in the '80's. http://oldcomputers.net/ampro-... I still have the hardware but haven't booted it in over 30 years, so the drives probably won't fire up any more.
Looking at people's responses, I'm guessing a "home computer" is one that:
- Plugs into a TV and could display graphics for games
- Play Games
- Could do programming on it
My first "computer" was a Sharp PC1211 (still have it). 2k BASIC programmable, large format QWERTY keyboard and a printer base unit that allowed programs to be stored on cassette.
My second was a wire-wrapped Z80 S100 CPM system: https://slashdot.org/comments....
Which came down to what did I get when I wanted something that I could play games and program: an Atari 400 - the ANTIC chip graphic capabilities were superior to the other competing small systems. I still have the ANTIC manual for it.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
dual magnetic tape drives cause i was cool!
Having learned some BASIC on II's and II+'s at school in Jr. High, the family bought a IIe for home before high school. I forget if we had one floppy drive or two. 128K RAM. Black and white monitor - but it could be hooked up to the TV for color.
I'd hack Ultima III save files to give my character better gear/stats - and the mapfiles to change the map contents.
The programming experiment I remember best was doing mandelbrot on the printer. I ran it over night and got about one really poor line of output before giving up on it.
The first family PC was an Amstrad PC 1640
(6Mhz CPU, 640Kb RAM, 20MB Hard Disk, 1 x 5 1/4" FDD & EGA Monitor... and MSDOS 3.2)
The first PC I built and 'kinda' owned (I payed for a 1/4 of the total price of parts) ~ while still living at home
Intel Pentium 166 with MMX, 32MB RAM, 2GB Hard Disk, XGA Monitor... running MSDOS 6.2
The first PC i purchased myself (I had left home & returned to study... so i had virtually no budget for it)
I brought 4 x XT machines which weren't working, with 512Kb RAM, 200MB Hard Disk & Monochrome Monitors ~ i got all 4 for $20.
And i rebuilt them, to get 2 working machines, kept 1 for myself to work on and sold the other for $50.
And this was at a time, when most other people at my Uni were running 486's, and i still managed to beat them with my marks, on my crappy hardware.
I know that the first computer I was able to buy for myself was an Apple ][c.
The thing is, I also had a Timex Sinclair, but I can't remember what order they came in. I really can't remember. That's kind of sad, as I don't _feel_ that old :)
I upgraded my ][c to an astounding 1 megabyte of RAM. I think the RAM cost $700, if I remember correctly.
I always wonder - are there algorithms out there that have been forgotten, because people said, "yeah, that would work, but you'd need like a GIGABYTE of RAM".
A RCA 1802 kit that Popular Electronics ran back in the mid-70's. It had a hex keypad and 2-8 segment displays to program 256 bytes of ram and it used a memory mapped composite display. With the expansion boards it had 4K of static ram, cassette and RS-232 interfaces and basic rom for programming.
We had an Eagle 8086 with two 5.25" floppy drives. Later it got an upgrade to a hard drive as well. It had a green monochrome display, which would sometimes shrink the image down tiny in the middle, and you'd have to whack the side of the monitor to get it back to normal.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
I had an Apple II clone. A Franklin Ace 1000 with a Star dot matrix printer which I loved very much.
On hindsight, I should have been glad with the cheaper Packard Bell my dad had wanted to get instead of pouting until he gave in. Still, it was a wonderous and life changing experience. Computer City was like a next level toy store for a 12 year old, just couldn't leave.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
The first computer in the family was a generic S-100 system, which used an 8 bit Zilog Z80 microprocessor and ran CPM (operating system) off of an external dual 8 inch floppy drive. It had 64 kB of RAM memory. We used a SOROC IQ 120 terminal as a keyboard and video terminal. For printouts, we had a teletype for a while, then a tractor feed dot matrix printer. I also did many grade school reports, term papers, and even a class newspaper on that computer using Wordstar. I spent a lot of time working on little Microsoft MBasic programs. My dad put the system together over several months/years, probably starting around 1980, and it lasted the family until 1987 when we got an IBM PC AT. I am startled and impressed by the changes in computing technology and its impact on society over the last several decades. I am a PhD computer scientist and researcher who has been working on virtual reality techniques and technologies, also for decades. Many thanks to my dad and mom for exposing me to science and technology.
It's useless but provides endless entertainment.
My first home computer was a Commodore 128, though it was a bit disappointing as I'd already used IBM 8088's at school in typing class.
Truthfully I spent 99% of my time in the C-64 emulation mode as the computer was bought used and almost all the software that came with it was actually for a Commodore 64. It was where I learned to tinker around in BASIC though. Eventually the disk drive broke; for a while after that I would just never turn off the computer so the memory wouldn't clear (until a power outage would lose all my work :)). I found out my aunt had an old C64 in her attic and I managed to scavenge a cassette drive from that that allowed me to store my programs for a while until I got my first PC.
Those were the "good old days". Computer are definitely more useful now but back then it still felt like you were messing with something new that most people weren't familiar with.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
My first computer was a Kim 1. It loaded programs from a cassette tape. It had 1K of memory that I wire wrapped on a perf board. I still have the Kim but the 1K board is gone. It was a good experience. We had a local compute club. We met once a week to discuss various ideas about how to make our computers better.
2 hours of typing Basic only to store on it on tape. I remember seeing Peek and Poke statements and thinking I'd found the Grail and all its secrets.
I remember storing programs on a cassette tape recorder. Making my own BASIC programs was fun. Now our phones put the best of older computers to shame.
The original V-tech "learning computer" with membrane keyboard and LCD screen. Did approximately nothing, though playing around with the music creator cartridge was fun.
Second was a Timex Sinclair 1000 which was just barely usable. I sort of learned to program, but the minuscule membrane keyboard made doing anything beyond painful. At least it had the 16k expansion pack so you could write something more complex than "hello world." The only game I had was subLogic flight simulator, which took forever to load off of tape, than ran at a maddening few frames per minute in glorious black and white character mode graphics.
Then I got a VIC-20, and never stopped using it. A real keyboard. A non-garbage tape drive. Sound! Color! Graphics and basic implementation were garbage, but it was more than I ever had, and I could play a passable version of Omega Race on cartridge.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I had come to your overlord's attention that Slashdot knows their old school tech. Please help us transition our outdated missile defense system. That is all. PS, bring 5 1/4 floppies and drives if you got them. Your smoke and coffee stained keyboard awaits.
I had a Dick Smith Systems-80 , a TRS-80 Model 1 clone.
Had an extra 32K of RAM fitted to it.
I remember some games taking 20 minutes to load from tape (Asylum IIRC).
S-100 based system that my dad built; H-19 terminal, 48k of RAM, later updated to 56k. For those of you that have seen WarGames, that's the one.
Z80-based, 64K ram, 6k rom, two 8-inch floppies running @ 2.5 MHz. System board was a Big Board and with a few mods ran @ 5 MHz with four 8-inch floppies and 16K rom. OS was CP/M by digital Research. Had schematics and source for BIOS.
The voice synthesizer blew us away. ;) Playing around in BASIC was a treat, too.
After reading all the comments , I'm feeling very young :-D My first computer was a 80286 12/16MHz with 1MB RAM, 5/ floppy disk driver, no hard disk, and CGA "full color" monitor.
It came with a free floppy with CAT.EXE in it. After playing with it for a while, I put my QuickBASIC 4.5 floppy and started hacking (with /G parameter, of course, for preventing CGA snow).
drmad
My first home computer (I'm an Computer Assisted Instructed alumnus (ASR-33 Teletypes with acoustic modems)) was a Victor-VI 8088, which was purchased by my family by some subterfuge on which I I discovered BBSes on which I played Hack until my visual purple did weird things and my eyes bled. Good times, good times.
In 1978 I build a copy of a Motorola D2 kit. It had a MC6802 running a 0.6MHz, 128 bytes of RAM, 1KB UVPROM, a 6 digit 7seg display and hex keypad. Drew the PCB designs up with a marker pen and had them etched as single sided PCBs. Hand drilled the PCBs myself and build it up. No other options as a 15 year old can't afford a fancy Altair 8800 and the IBM PC and Commodore 64 were still years away. Programing was done in machine code as an assembler needed another 2K UVPROM and an ASCII terminal, and who could afford that?
Later I got the system multi-processing with a 6809 running out of phase with a 6800. Later still I added a video interface and brought a 1963 Marconi TV studio camera and I was able to overlay computer graphics over live video, that was around 1980.
TI-99/4A. 1981. The neighbor, who worked at IBM, had one and taught me how to debug the programs printed in the Scholastic books that I bought at school.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
Bare board 8080 based kit with EPROM storage for basic drivers, cassette tape IO, 64x16 character based display, 1k ram for user.
It ended up mounted inside a board sized Bud chassis base with a daughter board with 3 S-100 slots on it all of 3" high. It confused a lot of visitors. It ended up 64k with customized CP/M (of course I had source, disassembled source) and software. It was followed by a Compupro box and Z80 board with 256k page swapping memory, EPROM OS booting twin 10 meg disks, and so forth. Later on I discovered the Amiga. Of course, they were hypertrophied, too, after I did driver software for Microbotics.
{^_-} Joanne
A ZX Spectrum+ clone called the dB Spectrum+.
TRS-80 Model III with 16K of RAM. Only storage was via external cassette player/recorder. Super exciting to upgrade the RAM to 64K and put in an internal floppy drive. Getting first modem - 300 Baud was very exciting, too (until I got my first phone bill).
I paid $3000 for it, happily, because I was going to learn everything about it. It had two (two!) 5 1/4 floppy drives, maybe 64K ram, and a green phosphor monitor. Along the way I upgraded to color graphics (16 colors!), a 10 MB hard drive to replace one of the floppies, and an 8086 CPU which was 10% faster than the 8088 it came with. I added or replaced all the chips myself, borrowing a chip puller and inserter from work. CPU fan? We don't need no stinking CPU fan. Fun times.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
An Altair 8800 kit with 256 bytes of static RAM which I mail ordered from Southwest Technical Products very soon after the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. I soldered every component of every PC board, plus all the 100 pin sockets on the backplane the multiple 100 wire connections between the backplane sections. I replaced almost every IC socket with Augat gold-plated machined-contact teflon-based sockets for reliability.
It had a 2 MHz 8080 CPU.
To boot it, every time after turning it on, you had to manually toggle in several dozen bytes of machine code by flipping 16 front panel toggle switches repeatedly to enter the binary codes. Then you cued up cassette BASIC and at the right moment started the cassette recorder.
I gradually added pieces over the next several years, including a couple of colossal 4K dynamic RAM boards, picked up a Model 15 5-level baudot coded newsroom teletype from Atlantic Surplus Sales in Brooklyn, and home-brewed a 60 mA current loop interface. I eventually wrangled a 300 cps optical paper tape reader through a consulting contract in return for developing a driver for it.
Commodore 64 or Windsurfer?? I guessed how many 1 inch cap bolts fit in a Midas Muffler, and won an O'Brien Windsurfer. I debated all winter whether to sell it and buy a Commodore 64, or sail it. In the spring I finally decided to try sailing it. I fell in over and over and couldn't stay up, so I sold it and bought a Commodore 64. It was minor fun for about six months, when I had a serious break in my arm and was off work for two months. During that time, I discovered a Commodore 64 club, and the wonders of pirating games and disks. A whole new world opened up thanks to the wonderful club members! I became very proficient at compiling six games per disk, and writing basic programs to create "menus" for my kids. The menus were a screen with numbers 1 thru 6. Just press a number and a game started. Behind the scenes, I remember having to learn all sorts of tricks with Basic to get the games to work, peeking and poking this, sys'ing that and emulating keyboard keystrokes for the other. I programmed several dozen disks. I remember acquiring an AWESOME program at one of the C64 users group meetings that would copy a whole disk in ONLY a half hour. It seemed like total magic! My brother got a C64, and even my retired Dad got one, and had great fun making newsletters for his Lions Club with it. He even scanned in cartoons and substituted his club member's names for the captions. Pretty advanced for a 70 year old in the 1980's. I had enormous fun with the legendary Commodore 64, programming in Basic, spending countless hours with programs like Simons Basic, The Print Shop, Logo, the MultiPlan spreadsheet and the Music Construction Set. The expertise I gained with the C64 led directly to a computing career at Boeing. It took many years to subdue my love of pirating (I'm not fully over it). We shared our discoveries in those days with glee and abandon. With a great turn of irony, I later became a fairly accomplished windsurfer.
The Astrocade game console only had a numeric input keypad. Coding programs was like texting on a feature phone, but without any text prediction, and especially without switch debouncing logic.
The cartridge itself did have a 1/8" jack so you could possibly save the fruits of your labor onto a cassette tape, with some luck.
The game console had almost no memory, so BASIC programs were stored in every other bit of the video frame buffer, and palette tricks were used to make the raw program data invisible on the display.
A Z80 self built in late 70's using a S100 pcb acquired from US and components acquired locally in Australia. It had 2k eprom and no memory. I built a memory mapped display (S100 based) before I even had actual ram so when powered up, the eprom based software found that display ram and placed its stack at top of that 2k of ram. One could actually see working stack in the display memory. Using tape for program storage was a dead end so I acquired 8" floppy drive, and a memory board. It ran CP/M initially using borrowed floppy controller. THat was upgraded to Z80 based controller, again built from parts acquired mostly from US. Finally I acquired a serial terminal and a 20MB half height HDD with add-on SCSI interface. BYTE magazine was something I purchased every month for many years. I still; have these in my shed.
1977, 10K+ hand soldered connections (figured why iron clad tips were good); 4K memory boards, later added 16K for $395; took 5 minutes to load OS and Basic interpreter via cassette tape deck and acoustic interface; and a manual that was half New Age wisdom and half poorly written technical details. Used an NEC 8080A and wrote most programs in Assembler. After I bought an IBM PC it was relegated to running my sprinkler system until dedicated irrigation controllers got so cheap it wasn't worth using even in that role. Now it's in storage to be eventually put into my personnel history-of-computing museum next to my HP 35 calculator and slide rule.
My parents bought it for me to learn how to use a computer and type due to my disabilities when I was like seven years old or so. I was scared of it. And then, I found out it can do computer games since I was a video gamer (Atari 2600 and arcades). And then I totally love computers after that as shown in my http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm... history. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Our first computer was an assembled desktop, having a computer was a great luxury those those days here, but father needed it cause he's a math professor, he invested 25,000 Rs/- to buy a computer, I still remember the configuration, it had 512MB RAM, and 120GB Harddisk a Gigabit motherboard. It was great it ran windows xp and we had some great memories using it for editing photos, viewing CD's etc.. right now we have 6 Computers at home, I have a MBA and an Asus, my dad has a Vaio and Lenovo my sister and mother have a Dell laptop. Its amazing to see how much the prices dropped.
It was MSX computer with 2 cartridge slots,comes with Basic preinstalled
First was a PCjr given to me by my uncle with the side expansion. Remember playing with the one for vocal output.
After that was IBM XT in the portable case with the built in 3inch? green screen but connected to the monitor I had for the jr.
John
8086 S-100 bus kit. Bare circuit board on which I soldered 1000 connections attaching all the components. 4k ram with Microsoft Basic in 8k rom. Television set with an RF converter for a display and portable cassette recorder for data storage. Had it up till 1989 when my home burnt. Got a complete working 386 setup, and a dual Pentium Pro Overdive now. Current computer is a Sandy Bridge I5 3570k, 16 gig, 1tb ssh, 4tb storage, and a 27" monitor, things have changed a bit.
A commodore VIC-20 with a C2N/1530 datasette tape player and a Commodore 1020 expansion box and a couple of game cartridges, like Commodore Tennis, which I think was a straight Pong rip-off. Tennis came with 2 Commodore paddle controllers, which were pretty unique, but useless for most other games. I also had an assortment of RAM cartridges to populate the expansion box with, which each added something between 1 and 8 kilobytes. I guess some time I should get it all from the attic and see if it still works. I stuck with C=. Next computer was a C64, followed by an Amiga 500, then a 386SX/20 PC.
For Slashdot: 1) Age of first computer 2) Age of first sex
Inverse relationships both ways.
Tape drive and daisy-wheel printer FTW.
On a breadboard: 6800 CPU, 512 bytes memory, no storage. Hex keypad and eight 7segment LEDs. Assembly language in ROM. Great for creating clock, timers, thermometer, etc.
Three months later I got an Apple ][ and forgot all about the 6800. Wow, the Apple had a better keyboard, 16K RAM, big TV display, Assembly and Integer BASIC, and plenty of storage on affordable audio cassettes!
Most important was the big Red Apple Manual with detailed specifications of the computer circuits, the ROM code, memory map and even some sample programs (and many errors that made things interesting).
No, no, that's not right; most important was the user group that I helped create shortly afterwards. Two hundred people in my town, thousands more around the world ... together we helped create the social structure that led to Slashdot. Computers come and go, people are more interesting.
...omphaloskepsis often...
My dad worked for RCA, so in about 1977 he bought a VIP (at an employee discount of course). This was one of the old "hobby computers" (some assembly required, programmed via a hex keypad, 2K of RAM), while he assembled it I read the manual. It was officially his, but I did all the programming. He did find a version of BASIC intended for the SuperELF which I was able to modify for the VIP, he added an ASCII keyboard (which he rewired from EBCDIC) and teletype for a printer (again rewired) and expanded the memory to 8K. Likewise a few years later my brother got a VIC-20 - his handwriting was so bad his teachers required him to type all his assignments - and I programmed on that.
The first computer I ever owned was a Timex/Sinclair 2068 (the US equivalent of a 48K Spectrum, with a few additions) which I still have in the garage somewhere. I used that until about 1988 when Dad gave me some PC-compatible to write my dissertation on.
The first I owned was a Dragon 32, with all of 32 KB of RAM and storage on cassette. But the first I ever programmed on was a TRS-80 model 1, a demonstration machine in a local Tandy store. Aaahh, good ol'times, man :)
It had 1MB of ram and 7MHz CPU with a graphics card that PC's of the didn't have. It ran everything of of 720KB floppy disks and it ran some really nice games. I learned programming in Basic on it.
Similar time with the Timex Sinclair 1000.
Dad recovered enough junk parts from repairing Digital VAX systems to build a computer in the home. (Floor-to-Ceiling tower room heater)
Later upgraded to 3 terminal stations and 300 baud cradle modem (on the rotary phone) with the related games (Star Trek, D&D, Zork)
Drove my teachers nuts when I turned in printed material (without white-out); they only understood typewriters.
I think it was in about 1985 I got an Altos 186 workstation. It ran Xenix. From memory it was the only workstation Altos ever produced. They were mainly a server company.
That was where I learned to write C.
Of course it was a clone, we could never afford a real IBM!
HUGE pizza-box style case with dual floppy drives. Stock clock speed: 6MHz, but you could push a button to enable Turbo mode, which ran at 12MHz!
I was also always glad that my parents picked us up an amber monochrome monitor, rather than a green one. I liked amber so much better.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
In the mid70's, I was a missile tech in the US Navy doing picket duty in the North Atlantic. I saw a copy of Popular Electronics that had an article about a computer kit. I wasn't especially into in computers at the time but liked electronics in general, and the kit seemed interesting and a god way to pass time while on patrol. So even though the kit and accessories cost three months take-home, I bought one. It introduced me to two realities: you really needed to learn programming to have fun with a computer and no matter what hardware you buy, better is being released in the next couple of months. The less than a year later, I spent even more on an IMSAI kit (and have been chasing upgrades ever since). I eventually wound up in the information security field.
I sent the Altair to my brother who was, at that time, an avionics tech in the US Marine Corps stationed in Japan. It had a profound effect on him. He became fascinated with the hardware. A few years later, he left the Corps and stayed in Japan to study electronics because he wanted to pursue his interest in chips and realized that Japan was the place to do it. After a number of years at various Japanese firms, he went to AMD where he had a significant role in that company's CPU designs.
I sent the IMSAI box, after my next upgrade, to my brother who was, at that time, a draftsman with a company that designed CATV systems. He taught himself programming and became interested in CAD. He quit his draftsman job to become a programmer. Eventually, he left to start his own firm to create a CAD system for designing CATV systems. He sold that company, started another and sold it, and so on. He now runs a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
And it all started with a computer that you had to flip switches to make the lights flash.
Wonderful computer with a good solid OS and GUI. I think I sold it for more than I paid for it and after I regretted selling it but times were hard...
A very amusing thing was that we all had bootleg Macintosh emulators and once the emulator was loaded it ran Macintosh applications faster than the Mac did! I started selling Macs soon after I bought the Atari and told my boss this so he had me bring it in and we ran side by side tests he couldn't believe his eyes.
realkiwi
An Apple II PC 4K. Board number 126 of the first run of 200 Apple II boards. It was the board with 4k of RAM. I used a linear power supply and a Southwest Technology keyboard and mounted the board on a wood cutting board in the cover of a bread box and the power supply in the box proper. Home computers were few and very far between in those days. So when someone asked me how big it was, I told them it was as big as a bread box!
It was built by Rockwell, the same company which built the space shuttle ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-65 It was the advance model with a whopping 4kB of RAM vs the entry level mode with only 1kB. In terms of software: A macro assembler, a BASIC and a Forth interpreter. To switch from one to the other ROM chips had to be swapped out, none of this modern floppy disk stuff. All signals where slow and easy to probe with an oscilloscope and it was easy to make simple mods with 74xx or 4xxx series logic ICs. And it still works when I switch it on in a nostalgic moment.
I don't recall the games or much about this system at all. I do however remember the joystick controllers and my rage at losing, and the subsequent breaking of the joystick.
Packard Bell 486 w/ 2MB RAM, a 'Turbo' button, and 256MB HDD running Windows 3.1 (Early 90's)
A Commodore Plus/4. At the time, they were being sold in the UK at rock-bottom prices and my parents bought one for my birthday. I'd been using the BBC Micro at school, but only the rich kids had parents who could afford one for the home.
The Plus/4 will always have a soft spot with me (and I still own that machine). Sure it was flawed in many ways, but it was still a pretty cool bit of kit and I spent so much time on it. Probably the only computer that I can say I fully understood every component.
It had a very good BASIC implementation and an excellent manual, and this taught me programming at the age of 7.
My first home computer was a 486 DX2/66 with 4MB RAM, a (surprisingly capable) Cirrus Logic SVGA graphics chip with 1MB VRAM, a Sound Blaster 16, a 503MB HDD, double-speed CD-ROM drive, high density 3.5 inch floppy disk drive, and a 14 inch CRT monitor with built-in speakers. Being that it was 1996 by the time I got it, this was not the most capable machine money could buy, but it did teach me a lot about computers and I enjoyed a fair bit of classic DOS gaming on it. I upgraded the RAM to 16MB later on before donating it to a school in 1999 and getting a brand-new Pentium III 450 with 128MB RAM and an Nvidia Riva TNT. I've since gone through an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ with ATI Radeon 8500LE, Core 2 Duo E6750 with Nvidia GeForce 8800GT, and I'm currently using a Core i7-6850K with Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060. I've also gone from MS-DOS 6.2 to Windows 95 to Windows 98 to Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux to Debian GNU/Linux. It's been a journey.
Atari 2600 with a basic cartridge. My friend and I would make little programs to draw patterns on the screen with little colored boxes.
My first computer (in 1979) was a hand-wired board using a MM5701 maths processor.
Later built a homebrew 6502 computer connected to an old Teletype.
Next built a S100 system, then bought an Apple IIe.
I had an old iMac G4. It was great for learning how to program and playing Counterstrike.
The first computer I used at home was my dad's C64, then his C128. When I graduated high school, my parents got me a 486 DX2/50. Which I quickly overclocked to 66Mhz by moving a jumper. Then I bought 4MB (getting me to 8MB) of ram so that I could play a game. I want to say it was X-wing or X-wing vs Tie, but I'm certain it was a Star Wars game. A few months in I upgraded the memory on the video card. It was something like 8 DIP modules that I had to install. 405MB or mabye 420MB hard drive, which at one point I triple booted into OS2/Warp 4, Slackware with a pre-1.0 kernel (installed from a whole bunch of floppy disks), and Windows 3.1.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
Lovely piece of junk - consumed more of my time than girls (even THINKING about girls).
Next one was a solder-the-chips, burn your own boot ROM, board built around an 8080a - using the ROM I developed in college.
Those were the days - fine-tuning a program at the byte-level to fit into the tiny memory space.
AND those days were the end of actually BUILDING a computer - vs the modern process of plugging in boards onto a purchased motherboard, installed in an off-the-shelf case & power supply. Nowadays, building a computer is pretty much a cookbook affair of assembling a motherboard-processor-memory, power supply, case, and handling a screwdriver to fasten it all together - - - gotta' love progress - - - and pity the poor dweebs that don't even know what eutectic means (reference to 63-37 solder, solid to liquid with no-or-minimal plasticity stage)
Was a real 'ego-trip' to beat your fellow classmates' models by a few microseconds and a few hundred bytes . . . lol
Pity the current gen of kids with GIGs to play with, assemblers/compilers that use generic 'calls' (dll's), and don't give-a-shit about byte-control size or instruction execution times
I 'lived' for the code control and re-use of command-call segments that reduced the overall program size, by CALL'ing into a part of a subroutine to reduce memory usage, and re-using as much code as possible - for as many tasks as possible ! ! !
Eventually (HOPEFULLY) the coding community will re-live those days, and AGAIN deal with minimalist code that optimizes the code to the processor, and reduces the surplus garbage inherent in using 'generalized' DLL's to produce a usable program that doesn't require a DVD for storage space. My best-guess will be around 2025 for 32-bit processors, and 2045 for 64-bit processors. -lol-
Actually, that is just a pipe-dream, as memory continues to increase in size/density, processor speeds increase, and byte-level tweeking gets delegated to the same category as 'flint-knapping'.
OK, so I'm old, and to lazy to look it up, but I do seem to remember a GUI program that was Win XT comparable, running off a 1.2meg floppy.
cheers . . .
redneck geek
Z80 at 2.106MHz to sync up with the horizontal sweep frequency on the TV. The II had 48k of memory (wow!) where the 1 had only 32k. Programs on big cartridges (re-purposed 8-track shells): BASIC, word processor, assembler / editor / debugger... we got the S100 cage (5 slots!) and Micropolis floppy disks - quad density! 330K per disk! - and eventually a 10MB hard drive with a controller that occupied two slots in the S100 cage. Character display, 32 lines of 64 characters (yup), but the character bitmaps for chr$(128) and up were in memory so you could get limited graphics that way.
Mine was a TI-99 4/A back in 1981 or 82. I loved that metallic beast! 16K of RAM baby! It's version of B.A.S.I.C. was far more fleshed out than even the C-64's was so I had a great time learning how to program on it. I got a patch cable and was able to save programs to a standard cheap radio shack tape recorder/player. Oh the things I did with that beauty. Later on I got a C-64 and loved it too, but that TI was my first Love.
Not counting a small collection of primitive electronic and mechanical calculators (and my prized possession, a Pickett Log Log slide rule, for which I was mocked by the non-geeks in my high school), my first real Personal Computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 30 purchased with student loan money 30 years ago. That helped launch a career that has lasted until this day. Favorite memories include having a text chat with a friend over a 2400 baud modem connection (it was like magic) and dialing a BBS in eastern Europe just for the thrill of doing it. And then there was the time I dialed the BBS of a software vendor (SBT) in Sausalito, California. I hung up for some reason, and when I tried to connect again a few minutes later, the phone call would not go through. Then I turned on the news and heard about the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Tandy/TRS-80 CoCo 1, full-sized silver sucker with 4K RAM and tape drive. Those were the days!
My first computer was a Video Genie - a knock-off of the Tandy TRS80 with built-in cassette drive and a semi-decent keyboard.
The machine had a Z80 CPU running (walking..?) at 1.7MHz, 16k RAM and BASIC in ROM.
I bought it used with a 9" amber monitor, added another 32k RAM and spent many, many happy hours playing with it and learning how to program in Z80 assembler - knowledge which later got me a pretty good job.
I think it had 3.5k of Ram and I bought a 16k expansion card for it.
followed by a C64, then onto the x86 computers.
46137
The joys of computing in 1982 ...All in an ugly shade on brown!!
9kb of memory...
Basic interpreter...
Expansion buss that allowed connecting things...
That thing really got me hooked in a way that has lasted since.
I still remember things like typing in an example program and not getting it to work at first and then the "oh" moment when I understood that I had typed in a O instead of a zero in all places the whole fairly long program and the feeling of accomplishment that I got from being able to solve it by putting in a "O=0" in the beginning. It is not the most elegant of solutions of course, but saved me from editing the whole program as the editor was kind of crappy...
Someone lent her a PC for a while, then she bought us a PCjr and someone from work soldered extra RAM on one of the sidecars. Had some PS/2s in the house.
The first computer that was all mine was a 486 custom build. Learned assembly and C (and a little C++) on it. I used to use the DEBUG program in DOS to program directly on the boot sectors of floppies. If I recall, it didn't understand any instructions past the 286, but I had a little flipbook with 386 codes, so I was able to assemble those instructions myself on graph paper. Got it to boot into protected mode, and had a (very) crude interface by hitting the video registers and memory. (Didn't do too much more with it because Linux was rising around that time and I was soon installing Slackware.)
See that "Preview" button?
As seen at http://www.samstoybox.com/toys...
Christmas present sometime around 1975 when I was 9 and had just been bitten by the computer bug. It really was beyond me at the time, but I didn't care.
A Sinclair ZX80 bare-bones with 1k ram.
The cassette deck in my boombox as mass storage, and the family living-room TV as screen, via the antenna.
I had to upgrade to 16k Ram pretty soon, at the same cost as the whole computer.
It turned out 1k wasn't enough to trace half an outline of Sweden, when i tried to do one of those fancy computer-map thingies I had seen in movies.
This was in 1982.
The ZX81 came out a couple of months later.
That one could show an image and run a loop at the same tiime...
It had a 6502 processor and 8K of RAM. I had to use a cassette recorder to save and load programs and I used video adapter on an old black and white tv as a monitor. And the language I learned was BASIC. I spent many an hour typing in programs from books to run them.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
It had this turbo button on it that fascinated me, I couldn't figure out why I would ever want it off.
Windows 3 took up half the hard-drive space, so like, first thought? Hey look nothing has changed.
I had a computer magazine (I forget which), that introduced me to BBSs, MUDs, then FreeBSD, and I was amazed how fast my computer ran when Windows wasn't taking up half my harddrive and being slow.
(Today: I am a mac guy with a windows gaming auxiliary machine, but that's now and the question is about then)
I think you are asking the wrong question.
I owned/used a couple of computers which really didn't leave much of a mark. But if you ask me about my most influential computer then I say:
Amiga.
It was so fat ahead of its time that even today you can put a 12 year old kid in front of it and the kid wont see much of a difference to modern computers.
I wrote my first C-Programm on an Amiga. Used csh, cc and lot other unix tools first on Amiga. Wrote my first Email, downloaded my first file by FTP, UUCP, FTSC, ZModem, first logged into another computer from an Amiga, first logged into an Amiga from another computer. Burned my first CD on an Amiga, used a hard disk first on an amiga, used a tape drive on an amiga, used an SSD (4MB PCMCIA format) on an Amiga....
Pretty much everything people nowadays take for granted I did it first on an Amiga.
Also Amigas where the first computer I saw using more than 1MB, 4MB, 16MB, 64MB of memory and mass storage of 100GB when PCs had problems using more than 8GB.
I ran in full parallel usage: Amiga-OS software, ST software, Mac software, CP/M 68k software, GNU software, X11 software, C64 software. One would not believe how much that thing could do and how fast it always feeled.
To be honest, my current i7-6700k system can do things equally smooth but my Amiga could do all of this 30 years earlier.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
With 16K ram that was later upgraded to 48K so that I could play Jet Set Willy on it. While I did like it, my friends later got Commodore 64s which were a lot better so I always kind of regretted not waiting and getting a C64 myself instead of the Spectrum.
It was a Power Macintosh 6500/225. And when I think about it, I am unsure whether my parents were poor or stingy, but I only got it after finishing high school, even though I was absolutely crazy about computers since I was a little tyke.
I had a zx spectrum as my oldest pc though i actually got that after my first one which was an Amiga 500 with 512kb mem which i then later expanded with a add in module to 1mb. Used to rock some serious summer/winter/California games and give myself blisters trying to wiggle the control backwards and forwards as fast as possible doing the sprints/jumps/skating etc haha I did also have a c64 but i actually cant remember if i had that before or after, i do remember having to type load * 8,1 or something similar though
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_Laser_200
I still remember the soft rubbery keys. :-)
My first computer was a CBM 3032.
This was basically a souped up PET:
-32kByte of memory instead of the standard 4/8kByte.
-Bigger and more crisp Screen - but green instead of white.
-an additional ROM socket for easy expanding
-and the most importand part: a much, much improved keyboard.
The really good keyboard of the CBM3000 series was the main reason why Commodore managed to catch a big chunk of the business office market.
I started with a tape drive, soon to be supplemented by a unlicenced copy of the CBM4040 double disk drive and a CBM 3022 printer - you wont believe how large and loud this printer was.
There was a lot of software available for the CBM Business machines, I would even dare to say between 1978 and 1983 it had the best library of all systems.
When I switched to the C64 years later my main reason was the high compability of the C64 towards the older PET/CBM-systems: You could switch the C64 into a CBM compability mode which allowed to use lots of software and even load some ROM programs into C64 RAM and use em. Guess most people didnt even know this feature about the C64.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Come on really? At least on Reddit the asinine questions are posted directly by users. Here the BS questions are actually curated.
Dad even splurged on a $600.00 floppy disk drive. I've told him it was the best money he ever spent. Thirty years in IT -- I have no idea what I would be doing today if I had not convinced him to spend the money on that PC. Thanks, Dad.
from thrifty's!
Really an awesome computer.
So easy to program, I was dinking around in assembly language in no time.
Absolute statements are never true
Uh uhh....oh my god the memories. Define computer because I had the original Philips Pong, not really a computer as we imagine it today. How about the Intellivision? It had D&D you know?
I also read the whole user manual of my first ZX Spectrum, the 16K then upgraded to 48K only to play Manic Mines. I had the expansion for the C64 Joysticks and I remember playing some kind of Flight Simulator. I still think the ZX, with this yummy coloured keys was something to be proud of.
The Commodore and Atari came, the the world of "real" computer opened. The war between Amiga & Atari was something like PC vs Apple at that time. I also was a proud owner of the C64 with the integrated CRT TV and floppy disk, a whopping 20 KG of portable powerhouse.
And since War Games came out those years, I thought I was ready to take over the world. In fact I didn't but that's another story.
Modern times aren't as romantic as my pre-teen dreams.
Apple //c - circa 1984 or 1985. A year or two later I got a //e. Which was way more expandable. I had a 10MB hard drive, color printer (with the //c), color monitor (//c), and an external 1200bps modem. Ah, those were the days.
It was an Acorn Atom, with a 1MHz 6502 and 4K of static memory. There was a 4K gap in the memory map after the 4K of memory. So I bought 8 2114s (1K x 4bit I think) and soldered them directly on top of the existing chips, with the exception of the select pin. With the help of a few 74xx chips to do some address decoding and driving the select pins, the new memory was mapped in to the gap. I didn't really know what I was doing, but it worked.
n/c
An Intecolor.
It was maxed out to start with: dual floppy drives, 32kb of RAM (24k usable, 8k video), 32kb ROM (BASIC, assembler, DOS) and light pen.
My first DEVICE was a Televideo 950 terminal used to access BBSs and MCI Mail (remember MCI Mail?). My first actual computer was a Tandy Color Computer.
Atari 400 here, with 8K of RAM and a membrane keyboard. I bought it on a whim. I was just out of high school and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I took it home that afternoon and read the manual to figure out how to write programs. Next thing I know it's three o'clock in the morning, and in that moment I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life. And so I did. I'm retired now, but that little computer started me on a path that led to a wonderful life.
courtesy of epson (yup they used to make computers). something you young whippersnappers will miss: the copy and printing chain "pip printing" borrowed its name from the old copy command, PIP, first used on old DECs and later in cp/m. the original conversation-centric bulletin board, citadel, got its start on cp/m, as well.
after that, a number of commodore 64s.. first "pc" wasn't until '93-94 or so. to this day, still about 8-10 years "behind the times" running am2 athlons
A Z80-based computer with 16k RAM, builtin BASIC and 72x78 block graphics, developed by Swedish companies Dataindustrier and Luxor, back in 1978. Easily the most popular computer in Swedish homes and schools at that time. I added 16k memory, developed several games (yes, with 72x78 graphics), and some development tools (HJÄLPARE) that were spread through the Swedish community ABC-klubben, in an early open-source movement. Eventually me and a couple of friends developed a 240x240 pixel graphics extension that we tried to sell, without success. Very good learning project!
This was a TRS-80 clone. Came with 16K, a built-in cassette deck and power supply, and it was 99% compatible with the TRS-80 Model-1
I got mine from a friend who had his computer destroyed by a nearby lightning strike. We spent weeks trying to figure out the problem(s).
When he bought a new one, he gave the old one to me. Without further debugging I removed all TTL chips (couldn't afford replacing the CPU or memory), and much to my surprise the system sprung back to life!
Since then I've had a Grundy 8002 CP/M system (8" floppy, 4MB harddisk(!)) and built my own CP/M system on breadboard, based on a Hitachi HD64180. Can't imagine how I ever found the time back tehen.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Actually, the Wirewrapped S-100 Z-80 with 8k of RAM and the LEDs and toggle switches (didn't have a keyboard) and a beautiful Conrac monitor and block video was my second computer, but it was the first one I had at home. In 1977, I took the Motorola microprocessor course at Chapman College, Holoman Air Force Base, NM (while living and in 9th grade at the nearby New Mexico School for the Visually Handicapped) where we built the Motorola MEK6800d2 kit. Mine at Five Hundred and Twelve bytes of RAM!
I wrote a morse code generator but ran out of RAM for the messages I wanted to send, so I set up a set of loops that modified the code as it ran to go back over the parts I wanted to repeat with small changes and then change it back each time through the loop. Every time it stopped, I had to recode a few bytes.
Then I got to high school and they had a DEC PDP-11/45.
A single board which you had to solder yourself. , An 1802 processor, 256 bytes of RAM, four 7-segment displays and a HEX keypad. The instruction set was highly symmetric so I was my own assembler. It was quickly expanded with a second board containing 4K memory and a video output which I could hook up an old BW TV with vacuum tubes. On this TV is was easy to adjust for the line freqency which was different in Europe and a modern TB didn't sync.
After a few years it was followed by an Acorn Atom (overclocked to 2 MHz).
Almost all hardware which came after the 1802 has gone, (numerous PC's, LSI 11/23 etc) but I still have the 1802 board and its manuals lying around, it probably still works after 40 years.
In Soviet Union calculators program YOU!
first exposure to a computer was the Eliza and moon landing programs at the lawrence hall of science in Berkeley ca 1972. next i learned linear basic in 9th grade in late 70s. next was a friends computer, which i was afraid to touch, thinking i would mess it up. then a friend showed me her early mac (plus, maybe), and i had fun with it when i could. first home computer was in 1993, a salvaged Mac Plus from an abandoned rental property of my girlfriends father. i added more ram, an external hd, installed the max OS (6.08?), and went to BMUG regularly. i did NOTHING PRODUCTIVE ON IT. no home computer has ever been personally productive for me. i loved my mac plus. the graphics will never be equalled in their perfection. hypercard, resedit, shareware games, and "if monks had macs". the latter was sublime, nearly converted me to christianity, definitely helped my spiritual development.
I got to use all kinds of computers belonging to the family over the years but the first computer that was actually mine and mine only (or at least the first one I can remember) was a 486 SLC33 powered PC. There were definatly PCs before then that I got to use and play with but the 486 was the first one I can remember that I actually owned.
My first was an Apple ][+ clone. I had added a 80 column card, a real external keyboard, a Mountain MFC card, then an Applicard Z80B with 192K of ram on it so I could run CPM. Then I installed an external Amalyn disk pack (5 1.2MB floppies which had a picker to pull in the desired floppy.)
Fight Spammers!
Circa 1990. 368SX-16 through a discount program at school during my bachelor's. If memory serves, it had a 40 MB harddisk. Didn't buy a DX so I could buy a deskjet printer as well. Installed MS-DOS 5.0 when it came out. Looked at QBasic, but didn't like it. Mainly used it to run WordPerfect and Turbo Pascal and later Turbo C.
At school we used a 386DX to run NASTRAN on Xenix. That was my first contact with UNIX.
I upgraded components over the years until I had a 486 around 1994. Installed OS2 2.0. Used IBM's compiler, but it was buggy and expensive. Installed GCC and GNU Make. Then a friend showed me Linux.
It must have been in 1996 when I downloaded a dozen floppies worth of Slackware in the evenings using my modem, and dove right in. I've been using Linux and later FreeBSD ever since.
Good times. :-)
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
I was the school sysadmin on a AT&T 3B5 & a bunch of 3B2s for a few years and borrowed Apple IIc's, Apricots (a 386 PC maker back in the day) and then a Mac +.
For my first personal machine I wasn't going to be using an underpowered Atari or an Amiga or PC with substandard graphics (this was back in the CGA day) & besides I wanted a _real_ Unix.
The school owed me some serious money for my time and in lieu of payment I wrangled a deal. The school bought a brand new fully kitted out Mac II (16 Mhz 68020 with 4 Mb RAM, a 40Mb hard drive and a 13" 640x480 screen) that they wrote off as non-functional & I picked it up for $1.
I installed A/UX to it, added a 1/4" QIC drive (so that I could move files easily to/from it) and for years had a faster, more powerful Unix machine at home than the Sun 3's I was administering professionally. A few years later I upgraded the RAM to 8Mb, upgraded the CPU with a 32 Mhz 68030 on a daughterboard that replaced the 68020 & the 68881 MMU and added a L3 cache.
That Mac II lasted for over a decade as my primary home computer.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
The FX502P and FX602P were scientific calculators with a simple programming language. Played on my mates Commodore Pet 3000, writing a little machine code (not assembly!) eventually.
The first proper PC i bought was a $400 16K Microbee (an australian computer) bought with milk run money and running on a B&W tv my father gave me. It was TRS80 compatible, and i properly learnt some assembly back then... writing and getting paid real money for a half dozen crappy games. They were the days alright! :) Getting absorbed by the Vic 20s at the Commodore Club, and being mesmerized
by another mate's Apple ][. What a home computer that was!
My whole Uni degree was on Microvax mainframes (and PDP11s for assembly), and i did some GWBasic on my siblings PCs. I then gave it all a break till someone gave me slackware 3.4.
An Atari 400. I had the modem and tape drive and wrote some simple basic programs. At the end of 1981 I signed up with Citibank's computer banking program "Home Base". It came on a cartridge for the Atari 400 & 800. I have been using computer banking since. I still have the Atari and some of the old cartridges, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man,etc. Now that i am thinking about it I'm going to go dig it out and see if i can get it working.
Not really my first computer (which was a second-hand 8086), but first childhood computer was actually 3 separate computers. A zx spectrum, c64 as well as an AMSTRAD PPC640. My dad never worked with computers, but he had an interest and thought they were the future so got as many as possible. 1991-92 we got a 386, 1994-95 we got a 486 DX2 Running windows 95.
Sir Clive Sinclair rules!!! :)
First computer was a DEC PDP-8/E with OS/8 v3C in a short rack. Used a Teletype ASR-33 terminal with paper tape reader and punch for I/O.
Spent most of the time playing around with PAL-III assembler and simple BASIC programs.
Does a TI-59 count? Else it was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, 4KB RAM, 4KB ROM. Tape recorder. 1977...
My very first was a Sinclair ZX81, had the hardest time just to get it to display properly on my french TV set. No modem, no tape drive, nothing, just plain basic and a lot of fun !! Was not mine, just a loan from a friend who did not bite to the all personal computing thing. Switched to Oric Atmos 16 for a short time, then got my own personnal Comodore 64, 15'' COLOR display (man the price of that thing !!!) tape drive, and I hooked it up to an external 1200 baud modem... I think I never disconnected from the computer world since that moment ;-)
In college in the late 70's I put together a maxed out 22 slot S-100 system with a Seattle Computer 4mhz Z80 card, a 64K memory card, a Cromemco 16FDC floppy controller, 5-1/4 inch floppies and a Televideo 920C RS-232 terminal. I made my own power board for the floppies because $30 was outrageous for a simple board with a pair of 7805 voltage regulators. It ran Cromemco CDOS, Cromemco Cromix, and IBM DOS. MSDOS still had bugs that IBM DOS had fixed. Everything was new except the S-100. Total cost was about $2200 and that was a good price as the 16FDC alone was 800 IIRC and a similar Cromemco system was a lot more.
I also have a similar Altair 8800 with a separate Cromemco Z-2 case with the horribly expensive (about $3000) Persci 299B voice coil seek 8 inch floppies that I got 5 or 10 years later when a friend died in an accident. Thanks David, you were a good guy.
SYM-1, sort of a fancy KIM-1. After that, it was an Apple ][.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
A wonderful machine with a color monitor. I had work for that for two years (as a child) to pay for it. Later I got a module for speech synthesis which came with an Eliza derivate called doctor spadeso . Wonderful a talking machine.
I think it is soviet schematic adaptation of ZX spectrum with only one Western chip - Z80 CPU.
64Kb RAM TV as monitor, cassette player as IO.
In 1987-90 there where massive grey-market production of these machines in USSR.
I bought a PCB, chips and assembled it myself.
Tried a BASIC programming, ten of lines were written in assembler. Polish journal (can not remember the title) with examples of program inspired me to do lot of things.
Recently I built a polystyrene housing, then decided to attach FDD, bought FDD controller and mounted all the stuff in "tower" crate. Then sold it to friend.
Osborne's second model, with a whole 64k of RAM, running CP/M on 5 inch floppies. I wondered what I would be able to do with all that RAM, since I was used to 8k or 16k. Spent a week patching Wordstar in 8080 Assembler so it would print on my daisywheel printer. Wrote programs in Microsoft Basic and dBase II. Send emails through our local university campus's VAX by logging on with a 1200 baud modem.
Green screen of course. 64k RAM. Tape loading.
My first home computer was a mini computer Nova 1200 from Data General. The year was 1973.
It cost more than my apartment and I had to take a bank loan to pay for it. The initial core memory was 16 kilobytes.
I bought the first RAM-based memory card for it from Intel, another 16 kilobytes.
The disk memory from Diablo was 2.5 megabytes.
I programmed everything in Extended Basic, later in Business Basic.
The final configuration was 64 kilobytes memory.
The largest application had 63000 liners of Business Basic.
Later I got Apple II, Mac 128, LaserWriter and currently a maximised Mac Pro with 64 gigs of RAM and 1 tera flash disk...
Let me start by saying that by the time it came out, the Age of Aquarius had already passed. Even the vendor (Mattel) internally called it "the computer of the 70s" even though it came out in 1982.
- Rubber chiclet keys.
- Space was where Left Shift should be. Shift was where CapsLock goes now. Ctl was where Tab should be. There was no Tab, and no spacebar. I suppose they did this to save a row on the keyboard.
- An absolutely execrable thermal printer that printed only to half-width paper, and in pale blue. Printouts would fade to invisibility in a matter of months, and the paper was nearly impossible to get.
- The game controllers were modeled on the Intellivision, only somehow even worse.
- Other than commercial game cartridges and a spreadsheet cartridge, any software had to be typed in from books and saved to cassette. Because nobody around me had one, I could not trade tapes with anyone.
It did have a couple things going for it, in my view at the time:
+ 4K of RAM was actually reasonable, and I had the 16K expansion. It also had a cartridge slot doubler so I could use both the RAM expansion and a program cartridge at the same time.
+ It had sound that was equivalent to (and may have actually been) an AY-3-8910. Three channels of tone, plus one of noise. It was possible to do some decent music on it, and the games also had decent music and sound effects.
+ It was mine, and nobody told me what I could or could not do with it. Of course, since it had no means to communicate with other computers, it was pretty irrelevant to anyone else what I did with it.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Parents bought an Atari 400 w/ 8K and 410 "program recorder" then quickly upgraded to an 800 w/ 48K and an 810 floppy drive. They bought me an early-model Atari 130XE w/ 128K RAM of my own when they upgraded to ST's. I started with the 1010 cassette drive and got me a 1050 5.25" "Happy Drive" pretty quickly after it ate tapes on me a couple times. Started with a black&white TV for a display.... then a green-phosphor Apple composite monitor.... then a nice NEC monitor. Also had a 1020 color plotter for it which was a lot of fun. Had a Koala pad for a while too. Was a neat machine. ANTIC>IA made for a pretty cool programmable video chipset.... could do 256 colors on screen at low rez with some dirty tricks. The 1.79MHz CPU was pretty zippy for a 6502-based machine.
This got replaced with an old Mac Plus around 1991ish which was replaced with an LC III a bit later.
This Z-80 machine had a 2MHz/4MHz switch, a pair of 2K RAM boards, and most of the interaction was via the switch panel on the front. Later, we got a keyboard, a printer, and a paper tape reader/writer. Then we got 4K RAM boards, a TV Dazzler and Microsoft 4K basic. SPACEWAR and LIFE were great fun to play!
I worked with a few mainframe computers before it, but an Apple ][ was the first computer I owned. I eventually wrote Apple Writer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer) on that machine, made millions, and I still have it --
* Picture when it was new: http://i.imgur.com/CjoRH.jpg
* What it looks like now: http://i.imgur.com/tb4Ea1s.jpg
6502 processor and, if I remember, 1k of RAM. I bought it as a kit when I was a student at university and soldered it together in my room.
Unfortunately one of the RAM chips I think, died. A few years ago I donated it to the Museum of Computing in Swindon, complete with the original mailing package.
My next computer was the BBC B, then I moved on to PCs with a 386 SX.
I had a Commodore VIC 20. Which was sold as VC 20 in German-speaking countries, because VIC could have been mispronounced/misunderstood as the german translation of the F-word. VC then stood for "Volks Computer" ("People's computer")
Mine was an Amstrad CPC464 with green monitor and integral tape drive. It did not take long for me to upgrade it with an external 256Kb RAM extention and a disk drive.
God the effort it took to get my hands on a computer ... I worked as a paperboy for about 4 months, right through a harsh 1983 winter. I froze my arse off riding through snowdrifts at 5am with no lights, no gloves, etc (cue 'when I were a lad', 'you were lucky', etc)
...
Then, when I FINALLY had enough money, my dad told me I couldn't spend it on a computer because it was a fad, a waste of time, bad for my eyes and so on.
Eventually I won out and I started my love affair with computers which has never dimmed. I write software in my spare time, most of it freeware (e.g. yWriter)
As a postscript, 20 years after so much opposition to my first home computer, I wrote a gigantic and very complex piece of factory management/sales tracking/accounting software from scratch, which saved the family business. My dad still hates computers though
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Soldered every joint in it myself. Still have it and it still works.
Anyone here had one of those Digital Group machines? (not DEC)
My dad got one around '75 or so, I was in elementary school at the time. The thing came in boxes filled with PCBs and tubes of ICs, but not the fancy case shown on that website; my dad built one himself. Z80, loads of memory (I think 64k), and a twin fully automatic tape deck that functioned more or less like a floppy drive with a directory and a simple load command to get the program you wanted. An old teletype served as a printer. It must have cost a fortune, perhaps half a year's wages or so. I still remember him spending an evening winding the transformer torus.
That's the machine I learned to program on, first BASIC, then assembly. My dad made it a point to teach us first before letting us get our hands on that shiny new toy, about how a computer functions, CPU registers, memory, etc.
What I miss most about those days is the trade shows. Back then there was no such thing as a "computer store"; you got your gear by mail order, perhaps from another hobbyist running a little business out of his living room... or trade shows. Going to a trade show meant seeing all the cool new stuff for the first time, seeing hobbyists show off their homebrew creations, and perhaps coming away with a few new friends or goodies of your own.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
https://todayinottawashistory.wordpress.com/2015/11/07/the-nabu-network/
https://todayinottawashistory.wordpress.com/2015/11/07/the-nabu-network/
Intel 8048 8-bit micro controller running at 5.37 MHz
on this, start of a programming career. We didn't bother with World, we're not really hard-core traditionalists. Sometime later, we modified it to print Hello! in a diagonal pattern, those long winter evenings just flew by (know the quote anyone?).
On y va, qui mal y pense!
The Wireless World Psi-Comp computer designed by John Adams pblishe in Wireless World in April 1979 onwards for a few months. Novel approach of using a MM57109 calculator chip as a co-processor to go with the Z80 CPU. 2k of Basic had all the maths functions you would expect, all handled by the MM57109.
I recall an agonising few hours trying to get all 120+ wires from the keyboard into the motherboard PCB all in one go, helped by a hooked piece of wire supplied with the kit. The instructions included how to modify a 12v black and white portable TV set with direct cathode modulation to get the high resolution the system used.
My first challenge was re-writing the basic interpreter to allow more the 252 lines of code and not look for line number that didn't exist by building a sorted lookup table of the line numbers of the basic code. Next job was a disassembler to check my code (I never did have an assembler, it was all machine code).
Many hundreds of hours later it got me my first embedded programming job (I'd qualified as a hardware engineer).
When I read about the new MITS Altair 8800 personal computer kit back in 1976 I had to buy it. As a kid I read the book, "Danny Dun And The Homework Machine", and ever since I had the dream of owning my own computer. It was an S-100 bus system, and I had to solder all the circuit boards. The assembly manual, a 3 ring binder, had several sets of errata pages I had to insert before I could begin assembly. When completed, I toggled in my first binary program into the front panel switches and then watched the front panel lights come to life executing the short program. It was magic.
COSMAC Elf with 1802 processor and 256 bytes of static ram.
Built from a magazine article using individual chips. I,m not
sure what year, around 1978.
... Started out with Audio Cassette player to load and save software.
Then came floppy drive solutions, ending up with a pair of 400/800kb 40/80-track, double-sided, switchable drives in a bridge case that sat over the back of the BBC.
Then a 6502 Second Processor was added, which made programming in BASIC much more reasonable [more space for code, in any screen mode] and brought me "Second Processor Elite". Wow...
That gave way to an Acorn Archimedes A440, which had an *actual hard drive* [MFM configuration - even pre-IDE drives]. of 40Mb capacity... That and 4Mb of RAM, in the days when an IBM PC could not handle more than 640kb thanks to design limits... as well as a 4 MIPS 8MHz risc processor [the precursor to the chips that power 90+% of smartphones sold today...]
Happy days.
It was the same age as me (10) and my dad scored it at a garage sale. I was instantly smitten, ignoring how incredibly out of date it was. I wrote my first attempts at fiction on it. I learned to code in QBASIC on it, went through dozens of early freeware/shareware games, my first *ahem* "Copied Floppy" - if you take my meaning. I later "upgraded" to an even older Trash-80 when someone donated it to my middle school GT lab. My teacher knew i was a Tandy guy, and also knew it was worthless to the school :) Fast forward to 1998: the Alaska PFD was huge that year and my dad dropped $1800 on a 450mhz Pentium 3 Gateway with a 20gig hard drive ("Youll never need more than that! ") and 64mb of ram... Lol.
First upgrade brought me to 128mb of ram to play Diablo2 on launch day. :)
Rescued from a dumpster in 1988. CP/M/. 800k hard sectored floppy 90 tpi with a z-80 proc. It had a handle and was "portable" as long as you could carry a composite monitor under your other arm...
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
Built it myself with 16k RAM and cassette drive. Later upgraded to 64k by piggy backing 6116 RAM on top of each other. Also moved to ZCPR and a floppy drive at a later date.
ATARI 1040 STFM
October 1982: Radio Shack Model III, 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, 128k dual 8" disk drive, 64k memory
An at the time "high-end" Apple ][ compatible Basis 108, parents-funded, when I still went to school. I really missed the excellent keyboard when I moved on to an IBM compatible PC two or three years later.
In the garage, VT52 in the house. Dad kept it alive and I got to use it.
Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer 2
64K ram
Cassette tape deck drive
Thermal Printer with paper no bigger than a cash register receipt
Tandy Basic
Hooked that up to a color TV that has 13 chrome buttons for a total of 13 channels.
Fond memories of writing my own version of Light Cycles of Tron and other games on there. I also wrote book reports for elementary school which confused the heck out of my teachers who thought I was at a grocery store for some kind of prank at first. Later on I got a 360K 5.25" floppy disk drive for that computer. Good times.
Mine was a win 95 (msdos actually) 133mhz 16mb ram, soundblaster, 2 floppy drives super swag, cdrom drive and gpu perhaps nvidia voodoo series?
My oldest working pc which now acts as a container server is a core 2 duo. These seem to be running for many still. Power consumption and heat is frigging shite, but it runs incredible stable.
A Radio Shack TRS-80. Oh the good ol days!
My first system was a ZX-81. But it was really only good for learning a bit of basic.
My first useful home computer was the Amiga500. Which was a thoroughly awesome thing.
Radio Shack MC-10 hooked to a TV
ZX80 and still have it (might still work). It was a Christmas gift from my family. I was able to make a "fireworks" program by New Years, had to work on it all week and really only made one sprite animate, but everyone loved it.
Atari 800. Dad and me went round all the computer stores looking at all the different home computers; Dragon 32, Acorn, Vic 20. Got the Atari 800 plus cassette player since we could reuse the controllers from the console system. Gradually evolved with extra memory modules, two disk drives from a discount sale of Atari 800XL's. Made my own controllers using ORP12 light sensors and an old telephone dial. Had fun with the little plotter and the line printer. Kept using it until late 1980's until I could afford a PC. Wrote many games and demos using hand coded 6502. Our computer store provided a collection of 100+ programming demos, everything from the Blue Danube Waltz with four sound channels to various animations.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
My first was a Lenovo laptop. It had only a i3 CPU and 4 GB of RAM. No solid state driver either! Ah, the memories.
My first was a VIC-20 I bought at K-Mart in 1981. There were lots of hardware projects for these in the computer magazines, and I built an adapter to use my existing cassette deck for storage, an 8 kB RAM expansion board (not cartridge - I stuffed the board inside the case so that I could continue to use a machine language monitor in the cartridge port), and a telephone dialer connected to the user port. I bought my first floppy drive at Toys R Us. It cost $250 in 1980's dollars for 170 kB storage capacity on single-sided 5-1/4 disks.
I learned BASIC and assembly programming and hardware interfacing, and had a great time doing it.
At Galdor we had an ICT-1301 in a purpose built building in the back garden of the house we lived in. It was built in 1961 and given the name "Flossie" by the manufacturers. She still exists and is waiting to be restored to working order, for the fourth time, at the National Computing Museum at Bletchley Park.
Early 1990s, an IBM PS/2 70/80 laptop with 386 SX 20 MHz, 2 MiB RAM, 120 MiB (i think) HDD. Hey, it still ran Stunts, Wolfenstein 3D (not too smoothly) and F-29 Retaliator! After a few years we advanced to a 486 DX 33 MHz Trust laptop w/4 MiB RAM, and were stuck with it until 1999, when Dad finally got an up-to-date system with a Celeron 333 MHz.
It was an Apple ][ c , my dad had an IBM PC-AT and the duo rapidly gained a rare friend: a Phillip VG-5000 - 16k RAM, 8k ROM :) - what a machine...
My first home computer was a broken Commodore 64 that I got from a yard sale for $10 when I was 13. It had a cassette tape drive and was plugged into a 13" B&W TV.
I think that my parents finally decided that "OK, he's serious about wanting a computer" when I figured how to fix the computer myself by replacing the fuse, so they got me a hand me down IBM PS/2 Model 50Z from work. It had such high tech features like a 3.5 "HD" 1.44M floppy drive, a 30 MB hard drive, and an Intel Above Board memory expansion board with a whopping 8 MB of memory. Most new computers didn't have that much RAM for another 3 years. It was definitely a business machine, because it didn't have any fancy features like a CD-ROM or sound card.
8bit 2MHz MOS Technology 6502/6512
32K ram, Sideways ram.
50W PSU
Cassette player
5.25" Floppy drive
Acorn MOS
Texas Instruments SN76489, 4 channels, mono TMS5220 speech synthesiser.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
My first was a Z80 based Nascom 2 in the UK. Supplied as a motherboard, a bag full of chips and a bare Hall-effect keyboard. I'd like to say I assembled it myself but I chickened out and got the suppliers (Henry's) to assemble it for me. The Nascom never made the big time, mainly because it only came as self-assembly and was UK based where there simply wasn't enough of a market but it was one hell of a machine for it's day with a huge 2K operating system - source code supplied!
When I left high school in 1972, I bought parts for a KSR-33 Teletype from the Honeywell salvage store on Rt 9 in Framingham. Turns out, there was a Teletype Corp maintenance facility in the industrial park next to the Bose HQ just up the road, and a nameless tech there took pity on a geeky 17 year old, and built up a working machine out of scrap parts for, as I recall, about $150. For that, I owe him eternal thanks. It lived in my dorm room at UMass in Amherst for my entire college career, and was only replaced by a DEC VT05 which I acquired as parts when I worked at DEC Westfield for a couple of summers. I purchased for it, an Omnitec 701B acoustic couple ($350?) from a place in Burlington. This meant that I never had to tromp down to the computer center to do my homework...it could be done in the comfort of my own dorm room. On the strength of owning my own Teletype, I also managed to get a job (with unlimited login privileges!) at the Computer Center.
The first actual computer I had at home was not mine, but one I had on loan from a guy who wanted me to build some expansion memory boards for it. It was a SWTPC 6800.
The next one was, I believe, a home made Motorola 6802 system, as we were doing a project at my first job, based around that processor. No storage, just a 2708 EPROM with the MIKBUG monitor in it. This was followed shortly by a MEK6800D2 eval kit which we had bought for the project and which was now surplus to requirements. It followed me home. The surplus 6802 parts from the project turned into a controller for our ham radio club's repeater. I did a lot of wire-wrapping, but all the parts were free!
The first machine with storage, was a prorotype of the never-released Data General MPT. Looked a bit like a the TRS-80 with a CRT and two floppies stacked to the right of it, with the keyboard in front, and ran some version of DG operating system. It was mainly used as a terminal, and I purchased a General DataComm 9600 baud modem to go with it ($600, I think)
My first PC was a discarded 25 MHz 386 motherboard, for which I scrounged a chassis and peripheral cards. I put the whole thing together and I think I only purchased the disk drives. Everything else, I found in junk piles at work. About this time, I discovered Linux, and DG discovered DOS. They brought out the DG/One, of course, but they also had a desktop version, which never sold very well, called the Dasher/One. It was a rectangular base, which contained the motherboard and storage, and a CRT head,on a swivel, which contained the CRT and the power supply. I scrounged two prototypes, and my kids had them in their rooms for a couple of years, with warnings not to stick their fingers into any random holes. They ran DOS at 4.0 MHz (slower than the original IBM PC!) and had 3.5" floppy drives. The kids spent hours playing Popcorn, Tetris and Space Invaders on them.
By this time, PCs had become commodity items, and I had enough parts that I could build up a new one whenever better parts became available. My PCs have always been recycled ones, what with offices upgrading on a 2-3 year cycle, and being friendly with the IT guys never hurts when they're trying to get rid of last year's models. I have a couple of servers downstairs, a couple of LianLi aluminum towers with nice Gigabyte motherboards in them, and several Dell laptops with scratches or broken latches. They mostly run Linux Mint. The rest of the family runs Apple gear.
Ahhh yes, finally an article that belongs on Slashdot.
My very first computer was a TRS-80 Model I that my dad got for us back in 1980 or so. It had an external cassette recorder for saving programs - 600 baud AFSK encoding, IIRC.
That thing was fun to play with, although I got a lot of blank stares when I'd presented a program I wrote to my 3rd Grade show-n-tell in NYC in 1982. I think it was a sorting program or something like that.
I wish I could remember some of the games so I could perhaps find them today...
Mid-1970s, Heath came out with a series of kits built around a DEC PDP-11/03 sbc. Ugly box nowhere near as graceful as the DEC diecast housing. Glass TTY, paper tape reader/shredder. A whole 4k of 16 bit word memory. Interface boards configured with classic wire-wrap jumpers. A bad powersupply capacitor showed me what the real meaning of 'smoke test' could be.
Soon upgraded with 8" floppies and more memory. Ran RT11, a decent single user OS and a huge library of software available on DECUS. Focal, Pascal, Basic and Fortran were all available for library charges. After almost 10 years of use, upgraded to 11/23 and a 60" cabinet to support the two huge 3mb RK05 hard drives. Finally retired in late 1990's (to scrap yard) except the processor boards are on the wall. Sometimes miss that Saturn V launch sound as the hard disks wound up -- but not the power cost of the 100+ amp inrush. The NUC I use for a desktop is almost invisible in comparison. Oh, and the sliderule I got from Lafayette electronics the day the Gemini astronauts came to a McCormick Place packed with school kids is still in use...
The first "thing" was a C64.
Then came an Acorn A 5000 - which, together with the RISC-PC 600 (later upgraded to StrongARM and then equipped with a daughter-board that housed an actual 486-SX to run Windoze) - actually taught me useful lessons that helped me understand computing from a more general point of view, without the narrow focus (and obsession) on DOS- (and Windows 3.1 / 95) idiosyncrasies that most of my fellow CS students had.
It also helped that almost no computer games were available for the that platform - you actually had to do something useful with it :-)
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
A Salora Manager, a clone of a VTech Laser 2001. Made in Hong Kong, MOS 6502, a maximum of 32+32 kilobytes of RAM. Still have it, but afraid to start it up 'cause those huge power bricks might let out their magic steam.
My father had a TI Silent 700 teletype terminal. It had an acoustic coupler modem and used thermal paper. The paper was hard to find, before FAXes were common.
I lived near Dartmouth College and at school we had a teletype + modem to dial in. We also had accounts at Timeshare corp. I figured out how to use the Silent 700 to connect to Dartmouth's DCTS (or DTSS) and their chat room (conference).
Later, we got an Apple ][+ (never a modem though). In college I had a Z100 DOS system (not PC compatible), a Z248 80286 and after college I put Minix on it.
That lead to a Gateway DX486 with Linux SLS and 0.98pl5.
The Coleco ADAM!
Buzzing the information Superhighway at Warp speed
With the speech synthesizer FTW.
Later my parents got a "real" computer: an IBM PCjr, where I actually learned (IBM hardware/cartridge) BASIC and DOS.
My first home computer was the Commodore VIC-20 with a datasette (cassette deck). The beast first thought me Basic and later assembler. The VIC was later sold, and a Commodore 64 with a 1541 diskette drive took it's place. What a time !
Jake.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
This was an Apple II clone that Apple sued out of existence. They have one in the computer history museum.
The nice think about the Franklin was that it came with 64K by default rather than 48K, and had an arguably nicer keyboard than the Apple II. And it was cheap enough that we could afford a disk drive (Rana?) and a color monitor too.
Built from a kit. I still have this computer. Pre-Apple, it was one of the first computers with an integrated keyboard and video logic. It ran an 8080 chip at 2 MHz! Mine was purchased with the optional 16K memory card. It had an 8080 Assembler on cassette tape and I taught myself to code on this. Had to write a "driver" to let me connect this to a surplus Model 15 Teletype machine for a printer.
It could play an awesome turn-based strategy game called Army (I think)
I was in year 7 or something, I came home from school and there it was. Nothing like I expected a computer to be, but ahead of it's time compared to black and white offerings from most other places.
Check out tribute site (not my site) http://compucolor.org/
Same computer used in nearly all UK schools.
32k of memory, the disk version of Elite took 30.5k of that. I started off with a tape drive, and my Dad would get very upset if I moved the "tone" slider on it as it wouldn't load stuff anymore. Want to play a game? Choose before dinner, leave it loading (ErrrrrrrWheeeeee,ErrrErrrErrrWheeeee), then it'd be ready when you were done.
We got a 5 1/4" floppy disk for it, stuff loaded in 2 seconds! It changed everything!
10 PRINT "STEPHEN IS GREAT ";
20 GOTO 10
While my dad would occasionally bring his portable computer home from work for me to use, my family's first computer was in the fall of 1993.
Gateway 486/33SX
33MHz Intel processor
4MB RAM
1MB Video RAM
212MB hard drive
3.5" floppy
5x ISA expansion slots
Gateway AnyKey Keyboard
DOS 6.x and Windows 3.1
Eventual upgrades included:
6X CD-ROM
SoundBlaster sound card
32MB RAM
Pentium 83MHz Overdrive processor
3Com 10mbps NIC
Windows 95/98
750MB hard drive
Parallel ZIP drive
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Cromemco Z-2 my father picked it up with a auction lot he bid on and won. Had a single Cromemco serial terminal.
It's why to this day I favor Unix and it's derivatives as I cut my teeth on Cromix.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
1) School had two.
2) It wasn't a "Games computer" #don't get me started
3) Friends father worked on them
4) Australian Made.
16kb (later 32kb) RAM and a tape drive with BASIC and EDUASM assembler in ROM. I still have the beast.Still gets used. Still loved.
My Dad made me a simple 4 bit "processor" -- no memory just toggle switches on a panel with 1's, 0's and basic logic commands (or, and) and lights for the 1 bits. I played with that as a kid not realizing I was learning binary. This would have been like 1959 or 1960. Both he and my Mom worked with early computers so I was exposed to them early.
I won't go into details except to say spend time with your kids :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dos... dos dos dos. I remember when Windows 95 came in and thought "why should these new comers get the free ride... they should have to learn how to type command lines too."
My first pc was a failry late 1 tho, a 286 with 2mb ram and a massive 60mb hdd. My friends even thought I was lying until they saw it.. "they dont make harddrives that big" they said.
I bought a TRS-80 model 1 in 1977, and learned something about programming on that. My first computer, really, was an Amiga 500 a few years later. Don't get me wrong - I liked the Radio Shack thing at the time, but storage was a too-iffy casette tape drive. I could never reliably store and retrieve anything, and without storage, you don't really have a computer, I say.
Learned programming on that one. Basic. It even had a querty keyboard.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
...running ProDOS 3.3 on dual 3.5 floppies. When GS/OS came out it was a revelation, and I think I had a 2MB expansion card. After a bit, I spent a freaking fortune for an 80MB Seagate SCSI hard drive with a Ramfast controller.
I still have a GS emulator on my Mac.
It was a floor model so my dad was able to buy it at a slight discount (still over $2k). It came with a green monochrome monitor, the 80 column expansion card, and the dual-5.25" disk drive, but only the left one worked. When I was in high school we got a Packard Hell 486 SX and so my dad sold the Apple IIe to one of his coworkers who was a vintage computer enthusiast and he was able to get the right drive working again.
I remember picking up Apple computer magazines and reading everything I could about them after we got the IIe. I would copy small programs from them and run them on the IIe. I learned some of the syntax through experimentation and altered some of those programs. My first taste of programming at 11 years old :)
The Apple IIe was also the first computer I ever used, in 3rd grade. I remember playing Math Blaster and some typing program on a color monitor.. Lots of fun to an 8 year old.
TI 99/4A
Bought the part at the Dayton flea market with big dreams.
The first computer running at home was a wire wrapped 8080 with a debug monitor.
Then a used Imsai with basic and a 300 baud dialup modem.
The first computer with an OS was when a friend laid out a pcb for a Z-80 cpm system with 2 1Meg floppies. High cotton.
This one wasn't an XT model, although it did come with a 10MB hard drive as well as a 360K DS-DD floppy drive, monochrome green screen, 256K of RAM, and IBM PC-DOS 3.1. Took about five minutes to boot, and came with a copy of WordStar for DOS which got me through 4th, 5th and 6th grades.
Middle of 7th grade, one of my mom's friends had just bought herself an IBM ThinkPad, and needed to get rid of her Compaq 286, 40MB hard drive, 14" 640x480 VGA monitor, MS-DOS 5. I only had that computer for about a month, because one of dad's coworkers in computer resources heard about my interest in building computers and dug an Intel 386DX-25 chip, motherboard and 4MB RAM out of company storage, suggested we get the rest of the parts needed to get it running at the San Diego Computer Show. That ended up being the first computer I built.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
Still around...
Bought in the fall of 1977 IIRC. Had an 8080A running at 1MHz. With 48K of RAM, the thing cost $1850 at a time when low-end cars were like $1995. Used to like playing Target, but the Star Trek game was impressive too. Getting game sound through an AM radio placed near the motherboard was cool! (Yes, that was by design.) Also got a Computalker speech synthesizer board and turned the SOL into a text-to-speech talking terminal with software I wrote in 8080 Assembler. Followed by an Amiga 500, then an Amiga 1200, then an Amiga 600. Then finally in 1995, a Packard-Bell running the brand-new Windows 95... and so on.
My first computer was the VIC-20, bought in 1983. "3,583 Bytes Free" greeted me every day. I eventually got the 8K expansion card, giving me a little over 8K of available RAM. I used a 1530 Datasette for storage and a 1660 modem (300bps). I still remember being able to keep up with 300bps: so slow I was able to read text as it came down the line. I still have the VIC-20, but the AC adapter is dead. :-(
:-)
Less than 2 years later, I bought a Commodore 64 - I believe late 1984 or early 1985. "38911 Basic Bytes Free". I eventually equipped it with a 1541 floppy disk drive, a 1670 modem (1200bps) and a non-Commodore dot matrix printer. I used that Commodore 64 during my last year of high school and, later, through my college career. It was quite the workhorse.
In 1992, I bought my first "PC compatible" computer, a Packard Bell that had a 386 SX-20 processor, 130mb hard drive and, I think, 512k RAM. It also had 5-1/4" and 3.5" floppy drives and I put in a 1200bps modem. It had a 14" monitor which I still used for my nearly-headless NAS server until about 2016, when I decided I wanted more desktop real estate. If you put that monitor into 1024x768 @60Hz, your eyes would explode from the jitter.
My first home computer I used was a Compaq Presario 5660 with a 450 Mhz Pentium 2, Quantum Bigfoot hard drive, 56k modem, 4mb ATI Rage LT Pro, ~400 MB of RAM, and my dad bought the $1,000 dollar extra 15" LCD Monitor that stood up like a picture frame and used a weird proprietary video connector. The hard drive in the thing was also the slowest and loudest drive I've ever heard. We used it up until 2006 when Windows 98 was EOL, then my dad replaced it with a Dell Dimension with Windows Vista. We also had AOL Dialup until 2009 when we finally switched to DSL Broadband. Fond memories downloading random DOS and Windows shareware games.
Later, my first electronic computer was a Commodore Pet with 4K of RAM and a calculator-style keyboard.
I remember these fondly whenever I travel through Chicago. I always wanted one, but they were too expensive. Basically, these were tiny little PDP-11s, which would have been cool, since that was what I had at school. Sigh.
with a whopping 1k of ram, used old tape deck as storage drive
Osbourne 1 [http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/osborne/index.htm]
64K ram, 2 floppies, no HD, 80 character display
The Z-100 was an IBM work-alike which ran Z-DOS, an MS-DOS variant. It cost roughly $2,000.
128K RAM we later upgraded to 1 MB for $1,000. Had to add a couple of wires to the motherboard.
Two 5.25 floppy drives. Added a 10 MB drive for $1,000 (yes, MB).
8088 chip. Added an 80287 math chip for around $125.
My wife used it for her master's thesis on fractal worlds at which point we borrowed dual 8" floppy drives so it could run unattended.
IIRC, it booted from 5.25 floppy, then ran the Pascal compiler from the 8" drives and stored results on the hard drive.
Producing one image of a 3D fractal "world" (planet, mountains, tree, etc) took about 8 hours. I'm sure my phone could do it in a few seconds.
Commodore Vic-20. I saved up and got a 3K memory expander for a grand total of 6K. Who needs more than 6K?
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
You used little plastic tubes to program it by placing them over pins. You then cranked it and it would yield binary answers.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
vt220 - dialup modem - PDP11 at work.
TRS-80 model 1 level 2, with tape drive. Also a Mattel Aquarius.
Silence is a state of mime.
I purchased a Southwest Technical Products Corp 6800 system in 1978.
It was a kit system that the company that sold it to me mostly built.
I was not confident in my soldering skills at that time. It had a terminal that used a TV for output and a
box for data storage on audio cassettes.I eventually added a real monitor, a floppy drive and a hard drive.
I was stolen in 1984.
My first was my father's slide rule, and second my Grandfather's Monroe Calculator (formerly owned by the Coast and Geodetic Survey). Both still work.
Base design came from "Kilobuad" mag, over 3 issues they showed a talked through a S-100 bus computer systems. Still have that collection of mags.
Added video and keyboard by using a broken HP keyboard - drilled out the bad key with 1/2" bit.and build video display by following design in "Checp Video Cookbook".
What I liked most was the toogle switches for the front panel, I mount on separate board with connectors. Build first an added board that displayed lightss in hex using 74147 TTL chip. Then added hex entry board, with a 555 timer controlling the WAIT line on the Z-80A. This was a toggle switch on first board. So instead of single stepping though the program, I could slide the rate up and down (once per 10sec to 1000 per second, so I could watch the lights for errors.
Oh, the days when Radio Shack was "good".
A sample of Kilobuad Mag
Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I bought it for around 2000 SEK on my 11th birthday and learnt a lot about how computers work, both in hardware and software.
My dad got a DAI for his work in 1980 and brought it home with him regularly. Had to write all games himself. 4 colors, split screen graphics mode.
The DAI had been designed for Texas Instruments, by a Belgian outfit. Ti never bought it, so they produced them themselves.
Memories.
My first would have been a cartridge driven (zero storage) Texas Instruments TI-99 ( http://oldcomputers.net/pics/ti994-monitor.jpg ).
1979. I was tickled pink!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The MZ-80K was also my first computer: I bought it second hand with a Centronics 737 dot matrix printer in 1981, after having it on loan for about a year before.
The screen in my case was not amber but white on black.
I did not have any software for it, except for the cassette with BASIC SP-5025 and a cassette with four demo programs (a scrolling text/starfield explaining the Argo logo of the machine, a fashion show in character mode, a digital clock and a game of Nim) which came with the computer. I did not find any other software for it, which turned out to be a blessing since I had to write everything myself: a couple of hundreds of games in BASIC and Z80 machine code (I wrote a hex editor to type in hand-compiled assembly), text editors and a word processor ("FormulaWriter"), and dozens of pranks to fool my friends in the computer club (perhaps the first hacking simulator?), etc... My father wrote a database manager and encryption software on it (he was an army radio transmissions officer).
I stuck to the MZ-80K for quite a long time, until I bought an Acorn Archimedes in 1987.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
Still have it. =)
In 1975 my father brought home a KIM-1 that had been built by the guy who designed the IMSAI 8080. I eagerly typed in the 6502 instructions included in the HOWTO manual that came with it, and I got an idea of what Turing Complete was all about. Great fun. But at the time there was no way to save the instructions, so you lost everything when the power went down. I got over it: I was 10 years old, and it was a great way to learn about volatility and, as I mentioned, Turing Complete.
Then in 2005 I was working for a GPS company (which later became Garmin). One day my manager came to me with an SOC data sheet, and he said something like, "This is a really cheap part, but we need to program it to coordinate the 32-bit GPS part with the SSD part, and the USB part." I read the datasheet and about screamed with joy when I saw that it was a 6502 (now owned by ST Micro). Once again, the 6502 taught me in an amazing way: the 6502 was bit-banging (I2C) the NMEA sentences out of the 32-bit part, and control of the SSD part, and was able to control the interface to the USB device. My job: write firmware (YES! FIRMWARE on a 6502! NO MORE POWER OUTAGES) so the high-speed USB part could power things and exchange NMEA sentences; make the SSD hold the ephemeris and almanac for the 32-bit part. That little 6502 certainly did it's job, and I had great fun re-learning the 6502 instruction set.
The TI 58C (ca. 1978) was a hand-held programmable calculator with 480 programmable steps (opcodes)
Supposedly, it was even considered Turing complete.
It was a big step up from programming with mark sense cards and then waiting one business day to get the fanfold printouts.
I got the TRS-80 model I a couple of years later, and it was awesome in comparison.
By the time I was finished with it I had upgraded it to 512K with hard disk and floppy. I could run 16 programs at once. Programmed it in Basic09 and Forth using OS9 OS.
After 10 years got a PC in 1989 and was amazed how primitive it was since it had no graphics and could run only one program at a time. And it was so slow by comparison. The CoCo was more like a PC AT in speed.
This thing was retrieved by my grandfather (from the trash of his GE Factory) and given to me because I liked to take apart the Electronic clocks and other items. It was not receiving power from the cord, and a simple fuse (which had to be un-soldered) under a circuit board was the culprit. This was sometime around 1978. I was able to begin learning CP/M, and with the 300Baud modem and Dual 160k floppy drives, I was able to code and compile and share with others (that had a modem). Yes, 300Baud was actually slower than typing. The Printer (embedded) used Thermal Fax paper (expensive) so my printing was limited greatly. This taught me to read/memorize the way the code worked, and led to a lot of try/retry instances.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Built and programmed a Heathkit H-89. Moved onto a Heathkit Z-100, A Kaypro-10 and a Timex Sinclair just for the experience. The H-89 was the most rewarding in the ability to program the unit for various ham radio applications.
It was maxed out. 48k Ram and (eventually) 4 floppy drives. I thought I had reached nirvana when I reached the point that I could edit, compile, assemble and link 'c' programs without swapping floppies...
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
I desperately wanted a Commodore 64. My parents let themselves be talked into the TI at a JC Penney (I think). I was happy with it but still wanted that C64.
It had the famous membrane keyboard, which we upgraded with an after-market typewriter type keyboard. It used a cassette drive. We quickly tired of that and acquired two Indus GT double sided drives. Man, that was living!
Loading and saving programs onto cassette tape. Those were the days.
Also a Timex Sinclair 1000 around the same time (early 80's). Then came the Apple IIc in '84. Still have that one.
Sinclair ZX-81
My dad brought home an at&t branded 8086 from his job at bell labs when i was pretty young. Pretty sure it had a 10 MB HD though that may have been the upgraded one. I remember playing castle adventure on it quite a bit.
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16k which I upgraded later to 48k. One of the first things I bought for it was a Pascal and a Forth compiler. Man, Forth rocked. Awesome language.
My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, as a 13th b-day gift. With a tape drive. And 2.5 Kb RAM. I learned a lot about computers and programming in general from that.
A year later I worked all summer and bought my own C-64. 4 years later I had an Amiga 1000.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
My first was an Atari 130XE, strictly used as a word processor for school assignments. This was a time when everyone was getting word processors or computers to type out schoolwork instead of handwriting it or using a typewriter. A few yeas later I was quite jealous of friends that had Commodore 64's. The graphics on the Commodores were so much better.
Eventually purchased an Apple II which was vastly superior for school work. Upgraded to a PowerPC. PowerPC was a legal official Mac clone and I loved it. Apple stopped allowing clones and pissed off many Mac users by making an already small ecosystem even smaller. My last Mac was a G3 which had a lot of issues and I didn't like the new OS as it was a far departure from what I considered a real Mac OS. I got tired of Mac OS issues & lack of programs that my friends would show me that simply were not available on Mac OS, comparatively the Windows ecosystem seemed so vast and endless.
I built my first Windows PC afterward and have been building my own Windows PC's ever since. I dabbled in Linux for a while but found the OS to be more work than it's worth, custom coding your own drivers just to get peripherals to work correctly was and still is Linux biggest hurdle to mainstream adoption. Though with Windows now forcing updates without consent and a lot of other anti-trust issues I have given Linux a try again. It's progressed a lot since the many years ago I last tried it (many different distros). I really like the new Mint & Mate, better than Ubuntu in my opinion. Actually has that classic Mac feel that I've longed to use again.
My first was a Commodore Vic20, complete with tape drive and hooked up to an old 14 inch black & white TV. I remember writing my own version of 'extended DOS', and hours typing in pages of peeks and pokes from the back of computer magazines to program in some games or application.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
Mine was a TI 99/4A the folks got at Christmas, 1983. The price had just been reduced to neighborhood of $50 as the computers had been discontinued. Reputedly due to the power supply having a tendency to catch on fire. I played video games on it for a while but quickly got into BASIC programming for it. The next year, my parents shelled out for the cartridge for it that would allow you to do assembly language programming on it. As I recall, my success with that was limited to moving a sprite around the screen with a joystick, but that wasn't too bad for a fourteen-year-old with limited reference materials. Started taking programming languages in high school a couple years later, and their Apple 2 machines put the ol' TI to shame. But I still get nostalgic for it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My first home computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A which sat in my bedroom connected to my 13" color television. I did a combination of playing cartridge-based video games on it, and programming in TI's (attempt at) BASIC. The only upgrade I made to it (with help from the 'rents) was adding a cassette player for data storage.
Gawd that thing was awful. And painful. But it was my first.
Jason Van Patten
Actually, my first home computer was a slide rule, both at home and at work. But when they became available I bought a Commodore 64 with a floppy disk drive and a printer. Used it for everything, especially word processing (what a relief being able to easily correct my typing mistakes before sending a letter) and even had a little database program for all of my genealogy research. What a big aid to organization that was! On weekends my son used it for games, and for re-writing those games. He already knew BASIC (by absorption I guess) so I learned it too. And I got a cartridge for the C-64 that enabled me to send and receive AMTOR digital signals with my ham radio transceiver.
Meanwhile, at work, I was doing assembler language (PAL) on a DEC PDP-8 for data acquisition and processing in a small lab. Those were the days!!
A little later I bought an 80286 for home. Today you can buy three or four computers for what I paid my my '286.
286; 2MB RAM; 40MB HD; DR-DOS. Played Commander Keen pretty well.
It took about 30 minutes to bootstrap through the various phases into the Basic interpreter. https://www.google.com/url?sa=...
Proudly, my first was a TI-99/4A. And did I ever get every penny out of that thing, nursing it along until 1993 or so. Texas Instruments makes more chips (to this day?) than Frito-Lay. So of course their computer was something special. 16 bit TMS9900 CPU. Amazingly high quality parts and construction - literally cast aluminum around my 32k RAM expansion card. And they built-in owner loyalty by fostering and supporting users groups, even after they'd left the Home Computer market. TI knew how to sell to scientists and engineers; they clearly didn't know how to sell to the general public. And they kept the software model closed (any different from Apple today?). It was the very earliest days of the digital age; they failed in the market as much for social reasons as for design reasons. So, sadly, that machine becomes an evolutionary dead end. But what a machine. Look at TMS9900 Assembly Language.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The first home computer I used was the Atari 400/800 at my junior high school.
The first home computer my family owned was an Atari 400.
The first home computer I owned is the Atari ST, which I still have along with an Atari 800 XL that I bought second-hand later on.
1978 Apple ][ 16K and tape deck for loading software... shortly added the green monochrome monitor,upgrade to 48K, dual floppy drive and the Applesoft rom card that turned it into basically a ][+ but with the advantage of using either the Applesoft or Integer Basic roms...
And the drool-worthy Novation Apple-Cat modem.....
Mac LC circa 1991! I guess this was renowned for being pretty crappy and limited but it was a lot of fun as a kid. I did have some earlier experiences at a friend's house who's dad worked for IBM. They had some 486's, 386's and a 286 in the garaged nicknamed "the dinosaur". They also had a cool "briefcase" sized computer with an orange screen. Can't remember if it was a 386 or 286, but was really heavy. Mostly played games and logged on to prodigy and downloaded low-res grainy nudes.
Bought one with a dead HD. I think it was a ST-251 that I replaced it with. Once Sys-V was installed, the adventure began. Found /bin before the books I ordered arrived. At that time, mkfs with no args, would immediately create a file system on the current device. Oops.
That machine is at the top of my must resurrect list.
Built my first one from a kit (Altair 8800). My first preassembled machines was an Amiga followed by a Tandy 1000. Ah, those were the days of Compuserve and 300 baud modems
I nearly bought a vic-20 when they came out, but I really couldn't afford it, it was about $700.
And then the c64's came out, and I really wanted one, but couldn't afford it either.
About a year after they were released I finally got a c64.
surprisingly (perhaps) I still have that c64, and it still runs! Most modern systems don't have that sort of longevity.
I now have my best friends c64 (from that time) as well, but it had video chip problems, and I've never gotten it fixed. :)
I also have my original 1581 disk drive, from when I came out,
and you can pry my 1571 from my cold dead hands!
I also have the infamous MSD drive, I think it was 2.3 megs on a regular standard floppy disk, quite remarkable really.
And I have one of the last IEEE interface modules made by batteries included for that thing, still working.
I may be the only person left with the hardware and software for a hardware c64 copier called Trackmimic. :(
But I really wanted a "drive mirror" though those things seem to have been vaporware, sadly
And I wanted an IHS (index hole sensor) copier, but never got one.
I did finally get a ram module/copier combo for the c64 though, I think it was called the smartboard? it's been too long.
And I have a super snapshot v7.0 original from the manufacturer
And props to Paperback/Pocket writer software developers!
I really miss Infocom, Sierra on-line, and Apogee.
OH, and almost forgot, I figured out what's "wrong" with the internet, what we lost.
Remember the BBS days? why were they so great, and what the internet is missing!
BBS's were LOCAL, the majority of people were from your local area, or city.
In big cities it was neighborhoods. You could find LOCAL people, people near you, with similar interests.
And this is what's wrong with online dating too!
Now, with the internet, it's IMPOSSIBLE to find someone close to you, I dare you! It can't be done!
And dating sites are the same. sure, you can find people in your city, big whoop.
But with BBSes, you knew you had things in common, and you knew you were in the same area of the city.
It brought common interests together, locally!
We've lost all that.
And that's why BBSes will ALWAYS be BETTER than the internet ever will be...
ZX81 + wobbly 16kB expansion pack connected to an antique black and white TV set. Typing Duck Hunt in basic from a magazine all night. finished at 4:30 AM, taking a nap first, but then falling over the god damned f*ng power line. Auch. (Saving to cassette tape failed most of the times.) Yeah, Awesome!
Saved up the $500 from my first summer job after my freshman year in high school in '80. Just looked it up on oldcomputers.net and learned more than I knew. Installed the RS232 card by unplugging the 8080, plugging it into the card, and plugging the card into the empty processor socket. Game controllers were funky...digital direction and an analog knob at the top of the stick. BASIC was a little like the CoCo, especially the graphics (x,y,color,something...or was it x,y,fg,bg?), but different enough to find it painful to convert. I think it overheated due to the very solid metal box the mainboard was contained in. Was forgotten when family for a ][e in '83. WHEE!!!
Plus ca change, plus c'est les memes choses.
Sinclair ZX81 built from a kit. Second was an Atari 400. Expanded it to 48k and built a real keyboard for it (wired up the matrix on a raw Cherry keyboard, and attached it to the Atari with a long ribbon cable). Still have that one on my shelf.
8080 processor, limited ram, ROM/EROM sockets for programs and a proto area.
Hooked to a Digital Group video board and an old TV and a
keyboard picked up at a surplus store in the U district of Seattle.
Monitor program and eventually code and hardware to decode Morse. All in hand coded assembly.
Fun times
Technically my first computer was some kind of clunky Sinclair programmable calculator, which met all the requirements of being an actual computer. But just barely. It was, for all intents and purposes, unusable for anything meaningful.
Next came an Atari 800 with an actual keyboard (not the chicklet keys). Two cartridge slots, two floppy drives (one of which was a "Happy Drive"), and a full 48-fuckin'-K of memory. Whoo hoo!
It had a 300 baud modem which could be set to *any* baud rate, all the way down to 1 or 2 baud so you could actually see the letters...coming...out...on...the...screen...one...by...one.
God times.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Not the ][+, the original one. Would have been late 77 I think? After that we had a few go through the house over time ... A Franklin (Apple clone) that I remember having to insert the ROM chip into the motherboard for due to the legal wrangles the company was having with Apple, a VIC-20, and a TRS-8- Model 4 from my mom's work. The oddest piece I remember was a "hard drive" that was about 2 feet square by 6" high but I can't recall the capacity or where it came from. Then it was all-aboard the Apple train with a Mac 512 ... that's the one that started a streak of something like 20 different Apple machines owned.
DaveyJJ
A commodore VIC-20.
Which, years later, back of the envelope math confirmed no number of tricks with video memory management/font crushing/etc could ever have enough resources to emulate a 80x25 vt-100 dumb terminal.
Someone had to do it.
The first IBM PCs were slow to arrive but the gray ring Binder in a cloth wrapped box was. A treasure trove of info. Great primer on bios and hardware for newbie. Read it cover to cover uncounted times while I waited for the actual hardwareto arrive. IBM deserves kudos for bringing a lot of soon to be engineers up to speed. I also constantly visited the Pc store in downtown SF which became a social hub. For years used to look look at this manual every time I need to check the ASCII code table page... though I suppose the internet has moved us on from that. Great days, Showing off the piano app for my Aunt and Uncle, Mom and dad.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
You can thank my 286 for the PS/2 mouse and keyboard interfaces (I had systems with RS232 and AT before then but the PS/2 was the first system I had as my own). I had a 10Mhz 286 in there with a full megabyte of RAM. Windows 3.1 looked pretty spectacular on that VGA monitor, even if it could hardly run anything inside of it. I think my HD (on a MCA interface) was 30MB; I had one 3.5" floppy as well. Both the PC and the monitor had some seriously heavy duty mechanical power switches.
Perhaps ever better it was my first exposure to the IBM model M keyboards. I marveled at how indestructible it was after it fell off my desk with all the keys falling off, only to work just fine once I put them back on. Simultaneously others marveled at how loud it was when I typed on it.
I kept some of the software (such as the original SimCity for DOS), though I really should have kept the keyboard.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
While I had worked on a variety of calculators and on an Ohio Scientific computer at school, my first personal computer (that I owned) was an Heathkit H89. It had dual Z80 processors (0ne for video, one for processing). It came with 16K of memory (which I upgraded to 64K). And it had a cassette tape interface for long-term storage. After about six months, I could afford two 5.25" floppy drives. At that time, I also purchased new boot chips so that I could run CP/M and UCSD Pascal p-system.
I loved and hated the cursor keys :-) Never been able to use the integrated "office suite".
I remember drawing my home using basic 3.5. No fond memories of games, though.
The second one was an Amiga 2000 (A).
...and login permissions to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's time sharing system
A Commodore VIC-20 with 20K of RAM and a cassette drive in December of 1982. Actually, I bought the VIC-20 first, found out I really needed some kind of storage device, so went and bought the Commodore cassette tape drive the next day, along with some cassette tapes from Radio Shack. I also learned to program in BASIC on the VIC-20, but it was more fun to play the cartridge games that could be bought and plugged into the back. I also loved playing a version of Pac-Man on cassette. Took awhile to load, but gave me hours of enjoyment!
It had a 6502 processor (same as used in the Apple II), and used a TV set for video display. My brother helped set up a cassette player to store data in Kansas City Standard. I wrote a Life program in assembler for it.
I thought it was cool that the first page of memory could be used for indexed-indirect or indirect-indexed membory and used that feature in my Life program.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The Micro-68, which did very little. The mighty Osborne One CP/M machine was the first productive machine I had, followed by the Commodore 64. Still love the Commodore machines.
I learned some BASIC programming on this while taking an electronic technology course at the local Junior College. I had programmed ohm's law, resistor divider networks and a few handy bits for the course. At the end of the course, I programmed the school's Apple IIe to move a stepper motor using peek and poke commands on its parallel port.
Purchased at Lawton OK Radio Shack, Oct 1978. I paid an extra $350 for 12k of RAM, so the machine had a huge 16kb of RAM. But I couldn't afford the additional $1000 for the floppy drive and enclosure, so that loaded software from a cassette recorder.
I owned an Amiga 1000 for one week, then the Amiga 2000 came in that I had actually ordered, and the family used it from 1986 to 1991. The Amiga cost about half the price of an Apple Macintosh, NOK 19 000 (about USD 3 500), complete with 20 MB hard disk, and NEC PinWriter dot matrix colour printer.
The first personal computer I used was an Apple II, that belonged to a friend.
Then we bought a Copam PC, our first PC, in 1991. This was followed by an Apple Performa 5000 in 1995, the world's worst computer, and the first one attached to a modem.
One reason we were so late buying a home computer, was that my wife and I had access to computers for several years at school. It was only when my son turned three that we felt we needed a machine at home. Machines prior to the Amigas included an IBM-370, HP-3000, DEC VAX-780, Norsk Data Nord 500.
... on a visit to Radio Shack, the sales guys were setting up this TV typewriter showing some crude blocks of white on black graphics and some all-cap text.
They "broke" it and I saw:
10 ... do something ... do another thing ... do some more stuff
20
30
Then they fired it up again.
After 9 years in this man's Navy as an avionics tech working on a 64-8-bit computer with ferrite core and programming a TI calculator, I realized IT WAS A COMPUTER!!!
I told them to box it up. They said they couldn't because it was a store demo and the only one within 200 hundred miles.
The manager walked in and told them to sell it to me because, "That's what we do here."
I took it home, breezed through the manual, had it calculate orbital speeds based on distance from the Sun (some being beneath the surface and exhibiting relativistic speeds).
It was the TRS-80.
You can look up the specs.
I wrote articles for 80 Microcomputing and ordered an A-D converter from Analog Devices and made battery checkers and digital thermometers.
Saw one at the Smithsonian Institute, many years later, when I visited D.C.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
A Heathkit H8 with 4K of memory, programmed in Octal. Later on it got a H19 display/keyboard and some floppy drives, followed by 64K of memory and a Z80 processor card...
When this topic comes up in person, it turns into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, as we all take turns one-upping each other about the lowest-spec computer we had to use. I had an Atari 400 in 1983, and my friend's first computer was a Vic-20 in 1990, and then some old-timer who cobbled together some kit machine in the 1970s would chime in... and some older guy had it tough, he had to go to the university to buy computer time.
Still have it, still works just fine :)
An 8008 thingy with 16K of ram in late 70's. Paper tape as the storage and playback.
Up Graded to a Z80 CP/M machine with 8in. floppies some time later
Graduated to an IBM PC for $3700.
About 1960 - Home built from scratch by me and a friend - 11 bit words with 5 memory locations using relays. Clock: erector set motor driving aluminum cams that activated micro-switches (cycle time about 5 seconds). Output: array of NE2 (neon) lamps, Input: data - push buttons, program - paper tape reader. Successfully implemented playing 15 lines. The most important result was easy interview and good job offer from IBM in 1964. Many of the parts came from an automobile junk yard that was recycling power supplies ("calutrons") that had been used for the electromagnetic separation process at Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project.
IBM PS/2 model 55sx
http://john.ccac.rwth-aachen.de:8000/alf/ps2_55sx/
A TI-99/4A which was given to me by my uncle, with a tape deck for saving stuff. Got a bit annoyed because I was the only one around with such a system, so half a year later, I convinced my parents to buy me a C64 for christmas. After that one, Amiga 500, then Amiga 2000, then a 386DX-33 (around 1990). After that (and gathering some experience upgrading the machine), I built my own systems.
Columbia Data Products MPC 1600-4 -- An XT-clone.
That was followed by an ALR 386/2.
Everything since has been a homebrew built from components. (Well, except for the Dell Inspiron laptop.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I see no one has mentioned the 8008 yet so I guess I'm the oldest geezer.
Popular Electronics had plans for an Intel 8008 based computer so I hand wired it on a homebuilt chassis. 256 bytes of memory. Programmed in bare machine code (no stinking assembler crutch). Added an octal keyboard and display which made it much easier to program. Also added a cassette tape interface which could store and read programs... Programmed and ran a few games on it.
I think I still have it buried under the house somewhere.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Lode Runner, Conan: Hall of Volta, Oregon Trail, etc. ;) Btw, you can replay them online here: http://virtualapple.org/ ...
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
1k RAM (including the screen), 1 MHz processor. I was maybe 13 and it changed my life. Then we got an Apple ][+, 48k RAM plus 16k extension, the CP/M card, two 5" floppies. Sweet!
Mine was a cheapo clone running Windows 3 as far as I can remember. I got it because being an accountant I needed to get access to that type of software. Visicalc rocked in those days for me. I can vaguely remember a Toshiba cpu ?? Main thing was that it worked. This was in the early 80's before my Linx days
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
Tandy 486SX 25mhz.
Remember playing Warcraft and doom on these. Especially the test builds before doom was even released. Compsci teacher knew John from ID.
Can't believe anything at 25mhz.
And a fun little 4 pen plotter I used to draw wire frame graphics.
First micro owned: 1979, Apple ][+ 48KRAM + 16K Language Card, UCSD Pascal, Zenith green-phosphor monitor
First micro programmed: 1977, KIM-1, hand-entry of op codes from hex keypad (http://oldcomputers.net/kim1.html)
First computer programmed: 1973, IBM-1401, FORTRAN IV on punched-cards (retired from active school district use, made available to high school students until it was reclaimed by IBM)
Bought as a kit in early '77. I had 16K of RAM in 4 4K boards (yes, I know that was too much for the time), the TVTypewriter (1200-baud serial16 x 64 character upper AND lower-case display) and a cassette recorder for 300-baud mass storage. It was pretty advanced for the time, on power up it booted to the PROM debugger, instead of needing to toggle in a boot loader like on the Altair boxes.
Which, as it turned out was a really great first computer. Simple enough to where you can pick up assembly easily, and it had a host of other languages to use as well. I actually learned C on my C64, which started my career in software. I wouldn't be where I am today without my C64.
My only complaint was the lousy 1541 disk drive that would eventually scramble any disk in it, given enough writes. Made programming super difficult having to back up your disk to a second disk every time you changed something.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Does my Atari 2600 count?
My first PC was an 8MHz 286 XT PC clone with (gasp) 512K of RAM and an amber 13" monochrome monitor and a 20MB HDD (because no one would ever need more than 20 MB, I mean come on, I think it was actually 40MB but firmware locked to 20MB). I also had one of those screeching dot matrix printers (I blessed the day that the HP Laserjet II arrived). I didn't even have a modem or NIC. I had MSDOS and ran Lotus and Wordperfect 5.1. I remember my first install of C being a stack of like 20x 3.5" diskettes (I cant remember the version, it was some guys name like Peter Norton or something). Good times.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Yet another VIC-20 story:
My high school had the first "Computer Studies" course in our state in 1982 and I was one of the first 10 students chosen. We had 5 Apple ][s in the classroom (we didn't call it pair-programming back then, it was just one-between-two). Anyway, I convinced my mother that I needed a computer to help with my studies and the local electrical retailer had these amazingly cheap VIC-20 computers for only $499.
She caved and so I took over our TV for the next year or so trying to write the next Space Invaders in Commodore Basic. It was OK when the sprites were going left-to-right but dog slow when trying to move them right-to-left. Anyway, lots of fun.
I've still got it in a box in the shed (which is more than I can say for all the 286, 386, 486 and Pentiums I've owned) along with the tape drive and the tapes. I do occasionally (every decade or so) think of getting it out and seeing if it still works. I don't reckon I ever will and think my son will probably end up throwing it out when he's going through all my crap when I'm gone. I probably won't care.
I came across this scan of a magazine spread for it a few years back:
http://imgur.com/a/4s6RF
Mine came with the CGA graphics card and color monitor -- FOUR AMAZING COLORS (including black)!
Turbo Pascal was lots of fun with this machine, Windows 3.10 riding on DOS 6.22. 4 Mb RAM -> 8 Mb, 40 Mb HDD (Computer Shopper upgraded to 350 Mb later)
When I upgraded I gave it to my parents, and went back to retrieve it years later only to discover they had sent it to the landfill . . .
https://www.recycledgoods.com/...
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
I built a 64k RAM 8080 computer on an S-100 bus. I started it out with CPM but transitioned to a UCSD Pascal environment so I could run a 6502 cross compiler.
I used the computer to learn how to program the Atari VCS game machine using a "Magic Card" that provided an interface to the Atari's 6502. I built a keyboard interface that emulated key presses on the Magic Card to load and test my game code. The Atari VCS had 128 bytes of RAM and the Magic Card provide around 1 or 2 K of RAM that served as a ROM emulator for the VCS. You really had to hoard RAM when all you had were 128 bytes to work with.
The whole rig cost around $2,000 in 1980 dollars but more than paid for itself in that I ended up working at Imagic, an Atari video game startup. That was one of the best jobs I had as the people I worked with were amazingly talented.
It was one of those come-by-mail kits. The kind where you assemble everything from the resisters up. Very early.
First computer was a Commodore Vic 20 with a 5KB Super-expander and cassette drive (~1982), then came a C64, and a PET 2001, another C64 (for multi-tasking)
Monochrome monitor, one integrated floppy drive, and . . . that was it. Later on we got a 1200 baud Hayes modem, but we never did much with it.
Programmed some AppleBASIC (to no great effect) and played a lot of Ultima and Bard's Tale games. Plus other stuff.
My real first home computer, around 1976, was a perfboard with my design for an 1802 cpu, 1K of 1103 RAM chips, a video chip that did B&W blocks, a hex keyboard made of discrete switches with a two character hex display, and a bunch of support DIPS all hand wire-wrapped. There was no ROM, you had to hand load memory in hex and then start the CPU. Quickly I wrote a short loader that could load data from an audio cassette so only the loader would have to be keyed in. Earlier, around 1968, I got some kind of computer (I had never heard of the manufacturer) from a military surplus program for schools (incredible program - made a huge difference in my learning). It had a remote terminal that was like a fancy calculator connected with a thick cable to a box the size of a small refrigerator. Inside was a mass of panels and thick wire-wrapping connecting discrete transistors. Unfortunately it didn't work properly and in spite of many hours trying, I never did figure out how to fix it so it probably doesn't count although I learned a lot. Much later I got an Exidy Sorcerer with the S-100 expansion. I replaced the ROMs with custom ones I wrote and burned that included a real time interrupt so it could timeshare and multitask and load other ROM images (I could load ROMs to emulate a TRS-80, a Polymorphic 8813, and custom stuff). Later I added a Micropolis floppy drive and wrote a loader that read and compiled, starting with the first sector, forth-based text. I remember getting two floppy diskettes and wondering why I would ever need any more.
My first "computer" was a Geniac Electric Brain, complete with Masonite wheels, sometime in the mid 1950s. No active electronics--yet it could be programmed. Output was via a set of light bulbs.
I had a Big Trak as a kid in 1979. This was technically my first computer as it was programmable. I didn't make the connection to computer programming until I took a Logo programming class in the seventh grade in 1983. It was exactly the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak
My first home computer was a Heathkit H-8 that I built while in college. It had an Intel 8080 and a relatively open architecture. It even offered a breadboard expansion. Most of the boards were optional, like the serial and parallel I/O. I used dual cassette decks to read and write programs. The biggest challenge and reward was entering the first programs via the hex keypad in front. It really cemented my appreciation for assembler language and memory management. The static RAM was very costly back in those days and going from 4K up to 16K cost a small fortune. (I bought the extra RAM in a clandestine drug-dealing-like transaction from one of the employees.)
My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
kim-1. Single board eval for 6502. 1k ram. 16 key pad. 7 segment display. Built up to 256k non-volatile ram, b&w video, qwerty keyboard.
2nd computer Aim-65. Expanded to color graphics with wirewrap first ti color graphics chip. Added dual 3-1/4 (yes 3-1/4) inch dual floppy drive using very early ti disc controller chip. Wrote primitive dos. These pre-dated any commercial attempt at home computers.
Using a custom video display chip, this 8-bit console had 4k of RAM, a keyboard, and used cassette-sized cartridges known as Videocades. Users could also do minimal programming with the BASIC program included.
Though since the Timex Sinclar 2068 was borrowed and easily confused (try nesting 5 for loops) I am not sure it really counts as my first home computer, especially since it could not connect to anything other that the tape player and cartridges I had.
The first one I bought was a Tandy Computer 2, with a multi-pack interface, dot matrix printer and an external dual floppy, used of course. OS/9 was a pretty cool compared to DOS and Deskmate was a neat interface. I used this to program, connect to BBS systems (where I met many people) and university computers at 300 baud. I had a basic word processor on this for papers, and handed it down to my parents who wrote an unpublished book on it.
The next one was a Tandy 1000 TL, a 286SX (that's right half the bus) with a blazing 1200 baud modem, 3.5 inch floppy and a 40 MB hard drive, monitor and a Dot Matrix Printer for $3500 new. I expanded the RAM to 786K to give video more space, and bought my first online purchase for this the 80287 math co-processor. Found a guy online selling them, I mailed him a check, he mailed me the chip. Real trust there. I used the modem to transfer the book off of the COCO2 to this computer and imported it into Word Perfect. Connected to the university computers to do coding assignments and play games, downloaded stuff as well as uploaded my first shareware (now freeware) to reset the Tandy Graphics to normal mode. Most third party developers did not know the assembly required to get out of Tandy graphics properly, so I got the system manual with all the details and created a program you could run in a batch after you exit programs like Fractint to reset the graphics, if you didn't reset, they were all weird when you opened something like Word Perfect. I wrote my own password based access system on this, preventing my roommate from playing games on the PC while I was at work and insisting he gets time to use it for homework when I got home. I sold this whole system online to a collector. He ended up playing for 90% of the shipping, I lost 10% of the shipping in the deal. Used 3.5 inch floppy to transfer my parent's book to a Windows PC and convert to Word, it is still unpublished, not for the lack of trying.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
Started with a C=16/+4, in a bundle from Toys 'R Us (with a 1541 floppy drive, and an MPS801 printer to go with the built-in word processing "suite")
"Upgraded" to a C=64, with a mouse and GEOS.
Then moved to an Amiga 1200, which was steadily upgraded over time, including a 250MB 2.5" hard-drive, and a 1200-baud modem for BBS', followed by a 14.4k modem when the internet started to take off.
Unfortunately, Commodore (the company) died, so I side-graded to a Pentium 1, and joined the PC treadmill from there.
The first computer I saw was my dad's Amstrad CPC 464.
Soon I had my own, a Timex TC2068. This is an improved version of the american TS2068 produced by Timex of Portugal, featuring improved Spectrum compatibility, in great part thanks to its emulator cartridge. I understand this is a relatively sought-after item in the american market.
Here's some photos of the portuguese factory in Costa da Caparica from 1986 if anyone's curious. This factory is a bit of a legend for portuguese geeks because it was Portugal's contribution to 8-bit computing with several innovations developed, such as the Timex FDD3000, until the factory was allegedly transferred to Scotland in a shady deal.
My first personal computer was a PDP-11/20 with 64K words of memory, a paper tape reader, and two Linc tapes.
I used it for years.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
My first home computer was a Grundy NewBrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Bought it second hand in '83, for 1000 guilders.
I actually started playing and had some training with a ZX Spectrum 48K from Sinclair, and my parents gave me a compatible one, a Timex 2048 made in Portugal when I was 14, in 1984.
I started using BASIC in the Summer, and went full Z80 assembly by Xmas.
Later on in 1995 I wrote the first ZX Spectrum emulation for Windows.
This little computer was invaluable to establish the basis for what I do today.
Atari 65XE ... 64k of memory and roughly equivalent to a Commodore 64 or Apple ][e but compatible with only the other Atari computers and had BASIC on chip vs cartridge. I had no cassette or disk drive, so I'd write programs or type/convert the ones from magazines or books, I'd add them to a home brewed menu system and use "renum" so shift all the line numbers around ... I couldn't save my work so just didn't turn it off. It was a good learning system since graphics and sound were easier to code than on most other systems. Eventually I ruined it by taking apart the keyboard. It had its own thin metal "box" inside the greater box, and once opened, it had what seemed like a square mile of mysteriously folded plastic ... could never get it folded back together correctly. Cut me a break, I was roughly 11.
In 1981 I bought a Micro-Professor MPF-I which was a development board designed to teach the fundamentals of machine code and assembly language on a Zilog Z80 microprocessor. About the most interesting thing ever done with it was to light a series of LED in sequence out of a parallel port interface. Wikipedia has a page on it, apparently it was still available in the early 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Later I bought an Atari ST 520M and got as far as opening a window using a C compiler. The ST did make a good Midi sequencer though having a built in port for it. After that it has been IBM PC's all the way.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Mine was an Apple ][, revision 0. It came with 16KB RAM and cassette tapes. We had to get the Sup'R'Mod RF modulator to use it with an old TV. It always displayed text with color tinges and had only 4-color hi-res graphics. Later on, I modified it with the circuit from Byte magazine to have 6-color hi-res graphics.
At the time, adding another 16KB of RAM would have cost $400. Floppy disk drives had only just come out, and cost $595, plus a hundred or so for the controller. We didn't get either until they came down in price.
Things I liked:
- It turned on instantly (although on a Rev 0 you had to hit Reset after turning it on, until you added a card with power-on-reset).
- The tape interface was relatively fast and very reliable. Although I'd always save a program on tape twice, I usually never needed the second copy.
The only time I had troubles was when I used a tape recorder with a badly aligned head. It would record and play its own tapes fine, but not other ones, and others didn't like its tapes.
- The disk drive was such an amazing improvement over tapes. It really changed the computer from being a toy to tinker with into a useful tool.
- Compared to the Commodore 64 or Atari 400/800, both the tape interface and disk interface were vastly superior. I couldn't believe that the Commodore 64's disk interface seemed as slow as the Apple's tape interface (at least, until you loaded an accelerator program).
Things I didn't like:
- The hi-res graphics were advertised as 280x192 with 4 (or later 6) colors. In fact, it's much quirkier than that. A dot placed in an even column is one color (maybe purple), and a dot placed in an odd column is a different one (green). Two dots placed side-by-side were white, mostly (in fact the edges were tinged with color, depending if the dots were even/odd or odd/even). Since the dots were stored as bits within a byte, and only 7 bits out of each byte were used, the 6-color mode would use the last bit of each byte to shift the other pixels of the byte half a pixel over, as a result changing their colors from purple/green to blue/orange.
By having the pixel position determine its color, Woz was able to get away with a relatively simple video circuity implementation. But it was a pain for programming and artistic representation.
- The sound output was as primitive as possible: touch a memory-mapped I/O location, and the speaker would flip states between cone in and cone out. To make tones required CPU-driven timing loops to toggle the speaker at appropriate times. Thus, for the most part, all game sounds consisted of short blips between other actions. Only very sophisticated games later on could do more continuous sounds.
I could spend all day reminiscing about how it used to be. It was a fun time, and I learned a lot about computing. There were many great games that used the power of imagination to bring you to worlds as interesting as any you'll find on today's PCs.
May Lord British and Tony Suzuki and many other game writers of the time always be fondly remembered!
Purchased from Hoshing-Kwong, a chinese kid who moved to my hometown of 5000 when he was 15. I went to his house to buy it. His bedroom was full of monitors, computers and computer parts on shelves on all four walls. His reality was far different than mine. One if my friends once asked how he always finished his schoolwork... With a straight face and broken English he said "I cover my face with toothpaste and put a drop of water on each eyelid". If his eyes closed, the water drops would hit his face and activate the burning sensation of the toothpaste. I always wondered what happened to that guy. And the computer? I played Zelda on the Commodore. It was fun.
The NewBrain. With ZX80 and 32KByte RAM and camelcasing. Fantastic little machine.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
A Commodores VIC 20... I ran fine the last time I checked. I should turn it on and hook up a Raspi to the serial lines on the user port, with voltage converters of course.
I remember talking with my college tutor about his first computer in 1975. He had worked on modifying the design of Lancaster Bombers for different missions during the Second World War. A computer in 1942, he said, was a lad or more often a girl, with a certificate in mathematics who would would take your work, insert the data, and do your calculations for you..(and they really were called 'computers')..
Advertised in the early pages of Byte Magazine, the 6800 based Sphere had 4K of DRAM memory, a 32x16 text display but there were no monitors to be had so you injected the video signal into a BW TV just before the video rectifier diode. It had a cassette interface for offline storage and was programmed in machine code.
Sold as a kit, there was a 90% chance that one of the memory chips would fail at first power up and you had to replace that yourself. They didn't last long.
6502 CPU, 8 kB RAM, cassette tape drive for storage. Fun times.
Our real first pc was in 1990 we had an IBM Clone (386) 16MHz 80386SX with DOS operating system.. Learned basic commandline on that machine. Ah the game Bruce Lee still gives me horrid memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I had a friend who bought an Altair, so naturally I bought something better. Z80 instead of 8080, bigger power supply, but still the same bus so all the Altair compatible cards worked well.
I wirewrapped a 80 by 40 video card of my own design. It worked well with the CPM operating system loaded by an optical paper tape reader.
I still have the computer in my closet gathering dust. I will probably resurrect it one day.
My first was Atari with TOS connected to a TV
Mendacem Memorem Esse Oportet
Atari 400 computer with a membrane keyboard and cassette tape to load programs. Parents added a disk drive and printer. Eventually upgraded to an Atari 800, then 800 XL with two disk drives.
Was I the only owner of a Commodore 16?
My first computer was a TI 99/4A. I was 5. Yep, I'm old. Haha.
My first computer was an Apple ][+ clone. I bought the bare circuit board (the only documentation was silkscreened onto the board), took my overtime in parts from the electronics firm I worked for (one of the engineers supplied EPROMS :-) and populated the thing. 48k memory, woohoo! Built a decoder for the surplus keyboard I had, built a power supply, wired the video output into the contrast control (I think) of my parents' colour TV, it worked perfectly. Then my parents came home from Florida early, "Um, son, what have you done to the television?".
I went on to build a 16k memory expansion ("Why do you want all that memory?" I got asked), a disk controller (had a pair of 8" floppies for a while), all kinds of stuff.
Late 70s? I soon became so dependent on it professionally that I bought a spare in case anything went wrong with it. I later gave one away, and after a few decades, sold the other one (still working) to a collector.
I had a Commodore Vic-20 with a tape drive. I had a bunch of the Scott Adams text adventures as well as a Koala Pad and the drawing software that came with it. Got a C-64 later on, naturally.
.... followed by a Commodore 64 10 years later
Bought in 1979. I still have it. Currently bringing it back into operation after 20 years in the loft.
That was the only comment to be modded informative and no comments moderated as insightful. Hmm... Seems to say something about the state of today's Slashdot, doesn't it.
Hmm... Looking more deeply, I see it was a split mod. If I ever got a mod point, I'd have voted on the "interesting" side for such a comment. However if that had happened, then this entire large discussion would be without a single comment showing an informative mod.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I happened to be teaching myself electronics in my spare time so I thought to look for a kit I could build on a limited budget. Just at that same point Sinclair put a kit on the market for a mere $200 (1980's money) which I was able scrape together. After receiving and building my kit I went knocking on doors down my dorm hall until I found one of the students that managed to get into that course (i.e. they bumped me from that course), and I dragged them down to my dorm room pointed at it and asked "what does it do?". He then showed me how to make it print out my name three times in a loop, and then left. I then wired my own keyboard by reverse engineering the membrane keyboard wiring, and built a 48k memory and expansion I/O expansion modules for it, and never looked back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I did graduate, after forcing the University to accept alternate courses as credit, because it was their own policy that caused the problem, not by my choice. After graduation I still had the computer bug and pursued further education to better understand microprocessors. Now I have a MS in computer science and work in a Physics Laboratory as an analyst.
First home PC was an i386. Green font on a black background. Good times.
TRS80 Model 1 Level 1 4K, paid $795 for it in 1978 The "level 1" BASIC was integer-only math, numeric variables limited to A-Z, string vars also A-Z.. Surprising though what you could do with it, even with those limitations.. Kinda wish I still had it, be worth quite a bit as a museum piece.
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Yeah 4K RAM, OS on ROM, booted in less than 10 seconds to a usable prompt.
Beat that!
I believe it was an Apple IIe clone. It ran most everything that an Apple IIe could run. It seemed very high tech compared to the TRS-80(cassette player) I used in high school. It had a lot more memory and a 5.25 diskette drive.
Later on I bought and installed a rocket chip, which made it seem even more high tech running at 10MHz!
My first computer was a KIM-1; I still have it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1/ for those who are interested in what one is...
A Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P in 1979 or 1980. 6502. 8k RAM. 8k Microsoft BASIC-in-ROM. Cassette recorder for loading/saving programs. You could also get out the 6502 opcode manual (I believe the term was machine code back then) and enter opcodes in hex one by one to create an app or BASIC-callable subroutine.
I had a Commodore 64 and used that until I could update it no more. Then I bought a Pentium 75 cutting edge at the time probably something like a 250mb drive
and the cool thing it was a AT&T PC with a really neat digital answering machine built into the PC. I think I managed to update the CPU to 120 Mhz Pentium which bought me a couple more years of good use.
JApple ][+, two 5,25" drives, C/PM card, and — 128K card!
A PC Clone hand made with processor NEC V20 8 Mhz emulatin 8086 at 4.56 MHz, 1 MB (but DOS and Windows 1.0 were able to access only 640 KB), 2 full size 30 MB HD and video CGA (Color!). In 1987 in the small town in Colombian and Venezuelan border this piece of HW was impressive...
With green then amber screen. Played Qix on it.
Black and white (not even grayscale) screen, dome-key flat keyboard, and BASIC built in. I ended up learning Z80 machine code on it.
Happy times.
- Paul
I had fond memories - learning to turn off the video refresh to improve computation time, membrane keyboard, etc... didn't have it too long until I got a ZX-81 followed by a VIC-20...
Big S100 buss box, 2x1.2MB DSDD 8" disk drives, 1x5MB hard drive, 2 serial ports, 64KB RAM, capacitors the size of beer cans. CP/M operating system. Very good keyboard, amber screened monitor, 2xserial ports, 1x1200 baud modem.
I still had the Decision 1 up in the attic of my house (along with a C-64 and a Compupro 8/16 box) until a house fire destroyed them all.
My first was a Kaypro PC: 8088, 20 MB HDD, and a single double-density 5.25 " floppy. 640 KB RAM (plus another 128 usable only as a RAM disk). DOS 2.11, as I recall. I had added an EGA Wonder card that allowed enhanced graphics on a monochrome (yellow) monitor. Eventually added a 720 K 3.5" floppy as well. Toshiba (?) 24-pin printer. After I acquired some experience, I added a fax/modem card, but that was several years later.
with 48K, Disc Drive, Tape Drive, and Dot-Matrix Parallel Printer, which had to be connected to a serial to parallel box.
2 cartridge slots, WOO!!!
A Sanyo MBC 555, dual 360 floppies, a whopping 64k of RAM, upgraded to 128k at considerable expense. 12" amber screen monitor with a Epson 9 pin dot matrix printer. Ah the good times!
64
I figured they were rare enough and old enough nobody here would have had one.
Sadly, I sold mine many years ago and I moved to the then very-nifty Atari 1200XL with its (then) great graphics and sound.
I think I still have a SWTPC 4K SRAM board in a junk box.
My first home computer was a Challenger 1-P from Ohio Scientific. I bought the kit version which included the case/keyboard and the Superboard II. This computer had a 6502 clocked at 1 MHZ and came with 4KB of static RAM. It had a cassette interface for loading/saving programs. The board had "holes" for an RS232-C interface and came with instructions for the components needed to make it work. Another trip to Radio Shack and a little soldering later and I had a working interface. It was perfect for the Radio Shack Quick Printer II.
Later I added the expansion board with 28KB of static RAM for a total of 32KB. It also had a floppy diskette drive interface. Since I was too cheap to spring for the "official" diskette drive I pieced one together by purchasing a 5.25" full height bare drive and my own power supply from Radio Shack. My father gave me his old Polaroid camera case which I used to hold the diskette and power supply. Again being cheap (I was 13 at the time so cash was tight) I couldn't afford to buy the disk operating system from OSI so I wrote my own.
A project I tried to tackle but never finished was an attempt to add disk commands to the BASIC in ROM. I wrote a disassembler and printed the disassembly of the entire ROM to the Quick Printer II. I then hand-typed it back in to an assembler that I also wrote. I made some modifications to add some disk commands but never got it to work properly.
The 6502 is still my favorite microprocessor. I had all the opcodes memorized so I could look at the machine code and disassemble it in my head. It was a great way to get introduced to the world of microcomputing!
I liked it fine -- built in tape drive baby! -- but it always seemed technically inferior to the C64, and had less software than the spectrum.
The first one I loved: Amiga 500.
Great story of coming full-circle.
My first store-bought computer was also a KIM-1. I had wanted a computer for years, always looking at advertisements in magazines, and subscribing eventually to BYTE. I remember going together with my father to a computer store (on Long Island) to look around. I think it was a second-floor showroom which was not very big -- maybe over other stores or in a house? I remember seeing some kind of computer there on a table with a terminal and a disk drive comping PASCAL or something like that. The KIM-1 was probably the cheapest thing there -- sitting in a display case by the cash register.
My father and I soldered a power supply together for it. I seem to remember saving longer programs to cassette tape.
Before the KIM, I had built circuits from logic ICs from RadioShack, and before those I had built circuits from discarded lights and switches my father had brought home from work. I had also haunted RadioShacks to play with the TRS-80s there -- and learned a lot by doing the exercises using pencil in a TRS-80 tutorial guide "Users Manual for Level 1".
https://archive.org/details/Le...
I was lucky that a high school teacher also had a computer company selling educational computers. He would loan me PETS for a time I would write some software for or fix up or do other things with. One time he loaned me an Apple II for a couple days -- but that is all I ever did with one of those. Our high school (in the late 1970s) also was part of a Long Island BOCES timesharing group so we could dial-in from school (or later home on a PET) to a PDP-10 and run stuff there (not that I understood that much of what was going on the PDP-10 back then).
I sold the KIM-1 (sigh) to get money to buy my own PET from that teacher, and then got a printer and a dual floppy disk drive (forgoing all my future allowance to pay for it). Overlapping the PET I got a VIC (which I wrote a video game for which helped pay for college) and then a C64. I really liked Forth cartridges I got for the VIC and C64. I made an interface box so a PET, VIC, or C64 could control relays and extra multiplexed I/O lines (binary, A/D, and D/A). I interfaced that to a Battle Iron Claw robot from RadioShack I used in my undergraduate AI research
Eventually, I got a couple of embedded 6811-based Forth computers for fun -- I used them to radio control a Petster robot cat. Later I got a (Panasonic?) portable with a micro-tape drive I ended up returning at my manager's suggestion when the lab I was working at got a portable 8086 computer he let me take home (still wish I had kept the other laptop which was surprisingly good), then a Z88 portable, and finally my first 80386 IBM PC from Gateway I needed for a a computer contracting job.
After that was bunch of other PCs and Macs, Newtons , a Palm Pilot, a couple handheld Linux devices, a couple of OLPCs, and so on -- into the current days of Chromebooks, Arduinos, Raspberry Pi, OpenWRT-powered routers, and of course PC & Mac laptops.
Might have missed something or other in there.
Frankly, I no longer know exactly how many computers I own. :-)
The KIM-1 It was a big mystery to me at first. I had gotten an assembly language programming book but did not really understand it. It took quite a while to "click" and I'm not sure it ever really did until I later did assembly using a PET -- both to Peek and Poke and to run a macro assembler on the PET. But the KIM-1 set me up well to understand the PET quickly -- as well as a "Cardiac" cardboard computer we used in high school.
So, I can credit starting with a KIM-1 as teaching me a lot about the fundamentals of computing which has helped me throughout my career -- especially having confidence I can understand systems all the way to the metal (in theory). Thanks, Dad!!!
Sadly, my own kid has little interest in the low-level details of computers. Nowadays, pre-made applications can do so m
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
it was my Dad's home computer. A PDP-11. it ran RT-11. Good stuff. This was before the TRS-80 and Apple ][
I was a Commodore 16 with dattaset
frist
At school we used some DEC operating system, and it came with the PIP program. When I ran into a computer store and saw it had an operating system (CP/M 2.2) with the PIP command [PIP copies files, amongst], I was sold. Saved up money, 6700 dutch guilders at the time, and the rest is history. Not much later I sold it, to replace it with a Kaypro-4, which has double density diskettes, 360K i thiink it was. 64k memory. But I later had some memory extension, where parts of the OS resided, and I learned how to modify the OS, ZCPR was the CP/M open source version. I would run C, Fortran and tex (for my thesis) on it, just because I could. The Kaypro was later replaced by a second hand $800 AT&T 3b1, and after that a 386SX that booted linux very very slowly..... I managed to never have to get DOS or Windows, I still have the kaypro. I used to play "ladder". It booted until 2010 or so, but the bootfloppy has issues. Perhaps will swap it with the other floppy and see if it still boots. Fun times.
Actually, what I find far more interesting is that there are essentially no trolls or mentions of politicians. It is almost as if the old Slashdot is back. Alas the experience is no doubt fleeting :-(
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
IOW, something with a Basic interpreter but none of those silly games of the Commodore machines some of my friends had (though it came with ROMs for chess and a Pacman-like game). Also, a manual in German which was great fun as in that year 1987 I had just started to study it as my second language.
http://www.old-computers.com/m...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The early 80's. Put 3 - Shugart SA-800Rs on it for floppy drives. DC hayes 300 baud S-100 modem. Zenith Z-19 was my original terminal on it. GE Terrminet 1200 & Centronics 101A printers. Helped a friend put together an IMSAI 8080 not too long before that.
Programs were stored and loaded from an external cassette tape deck. Had an acoustic coupler for dialing out. Distinctive looking.
I notice they have one on the show "The Americans" in their "Travel Agency" office. Pretty neat. Good show too.
64k RAM, CPM, dual floppy drives, not bad for a start (1981), Wordstar etc., but not so good for a non-geek, and very quickly outpaced (and replaced) by IBM and Apple.
It must have been 1977 or 1978. I designed and built an RCA 1802 handheld, battery powered computer. 256 bytes of static CMOS RAM, 1 MHz, 2 hex digit LED display, 8 bit DIP switch input. It was an 8-bit chip but had 16-bit registers, any one of which could be the PC. I chose the 1802 because it was very low power and needed few support chips and I was working with some folks at JPL who were going to use it on flight projects. Not Viking, it was too late for that. Galileo had a bunch of them and I'm sure there are some still flying. It was totally static, I'll bet if I could find it in my garage, put batteries in, and turned it on it would be running whatever it was 30 or so years ago. No sissy assembler programming, just raw machine coded entered through the DIP switches. It was great fun.
The very first "computer" that I could program and that I owned outright was an Intellivision ECS. It came in two parts. First, was the Intellivision II game system, which my mother bought for me as a gift for graduating Jr. High school. Then, one day I was in KB Toys and saw this "Intellivision ECS". Then I saw the price (it was like $40) and nearly wet myself. I bought it and got it home.
It was terrible. It had 2k RAM, hookups for a cassette recorder, and that's about it. The keyboard wasn't great (the current crop of keyboards from Apple remind me of the Intellivision keyboard). It had a slot where you could plug in Intellivision games and either play the game itself, or go into the ECS and interrogate the graphics and sound on the cartridge and use them in your own programs. That was kinda cool, but with 2k, you really couldn't do much with it. Besides, those features were not very well documented and were confusing to use. It had a BASIC language, and the computer would colorize the lines of your program to signify that you entered it correctly, which was pretty cool. If something went wrong (either a syntax error or you ran out of memory, which happened to me a lot), it would color the whole thing grey. Also, all of the keywords were 4 characters. So instead of "PRINT", it was "PRIN". Instead of "GOSUB", it was "GOSU". But you could enter the complete keyword and it would just ignore the last character(s). Yes, it was a pretty horrible little machine, but it was mine, and I did have fun with it.
In the documentation, there were "redacted" parts talking about an expansion module with would give you 32k RAM and a printer port (if memory serves). All of that would have made for a far better computing experience. But they put stickers over those parts of the manual because they never did come out with such a thing. I limped along with that thing until I got my next computer, a Commodore C-16.
Actually, what I find far more interesting is that there are essentially no trolls or mentions of politicians. It is almost as if the old Slashdot is back. Alas the experience is no doubt fleeting :-(
Are you a troll? If not, and having nothing to say, then perhaps you should say nothing?
Oh wait. I forgot this is today's Slashdot. It's approaching 99.44% pure nothing.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
In 1978, I spent my entire life savings (about $2500) on an Apple ][. Maxed out the memory at 48K (it was $150 per 16K). I can't remember how much it cost, but I footed for the massive 130K floppy drive because one of my friends had a TRS-80 model 1, and I refused to try to load programs by cassette. No monitor - couldn't afford one and they were all monochrome anyway. It ran Integer Basic in much less than 16K. The add-on Applesoft board, which would have made it essentially an Apple ][+ was just a dream.
It was a great machine. I learned assembler and simple device drivers on that machine. I have fond memories of the big red book with the entire ROM assembly in print form. I saved up for about 6 months to afford the Applesoft add-on board that had a toggle switch sticking out of the back so you could switch between the onboard Integer Basic ROM and the floating-point Applesoft Basic on the board. Never, ever flip that switch while the machine is running. I also remember driving 3 hours to a place that had the new ROM chip for the floppy interface card that would let it store 160K on a drive instead of the base 130K. Except for the 6502 CPU, there was nothing denser on that motherboard than MSI chips. And I don't mean the computer/motherboard maker.
It lasted a good 5 years, but the last year it started having some kind of thermal problem that required keeping the lid off of it or it would lock up after about 15-20 minutes. The only way to fix it was to power off, flex the motherboard, and power on again. Sometimes I had to pull the CPU and clean the legs of the chip off with an eraser.
For all my promises to my parents that it would be good for my engineering degree, I mostly used it to play games. Choplifter, Ultima 2 and 3, Castle Wolfenstein, Miner 2049er, and Wizardry were favorites. I also had the world's most primitive wireframe flight simulator with single-digit frames per second.
I really wanted one of those all-in-one 6809 systems, or , an Altair box with CP/M and the massive S-100 chassis. Couldn't afford them, and really it was just as well - this way, I was able to watch one of my friends almost ruin his college career by skipping most of his classes for 2 weeks to beat Ultima 3 on it.
Programming on it was so much fun. No memory protection. No O/S. You powered it on, and you were in Basic. Nothing like a BIOS, though you could hook the system reset and interrupt vectors. Video directly mapped to fixed memory ranges. Hacking the floppy disk driver was a piece of cake. There was no modem built in. There may have been an acoustic modem coupler that connected to the built-in audio out/mic jacks, but I might be mis-remembering that. If you put a radio too close to it, you could hear the apple work because of its EMR. The 1 MHz CPU
80kb of ram! We started with the Adam till it went bad after a couple of months and we returned it for a Commodore 64 -- never looked back. Used the Commodore 64 from 1985 through 1993 when I finally purchased a 486DX2 50MHz with 4mb ram a 400mb hard drive -- Windows 3.11.
My 1st computer was a mail-order one. It was from company Zeos. It was a 386DX, 33Mhz, 4Mb of RAM, and a 130Mb hard drive.
It came with a 13inch color monitor, mouse, keyboard, and DOS.
Back in the day, it cost me US$3000
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
My first computer was a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Rainbow 100. Not the fancier "100B" or "100+" that came out a couple years later. Ran CP/M on the Z80, but it had an 8088 that CP/M would off-load the disk I/O to so it could handle the DUAL 5.25" floppy drives that came standard! It didn't have the video RAM at the same location as the IBM PCs, so the OS was able to use more RAM for programs -- 892KB if the Wikipedia article is correct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100).
And when MS-DOS came out, Microsoft ported it and I could run all the Infocom (Zork!) games - fun times!
TRS-80 Model 1, 4k of RAM.
It was 1976 and it was the $150 Netronics Elf - an RCA 'COSMAC' CDP1802 with - wait for it - 256 BYTES of RAM. In that space you could write enough code to produce an animated graphic with its pixie chip. I later expanded it to 8 kB of RAM, though only 7 kB actually worked. It was used by the TV station I worked with to expand its character generator (3M Datavision D3000) memory for election results. Programming was in machine code in hexadecimal - later the Netronics people came up with a board that allowed it to read in programs from cassette tape.
How sad that my current computer has only 24 GB of RAM
My first one was a Tandy MC10 that my great aunt bought for me (I was 7).
I had been using her TRS80 model 1 when ever I was at her house ... I learned to read by learning basic.
I still have it and it still works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_MC-10
TRS-80. Loved it.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
My first home computer was an NCR keyboard/thermal printer/modem (yes, with the cups to hold the phone handpiece) talking to a Univac 1102 OR a Control Data Cyber depending on who I was writing for that day. We thought big iron would never die.
Sinclair 4, we bought a book and typed out programs, we also bought programs on cassette, it was fun.
... with 64k expansion block. Hooked up to a B&W 12" TV and an el-cheapo casetterecorder. That full-membrane keyboard killed my fingers after hours of typing in basic programs from various zines. I only recently realized how much I was hacking back then trying to adapt basic programs for other systems like apple work on this thing. My dad would help me by reading LOC while I typed. Thinking back, again, on the keyboard - I can't imagine his suffering with adult fingers on that thing.
At $120 for the whole setup, it was waaaaay cheaper than anything else and gave me a unique learning experience.
C2-4P, came with 4 K of RAM (and I paid $69 for an additional 4 K). Output to modified TV set with 64 characters/line. I think it ran on a 6502 processor.
1986: HP-41CX with a magnetic card reader
1989: 25MHz i386 with i387 running QEMM & Desqview 386 in 4MB RAM with 60MB HDD. Still remember running multiple copies of Windows 1 on that ...
Then Atari 800 and finally saved and bought Radio Shack Color Computer 6809 assembly. Best programming books were from Lance Leventhal.
Kaypro 2. My dad needed it for his work. I couldn't lift it, even though it was supposed to be "portable". Some tiny monochrome screen but it came with 2 floppy drives iirc. Games in text mode. Next up a Wang 20286 with 20mb hd and ega card. Cost as much as a car and had Windows 1 and 2 included.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
A Sanyo MPC-200, to be exact. 64KB of RAM, 16KB of VRAM, with a Sanyo DR-303 cassette data recorder .
I was 9 at the time (I just turned 42), and I still use MSX computers today (real hardware, CRT display and all).
My site
...a Radio Shack 16B+ with a 15MB HD, 8 inch, 1.26MB floppy drive, 768K of RAM, and two Hayes modems on two landlines.
It was on-line 1983-1991 as an email and USENET server (tijil) and connected with other machines worldwide via UUCP.
It was still working just fine in 2005 when it and several boxes of floppies were shipped of to a small computer museum outside of Chicago.
Here's Boris on his way to the shipping company:
http://tijil.org/boris_in_box....
I bought the terminal and modem in 1982 so we could logon to the Washington University in St. Louis mainframe to write and compile COBOL programs. My wife and I spend many a night playing cards while waiting for the entered program to compile and run. "Awaiting output processing" was the most common message. We had a T-shirt made with this message when my wife was very pregnant. This was a step back from my work DEC VT-52. Nothing like having a terminal on your desk in the office connected to a PDP-11/70 with 320K words of memory. Kind of skipped PC's until the Wyse 8086, so much easier to use a DEC VAX remotely.
Played many games of Tunnels of Doom. Practiced BASIC programming. Dinked with the speech synthesizer.
Built from parts on a PCB Used a TV as a display Had a hex keyboard with 16 keys for input. Could load and store on Cassette tape Still have it Design is detailed in Electronics Australia magazine The one built by the designer is shown here. http://www.mjbauer.biz/DREAM68...
Ours was a TI 99/4A. Hooked it up to an old RCA 13" television that was previously my dad's bedroom TV, and used a Penncrest tape recorder for data storage. Had a whopping 16 KB of RAM on that thing.
This sig no verb.
Apple IIc...not the first computer I used, but the first one I owned.
Bought it used for a pittance, with one program...word processor, which was all I really needed, at the time...still have it, & it still works.
Commodore PR-100 scientific calculator. Had nearly every function available on any HP or TI calculator of the time, and 71 steps of programming (no way to save them between power cycles, though), with simple assembly-type control flow - test, skip, etc. IIRC it was shortly after getting out of college - mid-1970s? Handy gadget, even though the display was limited and the battery would only last 3-4 hours, though that wasn't bad for the times. Still have it, though it no longer works (needs new batteries, internal cleanup).
Mine was a (second-hand) Commodore Plus/4 in 1988, for my 9th birthday. It conked out two days later and it took a while to get it fixed.
It was a good little system: 64K RAM, 128-colour graphics, tape drive, disk drive and a printer, plus a programming manual and a shedload of games. The major downside was that nobody else had one and it was pretty hard to find software; bargain bins in small computer shops and boot fairs (not sure what they're called in the US!) were the places to look. My friends all had other computers: a mix of BBC micros (for the posh kids), ZX Spectrums and C64s (for everyone else) and even the odd Amiga.
I owe a lot to that Plus/4 - it had a primitive word processor, database and spreadsheet in ROM, so introduced me to office software. It of course had BASIC and I was able to dabble with code, although it was more of the "guess the number and win points" type of game rather than anything sophisticated.
That system lasted me for 3 years, by which time my dad rescued an old IBM XT from his work (they'd chucked it into a skip). That gave me an interest in PCs and I've never looked back!
Didn't do much else than play games though.
I was a poor student in 1989, but I had a friend whose father sold computer parts. So I bought off him an IBM XT motherboard (4.77MHz!), a 10MB ST412 hard drive (I still have it!), a 384K RAM expansion card, a floppy drive, and a home-made sheet-metal case. I assembled it all (my friend had to show me which way around the RAM chips went), and managed on that for a while. I upgraded a bit, of course, and built my own computer case from chipboard, appropriately varnished.
I got a TK-85 back in Brazil around 1984. It had 16Kb of ram and it was a Sinclair ZX-81 clone. I was 8 and my grandpa said to my father that computers would be the future, he was right. I think we paid something around $100 in a department store. My father installed it on a TV, he tried to type his name, then gave the manual to me and started to hate the amount of time I spent with that computer :-D
It worked with cassette tapes... a nightmare to load games like donkey kong. I learned Basic on that little thing.
After that I got a TK-90 a Sinclair ZX-Spectrum with 48Kb of ram with sound and colors!!! Never stopped since then... a TK2000 (bad Apple II clone) and more clones like Exato CCE (another Apple II clone), a TK3000 (Apple IIe clone) until the early 90's when PCs started to get really popular.
MSX computers were a big hit in Brazil, but they were very expensive at the time. From TK3000 I jumped to a PC clone (AT 286). Fun time when we could name our computers and know their models :-D
My First was a Dream 6900 built in 1979 (http://www.mjbauer.biz/DREAM6800.htm) published in the Electronics Australia magazine (now defunct).
1 K of RAM, half of which was dedicated to the graphics video display. Used a HEX keypad to program in Chip 8 (although you could also program in 6800 Machine Code).
Rehoused it in an old kitchen drawer cut to accept a full keyboard, added PIA to decode the keyboard and s100 bus slots to accommodate a ETI 640 VDU. Added home made bus slots to add memory point to point wired on veroboard. Ended up with 8 k of ram , full screen display switchable to graphics mode, then added a floppy drive and a seimens teleprinter (that beast was HEAVY!).
Got my display monitors from a disposal store - they were from the local ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) studios and were (heavy) large valve based CRT composite monitors with very high quality displays
My bedroom looked like NASA.
I had lots of fun... didn't have a girlfriend though!
Loved the early days... went on to run a BBS for 10 years and eventually a Fidonet system.
A BASIC programmable calculator with ca. 1 kByte of RAM and a proprietary 4-bit Sharp CPU. That must have been 1981.
In 1982, I got a VIC-20 (great machine for the time, if you could afford a 1541 floppy drive), then a C-64, then an Amiga 500.
I also still remember fondly the process of installing the first hard disk into a PC XT clone. A whopping 20 MBytes of disk space and ca. 70 kByte/s read performance (that must have been interleave 6 or 7 for that MFM disk).
Amiga 500, 512k ram, 14.7 mhz processor. I loved it :)
C64. Learned BASIC in high school. Inspired by the movie Evilspeak, I used it during lunch hours to create an animated demon summoning cartoon. Didn't date much in high school, oddly.
Brilliant machine. For its time, the architecture was seriously clever. I saw a friend playing "Western Front" on his, and I was simply blown away - huge, detailed, smooth-scrolling map, with an AI that kept working while you were inputting your own moves (ingenious use of a small degree of genuine parallel processing capability, with code running during the monitor horizontal and vertical blank scans). And 4 joystick ports, to boot - M.U.L.E. was amazing at the time, and is still, for my money, one of the best computer games I ever played. If you wanted a machine that could play games at home on some sort of par with the arcade machines (and let's be real - games were what computers were about, for most of us), it left the competition standing in the dust.
My first computers were a C-64 for "business" uses like writing papers and book keeping and an Atari 2600 for gaming.
The C-64 has 64K ram and 8bit CPU and an external 1541 floppy 5.25" drive whose disks were all "double sided" with a hole punch. C-64 users will remember the profound meaning of "Load "*", 8,1"...
I played with it till it started overheating regularly. Modded the chassis so it had two 1.5 inch fans in the back and kept using it until a friend gave me an old 386, by giving me a bunch of "scrap" parts that I put together without manuals or internet. I had to figure out how to jumper the IRQs on the boards and finesse the bios into accepting everything.
Are you a fucking moron? Never mind. You already answered that question in your own special way.
Commodore Vic-20, with the 5 K ram cart, and a modem - you do NOT want to know what this cost in 1980. I upgraded to the C64 when it came out. By then had two 1541 disk drives
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
very very first was a Sinclair ZX81.
Then there was a Commodore 64 in there somewhere, but then we got an Apple ][+. The first PC was a Tandy 1000. I had more fun on the apple.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
The super-chic TRS-80 Model 4P with upgraded 1200 baud modem got me through my senior year in high school and my freshman year of college; after taking a job in the campus computing center, a VAXcluster, IBM 3090, and a Cray Y-MP became my personal playthings.
Amiga 500, loved it. I was jealous of the 486's at the time though when Doom was released!!! Amiga never really got into fps games, that's where I think they failed.
The ELF was an 1802-based SBC from a Popular Electronics article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_ELF), which I built in 1977 using wirewrap on a surplus Augat WW board. That led to subsequent wirewrapped 6502, 6809 and 8085 systems which I put together while stuck on an FBM submarine doing 100 day patrols (one per patrol). By the time I got out in '82 I was pretty well versed in microprocessor wrangling. Eventually ended up with an Atari 400 as my first 'store bought' box. It's been an interesting 40 years ..
But i had the RAM upgrade to go from 2k of memory to 16k of memory. Thats not bragging.
Which was (I think) a German clone of the Apple II with a case that felt like cast iron.
Bought used parts at Eli Heffron & Sons in Cambridge. Loaded RT-11 F/B. Dual 8 inch floppies for unlimited storage!
Electricity was much cheaper back then. (ca 1982). Ran for about 3 years before I broke down and bought one of those Charlie Chaplin computers.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Atari 130XE. Typed in peek/poke values from PC Magazine and ComputerEdge for days at a time.
In 1979 I acquired an Ohio Scientific Challenger 2 with a floppy drive (4P). It was a 6502 based single-board machine with 24k RAM (everything was soldered in), a monochrome NTSC composite signal video display port (24 x 80?), and even a UART that one could activate by cutting a trace, or by sending the machine back to OSI with several hundred dollars so *they* could cut the trace (seriously, guys? You were selling this to hobbyists with soldering irons).
The machine was not awful but the software and BIOS were. I don't remember the floppy DOS being particularly useful (something about the user having to manage sector allocation! for files). It did encourage me to learn 6502 machine code -- the only sure-fired way to program the damned thing.
I sold it to a music store in Denton, TX but to this day I wish I had retained it.
The two most common things in the Universe are dark matter and stupidity.
My father had worked in data processing at an IBM shop in KC, and we ended up with an IBM PCjr, with cartridge system and infra-red keyboard. We added a 3rd party sidecar that gave us a floppy drive, and additional ram. DOS 2.1. And we actually had a cartridge with Lotus 123.
This machine changed the course of my life.
My mother bought it on credit at Montgomery Ward's it was close the 3 grand at the time.
thank god my mom invested into this machine. I would not be typing this post from my job that I would not have if i did not have the skills that this computer laid the foundation for.
#aolwarez - LOL
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I often stayed behind at school to get time on the BBC Micro they had and try out all the BASIC I'd learned from library books. Eventually I got my very own computer, a second-hand Atari 800XL, and started re-learning everything again for that. On the surface it was similar (like most 8-bits I guess), but the Atari BASIC always felt a little bit behind the BASIC on the C64 and BBC at the time. Learned some assembly, how to smooth scroll, do funky rainbow effects and even wrote a primitive paint package that could load and save 16-colour bitmaps to tape. It eventually developed a problem with the SIO port, effectively rendering it useless, and then I moved onto the Amiga, which I still have today and run all the time, expanded with 20 years of funky hacks and add-ons.
I recently unearthed my cassette tapes of code for the Atari and recorded them as a WAV file so they could be converted to tape images for an emulator. Surprisingly, most of the recordings survived and worked first go. Scary seeing my code from so long ago again!
Haha.. just noticed that this is bringing out all us low digit Slashdot users. :)
:) Ahh the memories of Control-G bombing people's VT52 terminals so they would make that horrible buzzer sound you could hear half way across the computer lab.
My first was a TRS80 Model 1, learned some basic on that.
Next I moved onto using a PDP11 running RSTS at school and becoming a student sysadmin and learning Pascal and Fortran and playing TREK
Then my first serious home computer was a Commodore-64 the first week they came out. I used that for all sorts of hacking, BBSing, dialup to school mainframes, learning Motorola assembly, learning to be a pirate and bypass copy protections etc.. huge fun that system was all the way into college.
Got a 386SX when they first became semi-affordable (1500). Used that to do DOS stuff, and started running Linux in late 1993 simply because I needed a free C-compiler environment for university homework, by dialing-up a BBS in Ohio and downloading all the floppies for Yggdrasil Linux insdtall. So, I started using Linux before it had ANY sort of gui or X support(other than MGR), and before it had TCPIP networking(unless you hacked in the KA9Q stuff originally written for hams using packet radio on different systems yourself).
Good times. Computers suck now.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
load 8,1
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Know nothing of the pain of loading software off cassette at 300 bits per second (roughly 30 cps - you could read the software as it was loading...)
How's this for OLD?
Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P Superboard.
My father bought this in like 1978. It was his for a few minutes,
I still have it. It still works. It has the 610 board with a mind-blowing 24 KILOBYTES of additional memory to the stock 8. I now "import" software via a PC's sound card, as there is no disk drive.
I also have a C2P with dual disk drives...
My older brothers Digital Group Z-80 based CP/M with 4K of RAM, audio tape recorder, eventually upgraded to 8K of RAM and Phi-Decks (automated streaming audio tape). Graphics card..., yeah, that's cute. We played with TRS-80 Model 1s, IMSAI 8080s, Apple ][+s, //es, IIgs-es, Heathkit... He built a Cosmic Elf back in the day. We boxed with an Atari 400 and later an 800 with 300 baud acoustically coupled Novation CAT modem. We did SOMETHING with every Mac ever released in its own day. Later on in the 80s I spent some real quality time maintaining an LMI Lambda and Silicon Graphics machines and a Pixar PII graphics engine. That machine was the most beautiful computer I'd ever laid eyes on. Steve Jobs' shiny new NeXT was fun. SunOS 2.anything was a unpolished turd. These days its commodity hardware and virtual machines that have no character what-so-ever. The days of AT&T T-Carrier are pretty much gone as well. I lived with T-1 and T-3 for almost 30 years. Actually laid hands on a T-2 circuit as well. Never got to touch the mil-spec higher bandwidth stuff. Now 10Gb links look small. We need to be writing this down for posterity, you know?
It Started with only the internal 2k, but moved out to the expansion box to get a whopping 32k, huge memory at the time.
Eventually build the machine out to do EEG recording for a school project.
a Much simpler time.
a mac plus, no hard drive just two dsdd floppies
I *think* it was 1982: membrane keyboard; 2k ram; 16k ram pack; cassette program loading; 5" (!) color tv for display; and narrow little thermal printer (32 character per line). Function keys allowed to think I was looking under the hood, a-peeking and poking. It was a start. In 1984 moved to a fat-Mac with third party SCSI port and have remained Mac since with no regrets (okay... I do run Windows in Parallels...gotta play nice with much of the world...).
Which, for a birthday present, a friend voided my warranty, and *doubled* the memory, to 32k.... (Yes, children, I did say "k", not "m" or "g".) My second, six or seven years later, was a really nice, well-build 286.
It was an IBM PC that was modified. I got it used, added a full height 10MB Hard drive, I had dual 5-1/2" half-height dual sided floppies, added an AST 6-Pack+ so I had a whopping 256KB, Swapped the process for a NEC V20 chip for more speed, added a Hercules graphics card. I could do color!, and eventually added a single drive 10MB Bernoulli box. I did get a 1200 bps, and later a 9600 bps modem using a serial cable.
A Mattel Aquarius, running a Zilog Z80 microprocessor. No pixels, chiclet keyboard, 16k memory expansion. Ah the good ol days of hoping that program you're trying to save to cassette tape will read again.
High School through first couple of years in undergrad.
Altair 8080b. Shortly after a Ferguson Big Board I built into a desk with dual 8" floppies.
Heathkit H-89, SWTPC system based on a Motorola 6800. Elf micro
My friend and I figure we financed the home PC revolution...
Saved my lawn mowing money for an entire Summer to buy it later that Fall in 1986. Connected it to my 13" black and white TV and had no idea what to do with it. It wasn't until I got some books from the library and started entering BASIC programs line by line that I learned I needed a floppy drive for persistent storage. Luckily Santa was good to me that Winter and I had my first 1541 floppy drive. Thanks to books and magazines for allowing me to input my own 'free' software.
IBM clone.
I had borrowed other computers from my parents' schools (trs 80, apple II, etc) but this was MY first computer and the first one that stayed in the house all the time (not just christmas and summer breaks)
When I was a kid, there weren't any home computers. We wrote our programs on coding sheets which were sent to a local college where students would transcribe them for us to punched cards which would be run remotely on an IBM360. We'd get lineprinter listings back a week later.
My parents got a TI 99/4a. It came with BASIC, and one of the books was a manual on how to program, so I wrote code. Had to persistent storage, though... getting a tape recorder was an epic day!
Apple IIc+
Won it in a contest. You'd put a program (word processor, game, etc) into the 5.25" floppy drive and turn on the computer to load it. I had such classics as "lemonade stand," "introduction to Apple IIc+," and some maze game where you move a dot through a maze while avoiding another dot that represented a horrible ogre. I think there were a few more, but it's been a while. Also had a dot matrix printer.
UK101, Built from a kit, 6502 1MHz, 4k+1k RAM, 300 baud cassette tape for storage, No graphics, No sound - It is now in the National Museum of Computing.
In the late 1970s I got the "Computer Intro!" cartridge for the Odyssey 2 (Atari 2600's competitor) as a gift. It was fascinating for this, then, preteen; I drank up every word in the little color book that came with it, which described the low-level basics of computing in layman's terms. Soon I was writing programs in machine language up to 100 op codes. I was thrilled that I could "put stuff on the TV screen", etc., and wrote the programs down on paper (hard copy!) since it had no non-volatile storage.
It was very simplistic, but I think my brother and I learned a good foundation about this nebulous concept in the 1970s, "the computer", without all the higher-level "distractions". Case in point: Years later, when I got a Commodore 64 (which booted right to a BASIC language interpreter), it took a long while before I realized that it could be programmed in machine language too!
My first computer was a KayPro IV, which I distinctly remember buying in 1982 in spite of what Wikipedia says. I was going to write the great American novel using *Wordstar!
My first computer, back when I was 10 years old was a ZX81 Clone called "CP200s" from Prologica, a Brazilian-based firm. By that time the market in Brazil was closed to importing technology, so copied hardware flourished (stupid country never funded research instead). In that time I also played with a friend's CP-500 (TRS-80 Prologica clone). Today I still own a TK90x (ZX Spectrum clone with a dual switchable ROM to the original ZX spectrum) with a ZXCF I myself built, that way I can load everything from a Compact Flash card directly into ZX Spectrum RAM, pretty cool. I also have a MSX 1.0 in good condition with floppy drive and joysticks. Love to play Moon Patrol on it. :)
Great old times...
Commodore VIC-20 Serial number in the 500's extra 4k of memory in a cartridge, cassette tape for backup and uploading games. A few games on catridge too. I think maybe 600 bucks at the time. Later got modem (300 baud ) and signed on Compuserve. Very funny how slow letters refreshed on screen.
Soldered it together and paid a company to burn an EEPROM with a BASIC boot loader in 1978.
Build a type of modem to allow data to be backed up and restored from a music cassette player over analog audio.
Bought an old video game to get out the display and used it for the computer.
At age 10 I had a home PC and was writing games and all my school papers.
The first thing I ever touched that could store a program was a TI-59 programmable calculator a friend of mine let me play with in 1977. The first computer I ever played with was in 1982. It looked like a Commodore SX-64 but it had a black monitor with green text. The first computer I owned was an IBM 8086.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
7/77; shopped for three years, wife told me to go buy the damned thing already.
Almost unknown predecessor to the almost-but-not-quite-as unknown Nascom 2. This usually came as a kit consisting of a pcb, several bags of bits, 2 manuals (the "easy book" on how to build it and the "hard book" on how to program it) and a pre-assembled Licon keyboard. A power supply was available at extra cost! The first ones shipped used a user-assembled RF modulator which usually proved to be pretty bad and was soon replaced by a pre-built screened unit. 1MHz (later a 2MHz) Z80 CPU, 2k dynamic RAM on board (1k used by the display, about 850 bytes available to the user after the machine code monitor had taken the rest), 1k monitor program in a 2708 EPROM. BASIC? what's that? 300 Baud cassette interface including an output for a relay to stat & stop the tape. The keyboard was rather nice, using what was effectively a transformer under each key. Pressing a key closed the core, allowing keyboard scanning pulses to pass through. No colour or graphics of course. This was 1978/9 and probably the only way to get into computing in the UK at the time without spending an incredible amount of money.
The first computer I used was a DEC PDP-5 with a timesharing OS. It had 128 Kbytes of RAM, but you had too come in at 3 am if you wanted to use more than about 5 K of it. It had a CalComp plotter, so I ended up doing graphics rather early. It was at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, so I was often the only user on the system. I looked into getting a remoter terminal so I could code at home, but the cost (and connect time fees) was prohibitive.
The first computer I owned was an Apple ][+, with 48K RAM initially, expanded to 64 K later. I had an 80 column card to do decent word processing. It was the last computer on which I did much assembly code.
My next computer was a 128K Macintosh, and I've used Macs ever since.
My first computer was a 32k Tandy Color Computer. The entire computer lived in the keyboard. No disk drive. A tape drive (cassette player). Attached to a portable TV by an RF connector. 300 baud modem. Back in 1985. I was one of the few adult women on BBS's back then. My handle was sunbeam and I got plenty of comments from the college age males who frequented the BBS's back then. They assumed I was a guy and I got a lot of teasing until they figured out I was a housewife with 6 kids.
But that started my addiction. I remember at one point thinking if I could only afford a 40 mg hard drive I would never ever be able to use more space than that. So fast forward to my gaming computer (used for editing video for clients, creating graphics and websites) and even with 700 gigs of hard drive space and two terrabyte drives, I still bought a 3 terrabyte drive as a back up. Amazing how far we have come.
Access Matrix CPM machine on an old Z80A. Portable (only about 30lbs), with 2 5" floppy drives, dot-matrix printer built in, two modems (acoustic and "direct"), and a 5" monochrome amber screen.
Yeah. times were good!
The first computer I owned was a 3B2-300, 2 megabytes of RAM, 72 megabyte hard disk, running SVR 2.0.5. I bought it used for $1500.
My first computer was in 1980, an Interact. Bought from an ad in Popular Mechanics I think. OS loaded from a tape drive, and it had a BASIC interpreter. Had some pretty fun games, plus I learned how to program on it. 8086 8k RAM. 8 color graphics!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interact_Home_Computer
M6800 Design Evaluation Kit (http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16764/The-Motorola-M6800-Miicrocomputer-Systems-Design-Evaluation-Kit/) in 1976. It was a pre-wedding gift to my (to-be-later) wife, who put it together on the kitchen table (with some technical consulting help from me). As soon as the kit was complete, her first project was a program to make the OS relocatable
Frank
Learned CPM and wrote a very simple word processor in basic. Guess that is when I decided what I would do when I grew up. Spent hours writing all sorts of stuff.
Pentium 75Mhz 8MB RAM, upgraded to 32 (I think?), maybe 64. VooDoo 3D 32MB 1.18GB HD Win 3.1, followed by Win95
"Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead."
YAY!!! Finally, some others came in with a Columbia PC as their first. This was my first computer COMPANY, although I did start using a TRS-80 Model 3 as my first regular use computer. Just so you know, Columbia Data Products is still kicking, and on its fifth major project since getting out of making PCs. I bought CDP in 1986, after running Godfather's Used Computers for two years, during which we sold many of these PCs mentioned here. All I really wanted to do is to buy another used TRS-80 Model III, but no one wanted to sell them, and dealers thought I was crazy to even want a used computer. So, I started a Used Computer business. One thing led to another, and 33 years later, I'm still in the computer business.
The PC used to be called the MPC, which stood for "Multi Personal Computer". I sold the MPC trademark to Texas Instruments for about $8,000, since I thought it was a fairly stupid name. The CDP PC was built like a tank, and would have carried CDP forward into "server-land" as a company. You could hold some hotkeys down, and boot three other PCs connected over a serial cable! That was the idea, and MPC was designed to have built-in networking. Might have worked too, except for Digital Research's M/PM-86 wasn't quite ready for prime time. CDP might have continued to do well with DOS, except for a major misstep:
CDP introduced a "lug-able" with a METAL case and SHARP corners, when Compaq came out with a nice plastic case. I carried it as carry-on luggage, twice. Once to COMDEX and once to visit CDP in Columbia, Maryland. Although it did fit under the next seat up, carrying onto the plane risked taking one of those very sharp corners and breaking your leg while swinging that 20-30 LB. case. What were they thinking?? Also, Compaq's plastic case portable had three expansion slots, and CDP's only had one slot in most of these portables, and only two slots in a few of the later production. This meant you couldn't add a 512k RAM card to CDP's 128K RAM and a HD controller, and have it work properly. We tried to fix this, by creating a "slot extender", adding two slots to the one slot. However, the RF was so bad, since the CRT's flyback was very close to the added boards, that this proved to make the add-on cards unreliable.
The worst part of that desktop MPC was the Molex connectors, which would often get oxidized, and develop an open connection to the motherboard. Funny thing, I just had something similar happen with my new Dell 17" AlienWare Laptop with a 240 watt power supply brick: The power connector to the motherboard developed high resistance, and then overheated, and intermittently opened. The connector was smaller of course, but the identical problem!
My first computer was some type of very strange Atari COMPUTER, (not the game), that I bought from DAX. It lasted long enough for me to create some really cool graphics stuff for a day. But, that was about all it could do, so I sent it "home" for a refund. Next, I spent real cash for a Radio Shack TRS Model 3 with two printers, and daisy wheel and a 24 wire printer. With these, and one of the best word processors I've seen called "All Right", I created my own "camera ready artwork". With this, I submitted my first ads, "Letters from the Godfather" to Computer Shopper. It was printed and hand-carried to their Titusville, FL offices, five minutes before they had to ship the whole magazine's artwork to be FEDEX'ed to the printer! (The production guy hated to see me show up every month at press time, but got lots of free beer!)
We ended up selling thousands of CDP's PCs all over the world. CDP was the third largest PC manufacturer in the world in 1985, according to PC World. CDP never made Godfather's an authorized CDP dealer. But, I did end up buying all the remaining assets of CDP in 1986 from the CDP trustee and the banks, and re-incorporating CDP in Florida. We went on to sell a few thousand CDP PCs, and supported 70,000 users worldwide, came out with the next BIOS a
when i was six i got a Tandy TRS-80 for christmas and the following year i got the 5 and 1/2 inch floppy drive with a Dos 1.0a floppy disk to boot with.....
Power supply with half of components from junk. Plywood box, later upgraded to scavenged ALTAIR box.
TV for display. Wrote editor, assembler, debugger, and programmed into 2708 EPROMs
Had a HC-88 with Z80 CPU back in ~1990.. ;-)
It could run BASIC and back then there were magazines with games you had to type in by yourself
First real computer was a Amstrad (Actually Schneider, but it's the same thing) CPC464 with a green screen.
I had an Atari 2600 before that. My cousin wanted an Atari as well, but his parents bought him a C64. When he got it, i went over to check it out and, sure the gfx and sound were way better then the 2600, but what the real big deal was, was that you could enter programs and create your own stuff. There was even an extensive manual included. C64 was too expensive, the CPC464 was a complete solution with screen and costed less, my parents got me one of those. I loved it!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
S-100 Bus no name with 16K and and 8080, micropolis hard sector 8" floppies. Loved it almost as much as my Heathkit HW-16.
Murphy was an optimist
kaypro
My first computer was a DEC rainbow. Runs CPM and MS-Dos. I still have it.
Or Heathkit/Zenith Z-120 build by, then, gf's father...
My Dad's TRS-80 Model III was the first I can recall using. I was about 3, and I like to press the clicky red reset button on it. I think he didn't enjoy that, as he was probably working on something at the time. A kid can be worse than a cat when it comes to computer interference.
The first I owned, as a gift, was a Color Computer II, with the game cartridges like Doubleback, and Megamunchers. Didn't do much computing on it. Then we got a Commodore 64 and Vic 20 parts. Never got the Vic 20 going, but we had fun with the Commodore 64. The school, where my Dad was a teacher had his Model III, and a Model IV, and a bunch of Apple ][, and ][e computers. Soon there was an 8088 as well.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Then I moved into the PC world with a Zenith Z-120, 8088 processor, 2 floppy 320K disk drives, 256 K RAM, and an amber monitor, which came as a Heathkit H-100. I believe I had DOS 2.2
First computer I used was my dad's new Altos Series 5 with dual 5" floppies when I was back in 4th grade. Learned how to program basic on it, then moved up to a Commodore Pet with tape drive. :)
My first computer at home was I believe a 286 clone with 20MB harddrive and 5-1/4" floppy, and Amber monitor, which would have been fairly bleeding edge in the mid 80's. I spent a lot of time at my Grandfathers house as well, and I believe he had a lower spec 8088 based PC, with no HDD and dual 5-1/4" floppies. Running MS-DOS 3.x
A couple years later, when I was in Jr. High, I started working at a local TV station as an intern where we used Commodore Amiga's for graphic creation and Video Toaster based editing. The Amiga's really were awsome machines and ahead of their time, with multitasking, graphics, you name it they were a superior machine. Is a shame really what happened with the company and the Amiga dying out.
Around the same time, I saved up all summer from working and bought a state-of-the-art (at the time) Cyrix 486/DX based clone (parts at least, that was my first real PC build, using the case from the 286. Put a SoundBlaster card in it, and outfitted with 8MB ram. Cost me a pretty penny at the time, my mom split the cost with me, and my portion was close to $1000 at the time. Eventually bought a newer color monitor to go with it as well. I was into graphics and 3d rendering and later in High School got into programming with it. I needed the fastest PC I could afford at the time, as I was playing around with POVRay and 3DStudio R2 at the time, so if you know how long it would take to render a 3d ray-traced picture back then, you'd understand, as it was often timed in hours, and on complex images, even DAYS!.
A year or two later, my grandpa realized I was REALLY into computers, and found a second-hand Amiga 3000 for a decent deal, and bought it for me. This gave me the capability to run DPaint on it, and a buddy hooked me up with Lightwave 3D (which I was familiar with from working at the TV Station). I was in heaven.
I was also into BBS'ing back then as well, getting the free PC mags at the store and looking in the back for local BBS listings to try. I still remember plunking down like $200 for a 14.4K modem because file transfers were so slow with our original 2400baud that I started with. That was a good community back then... everyone wanted to help each other. Lost of shareware to download for free. Programming advice, graphics advice, people just learning together and teaching each other everything. Very open and welcoming, not at all like today's online groups.
I had my computer area setup with the PC and Amiga side-by-side, and frequently had them both running working on different things simultaneously though high-school years. I do miss those days. I kept the Amiga until after I got married, and had it for a few years after, but it mostly collected dust at that point. When my wife and I moved out of our first apartment, I figured at the time it wasn't worth anything, and tossed it out.
Those memories bring back an emotion that you just don't get with todays computers and technology. I don't know why, maybe it's because I was young, maybe because it was all new, or maybe because it was like being in a secret club that outsiders couldn't understand. I can't put my finger on why, but those years are full of fond memories for sure.
Just one of millions.
-- "Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."