First computers

[steve case]

Some time in the early 80s my wife came home with a box from "K" Mart.

It was a Vic 20. I had no idea what it was and certainly didn't know what to do with it. We hooked it up and of course all it did was display syntax error whenever we typed anything in.

I called my brother the computer wiz. He dictated over the phone a short program, and after I read it back to him he said, "Type in 'RUN' and press enter.

Stars twinkled on the screen and it played music.

Since then we've had a commodore 64, Apple 2GS a Mac and finally a PC, a compaq pressaario 7240 and so on.

 

[MorganO]

The first computer I ever used was in highschool. It was a teletype machine attached via telephone to a mainframe computer (don't know what model) at the downtown school district.

I still remember the amazing amount of effort it took to press the keys on this thing. You had to press really hard, and the keys would depress at least a half-inch before being recognized. The 'Screen' was yellow roll paper, and there was even a punched tape machine for printing a hard-copy of your programs, except we tended to use it to print banners with it!

The only language we has accessible to us was BASIC, and I mean basic BASIC. Still have some printouts of my early programs laying around in yellowing yellow paper.

Here is a link to view what this beast looked like: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/teletype.html

 

[starl]

hm - I think it's official - ExcelingintheAF is the oldest member at the board

 

[TinaP]

Apple IIc

I could write my papers on it, but not much else.

 

[Darren Bartrup]

First computer was the Sinclair ZX81 with 1k of memory (if I remember correctly my dad had to build it for me and it cost £100).
I later got a 16k memory pack for it which plugged into the back, but if you so much as even looked at it the whole thing would crash.
I then got a Cheetah speech pack for it and a thermal printer which came with a roll of silver paper and burnt the text onto the paper (I'm still sure that was a fire hazard).
My first game was a game called Mazogs which consisted of running around a maze trying not to run into these blob monsters that would wave their blobs in your face and you would die (http://www.classic-retro-games.com/Mazogs-and-Maziacs_124.html).

After this I got a ZX Spectrum with 16k of memory and the "dead-flesh" keyboard. The best games out then were anything by ACG Ltd (also known as Ultimate - anyone remember Attic-Attac which consisted of running around a maze trying not to run into coloured blob monsters that would wave their coloured blobs in your face and you would die. God those games were good).
I actually found my Spectrum in the cupboard a few years ago - I think I should of cleaned the circuit board first as when I plugged in it just fizzled and died.

Then it was an Atari ST (what was I thinking?)

After that it was onto the 486's.

 

[milesUK]

My first PC was very nearly a Vic20 but I cancelled the order when I discovered & bought the trusty BBC Micro with 16k in 1982. I upgraded it to 32k then a 'double-sided double-density' 5 1/4" floppy capable of 400kb.

That was followed by an Acorn Archimedes in 1989 with 512k which got various upgrades like ports, RAM and a HD of 40Mb!
It wasn't until 1994/5 that I got a windows PC. Pentium100 and Win95.

Our household now has a desktop, 2 laptops and a media centre PC. The latter is my best-value (the one I get most out of) machine if you ignore my laptop that was given to me!

In all I have had many PC's pass through my hands but have only actually purchased 5 in 25 years!

My biggest computing-purchase mistake was buying a colour dot matrix printer - didn't get value for money out of that beast.

Hope to try out some open source OS soon either a version of LINUX or ReactOS just for hell of it.

 

[Greg Truby]

Commodore PET with 8K of RAM. So, like Peter, I am familiar with loading from a tape (cassette) drive. The upside was that you could get a cassette tape anywhere. The downside was loadtime. Took forever to load an 8K program. Though it did make you a tight coder, not a lot of extraneous fluff (like REM statements).

I can still remember first time a fellow geek came into freshman English and told us about some dude inventing something called a "floppy" disk (adolescent wisecracks followed). It holds how much?! And it loads all this how fast!? We thought he had to have gotten the facts wrong. When I finally got to play on a TRS80 and saw it firsthand, I could barely believe it.

Third computer was a DEC mini computer, about 6' tall and perhaps 2 foot square. Got 16-32K per terminal (what bounty!).

Then an Apple II -- graphics! Yowza! Could write code to actually plot the points on all them "formula for a circle" and "formula for a parabola" crapola we were learning in math (never did get character-outputting "Star Trek" game I wrote in 8th grade converted to a graphic output).

And @ ExcelingInTheAirForce: I know that machine!!! The summer after my freshman year of college I took a job with DCASMA (Defense Contracts Administration Services Management Area) in Wichita and they had one of those teletype machines for communicating with Tinker, McConnell, Whiteman and other AFB's. It was the exact same machine pictured in the link you provide.

 

[daniels012]

HOw about Software!

I thought I was so cool having Word Star. This was so cool using this word processing software. Then four or five years after that getting QuattroPro spreadsheets!!!
Man was that fun!!!


Michael

 

[texasalynn]

Oh yes! My first - I think was an NCR Posting machine, that had a huge carriage that clunk around and one day I had my hand in the wrong place and my palm by thumb part got caught and got pinched. I still have a scar from it.

I also worked on an IBM with punch cards. One day the punch cards got spilled all over the floor. What a mess and trying to get them back into the correct order, #@#%^&, not a pretty site.

 

[hatman]

Not quite old enough for Punch Cards. Like many others here, my first Computer was ye Old Commodore 64. The best part is that when I went to college in 1993, I brought the CRT from the C64, and used it in conjunction with an ancient VCR that I had inheritted, in lieu of an actual TV set.

It wasn't until 1994, as a sophomore, that I finally got my SECOND computer, a 486 100MHz DX4... it was FASTER than the new Pentiums... still remember playing DOOM2 across the dorm network with my buddies down the hall... had the SFX piped through my stereo... opened up all of our doors, and shouted to each other as we battled the horde. Actually, one of those friends spent a semester writing a C64 emulator for his PC, so we could play the old games (He even rigged it to run the old C64 floppy)... the WEIRD thing is that there was some freaky interaction between his computer and my C64 monitor across the hall... when he booted up windows, I got a ghost image of the Windows startup graphic on my C64 screen.

I finally upgraded that in 1999 to a Gateway Destination... Pentium2 450MHz... 36 inch monitor... cable ready video card. I Still use this beast as the only television in the house.