I've had a computer for 20 years now--boy am I old.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Grelby, in 1993 or '94, I took a computer class that was a joke – this was right at the end of high school, and the computers were Apple IIes. Absolutely ancient! The same computers I’d used twenty years ago! I’m sure they couldn’t afford newer computers, though, this was a school with no budget that really tried to do its best by us.

Our textbooks were old enough that the picture of a modem was of the kind where you put the handset on the thing. I never used one of those ever!

Yep, and that wonderful useful BASIC we were learning; yep, that did us a lot of good! It WAS fun, though.

Fortunately I had a better computer at home!

42

Commodore 64
Amiga 500
Amiga 2000
286
486
PII 300
PIII 600
PIII 800
AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz
AMD Athlon XP 2200+

1984 - 2003 - It’s been a long road, since I was 2 years old… I still remember Crazy Taxi, Amy Ant and SnoCat! My dad used to stay up all night programming games in BASIC from a magazine! Those were the days!
I also really miss my Amigas! So many good times with the ol’ 2000! Great machine!

43

I’d first seen a computer in the spring of 1981, when a lot of us from our small-town Ontario highschool went to Waterloo University on a field trip. We say the Great Computers in their two-storey glass room, and got to write a simple program on punch cards.

A little later, as a special treat in my Grade 13 calculus class, the teacher and one of the students brought in a Commodore SuperPet. The student dropped it with a thud on the teacher’s desk, and I remember thinking, “Wow! A computer so small that one person can carry it!!” We then used it for demonstrating looping across ranges of numbers when calculating areas under curves.

Then in the fall of 1981 I went to Waterloo University. True, I was in architecture, but we had to take an introductory computer course. The punch cards were gone, and we programmed in BASIC on terminals connected to the mainframe. I was hooked. We had to write a program to display a clock on the screen and update it; this was easy. My best friend and I ended up writing a program that animated a complete story, and (oh yeah) had a clock (continually updated) in the corner.

In the summer of 1982 I got my own computer, a ZX81. I subscribed to Sync, the ZX magazine. I remember lusting after the Commodore 64, but at $800 for the computer, $800 for the monitor, and a similar price for the disk drive, there was no way I could get one.

Later, I quit architecture and switched to electronics. ANd I’ve been there ever since. :slight_smile:

After graduatinmg from electronics school with a Technologist’s diploma, I went to work, and saved up to by my first real computer, an Amiga 1000 (1987). It had no hard drive or modem, but it did have 512 k of memory. We would go to the Amiga club meetings and swap disks, and I subscribed to AmigaWorld magazine.

Around 1988 I got to use an IBM-compatible PC for the first time, at work. They were still in the multi-thousand-dollar range, especially if you wanted fancy graphics, so I couldn’t afford one that would do what my Amiga could.

  1. New job. New city. I ended up working next to the offices of Canada Remote Systems, then the largest BBS in the Toronto area. I went through cash problems and had to sell the computer.

Later… Sheridan College, 1992. Animation. An XT bought on the cheap, with modem and a subscription to CRS. My first introduction to email and newsgroups.

At Sheridan, I went to a computer in their lab and was shown how to log on to a remote computer in Finland! My first real taste of the interactive possibilities of the Internet!

Then the mid-nineties. Back at work. A succession of IBM-compatibles. I wanted a Mac, but they were too expensive and I would have had to buy all my software again.

Then… Mosaic, Netscape, and the great Web explosion staring in 1994-5. My first web pages. An increasing amount of time online. Exploration of Linux, Photoshop, and Illustrator. A scanner. More web pages. My first suspicion of Microsoft. Open-source software. And the beginning of the modern world…

Now I run an AMD Athlon XP 2200+, Windows XP (and soon Linux again, with Codeweavers Crossover for certain Windows applications) and can edit video and do comics to my heart’s content…

44

Was using computers of my brother-in-law’s for a few years 1978-1981 (IBM’s? He worked for IBM in the 70’s, I think he even helped develop fortran or ???). My first computer I bought was an Apple IIc 128k in 1982 or '83, the first portable Apple. I used my TV as the monitor.

My friends had a tricked out system (with those blue and black and white boxes and switches and ???) and we used to surf the BBS’s of the time, mainly downloading game scripts and jokes.

-Tcat

45

First computer I used was back when I was in high school. You had to write programs for it which resulted in punch cards that were fed into it. No CRT, but instead a room full of typewriter-terminals: you’d type instructions in and the computer would type responses back. Accordion paper.

But that’s all cheating. I never really learned how to use it. First computer I actually got any legitimate use out of was a Mac 512k-e, computer lab room at college, System 3, half a meg of RAM, 800K floppies, 1986.

46

Another “My first computer was a ZX-81” and close to 20 years messing with computers person here. I bought the kit version when I was in high school and built it, only to find they’d sent the UK version. The empty spots on the board labeled “USA Only” should have been the clue. :smack: Once Clive and Co. got the right one (this time, pre-assembled) to me, the magic was gone, and the computer was cute to play with, but frightfully expensive for the time and add-ons to make it do anything useful.

My first useful at-home PC was a 10-MHZ Turbo XT clone. I had it loaded up with that awsome new EGA graphics card, one meg of RAM set up as 640K system ram and the rest as a ramdisk, a 20-meg hard drive and an Intel 8087-10 math co-processor. I had some sort of used Oki 9-pin dot-matrix printer that I’d resurrected with a piece of coat hanger wire so the ribbon drive would engage.

That machine was stylin’ and I was the envy of the rest of my AutoCAD class as I could work on projects at home, instead of dealing with the oddball time constraints of the AutoCAD computer lab at school. Recall it was open for use between 10:30 - 12:00 and 3:30 - 6:00. Otherwise, it was in use by classes or closed.

I don’t recall how I found out about it, but I started going online with CompuServe, aka CI$. I had a 300 baud external modem - it too was fancy for its time. Instead of dialing the number on a phone then stuffing the phone into rubber cups, I just had to hit the big red “connect” button on the modem and carefully hang up the phone. A few months later, internal 1200 baud modems broke the 100 mark and after a crash course in how IBM built COM ports and IRQs, I was in heaven cruising the CI forums four times faster. No more being able to read a screen full of text before it scrolled off. :rolleyes:

Advancing from IBM’s comm.bas terminal emulator to Procomm was also an eye-opener. With comm, hitting backspace would crash the program, and occasionally the computer. Happily, since the external modem was stupid, I could retart the thing and pick up right where I left off. :cool:
As for the early name for AOL, IIRC, it was called People Connection.

47

Early versions of AOL had a large section called People Connection but I’m not sure that the service was ever called that. I believe it was Quantum Computer Services/Q-Link.

48

Eons ago I worked for a telephone research company (kinda like telemarketing but without a sales pitch, lotsa stupid surveys). One of the interview routines was for an online dialup service called “Chicago Online”. They were allegedly considering expanding to nationwide. This would have been in the vicinity of 1991 give or take.

Might’ve been AOL’s predecessor?

49

You’re all newbies.

My first computer, in high school, was an LGP21 (manual here It was too old to use ASCII, and it didn’t have an assembler. The first assembly language program I wrote was on an assembler I wrote myself, after studying a book on the IBM 1620, because I was tired of typing absolute addresses on jumps. This was in late 1968.

In grad school we used the Arpanet to go to Stanford to play with their Parry program, an AI classic simulation of a paranoid person. U of I had the Plato system, which had most of the features of the net, including newsgroups, IM, interactive games - but no spam. This was in the mid-'70s.

My first home computer was a Commodore 64, which I got when it was still expensive and before it hit Toys’R’Us.

50

I remember Plato from when my older brother was getting his MSME there around 25 years ago. My exposure to it was in a public place - perhaps the student center or similar. Recall it was a touch-screen terminal - either amber CRT or perhaps plasma? (Why do I remember the color of a walk-up terminal I had five minutes’ exposure to 25 years ago?)

But, some things never change. This particular terminal was stuck in such a way we couldn’t get anywhere but the bus routes info. :frowning:

51

You got it. The PLATO terminal was a plasma panel (Don Bitzer invented it, which is where the money for the project came from) and the text and graphics was a funny orange color.

There was a Star Trek based interactive game, where every so often the planet buster from “The Doomsday Machine” was sent in to stir things up. Trouble was, it looked like a giant carrot. :slight_smile: That gives you an idea of the color.