Ringo, glad to see I’m not the only one on here to have cut my teeth on a TI-99/4A. I don’t remember if we had a tape drive hooked up to it or not, but I do remember getting these computer nerd magazines that would provide you with the BASIC code to program in your own games. We mostly just used it for playing games, which as has been stated before came on solid state cartridges. The best was definitely Parsec! Oh yeah! Best name for a game: Hunt the Wumpus.
I think we got the machine in 1980 or '81. I’m a '75 vintage.
The first PC we owned was probably around '83 or so - an 8086 “IBM compatible PC” (yeah, they actually specified IBM compatible back then) with an amber monchrome screen and very early text-interface version of DOS. No mouse, no hard drive, no 3.5 inch floppy drive, one 5.25 inch drive. Kids, when you see a 5.25 inch diskette, you’ll finally understand why they called it a “floppy” drive.
A Compukit UK101 that I helped my dad solder together in 1979 (the webpage says 8K of RAM, but ours only had 1K until we upgraded).
There was no storage. We therefore used to get computer magazines that had things like Space Invaders on 10 pages of printed BASIC code, that my little brother would read out loud while I typed it in. This would take about 2 hours, and then we’d spend another 2 hours debugging it. After that, we’d play the game for 5 minutes, get bored of it, turn it off, and ping, it was gone. Eventually Dad put in a further 8K of battery-powered EPROM, which helped.
Then we got an Acorn BBC model A and a tape recorder, and we were laughing.
The first machine I owned was a second-hand Sinclair ZX80, but before that, I had dabbled a little on the Commodore PET and Sinclair ZX80 computers at school.
That machine was called the ZX Spectrum here in the UK and was available in 16K or 48K options; it was around for years and eventually was taken over by Amstrad, who continued to market it in various guises - full size keyboards, built-in tape decks(possibly also one with a floppy drive of some kind), enhanced sound, 128K memory(which I think had to be done by page swapping, as the ZX80 can only address 64K) etc…
Before the decline of Sinclair, they released a computer targeted at business users - the QL (standing for Quantum Leap, which was something of an exaggeration) - it was based on (I think) an 8080 processor and had ‘microdrives’ built in - these were removable storage devices that consisted of a small cassette containing a tape loop (Sinclair had been promising them since the launch of the Spectrum) and they were notoriously unreliable.
After that, Sinclair actually made a PC - it was 8086 based with no hard drive and just one double-density 3.5" floppy drive, but around this time came the ill-fated C5 electric vehicle and that was that.
First computer I worked on was a Bendix G-15 back in 1962. It was a “scientific computer” as opposed to the IBMs in DP group. My first programming language was ALGOL which disappeared soon after the birth of FORTRAN. I also learned machine language on this one.
It had vacuum tubes, a 2k word (not byte) drum memory (this was built even before core memory became state of the art) 5-channel paper tape, 7-channel mag tape and a drum plotter.
Since this machine was built in about 1958, my boss was looking at newer technology and was considering a PDP-8, but the G-15 was still there when I left the company in 1968.
My first home computer was a Tandy Model 16. Somewhere in my personal archives, I still have a couple of the 8-inch floppies it used.
The System/3 mentioned in my previous post had a whopping (as opposed to non-whopping) 96K of RAM, with no expansion possible. After taking out the OS overhead, we had 48K to support three terminals; so our routines (written in RPG) had to be no larger than 16K.
My first computer was a Toshiba laptop my dad gave to me after the office gave him a PowerBook 140. An interesting machine - it had a 1.4 MB flash card for a hard drive. Made for easy backups. It also had a 1200 baud modem, which I used to get into Prodigy. I remember waiting 20 minutes for a weather map to download - but it looked real cool on the CGA monitor I hooked up to it! We sold it at a garage sale once you couldn’t buy CGA software anymore. I remember being mad that everything started to require an EGA monitor.
I also played around on an old Mac Plus and some portable Compaq that my dad brought home from the office closet. Eventually I got my own LC III, and I’ve used Macs ever since.
I was born in late 1983, and got the laptop around 1988/89.
The first would have been in a college computer programming class on FORTRAN, although they didn’t actually let us touch the bloody thing. All we could do was write programs and turn them in to be run.
The first actual computer-like technology I put my hands on was the Texas Instruments HP-35 calculator, the first of its kind. It could do trig functions, which was mind-boggling at the time, and cost a whopping $400…for a calculator! TI basically put the slide rule out of business.
I used some big honking old Zenith (I think) in the military in about 1974 to run a crude scheduling program for projects. This was a dumb terminal connected to a fairly large computer.
The first one I owned was a Tandy 8086 with a huge 10K external hard drive and an internal floppy drive. Hot stuff.
Mine was the TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2, back around 1976 or so. It had cassette drive, 16 screamin’ kilobytes of RAM, and it even had a modem (300 baud, and you had to drop the phone receiver into it to get it to work). My dad had a subscription to a TRS-80 “magazine” called CLOAD (which was the command to load the programs from cassette into memory) that came on tape and provided a few little programs/games/utilities every month. (The only ones I can remember were a display of Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” which gradually filled the screen with “snow” (pixels) until it was white, and a reaction-time test that popped up a counter in some random part of the screen and measured how long it took you to hit a key.)
We also had a subscription to “The Source” (which I believe eventually morphed into CompuServe) but that might have been a little later on when we had the Model II.
Another TRS-80 Mod1 L2 guy here… 4K though, not enough to run the assembler, so I had to do my Z80 assembly with TBUG, a ghastly little machine-language monitor. This required me to hand-assemble all my source on paper for input into TBUG. Big fun, lemme tell ya. Around the same time I was abusing the PDP-11 at school via DECWriter teletype-style terminals. This beast ran RSTS if I remember right.
I later had a torrid, but ultimately doomed love affair with all things Commodore (VIC, 64, Amiga). The nice part was that I skipped the whole 286/386 generation except for work. Finally went over to the Dark Side, but I have an attic full of heavy duty Amiga hardware (2000s with '030s and Video Toasters, flicker fixers, a 1200 with AGA chipset, and on and on). I even have a SCSI CD-ROM drive and network card (BNC) on one of them.
BTW, If anyone is interested in trading, let me know. I’d love to see this stuff go to someone who will use it. I’m pretty happy with WinUAE.
I was in 3rd grade (in 1983) when i first used a computer. It was a computer class… math problems, ugh! I distictively remember the teacher pressing Ctrl+C a lot (not on the same computer)
I think that’s how I really got to love keyboard shortcuts when GUI came out. My first PC to own tho, in 1992 was a Macintosh LCII. $2500 Too much, but I could do my qBASIC homework on it.
First computer I actually sat at was a TRS-80 (later referred to as “model 1” – I have no idea level what) serial number 0000000024, IRC. The first one I owned was a Commodore 64 – wow! what a leap over the Trash 80!
My father is an accountant and shortly after VisiCalc (the first ever spreadsheet software for PC) became available, he purchased an Apple IIplus along with the VisiCalc 5" floppy in 1979 (i think).
I was born 1982…and first used the Apple to play Snack Attack, a game similar to Pacman, when I was 4 years old.
The nearly 25 year old computer still operates to this day.
The first computer I had was the TI 99/4a hooked up to a black and white TV and a tape recorder. I had a lot of fun with that thing creating games and weird programs in BASIC. I might still have it somewhere in the garage. I got more use out of that computer than the trashy packard bell I got about ten years ago.
At school we used Apple machines. I used to aggravate the teacher by finding the floppy containing a really cool asteroid-like game, running the file and playing it while she was teaching the day’s lesson.
We had access to a TTY (yellow paper roll, round keys like an old cash register) in the metal shop that had a “dial-up” line (300 baud max., maybe even less) into an IBM (pre-360) mainframe. I wrote a Fortran program to calculate the squares and square roots of all numbers from 1 to 25. When you got a clean compile, you made a punched paper tape executable. I still have the punched paper tape.
We had a calculator at school that didn’t have LEDs, it had light bulbs with twisted filaments that glowed the numbers.
To nitpick, Fortran predates Algol. I believe the first Fortran compiler was done around 1956, and Algol around 1960. Algol may be dead, but most languages besides Fortran and Cobol are Algol-like, so it actually won.
It also had a 1200 baud modem, which I used to get into Prodigy. I remember waiting 20 minutes for a weather map to download - but it looked real cool on the CGA monitor I hooked up to it! We sold it at a garage sale once you couldn’t buy CGA software anymore. I remember being mad that everything started to require an EGA monitor.