First I ever used was some Imsai, circa 1977. It was old even then; I had convinced my mom to let me take some outreach computer classes at the nearby university, and I was seated at the ancient Imsai, a teletype connected as a keyboard, and paper tape reader nearby. Everyone else in the class was using something that memory tells me was a TRS-80 Model 1… I think I was given the crummy computer because the lecturers didn’t trust a 3-year-old at their newer machines.
First system I owned was an Atari 600xl, 16k of RAM, with cassette drive. I’d
borrowed time on a slew of systems between 1977 and 1984, and my mom ended up falling for he sales pitch in the Atari Age magazines I had. Of course, my friends promptly adopted other platforms, and I soon moved up to a Commodore 128, my primary computing platform from 1986 to 1996 or so. (Lynn Bodoni, I’m thinking you might have been a bit oversold on needing a special monitor for the 128… It works fine with a tv, it just can’t use 80-column mode. I used the family tv for a few years until upgrading to an Amiga 1084s monitor.)
A Compukit UK101 with 1K of memory (wowzers!) that my dad built. No way to store anything. You would write your BASIC (or machine code or Fortran) program, debug it, run, get bored, turn it off and it would all disappear.
Oh, forgot to mention that while studying for my M.A. in Comp. Sci., I had to take a lab in which we literally built an 8-bit input/output device out of relays and LEDs; homework was to write simple “programs” which we would then input into the actual CPU (an 8085, I think(?)) by setting the relays with switches, flushing each 8-bit instruction into the memory, then setting the next “word…” and of course recording the “output” as it came. Talk about Programming The Iron!
This was 1984-ish. Those were the days…
My first was an IBM PCjr., but I was only 7 or 8 and didn’t really know how to use it beyond playing The Ancient Art of War (which tended to crash every once in a while). When I was 11 or 12, my parents bought a Dell 325SX (25MHz) and I taught myself every single detail of that machine: programming my own DOS files, upgrading the CPU, memory, and sound card, and installing a CD-ROM drive (which required soldering a cable to the sound card – a proud achievement for a 12-year-old). I took the entire system apart and put it back together several times. That computer was great.
I have fond memories of typing BASIC programs into my Commodore VIC-20. Of course, as has been mentioned earlier in the thread, I would make typos and the programs rarely ran properly or at all.
When I got the cassette drive, I felt like Matthew Broderick In War Games.
I remember typing in programs for the TI and the Commodore. Magazines would run pages and pages of text in hexadecimal and symbols. I’d taken typing in school, but never really got my speed up on numbers…until I started typing in those programs. AND my accuracy improved greatly, too. It’s one thing to sit in class, and spend maybe half an hour a day typing, and quite another to spend several hours a day typing, and then having to go over the damn program to find the errors.
The first real computer I owned was an Apple IIc. I had the choice between that and a Macintosh, but the Mac was such a useless piece of crap that I went with the other. I added memory and eventually a hard drive as I went along until Apple dropped the line and I went to a PC.
I had a Commodore 64, too, and an huge floppy drive unit that overheated easily - had to keep a fan on it. I remember being excited when I exchanged my 300 baud modem for a 1200 baud modem.
My first was a Commodore VIC-20 with 4K of ram. 6502 microprocessor. 16(?) colors. I learned BASIC and ML on it. I had no ML monitor so I had to figure out the ML instructions by hand and use DATA statements to poke them into memory. No storage so whenever I wanted to play a game from a magazine I had to type in the program. More than once I would be in the middle of typing in the program only for my loose power supply to lose conact with the prongs. Only peripheral I ever had was a joystick.
When I got my second computer, an Amiga 500, I had a job so I could buy my own peripherals and my computing experience was a lot nicer.
My mom spent 26 years working for IBM, and so when I was seven, we got an IBM 8086 in the house (IBM XT? Something like that). I feel like I’ve been around computers forever.
I’d thought about buying an Apple II, and later a PC, but could never justify the expense to myself. So the first one I bought was a DTK, in 1989, with a 386, 120MB disk, and 1.5 MB RAM. I remember opening it up before I threw it out, quite a few years later, and being amazed at the size of the 1 MB add-on memory board. It was 4" wide and ran the length of the mainboard.
The first computer that I ever got to lay my hands on (literally) was a Honeywell 6800.
My school system used it for accounting and to store academic records.
I learned how to hack it in order to change my grade in biology from a B to an A.
The first computer I owned was a home-built model back in the early 1970s. It was built around the (then brand new) 8080 chip from Intel. I programmed it in opcodes with switches. No wimpy assembly for me (because no such beast actually existed at the time).
I think the first interesting program I ever created was one that displayed an American flag on an old CRT monitor and played the star spangled banner on a nearby AM radio (because the concept of RF shielding was for REAL computers not these glorified calculator gizmos).
I’d like to say ‘those were the days’ but I enjoy designing and coding just as much now as I did then, and I get PAID to do so.
My first exposure was in 1978 at my high school, which had terminal access (TTY!) to a DEC 20 at a local college. The next year, I played with a Commodore PET (a 2001-N, I think, or maybe a 4000) in my math classroom. After that, I successfully sponged off colleges and girlfriends until 1996, when I finally bought a refurbished Performa 6110CD of my very own.
This message was typed on a MacBook Pro (MacBookPro5,2 – 2.93 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8 GB RAM, MacOS 10.5.8) I bought last year.
Mine too. I still have it somewhere. I wonder whether it still works.
In 1986 after I got my first job after school, I saved up and bought an Amiga 1000. Later I had a used XT, then a series of PCs (some of which I built myself), then a MacBook Pro. Now I have a 27-inch iMac.
My high school starting offering computer science for the first time when I was a senior in 1985. There was a special program wherein you could buy an AppleIIC through the school for a reduced price and my family took advantage of it.
We had a Tandy 1000, with 128k of memory (I think). It had two 5.25" drives and that was it. Up until a few years ago my mother still had it and I believe it still worked.
An original IBM PC. It had 640 kb RAM (using AST 6-Pack), 2MB of extended RAM (AST RAMpage), a Hercules graphics card and Amdek green monitor. I swapped out the two full-height floppy drives for two half-heights so I could install a full-height 30 MB hard drive.
The average bootup time was about five minutes as is verified all the installed RAM.
