Timex/Sinclair TS-1000.
Membrane keyboard, 8088 chip (IIRC)
Ahh…enter data for 45 minutes to play Pong…
garius, the BBC Micro did pretty well for itself in schools when you consider how long it lasted. When I started in '85, there was one in my classroom, and I was still using them in '92, until I left for secondary school. At this stage, there were still no plans to replace them, so I often wonder how much longer the schools continued to use them after I’d left.
My secondary school was still running A3000 and Archimedes machines when I left in '97. Not a single PC in the place, so I left with no idea how to use one… had to figure that out for myself later!
I still love my IBM Thinkpad 701C … you know, the one with the keyboard that folds out. That’s the computer that really made me the geek I am today (before that, I just had an Apple IIGS which I used for word processing, MIDI stuff, and Sierra games) … I need to fix that thing though. I’ve been putting it off forever…something’s messed up in the power supply. I should get to that. Too bad it’s not fast enough to play mp3 files…
I’ve got a couple of Commodore C16s and Plus4’s.
I think I even have a Coleco Adam kicking around somewhere…
The thing that I am really kicking myself about though is this. I actually OWNED a Spartan AppleII emulator for the C64. It was basically an AppleII that plugged into the back of the Commodore. I know a few made it out into the market (borderline vaporware) but I don’t personally know anyone else that had one. I sold it years ago. <sigh>
As to the Kaypro 4…
I will tell my mom about the proposition tomorrow and see what she thinks.
I’d owned other computers before, but my fondest memories are reserved for my Tandy 1000HD. It had 640k and a 20meg hard drive. Holy Cow! I heard somewhere the the Apollo astronauts used a smaller computer to get to the moon.
Simply put, that computer, which I traded a guitar for, helped me buy my house. My current 1100 megahertz monster is still operating in the red.
The TI-99/4A. I think my parents still have it somewhere; if so, someday I shall reclaim it! My greatest regret was that I never got the “Advanced Basic” cartridge and always had to program in stupid old “Standard Basic”. I liked the relatively easy way you could program it to play music… what was it,
SOUND (Frequency, Duration)
Where Duration was in milliseconds, so that 250 was a quarter note, 500 a half note, etc. Depending on beats per second, of course. Frequency was in Hz. I wrote “chord” subroutines that would rapidly play C-E-G, for example, to simulate a true chord. I’d spend hours trying to program in sheet music.
That, and typing in computer games published in 99’er Magazine, which I’d store to tape and play later. There was one game I liked so much, I wrote the author… by regular mail, even!
Digi-Comp, of course. Granted, it didn’t do much. But an all-plastic computer you built yourself was quite impressive back in 1965.
To see how it worked, go to the Digicomp Online Emulator.
The Osborne 1. Mine had a serial number of “27.” 64 K of ram, 2 92 K 5 1/4" drives, monitor, disk storage, video out, serial & parallel, and keyboard all in one handy 468 pound case the size of a sewing machine. Came with Word, Supercalc and DBase.
Ahh… another NeXT fan. I have friends that have a NeXT machine, but I’m not sure they have the monitor.
NeXTs were wonderful, and way ahead of their time.
Hoo, boy. Somebody wants $400 for what is evidently a MIB gussied-up VIC 20.
My favorite is the LGP-21 I learned to program on in high school. No compiler, not even an assembler (I wrote one myself) and 4K of rotating memory. I still have the manual, but I found one on the web
here - http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-21-prog-man.html
Close second is the PDP 11/20 I used in grad school. We had an old big disk drive, and each of us had our own disks. It was nice not having to share. Pascal compiler we wrote ourselves, but mostly good old PDP 11 assembler. I got a draft of the first Bell Labs tech report on C, and I was not impressed. “++, --, this is just PDP 11 assembler gussied up!”
I may seriously get it … it might be a good idea to have it for backup. Thanks!
I had a C64 (with a 1541 floppy drive and a modem), but my favourites have to be a couple of systems we had at work.
The earliest was the Commodore Super PET, a stock PET with a 6809 processor so it could run an assortment of compilers.
Later we had a lab full of DEC Rainbow machines with a three-way boot built in: Z80 and CP/M, 8088 with DOS, or VT100 terminal. They had graphics as well, though we only had monochrome monitors, mostly green but a few orange ones, but I did some stuff in grey-scale. What I liked best was the maintenance, which was part of my job. I got so I could tear one down, blow out the dust, reseat the socketed chips, and put it back together in under ten minutes, without tools. I once did it in twenty minutes over the phone with a naive user.
An abacus. I had an abacus. Digital drive, of course.
Tandy TL/2. It had apps.