I did, but only once for about 20 minutes in 1985.
Actually it was it was MS Windows 1.03 and I used it for closer to an hour and said I’ll stick to DOS. Boy was it a dog. It was also more like 1988.
My first real GUI was Amiga in 1989.
My first Windows Package I really used was WIN 3.1
Windows 1 and 2 truly sucked. Windows 3.0 was the first ‘modern’ windows OS, and it was a massive improvement.
Of course, the Mac and the Atari ST/Amiga were doing GUI OS’s for years before windows 3.0 came out.
Anyone remember Microsoft Word for DOS? That was a strange word processor, but kind of neat. A key combination would open up a ‘graphical’ menu at the top of the screen for accessing commands.
Most people hated it, but I rather liked it. I never did like the old DOS Wordperfect, which was for a long time the gold standard in word processors.
What was the name of that horrible interface that was on Tandys? Did it have a name? IIRC it was a blue screen with different boxes in it, each with different directories. Of course, I didn’t have a mouse, so it was all “right arrow, right arrow, down arrow twice”… Man that seems like forever ago. I can see it clearly, but can’t for the life of me figure out how to describe it any better.
TRS-80, Color Computer II. I actually wrote some reasonably sophisticated games on that thing, at least for an eight year old.
And then, of course, there was Dungeons of Daggorath. I can still type a-space-l-enter with remarkable speed.
Ah yes, Dave Ahl’s book of 100 Computer Games, of which the Star Trek game was the best. I translated it into Pascal for our PDP-11 when I was in grad school (ouer group wrote the Pascal compiler) and it was the standard test program for all our operating system work. I from time to time added features and changed things around. Quite a good game, actually.
Nah, you’re second on the list here so far, i’m #3. I learned on an Apple II at school. The first machine at home was a TI-994a with the program recorder and Touch Typing tutor. My parents were guilted into buying a smaller color TV for it when I complained that the BIG B&W TV is was hooked up to was burning the back of my brain.
Got it for $350…three months later, clothing stores in the mall were selling them for $50. My dad got pretty bitter about that.
My Highschool got Amiga 1000 and 500’s and I ached to own one. Fearing the same result as the TI, Dad got me an XT Turbo. 8088- 12Mhz, 640k RAM, EGA, 2400 baud modem, Logitech 3 button busmouse, and for HS graduation, a 32Mb HD. I was psyched with Autocad 2.12 (one floppy) went from 32 seconds loading from floppy to 6 seconds off the RLL HD.
In the mid 80’s our office got a Bernoulli Box (sp?) which was a storage device that was relatively portable and used "discs’ that kind of resembled laser discs as I recall, maybe a little thicker. Can’t remember how much storage but probably not much! Anybody remember?
We also had a couple versions of the Compaq portable that was mentioned earlier. I remember trying to “play” Hithikers Guide to the Galaxy with them … never could get past the first few parts of the story. You typed in instructions like “Get out of bed” “Open the window” to advance the story. As I said, I couldn’t advance it very far.
The first computer I ever programmed was a boxy thing about the size of a large microwave oven. It had a place where you could stack punch cards on one side (maybe on the top), a hex keypad you could use to manually enter a program, and a slot on the other side where you could insert a magnetic card kinda like a credit card that stored the equivalent of a bunch (I dunno, maybe 20 or 30) of punch cards. This was in about 1976 or 1977. There was no monitor but there were some 7 segment displays on it. If this machine sounds familiar to anyone PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I have no idea what computer this was and no one I’ve talked to in recent years has any idea of what it was.
The first computer I programmed was a TRS 80 Model 1 with a cassette interface. I remember that an el-cheapo cassette player and el-cheapo tapes worked a lot better than the special “computer” cassette player and tapes that RS sold. A whopping 4k of memory. Wheee!
The first computer I actually owned was a commodore 64. I managed to wear out the keyboard on that little beast and replaced it with a compatible keyboard that I found in some mail order catalog (the keys were a different color, other than that it was the same). I can probably still draw a 95 percent accurate schematic of a c64 from memory.
The first IBM compatible I owned was an XT clone made by Kaypro with a monochrome monitor. I hated word perfect. I always used Wordstar (anyone remember that one?).
After I graduated from college, I did some work on a PDP-11. While it definately was not the first computer I’ve ever worked on, it was definately the oldest. I’ve got a PDP 11 now sitting out in my garage but I can’t get it to run. It’s not like you can go down to CompUSA and buy parts for it. If you want some idea of how old it is, it has a CPU BOARD, not a CPU CHIP.
Deskmate.
Took me a while to think of that.
Not sure I’ve ever been face to face with Windows 1.0, but I did have Windows 2 ages and ages ago to run Aldus Pagemaker. Typefaces were a PITA back then - need Times Roman in 24-point italic but don’t have it installed? Sorry. Having to run the font generator to create 24-pt italic Times Roman or whatever else you wanted, was a “start it and go to lunch” sort of project.
Holy crap, I remember Deskmate! Some of the Tandy models of that era (the 1200, maybe?) had Deskmate built into ROM, even! Whoa… Flashback! Hahaha… My first PC compatible was a Tandy 1000A. I forget now what made it the “A” model, but it was some trivial upgrade to the original 1000. Anyway, Deskmate was tolerable, I thought, but I was hooked on Borland Sidekick. I still use the “joe” editor on Linux because I learned all the Wordstar-like control-this-that keystrokes from the Sidekick text editor.
Ah, but by the time I bought mine the engineers at Timex has solved that problem. The memory module was held in place with velcro! How could you not love a computer whose memory was partially held in place by velcro?
Commodore 64. If I were just a bit older that would have been the impetus for a great career in computer hacking. I used to type in BASIC programs from a book and save them on casette tape. We later got one of the first 5.25" floppy drives, but for a couple of years, it was tape all the way baby. Of course, at least 1/4 of the programs in those books had syntax errors that I’d have to hunt down and figure out. That’s not all that fun or easy when you’re five. If I’d been, say, 10, I’d have loved it; I was one of those kids who could concentrate obsessively on something until it got solved.
My first personally purchased computer was many years later. I got a Macintosh Quadra 610, and a couple of years later got a deal on the PowerPC version of basically the same machine. I had that for about 7 years and eventually sold it to my girlfriend’s landlord when I got my first notebook, a PowerBook G3 Firewire.
So, I went from one of the early home computers to relatively modern times. I remain a conservative adopter. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten the latest and greatest anything. Commodore was kickass in its day though. I remember being snotty because it was a couple of years before most people’s computers had color.
Well now, the C64 came out in '82. The Apple II series began in '77. The Atari 400 and 800 came out in '79, and the XLs were I think '82 and '83. Also, Tandy’s first Color Computer came out in '80, and their Color II came out in '83. Not to mention the Texas Instruments 99/4, from '79.
All of these were very popular color computers, some of them predating the C64, as you can see. Of course, around this time you’d still see black and white machines people had bought a few years earlier: the Commodore PETs and TRS-80s, for example. And many people who bought the early IBM PC (1981) bought it with only a monochrome video card. This might be what you’re remembering. I would still say that color support had become very common by the time of the Commodore 64’s introduction.
I certainly won’t dispute your first sentence however.
The very first computers I ever worked on were mainframes that we used via dumb terminals, and I don’t remember much about those.
I do remember this little baby, though:
The TRS80 Model 100 Tablet PC. The first job I got out of college in the mid-80s used these, and for the time they were pretty sweet little machines. I believe they cost about $800 apiece back then - think how much computing power that would buy you now!
A friend of mine had Windows 2 running on his computer. It was practically unusable. Of course, I used it after I had been using Win 3.1 for a while, so it really showed its age then.
The windows were tiled, weren’t they, before version 3? (As opposed to arbitrarily ordered and overlapping, as we’ve all grown used to.) I’d think that would be one of the biggest annoyances about Windows 2.
Or were there bigger ones?
Oh yes! I remember getting that when I first started working for the Navy. We had three programs: WordPerfect, Windows 2.3 and some graphics program - Freelance Graphics, I think. Anyway, Windows was pretty much unusable. You certainly couldn’t run either of the other two programs at the same time (they were DOS-based), and if you wanted to open Windows for any reason, you couldn’t use the graphics program first, because then when you tried to start Windows it would crash and you’d have to reboot the whole thing. God, what a piece of shite that was …