Your First Computer...
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
Well, I seem to be way younger than you guys. My first was a [Book PC^] with a 400Mhz AMD K6-2 processor and 64MB of SDRAM. It came with a 10GB hard drive, which took me a while to fill. :laugh:
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
Everyone here seems so young. First computer I met was feeding lab results on paper tape into an Elliot 803 which used cinefilm as permanent memory. Second was sending PL1 progs to run on IBM 360. First personal computer used was Radio Shack TRS80. First computer owned was the legendary Atari 400
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
Nascom 2 (Z80) Ahhhhhh...
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
The first "computer" I owned is not in the list; it dates back more than 30 years. It was an evaluation board for a Motorola MC6800 microprocessor (1MHz, 64KB address space, 8-bit data) with 256 bytes of RAM, 1KB of EPROM, 24 keys (16 hex and 8 function keys), and six 7-segment displays (enough to see one address and one data byte). The resident "monitor" supported memory reads and writes, program execution (aka GOTO address), and file save/restore (it had an audio modem to a cassette deck, using two tones at 300 baud) so you didn't haver to retype the 256 bytes it could hold for you! Some of the first things I did were: - create a cross-assembler running on PDP11 (Fortran 4!) - disassemble the monitor; - replace the EPROM by a bigger one (4KB!), requiring a new and bigger socket; - replace the MC6800 by a 6809, which was twice as fast, and more powerful, requiring an entire monitor rewrite and a new socket. Then I created some apps, the most impressive one solved Mastermind puzzles: 4 positions, N colors (N<10) with an algorithm that was guaranteed to find the solution in N tries (checked by running a simulation on a PDP 11/40 which took a whole day for each value of N). Mastermind in 256 bytes, counting both the code and the data. Nowadays you couldn't say "Hello World!"in less than a couple MB. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]
The quality and detail of your question reflects on the effectiveness of the help you are likely to get. Show formatted code inside PRE tags, and give clear symptoms when describing a problem.
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
How could they leave the Altair 8800 off that list? Grrr... sacrilege!:mad:
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
1. - Some experimental development machine my Dad's student's were building at Aston University (B'ham) in the mid-70's. All switches and binary-entry but I programmed it to count down to zero then flash a lot! 2. Commodore Pet - 80 column screen and disk drive - swiped from the Uni by my dad for use at home - though I used it a lot more than him. Wrote an assembler, in BASIC, then developed a version of Missile Command (which, considering it wasn't a graphic screen - text only based, I figured was pretty clever!) I also designed and built an 'Adventure Game Engine' in the style of the original 'Colossal Cave' 3. BBC B. I was one of the first couple of hundred people to get one, after I phoned to ask when mine would be sent out, and happened to get the head honcho from Acorn (wasn't it Chris someone or other?) on the end of the phone.. I don't know if it was my pleading voice, or his desire to get out of the office, but my 'B' arrived two days later. Wrote loads, disassembled Elite and Scramble to work out how to low-level program the graphics, wrote the infamous "PooperPig" (still available and runs on BBC Emulators if you're interested - I think it is worth it just for the opening story!) 4. Atari ST - I still remember setting it up and wondering how to run anything - there was this green screen with a disk icon on it - but nowhere to type! Learned 68000 assembler (SO much nicer than 6502) and worked for Atari ST User (and even resurected Atari ST World for a while) as Technical Editor - which basically meant getting programs for the cover disk - - which really meant playing with software all day! 5. Acorn Archimedes. FANTASTIC machine. One of the best thought-out OSes I've ever used. It unfortunately didn't have a real good target market - but it sure as hell wiped the floor with most other computers at the time. 6. Some TI PC Clone I was loaned (by TI) as I was working on TI Mini computers at the time. Had fun developing some graphically rich software (analogue clock, maze drawer) but the PC didn't take off as people were still not being fired for buying IBM! 7..20 something Various PCs - oh the joy really wnet oout of the market when everything became a clone.
___________________________________________ .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
IBM 7094 (pre 360) in 1968 at age 16. One JCL job card per day. Traded for unused cards of my classmates to learn Fortran. On career track to be 3033 systems programmer in early 80's, and bought a Sinclair when they first came out, paying extra to have 8kb instead of 4kb, iirc. Figured out how to poke bytes to do ASM for software divide. Still recall that C9=RET. You kids got it easy. Amazed at how fast a z80 was compared to Basic (at least 10,000x faster?). Dropped IBM big blue iron like a hot potato. NEC 8086 with CPM-86 and pair of 8" floppies, early 80's. Spent about $7000 in early 80's for S-100 Compupro with CPM-68000, also 8" floppies. Spent a bunch for 256kb ram and 2mb RamDisk. Upgraded to 10mb hard drive several years later for about $1000, iirc. As I write, holding a 5 1/2" Miniscribe hard-drive with 8 platters, 40mb IIRC. Serial number 52609. Top removed so I can see the platters, 16 heads, etc. About 6 lbs.
-
Everyone here seems so young. First computer I met was feeding lab results on paper tape into an Elliot 803 which used cinefilm as permanent memory. Second was sending PL1 progs to run on IBM 360. First personal computer used was Radio Shack TRS80. First computer owned was the legendary Atari 400
Not everyone m8, see my post just above yours Ferranti tried bolting an Elliot 803 onto the front of our Sirius to speed up simulations - didn't work though. They said it worked somewhere else that they couldn't tell us about. Maybe Blue Streak, that didn't work either, or perhaps it was at Calder Hall, I think they had some kit over there. From the Sirius went to Fortran on CDC 3600, then to PLI on 360's, then assembler on DEC PDP6, all downhill from there. First "personal computer" was Phillips something, more like a glorified calculator, handled 7 bit ASCII, stored programs & data on mag coated cards about size of punch card. It was personal 'cos I was the only one who could program it, and 'cos it sat beside my desk; but its printer was in another room, those friden flexowriters were bloody noisy.
Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.(Pliny)
-
C64 Amiga 500+ Amiga 1200 Boring PC
Vic20 C64 Boring PC Another Boring PC Yet Another Boring PC ... and then again Another Boring PC does it ever stop?
-
I had a huge Wang (don't go there!) given to me by a customer, who had upgraded to an IBM something-or-other. I later *upgraded* to a speccy.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
-
I had a huge Wang (don't go there!) given to me by a customer, who had upgraded to an IBM something-or-other. I later *upgraded* to a speccy.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
You are all sooooo young it hurts! First computer I ever wrote for (at school!) was an ICL 1903 using FORTRAN. At UNI I used a KDF9 (undergrad computer) fronted by a PDP11, programmed via punch cards or teletype. An Elliott 903, programmed via papertape and teletype. an ICL 1906A, mainly teletype, but also two, very expensive interactive terminals (text) or two even more expensive Tektronix interactive graphics terminals using persistent phosphor technology to 'draw' line graphs etc. Programming in COBOL, FORTRAN IV or ALGOL 68R. (Drew my first spirograph patterns on the A0 plotter!) Just after I left UNI I built my first computer, a Z80 based NASCOM2 It's been all down hill since then 8) but what an exciting time... 8) Mike
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
1. IBM 1620, golf ball typewriter and card reader/punch (1965 uni) 2. Wang distributed calculator with Nixie tubes 3. CDC 6400 (uni project) 4. Various RCA/Siemens/Fujitsu machines (writing operating systems) 5. GEC-Elliott 2050 (I started work in process control systems in 1975) 6. PDP-11 (various) 7. HP something or other 8. VAX (various) 9. BBC Micro: first machine I ever owned 10. DEC Alpha (various) 11. Acorn RISC (best firmware ever!) I still have it and it's still pretty good! 12. IBM RISC machines (various) 13. HP (ditto) 14. PC's: Compaqs, Dells, Gateways, HP's and homebrewed machines, some of which I actually owned! Along the way, there were Apple MACs, PDP-8's and a very memorable GE 4060 with a drum memory (20 hours MTBF) and a host of other very forgettable machines. Can I retire now? 41 pay slips and counting...
-
I had a huge Wang (don't go there!) given to me by a customer, who had upgraded to an IBM something-or-other. I later *upgraded* to a speccy.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
First I used was probably a BBC Micro in school (I mightn't have actually gotten to use it, since there was only one - maybe it was more of a demonstration, and I was about 5 years old). I got a C64 for, iirc, my 10th birthday (the newer light beige one, not the ugly brown ones that I saw a few years later at my secondary school), and started programming a little by typing in the lame sprite/character graphics examples in the manual, then a few programs out of magazines and a few silly "10 ?"I ROCK!!! 20 goto 10" things. The fact that CBM BASIC on the C64 sucked unbelievably didn't help much... Then I got an Atari STFM a few years later with 512kb RAM, and a couple of years later another STFM with 4mb (although the RAM sometimes got unseated and it required a short drop). I soon found a Basic interpreter called GFA Basic, which was the bee's knees :rose:, structured with an auto-indenting syntax checking interactive editor - a total joy to play with compared to the C64's awful Basic. Eventually I moved to the dark side and got a 350mhz Pentium 2 machine and that was that. The STFMs apparently went in the bin (thanks, maw) and the C64 got kicked to death by "a burglar" after I had left it in a friend's house for a year or two. Picked up another pair of STEs a couple of years ago, along with an Atari Falcon, but I don't really use 'em :doh:
-
I had a huge Wang (don't go there!) given to me by a customer, who had upgraded to an IBM something-or-other. I later *upgraded* to a speccy.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
No TRS-80 folks out there? I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Color Computer. Ironically, it was connected to a black-and-white TV for a monitor... I remember having the ROMs upgraded (although I didn't know that's what they were doing) to get a fancier "extended" basic interpreted. My sister and I spent hours dictating and typing BASIC code out of a computer magazine to program some dumb games. 10 print "Hello" 20 goto 10 Good times...
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
I first saw a computer back in '94 at one of my cousin's home. It was a IBM machine, can't tell the model. The first one I got my hands on was probably a cloned PC, used to play Paranoid on it, that too was back in mid 90's. The first one I bought was in 2000, was a HP BRIO BA600.
[Kayes]
-
Here is a suggestion list[^] The First I used was a Teletype Terminal connected to a 360 and only had paper out put, no screen. Then a ZX80 Then a 380z The first I owned was a ZX Speccy 48K I loved the PET and the Amiga. Ah the nostalgia!
------------------------------------ "When Belly Full, Chin Hit Chest" Confucius 502BC
IBM PC jr was the first my family owned and the first I did any programming on. Lazer 486 SX33 with 4 MB RAM, 120 MB hard drive and a screaming 33 MHZ processor was the first that I ever bought for myself.
Mike Devenney
