Your First Development Machine?

[GuyThiebaut]

Mine was a ZX Spectrum 48k which I received as a pre-Christmas present back in 1983. I spent most of that night up playing Flight Simulator[^]. My only real piece of coding on it was a database engine, I wrote, that could save 12 records.

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

― Christopher Hitchens

[mikepwilson]

Our school had a PDP-11 I started on in the mid 70s. First one I had was a Franklin Ace 1000 a couple years later.

[Mike Hankey]

That looks like a luggable that my boss made me tote to Mexico when I was working down there. It was a Compaq[^] and weighted a freakin ton, 2 tons if you where in a hurry to catch a place at the other side of the airp0ort and had to be there in 5 mins.. Semper Fi

VS2010/Atmel Studio 6.1 ToDo Manager Extension The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. -Steven Wright

[Jason Gleim]

I got selected to learn programming in 4th grade on an Apple II+ by my elementary school teacher. (1982-83) Our district got enough machines to put a half dozen in each school but there was no formal curriculum at the time so it was all pretty unofficial and ad-hoc. When I got to high school in 87, our computer teacher was awarded one of IBM's first Teacher of the year awards for his program "reach out and byte someone" (1988) which taught students how to use dial-up resources like CompuServe to help with research projects. Big Blue donated an entire lab full of PS2's networked to a server all running Netware. It was amazing at the time and really put some fire to the districts' computer cirriculum. I started learning Pascal on that network in '89. Gave me a big leg-up when I got to college.

[gggustafson]

IBM 1410[^], 1965

Gus Gustafson

[grralph1]

The first was a main frame using Fortran and input via punch cards. I will leave this off the list as whilst it was my first dev machine, it wasn't owned by me. ZX81[^], Spectravideo[^], A Sony modular Computer?, TRS-80 Model 4 with 128k memory[^] Then IBM PC, 286, 386, 486, P3, P4, i7. Looks like that picture of an ape changing into a man.

"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa 1980

[Lost User]

Did you ever play PooperPig [^](downloaded from Ceefax)?

MVVM # - I did it My Way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')

[PIEBALDconsult]

GuyThiebaut wrote:

that could save 12 records.

I hope you mean, "all of 12 records". :-D

[Michael Kingsford Gray]

CDC3300

[Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter]

C64 in late 1982. Used Basic and ASM. Later got GEOS and played some C on top of it...

I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is (V).

[Great Crested Dave]

1981 :: NASCOM 2 kit :: Z80, 2kB RAM, 2kB ROM, 8kB NAS BASIC, about 100 TTL chips on a 12x8 inch motherboard, all socketed, all hand soldered. Took about 3 months to build. Added some extensions like a 64kB DRAM board and a home designed programmable character generator. There was a Z80 assembler on tape which is what I used for most developments. I had a video monitor and I do recall having to hack the flyback circuitry to get a stable image. Not for the faint-hearted... Those were the days, when developers had to know how to solve clock skew introduced by 6 inches of ribbon cable (solution: cut 3 inches out). Now, I can't even distinguish two adjacent pins on a surface mounted chip.

[Gergo Bogdan]

That was a neat machine that time, I had one of those :)

[Simon ORiordan from UK]

Ah yes. ICL 1904 with card punches and a batch reader back in 1980. :)

[Chris Quinn]

For real work, it was one of these bad boys[^], running the Dataflex 3GL. For my first computing and program experience, I bout a ZX81[^] kit and got out my soldering iron.

========================================================= I'm an optoholic - my glass is always half full of vodka. =========================================================

[RugbyLeague]

Professionally it was a TI-990 mini computer

[hairy_hats]

BBC Master Compact, with a naff green screen that made the world look like it had raster lines if you used it for too long...

[quilkin]

Basic on Sinclair ZX-81 in 1982 (it was released a year late). IK of Ram. Later bought a 16K dongle that kept falling off and losing my work.

[Gary Wheeler]

My first professional computer, that I actually got paid to program for, was an HP 1000[^] minicomputer in 1980. I also programmed on an Intel Intellec MDS-80[^] in that same time period. In 1984 I did a lot of programming on a Zenith Z-100, a predecessor of your 120.

Software Zen: delete this;

[RogelioP EX DE HL]

1980, Heathkit 3400 Microprocessor Trainer like this one [^]. Soon the Tandy Color computer would be released - with a Motorola MC68B09E microprocessor beating inside it - only natural I would graduate from the 6800 in the Heathkit to writing code for the CPU in the CoCo :cool: -- RP

[Brad Stiles]

Kevin Marois wrote:

I taught myself GW-Basic on this Zenith 120[^] back in 1985 while in the Marine Corps.

Wow, that takes me back. That was my second professional computer, in the same circumstances as yours, only a year later than you. :) I learned BASIC on a PDP 8 or 11 (I can't remember which) in High School in the late 70s. The first one of my own was an Atari 800; more BASIC. The first professional programming was in COBOL on whatever the Marine Corps was using in Quantico at the time, I think it was the 370, but I couldn't tell you for sure.