Your First Development Machine?

[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.

[G Tek]

Ditto that on the C64 (though it wasn't my first, a TI). Also had a special add-on cartridge - one of those ones that you buy from the massive computer supply stores with the big catalogs (remember the days of pre-internet catalogs?). I never quite took the time to understand how the cartridge worked, but boy did it make a difference in load times! Load just about anything in under 10 seconds. It was so much faster you would think it would just be destroying the disks in the process, but I never had any problems with the disks (ah, remember DS DD?).

[G Tek]

A TI-994A. With a tape recorded for storage... we were never rich enough to shell out for a disk drive. I remember my dad asking if I wanted to get an Atari at Christmas or the TI now... I'm a kid, of course I want it NOW. So while I never got to play the same cool games that all of my friends had (since EVERYONE else had an Atari), it did give me my first introduction to a real computer. After introducing me to programming, I then continued on with the various TI magazines (can't remember the name of any of them off-hand) and learned a lot about line-code programming.

[G Tek]

I think that may have been the same one that my Dad had. I remember being blown away by the graphics demo on it (which essentially showed amazing things equivalent to 1990's Windows screen-savers). He had it hooked up a heathkit power-bar kit. My first was a TI-994A right around the same time frame - I was in grade 3 at the time. I eventually moved on to C64.

[Ravi Bhavnani]

:thumbsup: /ravi

My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com

[edmurphy99]

PDP-8 in 1981

[jfwfmt]

I taught myself Assembly Language on an IBM 7040 in 1968 or 1969 by reading the code output of the FORTRAN compiler.

[DaveP62]

Wow, this brings back fond memories. My first development machine was a Commodore Vic 20. I wrote a product pricing program on it for the first company I worked for back in the early 1980's. The proof of concept was well received. The company purchased an IBM PC with PFS File and word processing and my IT career was launched. :) And yes, the Vic 20 was hooked up to a black and white TV and had a tape recorder for a storage device. Man those were the days!