Your First Development Machine?

[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!

[tom1443]

+1 for me on the Commodore 64. Soon after I bought myself a Trash-80 and I thought I was really living large until I built myself an Apple II clone. It was so much fun back then.

[gggustafson]

AutoCoder and RPG no less!

Gus Gustafson

[dpminusa]

The very first, circa 1964 - 1970, was an IBM 360 with Assembler and Fortran IV. In the PC world, circa 1980 - 1982, it was an IBM PC with dual floppies and 64K RAM using GW-BASIC. Soon after I switched to Borland Turbo Pascal. Those systems were so limited even when compared to an Android Tablet today.

"Courtesy is the product of a mature, disciplined mind ... ridicule is lack of the same - DPM"

[jnlt]

assembler on a z80.

[RafagaX]

Wow! All the responses makes me feel really young, my first development computer (the one ever I did something that could be considered development) was a 386 computer owned by my school (don't rememeber brand) that ran the glorious MS-DOS (unknown version), on it I developed some programs on Logo and stored them on these big 5 1/2 floppy disks. Making the turtle move and draw was amazing back then.

CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...

[Mike Ellison]

My initial development experiences were with BASIC first,then assembly on a TRS-80 Model 1, complete with 4K of RAM and tape cassette storage. It was a great day when my dad finally buckled under pressure and sprung for the 48K expansion interface.

www.MishaInTheCloud.com

[Cliff Cooley]

ICL 1901 in 1970, getting ready for decimalisation

[bwallan]

I started in 1969 on a PDP 6 with a huge 6K of drum storage (a 3 ft diameter drum with magnetic material on the outside and (about) a 3" read head). Our group was developing analog to digital converters at the time. During the development we upgraded to a PDP 8 with almost twice the processing power and 8K of memory. Fun times!

[MTWill]

I fondly remember many long afternoons in junior high school (late 1970's) on the single Radio Shack TRS-80 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80[^]. Hey, it was either that or churn through roll after roll of printer paper playing Star Trek on the teletype terminal. Fortuantely for me, not many kids wanted to spend their free time in the computer lab in those days. We saved our spaghetti code to an audio tape cassette drive! Ah, the good old days.

-- Mountain Will

[fglenn]

My first programming was done for school on an IBM 360 in 1966. However, my first development was done on an Intel Intellec 8. This was run by an Intel 8008 (not a typo for 8080) chip back in 1973.

Fletcher Glenn

[Mike Riley QUSA]

An HP-2000C via modem using an ASR-33 teletype @ 110 baud in high school. It was available to some schools in the Los Angeles School District if there was an instructor to teach Basic programming (all we had). Programs were created offline on another ASR-33 using paper tape. We couldn't store files, so when done you had to output your program onto paper tape again after making changes or lose them. My first personal computer was a Commodore Kim-1 (6502) with an S-100 expansion board to add 8K bytes of static RAM. The terminal was a Compucolor 8001 19" color graphics terminal, which was an 8080 computer in its own right. This was in 1974 I believe. Mike

[kmoorevs]

Same here on the TI-994a. I still have it, though I haven't started it in over 20 years. When I was in high school, I used to write little programs to do all my math homework. I also spent many hours playing the Scott Adams Adventure games. :laugh:

"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse

[Lost User]

A Commodore VIC-20 in 1982 with 4k memory (the other 16k came as expansion and at a price).