What was your first computer?

[bsalai]

ZX-81 with a tape drive.


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[stmdude]

ZX-81 with a tape drive.

Surely you mean "a cassette recorder" ?   

[plazma]

My fist computer was a Commodore 64.

Mine too. C-model with Scandinavian keyboard.
I bet C64 would win if this was a poll.

[gardner]

In the late 70s, a friend's dad's HP-97 followed by a TI-48C of my own.
After that, a series of trash-80s until the 80386SX era rolled around and a box with virtual memory capability became affordable.

[ataradov]

PDP-11 compatible, really? That's pretty neat. Did people actually run PDP software on it, e.g. in academic or industrial control settings?

It is compatible with PDP-11 instruction set, but I don't think it is a replication of any specific PDP-11 machine, so peripherals are all different.  But people that programmed in assembly used PDP-11 books.

I only knew BASIC, and this computer came with Vilnius BASIC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilnius_BASIC) in the ROM.

That black box in the background is a ROM expansion with standard tests, but it also includes FOCAL programming language, which does take its roots in PDP family, but I don't know how it was obtained. Possibly fully rewritten.

I'm pretty sure most of the software and games were written from scratch or ported from other home computers, since it was a personal computer, and people who uses it, would not have access to native PDP-11 software.

[Canis Dirus Leidy]

PDP-11 compatible, really?

Partially. It used LSI11-compatible CPU and (crippled) Q-BUS, but the peripherals were completely different.

P.S. My first computer was not so original. Just another one of the horde of ZX Spectrum clones. Lived (coexisting with PC clone) until the middle of Nineties.

[Beamin]

There is, of course, already a thread on this. It is hiding in the Vintage Computing forum. There are some really cool old non-PC machines in that thread.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/vintage-computing/what-was-the-very-first-computer-you-owned/


Here is mine.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/vintage-computing/what-was-the-very-first-computer-you-owned/msg1272450/#msg1272450

I did see that but wondered if someone's first computer might be a raspberry pi or an android tablet and I wouldn't call that vintage I'm sure there are people who don't know what a floppy is or even a cdrom drive. I still haven't found a good way to preserve data for the long term. CDROMs were always good because they never went bad assuming you bought good CD's and they could always be plugged into newer machines. I just don't think an SSD card will last forever or not get corrupt plugging it into some futuristic machine that may not recognize something so small or slow. Plus a stray cosmic ray / electric shock could ruin it. I once read that computers left on long enough will have a memory problem/crash because of stray cosmic rays or back ground radiation corrupting the right bit at the right time in the RAM or cashe.

[ebastler]

I did see that but wondered if someone's first computer might be a raspberry pi or an android tablet and I wouldn't call that vintage

So how did your thread end up in the Vintage Computing forum then? 

[Melt-O-Tronic]

My first was an 8080 machine I wire-wrapped, loosely based on a series of Popular Electronics articles.  It had 1K SRAM, a hex keyboard salvaged from calculator parts and a 4-digit, 7-segment display.  I've since re-discovered the article series and have some of my original design notes.  I may try to recreate it.     I still have 7 of the RAM chips (2114's) and only recently lost the EPROM -- I think it fell into the trash.   

Then my dad got a ZX-81 and shortly thereafter, I got my TI-99/4A.  Man, I loved that TI!  Had the expansion chassis, RAM card, floppy drive, cassette drive, speech synthesizer, color monitor, etc.  I eventually traded it for a 1975 Chevy Impala.  I shouldn't have done that.

But I still have my dad's ZX-81.

[cowasaki]

VIC20

[Johncanfield]

I built a "PC" from a Popular Electronics article based on an RCA CDP1802 microprocessor, this was my first. Then the usual progression.

[ez24]

Apple II clone

[djos]

Apple II clone

It's kind amazing to me that the II was cloned by so many companies given they would have needed the copyrighted ROM images to do so. I dont ever recall seeing Apple II clones in Aus but I was only 5 1980.

[Ampera]

I did see that but wondered if someone's first computer might be a raspberry pi or an android tablet and I wouldn't call that vintage I'm sure there are people who don't know what a floppy is or even a cdrom drive. I still haven't found a good way to preserve data for the long term. CDROMs were always good because they never went bad assuming you bought good CD's and they could always be plugged into newer machines. I just don't think an SSD card will last forever or not get corrupt plugging it into some futuristic machine that may not recognize something so small or slow. Plus a stray cosmic ray / electric shock could ruin it. I once read that computers left on long enough will have a memory problem/crash because of stray cosmic rays or back ground radiation corrupting the right bit at the right time in the RAM or cashe.

The best backup method is one where the contents change mediums over time.

Hard drives tend to retain data for a long long time, when stored right. Tapes too. Of course, the magnetization on those drives can degrade.

[jsi]

My first computer was the University's main frame.   You fed it punch cards and hours later you would get a print out of your program run.   There were no terminals for any student use just this great hulking box.

[jsi]

TI99 4/A

My first computer job was working on the Texas Instruments help desk, fielding calls on the 99 4/A.  By the standards of the day they weren't too bad of a computer, but the RF connector to the TV was garbage. 

[Ampera]

I mean, shoving raster graphics over an RF connection is always garbage. I have a Commodore 128 with a digital TTL RGB out (CGA compatible) and it does BEAUTIFUL 80-column graphics on a 1084 monitor. In colour too.

[Joel_l]

Commodore 64 with floppy drive, still have one.

[Galenbo]

Atari STF 1040, with switchbox between monochrome and color screen.
I still miss GFA Basic.

[ez24]

My first computer was the University's main frame.   You fed it punch cards and hours later you would get a print out of your program run.   There were no terminals for any student use just this great hulking box.

What I learned about punch cards was at least for Fortran there must be an "end" card.  I did not include one and at the same time the lab person stepped outside.  When he came back my program had used up the entire supply of paper and he had to shut down the lab.  I just remember him yelling at me and that was my last experience with punch cards.

[Gyro]

If I remember correctly, on the ICL1902S there were three cards needed: STOP, END and FINISH. Card stacks were processed in batch, so if you forgot them it would just plough on into the next program, executing data or code indiscriminately.

As well as Fortran and Plan (1902 assembler), I used COBOL - now those was a card stacks that you didn't want to drop in the corridor! 

[Beamin]

I did see that but wondered if someone's first computer might be a raspberry pi or an android tablet and I wouldn't call that vintage

So how did your thread end up in the Vintage Computing forum then? 

It must have been moved because I swear I put it in the general forum because I wanted to see what young people views on the subject is. Maybe we can put it back? Not all of us are vintage models

[Beamin]

Sharp MZ-80A. It's up there in my loft. I really should do the 80 column mod and fit a serial port and turn it into a dumb terminal.

All I had back in 1982 was BASIC SA-5510 on tape, and the owners manual. I programmed in BASIC back then as an 11 year old kid but was intrigued by the listing of the "Monitor ROM" in the back of the owners manual and also the Z80 instruction set with registers and clock cycles etc in a pure datasheet format and nothing else.

I soon figured out how to PEEK and POKE and do decimal to hex and make little Z80 machine code routines, but it was laborious and all done on paper to work out the branches and jumps.

One of the best things of my next computer, the BBC Micro, was it's amazing BBC Basic which had structured programming and an inline 6502 assembler, no need to piss about doing pure hex machine code any more!

Is that why you see people take the brown roll of package paper and draw things all over it and put it on their walls? I always wondered how you kept track of if else things that were really long too long to remember.

[imidis]

Mine was a Tandy, no pics though. Can't even remember the model number. Traded something for it. I honestly don't even recall what I did with it. 

[Ampera]

I did see that but wondered if someone's first computer might be a raspberry pi or an android tablet and I wouldn't call that vintage

So how did your thread end up in the Vintage Computing forum then? 

It must have been moved because I swear I put it in the general forum because I wanted to see what young people views on the subject is. Maybe we can put it back? Not all of us are vintage models

I'm 16 and my first computer was a Commodore 64. Try again. 

After that I think it probably was something like some sort of P5 pentium, maybe running Windows 2000