Author Topic: What was your first computer?  (Read 64359 times)

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Offline djos

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #100 on: May 02, 2018, 01:56:58 am »
Mine was a souped up Fat Mac.  I increased the ram to 1 meg from 512k.  I had a Rabbit Drive external hd with 512 megs.  Floppies were 128 and 256 k in those days.  People drove from Albuquerque, 100 miles away to see it.  It would be a fart in a wind storm compared to even a small tablet these days, but, back then I was blown away by what i could do with my fattie.

Did you mean 5 MB storage? Even 50Mb was't a thing until the late 80's iirc.

Offline GerryBags

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #101 on: May 02, 2018, 02:49:49 am »
First computer I owned was a C64, Then an Acorn Electron (very similar to the BBC Micros we used at school I seem to remember) that I swapped a BMX for. Then Atari 520ST, followed by Commodore Amiga (finally cracked the meg with that one!), and then to the PCs. First was a hand-me-down 286 with MSDOS that worked long enough for me to get thoroughly frustrated with playing Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. First Windblows machine ran 3.1 I think. First Mac was a G3 desktop model a few years later. I was still on Macs when the first processor to crack a GHz came out.

I kept thinking: "Any time now they (someone, anyone) will come up with a computer that doesn't keep crashing all the time.".

Any day now, I reckon.  :)
 

Offline musicamex

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #102 on: May 02, 2018, 03:08:14 am »
You're probably right.  It probably was WAS only 5 megs.  Actually now that I think about it the floppies were 64k and 128k.  WOW!  To think that now you can buy Terrabyte size hard drives at Costco and it's hard to even find a memory flash drive under 8gb.  I bought a bunch of 4gb usb sticks to share music on.  Like 3 bucks each on Amazon.  But I still love the old tube technology that I  grew up with. Its what i build and repair every day.
 

Offline djos

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #103 on: May 02, 2018, 03:46:11 am »
You're probably right.  It probably was WAS only 5 megs.  Actually now that I think about it the floppies were 64k and 128k.  WOW!  To think that now you can buy Terrabyte size hard drives at Costco and it's hard to even find a memory flash drive under 8gb.  I bought a bunch of 4gb usb sticks to share music on.  Like 3 bucks each on Amazon.  But I still love the old tube technology that I  grew up with. Its what i build and repair every day.

Even Apple II's had 170kb SSDD Floppy Drives, the early Mac's had single 400 KB, single-sided 3.5-inch floppy disk drive - it wasnt till the Macintosh Plus that they gained DSDD 800kb Disk Drives.

10MB is also possible as 5 & 10 were the two main sizes I recall seeing in those days.

Offline james_s

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #104 on: May 02, 2018, 07:06:43 pm »

Did you mean 5 MB storage? Even 50Mb was't a thing until the late 80's iirc.

The IBM PC my dad bought around 1983-84 had a 20MB hard drive that was mounted to a bracket that fit in an expansion slot, that was a really big deal back then and cost a fortune. As recently as the late 90s when I was in highschool there was still a computer lab at the school with Mac Plus machines that had 20MB external HDDs that sat under them.

I remember how excited I was when my dad bought me a 340MB hard drive for the 386 I built in the mid-late 90s, it was so much space! I could install all the games I owned! I remember drooling over 1.2GB hard drives I saw in catalogs, they were 5.25" full height monsters back then. I couldn't imagine ever needing more space than that, now I sit here looking at a stack of 160GB drives I rescued from the scrap bin at work a couple years ago wondering what I'll ever do with a drive that small. Funny how perspectives change.

A funny story surrounding that original PC comes to mind. Sometime in the late 80s my dad brought it home from work and had set it on the floor in the livingroom after unloading it from the car. Our house had a balcony that overlooked that end of the room from the den upstairs and my little brother and I were playing some kind of game involving a hook on the end of a string and for some reason had a about a 3 pound lead fishing weight attached to the hook. Well I hoisted the string up and then had a thought like "that would suck if the string broke, the computer is sitting right below" and just at that moment the weight bumped the edge of the 1st floor ceiling and cam loose. I watched it fall in slow motion, landing right in the middle of the keyboard. This resulted in a spectacular explosion of keys flying into the air and raining down around the room, I stood there in horror peering over the ledge from the den thinking "Oh no, dad is gonna KILL me!" 30 years later I can still play that back in my head in slow motion like it happened days ago. Needless to say my parents were NOT pleased, a replacement keyboard cost $100 which was a sizable chunk of money back then.
 
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Offline djos

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #105 on: May 02, 2018, 10:27:24 pm »
Ah good point, 20MB external hard drives are quite popular on early Mac's.

I think our first HDD was an internal 40MB half height voice coil MFM drive in ~90 - one of my dad's uncles had a computer store and I think he gave it to us for free. It must have been worth a bit because I recall being amazed that we didn't need to park the heads before turning it off.

Didn't take long to fill it either :D

Offline james_s

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #106 on: May 02, 2018, 11:05:52 pm »
Some of the later stepper motor drives were self parking too. Pretty clever really, they used the inertia of the platters to generate enough electricity to park the head. When power was shut off they would make a Bzzztztztzt noise.
 

Offline rrinker

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #107 on: May 03, 2018, 03:27:44 pm »
 They got up to 15MB with the TRS-80's, I have the manuals for the hard disk for the Model 4. but IIRC those were somewhere around $4K USD which was so far out of what I could afford as a HS student/just starting college.

 My first hard drive, I think I got that int he summer of 87. Fall of 86 I purchased my first MS-DOS machine, a Zenith Z-158 through school. Too much stuff going MS-DOS, it was time to retire my TRS-80 4P. I initially got the model with dual floppies. The following summer I decided it was time for a hard drive. 20MB was the common standard, but when I looked at my boxes of floppies, I figured it would be too small. a 40MB model was too expensive - but right in the middle were the 32MB RLL drives, so that's what I ended up getting, a Seagate ST-238R. Forget how much it cost me.
 

Offline jmelson

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #108 on: May 04, 2018, 09:23:43 pm »

I kept thinking: "Any time now they (someone, anyone) will come up with a computer that doesn't keep crashing all the time.".

Any day now, I reckon.  :)
Hmmm?  The system that runs my Asterisk phone system has been up about 13 months.  It just sits there and runs.  It is an old Intel mini-ITX Atom motherboard running a Linux OS.

My main desktop at home is used for electronic design, and general web browsing, email, etc.  It has been up over 300 days.  Usually I end up shutting it down to swap some bit of hardware, so that is better than usual.  Not a crash, just I rarely leave it alone that long.  Also a Linux system.

My web server has been up 61 days, and that is with all sorts of attackers constantly trying to break in.  I had some reason to reboot it then, I don't recall what for.  Also a Linux system.

I also run Windows XP and Win 7 under Virtual Box, to run certain apps that are not available on Linux.  These OS's seem to actually run MORE reliably in the virtual environment than on physical hardware.

Jon
 

Offline james_s

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #109 on: May 04, 2018, 09:29:34 pm »
I haven't had much trouble with stability in a long time really, beyond some hardware/driver problems. This Win7 laptop has not been rebooted in probably 3 months, I just let it go into suspend mode. I have a couple of Raspberry Pis that are up over 100 days uptime, and my Plex server which is running Ubuntu Mate.
 

Offline intabits

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #110 on: May 07, 2018, 04:32:11 am »
An EDUC-8 ( by Jamieson Rowe of Electronics Australia magazine)

I made my own case for it, but used the original design PCBs.
It sported a whopping 256 bytes of RAM! 
This thing came out just before the first micros, and had a serial architecture, inspired by the DEC PDP 8/S, and ran quite slowly (some few hundred KHz IIRC).
But JR specified some Fairchild bipolar RAM chip, that cost about $50 in 1974 - Very, very expensive. Especially as a cheap (about $3) and slow MOS 2102 was more than sufficient. (it had a different pinout, but was easily hacked into place)

It was very flaky, as the PCBs had no gold flashing, so a bump could upset it.

http://www.sworld.com.au/steven/educ-8/

https://archive.org/details/Educ-8

I got it to play a little music, but not much else. No idea what happened to it...
 

Offline edy

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #111 on: September 02, 2018, 02:20:06 am »
My first was an Atari 600 XL with a cassette drive for loading and saving basic programs. There was also a cartridge slot for playing store bought carts. I still have it collecting dust in my parents garage with all the manuals and original box! May be fun to bring it back to life on day but the cassette drive started having problems long ago. I saw some people just digitize the tapes to sound files which basically play back to the system (like modem tones) and feed in the data that way. I did convert all the tapes over a few years ago when I transferred all my mix tapes to computer and may be able to convert the audio to programming code for use with an emulator even. Will be a fun project for the future!

The other thing I remember from school is we had a whole lab of Commodore PETs and we used to play a game called Paladin:




[EDIT:]

By the way, I found the original creator of Paladin on the web and he even has a website with a new HTML5 Canvas version of this game for anyone to download! Awesome! Here is his webpage:

http://www.scale18.com/cgi-bin/page/kpickell.html

And here is the game in HTML5 Canvas:

http://www.scale18.com/canvas.html

By the way, if you download the page and edit the source code you can modify the scale of the canvas and the resolution by changing the #area parameter at the top of the page, and the <canvas id="area"> height/width a few lines from the bottom of the page to create a higher resolution and larger area version of the game with sharper graphics.
« Last Edit: September 04, 2018, 06:23:28 pm by edy »
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Offline GeoffreyF

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #112 on: September 18, 2018, 09:19:34 pm »
My first computer for which I had hands on use and wrote software for was an IBM 360/30.   My very first computer which I owned was an Altair 8800.  Built it from the parts. It was one of their very early kits.  I got it about 4-6 months after the original popular electronics magazine cover.  Later I was building the kits for people and going up to "The Computer Store" - one of the first two retail stores in the Boston MA area.   A spontaneous job interview was: "So you like those 4k memory boards"?   Me: Yeah, a little tricky to get running right but they are OK".  Them: "You are our only satisfied customer, would you like to work for us?"

Epilog: I just chucked the soldering iron I used for all that and bought a Hakko.
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Offline DonRon

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #113 on: September 20, 2018, 05:31:33 pm »
This was my very first computer:

Eltec Eurocom 1 - single board computer with motorola 6809 processor and LED-display. Learned Assembler with that.

and after that I had a Sharp MZ80K

Cheers,

Ronald
 

Offline taydin

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #114 on: September 20, 2018, 06:20:47 pm »
My first computer was an Amiga :)



About two years later, I bought my first 80286 PC. And then I saved money for 1 year to get the 80287 math coprocessor for it.
Real programmers use machine code!

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Offline Gixy

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #115 on: September 21, 2018, 07:15:35 am »
Rockwell AIM65. Learned assembly with it. 4KB (yes K, not M) of memory (including the OS called Monitor…). Think of it when using GBytes today...
 

Offline MarkF

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #116 on: September 21, 2018, 07:58:39 am »
First computer I used...

   

   

First computer I owned (Google image.  Couldn't be bothered to unpack mine.)

   
 

Offline BeaminTopic starter

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #117 on: September 21, 2018, 03:12:25 pm »
ICL 1904S. Not this actual one (that was in the Nederlands) but it's the same processor:




 :scared: What how?!? Where did you keep it? What year was that? I'm guessing that was at work or you worked in a university?

I thought I was old because "computers" was an actual separate class you took, where if you finished early you got to play with the paint brush program!


Do schools now require you to have a laptop? Do the poor kids get to borrow laptops while at school or does each desk have a computer on it?

If I ran a school each desk would have a raspberry pi on it and each student would plug in their SD card or bring around their own pi. That way the poor kids could get a free computer to bring home and if they lost it they could replace it or the school could. Would also stop from being labeled as poor as everyone would have the same machine and teach them Linux skills from a young age. In fact isn't the point of the R-pi?
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Offline Cerebus

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #118 on: September 21, 2018, 05:52:56 pm »
:scared: What how?!? Where did you keep it? What year was that? I'm guessing that was at work or you worked in a university?

This was at secondary school (high school to you), the computer was at the local Polytechnic.

I thought I was old because "computers" was an actual separate class you took, where if you finished early you got to play with the paint brush program!

I part taught the first computer class at my school. A maths teacher started a supplementary class in computing for the form two years below me. I'd spent a week the previous summer at ICL with a bunch of other kids from all around the country being run through the "computer education in schools" course that they had designed for secondary schools as a dry run for the course material. As a consequence the teacher, who all this was new to, talked me into being his assistant. I was the original kid who knew more about computers than his teachers.

We used to have to write stuff up on coding forms, send it off to be punched on 80 column cards and run as batch jobs on the 1904 at the Poly. Later in the year we got the loan of an ASR33 and a 110 baud dialup modem with acoustic coupler that we could use online.

I got to know the people in the computer centre at the Poly and they'd let me use the programmer's terminals in the computer centre and have access to the (huge pile) of official ICL documentation that they had.  If I had questions I had all the computer centre's programmers to ask and they were happy to help as I was politer than the students and academics they normally had to deal with and actually listened to the answers rather than tried to get them to 'do my homework for me'. Happy as a pig in shit was I.
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Offline BeaminTopic starter

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #119 on: September 22, 2018, 09:36:29 pm »
:scared: What how?!? Where did you keep it? What year was that? I'm guessing that was at work or you worked in a university?

This was at secondary school (high school to you), the computer was at the local Polytechnic.

I thought I was old because "computers" was an actual separate class you took, where if you finished early you got to play with the paint brush program!

I part taught the first computer class at my school. A maths teacher started a supplementary class in computing for the form two years below me. I'd spent a week the previous summer at ICL with a bunch of other kids from all around the country being run through the "computer education in schools" course that they had designed for secondary schools as a dry run for the course material. As a consequence the teacher, who all this was new to, talked me into being his assistant. I was the original kid who knew more about computers than his teachers.

We used to have to write stuff up on coding forms, send it off to be punched on 80 column cards and run as batch jobs on the 1904 at the Poly. Later in the year we got the loan of an ASR33 and a 110 baud dialup modem with acoustic coupler that we could use online.

I got to know the people in the computer centre at the Poly and they'd let me use the programmer's terminals in the computer centre and have access to the (huge pile) of official ICL documentation that they had.  If I had questions I had all the computer centre's programmers to ask and they were happy to help as I was politer than the students and academics they normally had to deal with and actually listened to the answers rather than tried to get them to 'do my homework for me'. Happy as a pig in shit was I.


So early 70's? When did they stop using punch cards when the first floppies came out and were cheap enough then the real to real tapes?
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Offline Cerebus

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #120 on: September 22, 2018, 10:11:45 pm »
So early 70's? When did they stop using punch cards when the first floppies came out and were cheap enough then the real to real tapes?

Mid 70s.

Punch cards hung on a lot longer than many people realise. I was using them actively in 1982 and I knew businesses and colleges that were still using them in 1985. In 1987 or 1988 I got involved in a systems migration job that required the transfer of cards to mag tape (on an IBM mainframe), and then from mag tape to floppies (on an NGEN cluster). No doubt there were a handful of systems still using punched cards into the 90s.
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Offline jpb

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #121 on: September 22, 2018, 10:21:02 pm »
So early 70's? When did they stop using punch cards when the first floppies came out and were cheap enough then the real to real tapes?

Mid 70s.

Punch cards hung on a lot longer than many people realise. I was using them actively in 1982 and I knew businesses and colleges that were still using them in 1985. In 1987 or 1988 I got involved in a systems migration job that required the transfer of cards to mag tape (on an IBM mainframe), and then from mag tape to floppies (on an NGEN cluster). No doubt there were a handful of systems still using punched cards into the 90s.
Pre-university I got a job with a software house in London and learned to program in FORTRAN on punched cards - this was in 1979. I don't know what the computer was all I knew was you delivered your program as a box of punched cards and the computer operator fed them into a hopper and then the next day you got back a stack of printout pages generally containing just one character per page because there was a mistake in the program!:)
The punch cards were produced on a machine like a typewriter but with two hoppers, one for blank cards going in and one for the punched cards coming out.
It was designed for a different system though so several of the characters were different requiring sticky labels to be put on the keys.

This was a lot better though than the computer club at school, which I never joined, I used to watch them producing punched cards on a device with the same number of keys as there were punch holes (about 8? I forget) so each character was labouriously produced by combining the correct keys and then shifting the card along to the next column. I reckon that the "typing" rate was something like a character every 5 seconds or so! The programs they produced were run on some business computer that one of the parents got some access to at his work.

I often wonder what happened to all the computer operators when their jobs disappeared in the pc revolution.
« Last Edit: September 22, 2018, 10:26:38 pm by jpb »
 

Offline rrinker

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #122 on: September 24, 2018, 05:47:09 pm »
 When I was in high school (graduated 1984), we had 3 computer classes (plus they did some word processing type stuff in a 'business' class). Beginner BASIC, Advanced BASIC, and one they called Computer Science which was FORTRAN.  Wasn't too difficult for me to skip the beginner BASIC class for the 82/83 school year because by that time I had already been programming BASIC for 4 years, had built my own computer, and had a few others. That was also the first year the FORTRAN class didn't use punch cards - they had expanded Apple II's with dual disk drives to compile and run FORTRAN on. It was so new that I actually taught the teacher how to do file I/O in the morning and then she taught it to the class. That was my moment of "if only I could have that to do over again" - during my class I wasn't paying attention to her or taking notes (why should I - she was just going over what I myself had taught her earlier that morning) and she dared chastise me for not paying attention. I was instead working on my next program. I aid nothing at the time, I was the meek, mild, very geeky kid. If I had it to do over I would have horribly embarrassed her by bringing up the fact that I had had to teach her so she could teach the rest of the class. So in my school, punch cards lasted until 81/82.
 I never had to use punch card in college, although the the operating system on the CDC Cyber series mainframe we had for the engineering department originally still had error messages relating to punch cards - instead of a more common "syntax error" it would print "Error on input card" on the CRT. It was I think my junior year in college when they sent out a memo saying the very last card reader in the computing center was going to be retired, so if you had any old decks, to get them submitted so they could be read and saved to your personal storage.
 

Offline Tarloth

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #123 on: September 24, 2018, 07:29:50 pm »
The first computer that I use was a ZX81 outside the school and Ti994a into the school. My first own computer was a Commodore 64. I still have the C64 and one Sinclair 2068... and one module of magnetic bubble memory from a mainframe :-)
 

Offline BadPenny

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Re: What was you first computer?
« Reply #124 on: October 11, 2018, 05:53:17 am »
TI 994a.  Cassette storage, RF adapter to small TV, 300 baud modem, 5” Floppy and extender cabinet, lived close to the distributor when they announced they were going out of business. Stood in line for hours to buy tons of software I would never use.  $3,000. Invested. Bad decision. 

Learned on Data General Mini at work especially after hours stumbling with some assistance but no classes, running clunky RDOS.  We had office IBM PC’s for the secretaries so by 84-85’ I was able to use after hours.
Then IBM PC Jr. w 1024 expansion side cards 1200 baud modem and used Compuserve a bit, logging into BBS’s all over.  Next IBM Clone AT 286 1987’ w 2400 baud modem, DOS 3.1 stuck with it many years.  IBM ThinkPad running Windows 95, then about 30+ computers in my business and at home since then.  Started on internet in 1995 and did first HTML websites in 1996. Top of Yahoo search position all my product keywords for business and ready for 2000 surge.  Switched to Apple mostly in 2006.  Things were great until about 2008.

Unfortunately, I dislike where we are now where Google controls way too much information and 5 companies seem to control everything and owning a website feels like owning a house you need to protect like in an online ghetto. Ranking websites is super difficult.  The amount of bots stealing data and brute force attempts from all over is disgusting. The internet has changed so much since the early days and to be so much spying, tracking, phishing, bot scrapers, etc. 

On the bright side though and By choice, I Don’t do any social media, I believe in forums like this nice one and websites and wish more people would create websites instead of using Facebook.  The vast amount of reference information and Youtube tutorials by so many creative people are great. 

Thanks to all good people out there on this forum and Youtube!
 


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