What was your first computer?

[Keith956]

So the first digital computer I owned was an Exidy Sorcerer bought in 1979, Complete with S100 bus extender, two 8 inch floppy drives and it ran CP/M. Somewhere I've still got 'Original Adventure' on floppy for it.

[THDplusN_bad]

Good Day,

Ah, yes, it seems that everybody holds some fond memories of the 1st computer in his/her heart... 

I suppose I had a "typical computer career" of a teenager that grew up in West-Germany in the 80s.

• 1st impressions of what a PC is were the Spectrum ZXs, Sinclair ZX-80s and Commodore VC-20s of my peers at the boarding school. A TI99/4A with TI invaders game on it was the ultimate attraction, until we have found out how restrictive TI's policy was - no schematics, no real programming support, no real 3rd party network 
• I had then saved enough to get my own Commodore C-64 two years after that. I was over the moon with it - we built several user port interfaces for a hardware reset-button (lo-and-behold), a series of LEDs and even an AD-converter! I was not much into assembler programming back in the days, but very much into "swapping" cracked games!
  Anyone here that still remembers the Dynamic Duo "intros" or those by the Swedish Cracking Association SCA? Oh my, there are even websites for that!
  https://intros.c64.org/intro/swca-01
  and YT-videos!
  
  
  Never really interested in the Schneider CPC128/Amstrad-CPC or other alternatives. I still have that C64 with its bulky power supply and a datasette
• I had then "upgraded" to an Commodore AMIGA A500, topped the memory to 1 MByte - oh, yes, just to see that famous video animation of a walking cat "El Gato" turning a full 360° angle Holy Moly -  the cat video can still be found at 1:47 here, that is AMAZING!
  https://www.techeblog.com/a-look-back-amiga-500
  I remember that the Atari ST was the dream machine for the more serious programmers and for the egg-heads...
• Just because it was cheap I had also bought a Commodore C-16 a few years after the Amiga.
• And then up for a 486DX-40 (?) IBM-compatible PC and on with Cyrix-CPUs-powered PCs, and Pentiums...

Cheers,

THDplusN_bad

[woofy]

So the first digital computer I owned was an Exidy Sorcerer bought in 1979, Complete with S100 bus extender, two 8 inch floppy drives and it ran CP/M. Somewhere I've still got 'Original Adventure' on floppy for it.

That's a computer I've not heard of in a while. Never owned one myself but a colleague I used to work with did. We used to get together for a "computer evening" at home with my Nascom 1.
Fun days.

[larrybl]

My Son got this working.

[DrG]

My Son got this working.

Nice, thanks for posting. I never had one but for some reason Radio Shack, at some point, sold their power supply boards for this TI computer....and, again, for some reason, I bought one of those

[salvathor]

Mine was an Olivetti Prodest PC128, a rebranded Thomson MO6. With 128 Kb of RAM !



https://worddisk.com/wiki/Thomson_MO6/

[larrybl]

My Son loading a game on to his vintage TI 99 Computer from his Smart Phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6vf8--Gn0&feature=youtu.be

[S. Petrukhin]

"Iskra-1256" 

[free_electron]

eurocard system in 19 inch rack built around a motorola 6802 processor. i had to solder everything myself. then i got my hands on a used apple II and then a single board around a 8052-ah-basic. and then i got my first pc. a 386DX , non of that sx crap ) with 1 meg of ram and a 100Mb harddisk. VGA card on a NEC Mulitsync 3 monitor.

[brcondor]

Mac 128K with one 3.5 internal floppy. I added an external floppy some time later and thought it was awesome to not have to swap floppies from the OS to another program. My first mod was swapping the motherboard with one from a Mac Plus that had the CRT cracked. I thought it was such an advance to be able to add memory simms.

[Nominal Animal]

"Iskra-1256" 

I have to ask:  Did you ever accidentally press Reset when intending to press Write?

[S. Petrukhin]

"Iskra-1256" 

I have to ask:  Did you ever accidentally press Reset when intending to press Write?

No, I was young and had very good coordination, stimulated by re-entering the program text line by line. 
The photo, by the way, is inaccurate, this is another model "Iskra-226" in which Basic. I didn't find the photo "Iskra-1256". 
But outwardly they are very similar.

Or... no, no, that's right: there is a switch "Fortran-bird language". The "write(" operator is for Fortran, and on the same button, the "ввод (" operator is for bird language.

[Kuber]

SWTPC 6800 kit system, purchased in 1977.  It had a whopping 2K of RAM, which I later upgraded to 4K.  To this day I could still (probably) write a 6800 machine code program without referring to any documentation. 

[DrG]

I always thought those boxes were quite cool. Do you still have it? If not, do you remember where it ended it up?

[Wawavoun]

Hello there !

Elektor Junior Computer.... 1982... The one on the picture is a rebuild !

Soldering iron was useful when programming !

Philippe

[S. Petrukhin]

I remembered a joke...
-Dad, did you have the Internet as a child?
 -No.
- DVD?
- No...
- And there was no computer?
- It was not...
- Paaap, and you have seen the dinosaurs?
 

[Larryc001]

My first computer was not really mine, but it was the first computer I had seen. It was in 1966 that the radio observatory where I worked purchased a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-9. It lived in a large screen room inside the radio telescope control room. I learned to program it in assembly language. It was the start of a career in computer software. I eventually worked for DEC and I was able to work on a variety of their computers. I even spent some time in the plant in Maynard, Mass. Those were the days all right, the Wild West of computers.

[rfclown]

TRS-80 Model I Level II with 16K ram, and NO disk drive or Expansion Interface.,...    The concept of 32  baud cassette tape program storage  still gives me the jitters...
Anyone else remember the one line programming challenge?  reason being cr-lf burned a hell of  a lot of RAM,

47x127 B&W graphics... yum.. Sound (if you could call it that) by modulating the tape drive on/off bit.

Still taught me one heck about low level computing and TTl interface.

"WHAT?"   

Steve

Mine was exactly the same. I learned a lot from it. I hand assembled and poked into memory. I did a mod to double the clock speed. I did a mod to add lower case. I got the technical reference manual, and as a high schooler got a start understanding digitial electronics. The whole design was simple enough for me to understand every part of it (those were good times). Everything was memory mapped (keyboard, display). Just Z80, TTL chips, character ROM, BASIC ROM, RAM, not much else. When the warranty ran out and the display went wonkers, I made a logic probe and traced the problem down to a bad inverter in the video circuit. I was very nervous taking the bad DIP part off the board (I'd never done anything like that before). I used an IC socket for the replacement, and solved the problem. I had planned on making an expansion interface, but never finished it. Still have the wire wrapped fragments of the start of the project (and 16k of memory).

Before that, the first computer I used was an IBM 360. At my dad's job they let me run a FORTRAN program on punch cards which computed a quadratic equation. Then at the same company, they let me play with an Olivetti programmable calculator like this one:

[MIS42N]

My first computer program was written in Algol for an Elliot 803 c. 1967. Years later I had shares in a KIM-1, we couldn't individually afford it. We had the use of an old paper tape teletype for I/O. I wrote a 6502 assembler for it, I'm hoping to unearth the code one day, it was tiny, I think 300 bytes. It read the source, put the code direct into memory. It had no error checking so there was also a disassembler and if it was loaded first the assembled instruction, instead of loading into memory, was disassembled and compared with the source line. If it didn't match byte for byte it was flagged as an error. The first computer I owned was an Ohio Superboard with ROM BASIC and keys soldered direct to the motherboard. Then followed Atari 400, Atari 800, Osborne 1, Visual 1050 then various PCs starting with a 80486SX with DOS. I still have most plus a few others given to me. C64, Amiga, Apple IIc, Kaypro, Toshiba 3100. Awaiting the time when I restore them (probably never). I also have an acoustic modem terminal. And an Intel 4040 evaluation kit with ceramic ICs. Still using a Compaq Armada laptop c.1998 as a serial terminal. The junk we keep!

[intabits]

It was in 1966 that the radio observatory where I worked purchased a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-9. It lived in a large screen room inside the radio telescope control room.

Have you seen the movie "The Dish"?
About the Parkes radio telescope involvement with the Apollo program. They also had a PDP-9.

[srb1954]

I always thought those boxes were quite cool. Do you still have it? If not, do you remember where it ended it up?

I still have my SWTPC 6800 stashed away somewhere. I built it from a kit in 1978.

I equipped it with what was a huge amount of RAM at the time: a whole 8K bytes. With that amount of memory I could run the Motorola co-resident editor and assembler and still have enough memory left over to assemble and run small programs. All the application S/W had to be loaded off a painfully slow cassette interface which took about half an hour to load each time.

[DrG]

I always thought those boxes were quite cool. Do you still have it? If not, do you remember where it ended it up?

I still have my SWTPC 6800 stashed away somewhere. I built it from a kit in 1978.

I equipped it with what was a huge amount of RAM at the time: a whole 8K bytes. With that amount of memory I could run the Motorola co-resident editor and assembler and still have enough memory left over to assemble and run small programs. All the application S/W had to be loaded off a painfully slow cassette interface which took about half an hour to load each time.

If you ever dig it up, please post the experience (getting it to work) and, by all means, with some pics!

[faraday]

My first computer TIMEX2048

[Larryc001]

It was in 1966 that the radio observatory where I worked purchased a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-9. It lived in a large screen room inside the radio telescope control room.

Have you seen the movie "The Dish"?
About the Parkes radio telescope involvement with the Apollo program. They also had a PDP-9.

Yes thanks I have. I actually wrote some software for them. Funny I had forgotten about that.

[ozcar]

I still have my SWTPC 6800 stashed away somewhere. I built it from a kit in 1978.

I equipped it with what was a huge amount of RAM at the time: a whole 8K bytes. With that amount of memory I could run the Motorola co-resident editor and assembler and still have enough memory left over to assemble and run small programs. All the application S/W had to be loaded off a painfully slow cassette interface which took about half an hour to load each time.

I built my SWTPC 6800 in 1977. Building it in stages, I spent quite some time working with it before I put together any of the RAM boards, so fitting hand-assembled programs into the huge 128 byte RAM chip on the CPU board. I know it ended its days upgraded to a 6809 with 48K RAM, but now I can't even remember now how that 48K was made up, maybe 2 x 8K boards and a 32K non-SWTPC board.

I got rid of most of it over 10 years ago, but I had a lot of the plug-in boards up until 2017, when I finally turfed them out. However, on my desk next to me now there is a small power supply I built in the last year. The top cover of that is made out of a piece of the perforated aluminium sheet from the SWTPC machine.