What was your first computer?

[SiliconWizard]

My first computer TIMEX2048

Interestingly, although not as "sexy" design-wise (but tastes vary) as the original Sinclair Spectrum it was based on, the TIMEX2048 was actually a better product.

[gnuarm]

I had an Heathkit LSI-11, not sure what Heath called it.  The CPU board and back plane were from DEC, the rest of the machine was Heath.  A friend had a paper tape reader/punch, but the power supply in that was anemic and it would not punch the DEL character well.  lol 

I bought 8" floppy drives for it.  The machine ran RT-11.  The biggest limitation was the OS would allocate half the remaining disk space for any file opened until it was closed.  So when compiling opening multiple output files would greatly restrict the size of the final one.  I guess this was their way of assuring contiguous files.

10 years later when I had a 286 or maybe a 486?  Not sure which, I finally cleaned out the garage and trashed the Heath.  I didn't think about historical perspectives. 

Wait!  I did have one before that.  It was an 8008 based MOD-8 by MiniMicroMart.  Originally used 1702A EPROMs and a TTY current loop.  A bug in the PROM was fixed with a logic patch on the memory board.  I adapted it for RS-232 and possibly 2716 EPROMS.  After that I had a Technico TMS9900 SBC.  That was adapted for 2716 EPROMs for sure.  You could even program them in the socket... I think.  Not sure how the programming program ran while programming the EPROM.  Too long ago.  I guess it ran from RAM, but how would the EPROM get erased... wait!  I think I had an adapter that plugged into the two EPROM sockets to allow FOUR EPROMs to be used, program two while running from the other two (16 bit machine).

I still have both of these, but no idea what shape they are in.  Haven't fired up either one in decades.  Yes, plural.

[DrG]

I had an Heathkit LSI-11, not sure what Heath called it.  The CPU board and back plane were from DEC, the rest of the machine was Heath.  A friend had a paper tape reader/punch, but the power supply in that was anemic and it would not punch the DEL character well.  lol 
....
I finally cleaned out the garage and trashed the Heath.  I didn't think about historical perspectives. 
/-/

This one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H11 - that's hard core!

Don't feel too bad about trashing it, I have kept a few things that better-adjusted people would have thrown out long ago    and it did not have much to do with historical perspective.

[jfiresto]

I had an Heathkit LSI-11, not sure what Heath called it.  The CPU board and back plane were from DEC, the rest of the machine was Heath.  A friend had a paper tape reader/punch, but the power supply in that was anemic and it would not punch the DEL character well.  lol 

I bought 8" floppy drives for it.  The machine ran RT-11.  The biggest limitation was the OS would allocate half the remaining disk space for any file opened until it was closed.  So when compiling opening multiple output files would greatly restrict the size of the final one.  I guess this was their way of assuring contiguous files....

Heathkit called it the H11. Heathkit's H27 floppy disk system emulated the SSSD RXO1 which stored somewhat less than 1/4 megabyte per disk. That is not much. The DECUS C compiler for RT-11 actually ran pretty well off 1 megabyte per disk, DSDD 8" floppies.

[temperance]

Our first computer: a 486 running at 40MHz. What a (costly) beast. But very disappointing too.

A few days after it was delivered I rushed to a store to get a book about C in the big city only to find out it was impossible to compile C programs with the software installed on that machine. Being 13 years old and living in a suburban area didn't help because no one in my area could help with that. Pretty boring. That machine was only good for writing school assignments and playing simple games in which I wasn't really interested. I wanted to flash lights, run motors and what not. An other thing which I found interesting was finding out how a computer calculated sines, cosines,... and program my own calculator. An other disappointment because in the local library they didn't serve any books on the subject. (and if they did, I would not understand to much of what would be in those books because curve fitting and series is something you learn about much later)

Then came EDWIN, a PCB CAD package which hobbyists could buy for about €35. A few years later I spend all my hard earned money on a kit with a 80C752. Microcontrollers of that type back then costed around €50. The kit was nothing more then some kind of 80C75x series programmer. Still no C compiler but all assembly language. All you got for that money was 2K EPROM memory and 128 bytes RAM. I still have those. The scariest part was powering up a circuit for the first time and that €50 controller would go up in smoke. The first LCD display I obtained with an HD44780 controller was salvaged from a fax machine. Memories...

[gnuarm]

I had an Heathkit LSI-11, not sure what Heath called it.  The CPU board and back plane were from DEC, the rest of the machine was Heath.  A friend had a paper tape reader/punch, but the power supply in that was anemic and it would not punch the DEL character well.  lol 
....
I finally cleaned out the garage and trashed the Heath.  I didn't think about historical perspectives. 
/-/

This one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H11 - that's hard core!

Don't feel too bad about trashing it, I have kept a few things that better-adjusted people would have thrown out long ago    and it did not have much to do with historical perspective.

Seeing that almost brings tears to my eyes.  It would have been the crown jewel of my junk collection and it is under a mountain of debris now.    I feel I dishonored it. 

[DrG]

Seeing that almost brings tears to my eyes.  It would have been the crown jewel of my junk collection and it is under a mountain of debris now.    I feel I dishonored it.

Nahhh you did not dishonor anything - you were fortunate enough to be part of a very exciting time!

[djbrooks]

Or your dads computer...

Mine was this


Had a 9600 baud modem and speeds of 4 or 7 MHz. Cost around $3,000 or $4,000 without the monitor. Ran DOS. My favorite part was when I discovered the modem and BBS by looking one up in the phone book. I remember there was no "internet" listing in the phone book and thinking even at that young age how it should be considering it will be just as good as the phone book one day. MY father had the internet at his work so I knew what it was. I thought you could still buy phone books. Seems like they still make phone books as a bunch were dropped of at an apartment I visited several times in 2015 and the phone books just sat there. I don't know how I found the phone number of the first bbs but once I did I found others while my parents found an $80.00 phone bill which was a lot back then. Other things we had was a shitty dot matrix printer my dad bought because he was cheap. It had four fonts you selected on the printer why it could only do that even though it was dot matrix was due to it's shittyness I guess.

Moderator Edit: Corrected minor typo in the title (It was bugging me)

Great.! I love those days 

[gnuarm]

My first was an 8080 or Z80 (I forget which) CPM box that the crooks never shipped.  My second computer was an LSI-11 made by Heathkit.  I didn't miss the CPM box anymore.

[fourfathom]

The first one I programmed was in 1963.  Some unknown minicomputer, when I was about nine years old.  I was in a summer class where we hand-punched Hollerith computer cards and got the results back in a week.  I didn't know what I was doing, really, but I enjoyed it.
The first one I programmed in person was a PDP-11 (?) when I about 20, in school.  We used the KSR-33 teletype / paper tape and that's how I learned BASIC.
The first one I worked on was a friends Altair -- I designed and built a paper-tape reader for loading bootcode, and a tape modem (Kansas City Standard) for program storage.
The first one I owned was a 6502 (?) evaluation board that had a built-in keypad.  I soldered together a pair of R2R DACs and had it displaying simple X/Y wireframe graphics on my oscilloscope.
Then I could actually afford to buy a Sinclair ZX81.  I wore that sucker out.
Next was an IBM PC clone, with a 10 MHz clock (or was it 8?).  It had a toggle switch on the back to switch the clock to the standard 4.77 MHz.  I added an external 5MByte hard drive -- Wow!
Then an Apple-2, when moonlighting as a consultant.
Then at work, Sun workstations and PCs.
Since then, a long progression of PC clones.

[Beamin]

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

Cheers,

THDplusN_bad

What did your comrades in east germany have for computers? Did they even have transistors? I bet their pocket radios didn't brag about "6 transistor" But maybe "One transistor" crystal radios. Computers? in East Germany, isn't a guy that sits at a desk all day solving math problems by pen and paper?

[ebastler]

What did your comrades in east germany have for computers? Did they even have transistors? I bet their pocket radios didn't brag about "6 transistor" But maybe "One transistor" crystal radios. Computers? in East Germany, isn't a guy that sits at a desk all day solving math problems by pen and paper?

You are misinformed; East Germany was not that far behind in technical capabilities. But the products were often very hard to come by for their citizens -- expensive, available only sporadically, or with waiting lists that could be many years long (e.g. for a new car).

One reason for the supply shortfall was that products were actually exported to the West, in return for foreign currency that was needed for imports. East Germany certainly exported plenty of transistor radios to Western Europe!

Computer technology was lagging behind by a few years, but followed the same path as elsewhere. Microprocessors were made locally, but the designs were mostly following Western processors closely. An Intel i8008 clone made from 1978 onwards started this product line, followed by 8-bit and 16-bit processors, up to '286 compatibles in 1989, just before the political "Wende" in the East and re-unification.

[JPortici]

Hah! The first pc my family ever had is an Amstrad CPC 464. Older than me, as old as my sister. I haven't booted it in a couple of years, but last time it was still functioning (minus some keys that need cleaning and probably restoration)
I dabbled with it for a bit but in reality i never got the hitch for retrocomputing, programming in basic on those old machines... not for me.

[Black Phoenix]

ZX Spectrum +3 mostly used for games. Never done a program on him.

[jonpaul]

recollection of computers I used and built


1965 CCNY NYC program punch cards,  Fortran II on IBM 360, filled entire basement of Teman Engineering building

1975 Popular Electronics SOL basic, Leslie Solomon was a friend

1983..1986 CPM office computer

1986, built IBM AT type using Faraday mobo, my first PC, MD DOS 3.1!

Just a walk down memory lane

Jon

[DavidAlfa]

I was given away a Columbia VP1600 with orange phospor screen circa 1996, had some kind of memory issue where suddenly all the characters became happy faces after a while.
I remember fixing the mega-floppies with Norton utilities every then and now!

[Sherlock Holmes]

This baby, I was studying electronics and telecommunications in Liverpool UK in the late 1970s and I got myself one of these, a TI-57



I was amazed at this calculator, I'd never programmed a machine before and found it very absorbing. I later got myself this one, a PR-100



The TI was well constructed but the PR-100 was a good machine, these were truly my and many peoples' first real experience of programming.

As for microprocessors, this was the very first and I did a lot with it, even made a crude robot where each of two wheels had a motor and I used a bank of relays to stop/start/revere the motors, it was crude but a lot of fun, had two 6V lead acid batteries, this was right about the time Star Wars got released, very timely.



It was a kit, very exciting at the time, had a 1MHz 6502 with an extra INS8154 IO chip. It also supported the CUTS tape standard so I could save/load code, that worked quite reliably too, remarkable.

[Nominal Animal]

memory issue where suddenly all the characters became happy faces after a while.

Ah, monochrome text buffer filled with 0x01, or the video generator not accessing the memory correctly and thinking it was filled with 0x01.

The good ol' cp437 and its happy faces at codes 1 and 2.  I was rather enamored of the box-drawing characters, but then found out from RBIL (Ralf Brown's Interrupt List) how to reprogram the character set, and started making all sorts of my own funky char-mode graphics, in glorious 640x350 with 16-out-of-64 EGA colors, too.

[globoy]

A Quest Electronics Elf kit that my Dad bought me for $99USD.  I think I may still have it but can't remember where and haven't looked at it in a long time.  It had 256 bytes of RAM and a 32 byte ROM (with 3 commands entered using the switches).  Based around the quirky RCA CDP1802 microprocessor that sports an instruction called Set X (opcode SEX) which made my pre-adolescent self giggle every time.  I was insanely jealous of another kid who had an Apple II with the works.

 The pic is courtesy of "astrorat.com" but I had a copy of the schematic for some reason.

[Phil_G]

The Cosmac Elf is alive and well, with a strong following:
https://groups.io/g/cosmacelf/topics
and
https://www.facebook.com/groups/cosmacelf?sorting_setting=CHRONOLOGICAL
New members always welcome!
Cheers
Phil

[SiliconWizard]

A Quest Electronics Elf kit that my Dad bought me for $99USD.  I think I may still have it but can't remember where and haven't looked at it in a long time.  It had 256 bytes of RAM and a 32 byte ROM (with 3 commands entered using the switches).  Based around the quirky RCA CDP1802 microprocessor that sports an instruction called Set X (opcode SEX) which made my pre-adolescent self giggle every time.

I had a kit similar to this a long time ago, with an accompanying book that I still have in my library. It was my introduction to low-level microprocessor design. The book was pretty detailed in how the CDP1802 worked internally and its design was easy to understand. As can be seen, the book shows signs of use and abuse. I don't have the board anymore sadly.

[pcprogrammer]

For as far as I can remember my first computer was a Casio PB100. Not very exiting but it gave me my first programming experience in basic. Got a Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 soon after and made all sorts of extensions for it. Eventually ended up with two of them. Ditched them 5 or 6 years ago after trying them since not being used for ages. One failed altogether and the other one started but had some problems. The extension box with floppy drives also did not work anymore.

Also had a bunch of Apple II's but they also had problems with magic smoke and I could not be bothered to fix them or sell them via evil bay. So together with a bunch of old PC's it all went to the recycle station.

Have had many computers throughout my live. When we moved to France I offloaded a station wagon full of Apple Macintosh computers and peripherals onto some enthusiast, so those went to a good home.

[elecdonia]

The first computer I interacted with one-on-one for a considerable length of time and wrote code for was a DEC PDP-5.
     Word length: 12 bits
     Memory: 4k words of magnetic core
     Language: BASIC
     I/O: Teletype

The PDP-5 completely filled up a 6-foot rack because it was constructed with discrete transistor logic circuits. It did not contain any integrated circuits. Its successor (the PDP-8) was much smaller do to the invention of TTL logic chips.

I succeeded at writing a BASIC program to solve a 4th-order differential equation with the results “plotted” by the position of a “*” on each line printed by the TTY.  It used nearly all of the available memory. My program used the “Thiele/Small equations” to model the frequency response of a simulated loudspeaker.

[elecdonia]

Home built Z80 using wirewrap sockets and perfboard.  Also reused parts from a discarded IBM 3270 Model 5, including the 8" floppy drive, enclosure and keyboard.

We should have a separate topic for “What was your first DIY single-board computer?”
Mine had an Intel 8080, EPROM chips with the window for UV erasing, 4k of static RAM, and a serial port. Like yours, the construction method was IC sockets and wire-wrap.

[dobsonr741]

Commodore CBM around 1987 when I was an intern.