Do you remember the first computer you used? - Page 4

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Posted: 12/5/2018 8:17:25 PM EDT

[#1]

This maybe or even something earlier. I know I played with a PET but I recall something boxier with a small screen in the middle. I was like 8 or 9 at the time so my memory of it isn't clear. I did most of my early programming with a TI-99 though.

My dad was always bringing interesting stuff home from work.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:18:23 PM EDT

[#2]

PDP-11/34

Running RSTS/E

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:22:14 PM EDT

[#3]

Quote History

Quoted:
That would have been a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe, or a mini computer. There were no PCs in the early-mid seventies.

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Not quite, the Altair 8800 was 1974....

from wikipedia:

The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue (published in late November 1974)[2] of Popular Electronics, and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines. The designers hoped to sell a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold thousands in the first month.[3] The Altair also appealed to individuals and businesses that just wanted a computer and purchased the assembled version.[4] The Altair is widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution[5] as the first commercially successful personal computer.[6] The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.[7][8

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:26:12 PM EDT

[#4]

Quote History

Quoted:
This was the second computer I used:

http://retrotechnology.com/pdp11/11_panel_2.jpg

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I've loaded the bootstrap on one of those through the front panel more times than I'd like to remember...

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:29:59 PM EDT

[#5]

Quote History

Quoted:
Commodore 64

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Posted: 12/5/2018 8:32:36 PM EDT

[#6]

HP 2000 main frame at the U of L campus on acoustic modem. Then a commodore then an 8086.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:36:00 PM EDT

[#7]

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:36:50 PM EDT

[#8]

TRS-80

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:37:13 PM EDT

[#9]

One of those old apple computers had a little built in screen. Used it in school

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:38:33 PM EDT

[#10]

Quote History

Quoted:
TRS-80

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1983 Trash-80 coco
1986 Heathkit
1987 Atari
1991 Mac
1995 PC
...
2007 Macs
...
2018 also some Raspberry stuff now

ETA I went with dad in 1970 to rent time on IBM 360 at $100/hour in the nighttime. But I didn't get to touch anything.

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Posted: 12/5/2018 8:39:41 PM EDT

[#11]

Quote History

Quoted:
First one I remember using..

https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/11650/Macplus_jpg-761975.JPG

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Pretty sure this is it

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:39:58 PM EDT

[#12]

Attached File

Attached File

1st use.

1st personal.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:41:00 PM EDT

[#13]

Yes, at school on the district main frame. Lunar lander.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:41:31 PM EDT

[#14]

Probably a apple IIe. However, regular use was limited to the "smart" kids in math class.

My own first computer was a Sinclair Z81. $200 in the very early 80's.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:42:03 PM EDT

[#15]

Timex Sinclair sometime in the early 80's.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:45:40 PM EDT

[#16]

First used was a mainframe terminal in elementary school. First owned was the TI-99/4A.

I actually still have a rather large collection of TI stuff sorted around here. Never use any of it anymore, but I still like to have it around.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:47:28 PM EDT

[#17]

Quote History

Quoted:
Apple IIGS

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This was the first computer I had at home.

The first computer I actually used, I don't recall what it was. It was 1986, I was 5 or so. It wasn't a very good one.

I do have fond memories (gag) of that packard bell, my aunt had one. It was the machine I first used to mess around on the internet.

I'd go visit her just to screw around with that computer.

A couple years later, I got my first job working on them.

I grew to hate packard bell computers but that first one I don't suppose I'll ever forget it.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:50:08 PM EDT

[#18]

When I was a kid the “App Store” was the grocery store magazine rack. You took home this magazine, sat down, and typed in the code. The one I remember most was an artilery simulation that my dad re-wrote as a celestial-body simulator. You could create planets of varying size/position, and then experiment with moons. Working to get a moon in a stable orbit was way more fun than watching the Lawrence Welk show, which was pretty much the only other thing we had to do on winter nights.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:50:36 PM EDT

[#19]

First computer I used was an IBM 360/70 with punch cards.

Then a PDP-11.

Then a Digital Group 8088 with 8k Ram.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:51:08 PM EDT

[#20]

IBM 1130 - mid 60's ......

Then IBM 360/370 ....

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:51:25 PM EDT

[#21]

Double tap .....

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:51:51 PM EDT

[#22]

Quote History

Quoted:
TRS80

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Same here...I am OLD

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:52:10 PM EDT

[#23]

Burroughs 6800

Learned ALGOL, Fortran and Basic there.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:52:45 PM EDT

[#24]

Quote History

Quoted:
Commodore 64

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This

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:54:00 PM EDT

[#25]

Commodore Vic-20.

My first computer of my own was a Commodore 128.

Posted: 12/5/2018 8:57:03 PM EDT

[#26]

I wanna say it was a Texas Instruments, circa 1975. It was in high school. We had to program punch cards then run them through a card reader. If you did it right, the program would run, I don't remember what it was supposed to do. Mine didn't work. I think there was one nerdy kid that was successful in the whole class.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:00:48 PM EDT

[#27]

basic programming and this:

The Commodore Vic-20 with lots of typing out of magazines and then *poof* power switch. C64 with tape drive. 20+ minute load times. 300 baud. Then 128. Had dual disk drives (,8,2 master race), cut slot and flipped them, dot matrix printer and a 2400 baud modem.

I can still remember the sound of 5 1/4" drives and a 300 baud connection handshake. I remember being able to read faster than the BBS could send text. Also ran a BBS and was a mod on a 6 channel chat board. 6 phone lines in for it to work.

My dad used to hound me to "get off that damn computer" - years later he admitted to my mom maybe it wasn't such a bad idea. I ended up in IT.

edit: we got Pong for Christmas - the first ever computer game I played was a version of duck hunt projected on a wall in a bar. It was magic.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:06:20 PM EDT

[#28]

Don't know what kind of computer it was but we used punch cards in high school in 1970 to input formulas and then checked them with a slide rule. Later on, used a type of computer in the Navy but it was more of a counter scaler. We had fire control and nav computers, but I wasn't one of the people that had any hand in data input.. I remember when calculators came out and we weren't initially allowed to use them. I bought one at K-Mart for $70 in nuke school. Square root function was what made it so expensive. We had a type of computer later on that used an adding machine with solenoids on the keys to input pulse height discriminator output to paper. We then used a Phillips 66 catalog to tie energy level to nuclide.

Of course, I was one of the first with a Trash 80 and then a Commadore 64. 283 and then 383 came out and things began to make quantum leaps.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:06:22 PM EDT

[#29]

Quote History

Quoted:
Timex-Sinclair ZX-80

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this

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:07:25 PM EDT

[#30]

Quote History

Quoted:

Then IBM 360/370 ....
https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/91/ibm360-762144.jpg

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in 1968.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:11:09 PM EDT

[#31]

Quote History

Quoted:
Apple IIe

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This used to play Oregon trail

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:11:12 PM EDT

[#32]

TRS-80 color computer from Radio Shack

It had a cassette tape external drive.

I had a subscription to a magazine every month that gave you all the BASIC lines of code for different programs that all did relatively useless computations. It would take hours and hours to hand type all that code, another few hours to de-bug the program and what you ended up with was a Rube Goldberg calculator.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:12:03 PM EDT

[#33]

We wrote the (simple) programs. Went over to a machine that typed the program onto/into cards. Carried the cards to a window and give them to the person to run on the computer. Once it was done they'd let us know if it worked or not. If not, we had to sit down, figure out where (what line) contained the error(s), correct that card at the card punch machine, put it back in the stack in sequence and carry it back to the window to be run again.

Pain in the ass. I hated it.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:26:57 PM EDT

[#34]

'member when?

C64 Longplay - Forbidden Forest (HQ)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j86veyiIcS8

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:27:55 PM EDT

[#35]

Commodore PET

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:30:44 PM EDT

[#36]

If you count game systems, an old Atari 2600 my prents had. That thing was awesome.

Computers... Some sort of Apple in school.

Personal computer.. A 400mhz Acer

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:37:00 PM EDT

[#37]

At home? TRS-80 Model 1 Level II. My first home printer was a Teletype RO-33 picked up at a hamfest. Made an interface that ran off the cassette port, triggering a mercury wetted rely that would break the machines internal 20 ma current loop. The driver that ran the interface was my first go at writing machine code. First time ever exposure was via a punch card deck ...

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:38:33 PM EDT

[#38]

Quote History

Quoted:
Honeywell. Yeah, I'm old.

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I worked for them, DPS6 and Multics!

Ibm 360/370 and pdp8 in College.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:46:45 PM EDT

[#39]

This one.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:47:39 PM EDT

[#40]

Commodore PET and Apple 2. 3rd grade.

Was in a very wealthy school district, we had a computer lab.

First computer I owned: Commodore 64 (still have it).

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:50:56 PM EDT

[#41]

My first pc was a Compaq 1 that by dad dug out of the trash in 1989. I never looked back.

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:51:27 PM EDT

[#42]

Burroughs B5500 via time share at my hgh school using a Model 33 Teletype with paper tape reader

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Posted: 12/5/2018 9:52:10 PM EDT

[#43]

It was an IBM and the monitor was B&W. I'm pretty sure it was a PS/2 but I'm not 100%.

It had a whole suite of games installed that I wish I could find today just to bring the memories back. I recall it had Blackjack, a word search puzzle maker game, and some rudimentary non-scrolling platformer genre game. Maybe it was Lode Runner?

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:52:43 PM EDT

[#44]

a PET..

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:53:13 PM EDT

[#45]

IBM 360

Posted: 12/5/2018 9:53:58 PM EDT

[#46]

I played around with a friends commodore vic 20. The first computer I owned was a Commodore 128.

Posted: 12/5/2018 10:03:14 PM EDT

[#47]

Quoted:
For me, it was a family computer. I don't remember much about it. It had a 386SX processor (no math co-processor). I remember it was called 386SX, because it sucked! It had DOS on it, and it was a beige box.

And you?

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Same. But ours had a "Turbo" button, too.