[ARCHIVED THREAD] - My first Computer. (Page 1 of 3)
Posted: 11/18/2012 7:01:26 PM EDT
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Commodore VIC20. I still have it, tape drive and all. 
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Can I count this?
In the early 90's, this is what I used to write my first Hello World program on it's "Large 4 line LCD" screen. It came with cartridges that had different games, but they were ALL just Q&A trivia games. It came with instructions for writing programs like "What is my name?" "Who is the best person you know?" etc. But there was no storage so if you turned it off, you would have to re-write those 20-30 lines PERFECTLY all over again. Couple of years later I got a 386 that ran Windows 95. It came with a CD that had moon lander! sweet! The very first computer I ever used was a C-64 though. We had one at school for spelling tests. Load your 6" diskette, put the cassette in the tape deck, it would say the words and you spelled them on screen. |
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Mine was a Commode 64, and I had the tape drive also.
In high school I took a computer science class, which was just learning to program in BASIC (which I had already taught myself at home on the Commode, so I breezed through it). We used Trash-80s in that class. |
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Apple IIc That was the first computer in my family too Crazy how things have changed. |
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Quoted: Can I count this? http://www.blujay.com/1/525/3831270_s1_i1.jpg In the early 90's, this is what I used to write my first Hello World program on it's "Large 4 line LCD" screen. It came with cartridges that had different games, but they were ALL just Q&A trivia games. It came with instructions for writing programs like "What is my name?" "Who is the best person you know?" etc. But there was no storage so if you turned it off, you would have to re-write those 20-30 lines PERFECTLY all over again. Couple of years later I got a 386 that ran Windows 95. It came with a CD that had moon lander! sweet! The very first computer I ever used was a C-64 though. We had one at school for spelling tests. Load your 6" diskette, put the cassette in the tape deck, it would say the words and you spelled them on screen. Had an embedded computer class with a lab. The lab time was a couple of hours and consisted of sharing 3-4 computers. I would get there late, having drove an hour or more from work, wait for my time, type part of the program, instructor now closes the lab, shut off computer without saving the program, and I start all over next lab period. Lord  |
, but was impressive for its small size.
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My uncle worked for TI and brought home a 99/4a. Earliest home computer I remember seeing. One of his son's was a programmer for some company that wrote French tax software and brought home the first IBM PC (Portable Computer). 7 inch mono screen, the size of a small suitcase, weighed about 50 lbs. We used it to play probably the first Star Trek video game. Involved plotting coordinates, speeds, etc. Anyone remember that one?
First PC I personally owned was a Packard Bell Pentium in '94 or '95. Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL... It had it all!! And yeah, I still have that thing sitting at the bottom of a closet. Hell, the first full-time job I had out of high school was at TI assembling boards for the TI PC. That thing was actually top of the line at the time. Color display, voice recognition, blazing fast. It totally failed and we were all laid off... LOL |
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The first one I got to play with was a DEC PDP-11, IIRC. I learned to program on it when I was 10. We printed out the code for Lunar and decided that if they could do it, we could do it, too. It was hard to make an entertaining simulation on a dot matrix printer with no monitor, so after I wrote a couple of crappy games (they did work, but they were awful.) I wrote a program to process checks and another one to manipulate the letters in words and compare them to a database.
Then in 1981 I decided that computers were prohibitively expensive. I said to myself, "No one is ever going to give a shit about this stuff," and studied English. I regard that as the most monumental fuckup of my life. Oops. My own first computer was a Macintosh Plus, which I won because the WPU book store made me enter the contest to get a Matt Groening poster even though I had no desire to win the computer. I don't remember my handle on the boards on Compuserve, but I had a 20k hard drive. I was a badass.
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Whippersnappers!  My first computer was an 8080 machine I designed and built myself with wire wrap on perfboard. It had 1K of static RAM, 8K EPROM (mostly empty), a 17-key keyboard made from calculator parts and a 4-digit, 7-segment LED display. Oh, and a toggle switch. I still have most of the chips, but the boards were scavenged years ago. I had no schooling or training of any kind to back me up (the first computer ever seen in my HS was one that I brought in). Everything I learned came from Popular Electronics, the Digi-Key catalog, a smattering of books and a massive pile of datasheets, product guides, and app notes obtained by writing letters to every semiconductor manufacturer that had a mailing address. I typed a lot of letters on my dad's Smith Corona typewriter too.  |
