The first system I owned!

You haven't lived until you have spent 2 hours loading a program from a cassette drive!

Pff. First computer I ever had was a PDP-8. First I had to toggle switches for half an hour, programming the thing so I could load a system file via paper tape, and then dial the Digital Equipment mainframe so I could play space games.

Of course, that was 1970.

First computer I ever had that I could actually work on -- that had memory and all -- was an obsolete PDP-10. The monitor looked like this:



The main unit was the same size, racked below it, and the printer was the size of an upright piano. The two apartments I moved it into were both on upper floors, and once we got the printer up the stairs, the strain had been enough that we'd then vomit, before going back for the rest of it.

I wrote all my scripts from 1984-1987 on that thing, and when it crapped out, it was no longer repairable, so that's when I got a Mac. Lovely fluffy light things, Macs...

Aaahh, pointless nostalgia

This was the first computer I ever learned any programming on, back in Grade 8.

Upon reaching high school, however (in that grand future-sounding year of 1984), I got to start playing on this beauty. Our computer class actually had ten of them networked together so they could all save info on the 48K floppy drives!

Of course, a year later, I got to use the other computer lab that had plenty of these old TRS-80's, each with their own disk drives.

2. 2 floppy drives each! Imagine the power!!

But THIS was my baby. This was the very first computer I ever owned (also purchased, I think, in 1984). Easily the biggest Christmas present I had ever gotten.



And, yeah, it used that wacky cassette tape drive. I found that, if you put a normal cassette in it, it would play the audio through the speaker of the TV set the computer was hooked up to.

Hey, for a kid in farm-country Manitoba, this was seriously high-tech stuff!!

Wow - I can't even find a reference to this at old-computers.com!


Heh - I just remembered - in grade 10, our computer lab also had an old mini-computer (anybody remember those monsters?), from Digital Equipment, I think.

In grade 11, it was replaced with a brand-new state o the art Sperry mini-computer. The impressive thing with this was the multiple disk-drive system, each disk holding a massive 14 megs of data!!!!!

Wow, just geek-out wow!

I think the following year was when the first 1-meg RAM chip was introduced. It was an external piece, and kinda looked like a computer mouse.

I remember when I was 17, all I wanted was a Data General One laptop computer. As I now stare at my (too slow) Pentium III with twin monitors and DSL modem, blah blah bells whistles blah military grade guidance chips blah blah blah....

Ah, yes... all that fiddling around with a screwdriver (?) to adjust the tape heads. Although, with our VIC-20, the first thing you had to do was fiddle around with this damn thing to get a picture on the TV. We tried Blu-Tacking it to the floor to keep it stable. Didn't work...



Luckily I was able to persuade my parents to buy a C64 shortly after we'd all gone nuts, bananas and assorted snacks with this piece of computing excellence.

Ed,
I used all three of those systems. I first used the Apple IIe at school, learned some BASIC and loved it. Then I bought a Vic 20 (ahhh, 5KB of memory, who needs more than that?) Later at school they got the TRaSh 80s.

I spent many a night programming on that Vic 20. What's worse is it was 4 months before I got a tape drive. So everytime I turned the thing off, I'd have to retype the program in. On the plus side, I learned how to type relatively fast.

I was intrigued by Kurt's description, googled around and found this: a Java interface for running a PDP-8, complete with a simulated front panel.

Played some Tic-Tac-Toe with it...

...only to have it not run for some unknown reason?

remember when a mouse was optional?

i think we actually threw away the one that came with our first family computer...after all, i didn't need it on my Atari ST or the Apple II that i used at school...

One of the first things I said to Dad when we talked about getting a C64 was "I want a disk drive..."

It always struck me as funny that in Britain, C64 disk drives never really caught on. They were very expensive at the time, certainly, but I always thought the increased speed (with turbo loaders... wow!) and reliability was worth it. Of course, disks failed for unknown reasons every now and then, too...

The TRS-80 Model I was my first computer as well. My only real gripe was that the cassette recorder didn't save my programs reliably. This made me want something with a disk drive ... anything with a disk drive.

I used the Apple ][+ and ][e in school.

The next systems I had purchased were:

Commodore 64 / 1541 Disk Drive / 300 bps "dumb" modem, 1525 printer
CP/M cartridge for the above
later, a pulse-dial Westridge modem ( still 300 bps )
Commodore 128 / 1571 drive, 1200 bps tone-dial modem
Commodore +4 ( it was $60 at a closeout warehouse )
Amiga 500, single floppy, 1200 bps "Hayes compatible" modem
Vic-20, 300 bps "dumb" modem
Intel 8086 PC ... the first of a long line of Intel PC's.

The Vic may look a little odd in the progression, but I'd just sold everything else and needed something to hit the BBS's until I bought a PC.

When I got my first "dumb" modem for the Commodore 64 above in 1984, dialing a BBS meant I had to manually dial the phone ( we had a rotary dial phone in our basement ... so it took a little while ) wait to ensure that the BBS answered, then unplug the line from the handsent and plug it into the modem. Patience was indeed a virtue in those days.

Holy cow! Kurt's a closet techie!

I knew a guy in the mid-80's that had a PDP ( not sure what model ... ) in his basement. He won a sports car in a basketball free-throw shoot contest and, like a true nerd, sold it and bought a bunch of computer equipment.

This was my first. I was around 14 at the time. 2 floppies. No hard drive. Ran on DOS 1.1.

IBM 5150

My father dropped out of college to get married. His first job was as a refrigerator repairman, but when he heard there was work available repairing computers out in Maynard, at this new company, he figured that soldering wire was soldering wire, so what the hell, it sounded like there was more of a future there.

The company was Digital Equipment, they'd started in 1957 and my father started there as a Field Service Technician in 1958, three years before they introduced the PDP-1. By the time he retired, he was Vice President of Software Services.

Every now and then, I'm reading a book like SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE or something, and I run across some key development in the AI field or the microcomputer industry and realize, "Holy Cow, I saw that!" I just thought it was fun to be able to play games when my dad would visit MIT or Lincoln Labs...

These days, of course, the only thing most people remember about Digital is that they created Alta Vista, and even that's not what it once was. But when I was growing up, it was DEC as David versus IBM as Goliath for the future of computers. DEC won in the end, but died in the process, fostering the revolution that overwhelmed them.

In the end, they just didn't react fast enough (which was irony, since being able to react faster was their advantage over IBM) and they had an absolutely horrible marketing department. One guy described DEC's late-era marketing by saying that if they'd been selling sushi, they'd have advertised it as "cold, dead, raw fish!"

Of course, by then, my dad was either retired or on the verge of it.

I still work on a couple of systems running VMS. I'm not as knowledgeable of it as some of my co-workers, but I do appreciate it's reliability.

I saw on HP's site recently that they are releasing a version of VMS to work on 64-bit Itanium servers. So the old horse may not be dead yet.

What they discovered is that during 9/11 the companies who were running VMS were back online much faster than the ones depending on other operating systems for fail over.

Here's some info about it:
http://h30046.www3.hp.com/news_article. ... code=USENG

Heh - I'll have to get she who must be obeyed to come and do some posting.


Why ? She is Historian looking at the development and use of computers....


Now I had an amstrad CPC-464 as my first machine.

A Speccy too, perhaps?

yep - best one for swapping games.

My first was a Commodore 64 I picked up after being very impressed with a friend's Vic 20. I pickup a tape drive, which I found to be very reliable, but eventually got a 5 ¼ drive for it. As I recall the drive cost twice what the computer did. It had a cartridge slot in the back and I'd pickup some 'office' software on cartridge.

I taught myself basic programming on that machine, and wrote a version of the game, Mastermind, when I only knew logical AND and OR, and the IF statement. Code listing was about 12 pages long. If I'd know how to code loops, I could have written the whole thing in a dozen lines.

I wore that first C64 out and then got another. Then went through 3 C128s, before getting a tricked out IBM PC Jr. 640k memory, bay-bee and two, yes you heard me right, TWO 3 ½ disk drives. Big time!