What was your first computer? - Page 2

Drdogface · Drdogface's Garage

Apple II

(very cool Jeff

)

red-beard · red-beard's Garage

The first computer I worked with was a PR1ME 300. We somehow made that a 23 1/2 user machine (the 1/2 was that one of the user interfaces never worked quite right, and we saved that one for the system console). This was owned by my high school, and I was a Student System Manager from 1979-1983.

First PC I worked on was an Apple II, also owned by the high school. These were 48K, had single floppy drives. If you didn't buy a floppy, you could use a cassete tape drive...The floppy drive was extra, as was the video to RF modulator. The story behind the RF modulator being separate, was that the computer failed its FCC radio interference test with the RF modulator installed. It was the owner's problem if it was sold separately.

1st PC I owned was a Commodore 64, circa 1984, and it worked quite well for lite programming and word processing. We bought it at Montgomery Wards and it came with dual floppy drives and a dot matrix printer, for about $800. Pretty darn inexpensive at the time.

The first computer I personally purchased was a Toshiba 1200HD. 10 MB Hard-drive, 640K RAM (upgraded to 2MB!), 1200 baud modem, MS-DOS. Great little machine. This combined with my electronic typewriter from college as a printer, served my while I worked in India and Pakistan in the late 1980's. I still have it and it still boots. The screen is cracked...I think I spent $2500-$3000 for everything including the modem/memory upgrade, and software.

jwhcars · 09-03-2009, 09:05 AM

A Tandy 1000 and we got it for home use.We got it in the late 70's or early 80's ...it was so long ago ...my how things have changed.

red-beard · red-beard's Garage

They HATED us at Radio Shack. We could actually program the computers and make them do stuff, something that the guys that worked there, could not. CPM-86. Wow, it has been a long time.

I had a Control System Graphical User Interface that used CPM-86, in the late 1980's. That was very antiquated for the time!

Steve Viegas · 09-03-2009, 10:23 AM

Another vote for the TI 99-4A

carreraken · carreraken's Garage

Quote:

Originally Posted by equality72521

Same here.

Me too (Timex Sinclair witn an extra 512k of ram!). Probably still have it stored under the house somewhere!

legion · 09-03-2009, 10:53 AM

We had a Commodore Vic 20 at home too.

My dad had some kind of IBM microcomputer at home in the late 70's (he was and IBM salesman). It was NOT micro by today's standards!

notmytarga · notmytarga's Garage

Leading Edge with 8088 chip. 256kB RAM and the upgraded 40 MB hard drive. Monochrome monitor. Bought in 1985 I believe. $1496 sounds right. Dot matrix Panasonic printer. My brother and mother had similar ones. Managed a 'Big' alumni database of 1000 names and got $17,000 donated for our fraternity with 'personalized' letters before anyone would suspect they were automated on our small sc.ale

RWebb · RWebb's Garage

CDC & DEC, PDP... - then VAX when it came out

or did you mean something along the lines of the hp 41C? or hp 67?

dan79brooklyn · 09-03-2009, 11:28 AM

Around the mid 80s our family got an Apple IIe.

I played a lot of California Games and Karateka on the green monitor!

Deschodt · 09-03-2009, 11:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LakeCleElum

TI 99-A: Cassette tape drive.

Games and I learned how to do some basic programing in DOS - I learned a lot on that thing.

ME too, remember PARSEC, the space shooter ?

DOS ? didn't know it could, I learned BASIC on that though !

Gogar · 09-03-2009, 12:07 PM

I still have my commodore 64. I try to play jumpman junior and kung Fu about once a month, just to remember where I came from.

As a little kid, I got "compute" magazine, and used to enter thousands of lines of code for the little games they would put in that magazine! What a boring little 12-year old kid.

legion · 09-03-2009, 12:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by notmytarga

Leading Edge with 8088 chip. 256kB RAM and the upgraded 40 MB hard drive. Monochrome monitor. Bought in 1985 I believe. $1496 sounds right. Dot matrix Panasonic printer. My brother and mother had similar ones. Managed a 'Big' alumni database of 1000 names and got $17,000 donated for our fraternity with 'personalized' letters before anyone would suspect they were automated on our small sc.ale

I brought an old dot-matrix Panasonic printer from the 80's with me to college. I had to use a driver for a similar (but not quite right) model to get the thing to print.

I remember finishing a term paper at 2 a.m. and it took it six hours to print 25 pages (it was literally printing about a line of text a minute). That sucker was LOUD too. I dumped the thing in the trash and went out and bought a bubble jet the next day (right when printers dropped below $100 for the first time).

Icemaster · Icemaster's Garage

Franklin Ace. Apple clone.

Pazuzu · 09-03-2009, 12:22 PM

Apple 2e, probably around 1979. borrowed from the school.
Then did programming on the first Mac, and worked on a windows interface for the IBM (before Windows 3.1 came out). also got to do some video editing with an Amiga 500. That was all in the summers of 85 and 86. all that was while working for the school district, so their computers.
Then I walked away from computers and programming for a while. Bought my first computer for grad school, 1995. Have owned 2 laptops and 1 desktop (and still have 2 of those 3) since then.

Only in the past year or so have I done anything at all with programing (my boss loves Fortran 77, so I'm learning that to keep him happy).

masraum · 09-03-2009, 12:30 PM

Jumpman for PCs

http://www.thehouseofgames.net/index.php?t=10&id=19

masraum · 09-03-2009, 12:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

Only in the past year or so have I done anything at all with programing (my boss loves Fortran 77, so I'm learning that to keep him happy).

We had to take a Fortran class when I was in College. I HATED that class. But then, I apparently don't have the correct mentality to be a programmer. Blech!

Joeaksa · 09-03-2009, 12:32 PM

Started working with computers during the steam years, on a IBM 360 with punch cards and so on.

Finally graduated to a Commodore then a Tandy. Oh the days when we got an external 10 meg hard drive instead of a 5.25 floppy!

Pazuzu · 09-03-2009, 12:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by masraum

We had to take a Fortran class when I was in College. I HATED that class. But then, I apparently don't have the correct mentality to be a programmer. Blech!

There's a reason I actively walked away from programming for almost 20 years...

However, I find that being able to toss together something in 30 minutes that lets me manipulate a dataset exactly the way I want to, instead of spending 3 days trying to figure out how to have our pre-made software do what I want...it's kinda nice. Anything beyond about 100 lines of code though, and I'd be dead in the water, I have no skills for such things.

legion · 09-03-2009, 12:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by masraum

We had to take a Fortran class when I was in College. I HATED that class. But then, I apparently don't have the correct mentality to be a programmer. Blech!

You just have to realize that when someone asks you to do something that they think is simple, there are really about six dozen undiscovered requirements that lie in situations they haven't thought about. You also have to realize that words like "always" and "never" are usually followed by a silent "except when..."

A good programmer anticipates these situations and brings them to light early.