What was your first experience with computers? Mine was an Apple Power Macintosh 6100/66. The first upgrade I was introduced to was a memory upgrade to play the original StarCraft. The game required 32MB of memory and I had 16MB of memory. I’m curious how other people got involved with computers!
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My grandparents bought me my first computer.
VIC-20
With Cassette Drive
and TV
I learned how to program by typing in the examples in the user manual. I didn’t really understand the text as much as the code.
Specs:
- MOS 6502 1.02 MHz
- 5k of ram, 3k usable for basic
- Graphics 176 x 184 3-bpp
- 22 x 23 char/line screen
I think this is ad that sold my grandparents on the idea of a computer
I then got a Super Expander cartage and this made things much better because it added actual graphic and sound commands to basic as well as added 3k more ram.
I was excited to be able to do all these cool new things.
I eventually got a Commodore 64 and Disk Drive and continued learning on that …
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It must have been about 1983 that TI decided to get out of the personal computer market and when they did all my relatives that worked at TI gave away computers for Christmas. TI was selling them to employees for about $35 for the TI 99/4A. Later I found a guy selling his expansion box, so I bought the entire set up with a 180K SSSD “flippy” drive. Later I made a friend named Mike Kennedy in Wichita Falls area where I lived and we started going to the Dallas First Saturday Computer Sidewalk sale every month. I eventually put together my own XT, then 386 and kept upgrading. Eventually in the 90’s I decided I probably wasn’t going to make much money on computers and concentrated on my job.
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My uncle had a TRS-80 Model I and I got my ass handed to me repeatedly by Sargon Chess. My middle school had an Apple II+ in the library and I started learning BASIC and modifying code they had. I sold 2 Atari 2600 game consoles and picked up aluminum cans to get to within $100 which my parent pitched in to get a TRS-80 Color Computer. I upgraded it through middle and high school to 64K, floppy drive, modem (OUCH! the phone bill for BBS use…) and more.
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I started as a 5 year old with windows 3.0, no clue what hardware we were running. Just remember booting the computer and often loosing interest before the machine had even fully booted. My parents loved this, as they would come by later use the computer and then turn it back off.
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I took “computer science” in high school, it was essentially “programming on the school district mainframe in BASIC.” A friend of my parents owned a business and wanted to use his TRS-80 to run a program called “Visi Calc” to do his books. (Visi Calc was one of the first spreadsheet programs). I learned it and set up some spreadsheets for him and trained him on it. When I joined the Army my job involved error-resolution on the personnel system using IBM punch cards. I learned to keypunch on an unforgiving “real-time” keypunch machine; when we upgraded to the ones that have a memory and let you review your card before punching, it was like magic.
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The school district where I worked had invested in a word processing system developed by Sperry-Univac called Sperrylink. Shortly after the rollout, Sherry introduced an IBM clone. I forget what they were called pre-XT (that was 286, right?) Our computer department decided to get ten pc’s to start, and threw out a request for proposals of how we would utilize said machine if we were chosen to be part of the inaugural ten. I was spending hours retyping testing results to turn into graphics for overhead transparencies for the testing administrator to use at board presentations. I could see that a computer could vastly improve the long-range file-sharing opportunities. Both the testing guy and I were chosen for the first group, and were soon trotting 5.25” floppies up and down the hall to each other.
Woo-hoo!
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Early 1970’s. Mainframe, DEC-10 and TSR-80 (tape player for storage) in school. Once out I got a Unix machine with 8 inch floppies and a 10 inch hard drive.
I feel old.
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I think we are…
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A Fortran 2 class at Tarleton State College (now University) in 1964. In 1968 I was not doing well in EE program at UTA so I quit and signed up for a six month programming course at Control Data Institute. Later worked for Control Data Corporation for 27 years.
I’m 73 and generally do not feel old.
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The computer before the IBM XT was the IBM PC
They both were 4.77mhz 8088 cpus
| Model name | Model # | Introduced | CPU | Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PC | 5150 | August 1981 | 8088 | Floppy disk or cassette system.[119] One or two internal floppy drives were optional. |
| XT | 5160 | March 1983 | 8088 | First IBM PC to come with an internal hard drive as standard. |
| XT/370 | 5160/588 | October 1983 | 8088 | 5160 with XT/370 Option Kit and 3277 Emulation Adapter |
| 3270 PC | 5271 | October 1983 | 8088 | With 3270 terminal emulation, 20 function key keyboard |
| PCjr | 4860 | November 1983 | 8088 | Floppy-based home computer, but also used ROM cartridges; infrared keyboard |
| Portable | 5155 | February 1984 | 8088 | Floppy-based portable |
| AT | 5170 | August 1984 | 80286 | Faster processor, faster system bus (6 MHz, later 8 MHz, vs 4.77 MHz), jumperless configuration, real-time clock |
| AT/370 | 5170/599 | October 1984 | 80286 | 5170 with AT/370 Option Kit and 3277 Emulation Adapter |
| 3270 AT | 5281 | June 1985[120] | 80286 | With 3270 terminal emulation |
| Convertible | 5140 | April 1986 | 80C88 | Microfloppy laptop portable |
| XT 286 | 5162 | September 1986 | 80286 | Slow hard disk, but zero wait state memory on the motherboard. This 6 MHz machine was actually faster than the 8 MHz ATs (when using planar memory) because of the zero wait states |
One friend had an Atari 400 while another had an Apple IIc. My parents bought me a Commodore VIC-20 and an accompanying tape drive. I learned BASIC from the user manual and various computer magazines.
I quickly outgrew the VIC and purchased a Commode 64, 1541 disk drive and the Commodore RGB monitor. I began learning more advanced programming in BASIC and even started to dabble in Assembly. Then I joined the Navy as Aviation Electronics Tech. My first job was supporting the “Computerized Automatic Test” station or CATIIID.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/navy/ntsp/CAT3D.htm
XT was a PC with a hard drive. Not yet a 286.
1970… 5th grade… line printer with an acoustic modem and paper tape that dialed into Irving school district mainframe. All you could do was program in BASIC or play a few BASIC games. I was hooked.
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https://www.google.com/search?q=vector+graphics+z80
None of the college professors knew how to use it so none of the students had permission to use it. During basketball games the computers were unsupervised. If the game was boring and my foosball buddy wasn’t around, I would work with it. Eventually I learned enough assembly to write simple programs and determine that the “graphics” was “character graphics” which required hand-coded assembly to be “animated”. Meh. Over-hyped marketing right in the name of the product.
I did manage to produce several useful tools for my father’s business using their new newfangled “BASIC” and a simple horse racing game complete with betting.
I know a lot of people have fond memories of this device, but all I have is memories of me spending hours trying, unsuccessfully, to program a balloon to float across the screen. That’s when I knew coding was not for me.
I remember going with my (then) boyfriend to a store across Preston Rd from Valley View Mall. They had a Timex computer on sale that he had his eye on. I convinced him that he would outgrow the Timex pretty fast, and he should consider something a bit more advanced. He settled on a Commodore 64. I think he may have convinced that balloon to float…
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My dad was schizo affective and worked a boring federal accounting job and was a hoarder. He located a few computers in dumpsters since he was the kind of guy to keep an eye out for those kinds of things. I obtained some kind of beige IBM unit that ran BASIC. I installed windows 3.1 on it from scratch and fooled around on MS DOS.
later my dad had an aquaintance that did IT and taught me how to build a computer largely hands off just making sure i didn’t break anything. a 233 MHz windows 95 BEAST with 32 megabytes of RAM. It had redhat linux something or other.
Then in high school I got really into MUDs via Telnet. The school wisely blocked that site from their firewall. So I and had to leave my linux machine running so I could log into my home machine from school (hand writing down the IP address) and then proxy out to my MUD from there. I left the linux machine open with altavista running on a website due to the automatic refresh keeping me online.
I was in College at The Ohio State University in the mid 1970’s studying Electrical Engineering. The College was starting up a new curriculum to be called Computer Engineering and the staff was trying to get us Electrical Engineering students to transfer into the new program. Since I was approaching graduation I decided to stay where I was and get a BSEE Degree versus the unknown (at that time) BSCE Degree. I figured that employers would not know what a BSCE Degree was since it was so new.
The first computer I owned was a DEC PDP-8, I bought it off the College as surplus for around $50. It was a full sized desk with the computer mounted in a 19 inch equipment rack on the right side. The desk also had an IBM Selectric typewriter as my user interface which contained a paper tape reader on one side and a paper tape punch on the other side. I copied a Fortran Complier on paper tape from the College and I was ready to go. By the way, when they talk about a two pass compiler that meant I had to run the Fortran Compiler paper tape through the tape reader twice. Hence two passes.
So…as I look back in my successful career in Engineering I have used computers of one sort or another all the time. I can type faster then 60 words per minute using just 2 fingers and an occasional thumb, I never did learn to touch type. I know that because that old Selectric typewriter would garble the input if you typed faster than that.
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