OT: What was YOUR first personal computer?

DGates wrote on 10/25/2011, 4:57 AM

A Wang PC from Wal-Mart. Close to 20 years ago I think.

Followed by various brands, including Packard Bell, Compaq, HP and now Acer.

John_Cline wrote on 10/25/2011, 5:57 AM

"Geez...I'm old."

Apparently, we are all old! I'm 58. Man, the number "58" even looks old...

David Johns wrote on 10/25/2011, 7:51 AM

I had a Sinclair Spectrum 48K (the original version), must have been around 1983 or '84 I suppose. Ahh, very happy days, writing Z80 machine code by hand...

Followed at Uni by a Commodore Amiga 500 with PC/DOS-compatible Intel 8088 add-on board running at some phenomenal speed like ...er... 3 MHz I think (not a typo)

Cheers
Dave

rs170a wrote on 10/25/2011, 8:35 AM

Apparently, we are all old! I'm 58. Man, the number "58" even looks old...

John, 58 is young. Wait until you hit the big 6-0. Then you KNOW you're old :)

Mike

IAM4UK wrote on 10/25/2011, 8:38 AM

Zenith Z248, based on the IBM 286 CPU. Two 5.25" FDD and a 10MB Winchester drive.
About five years later I bought a 486-DX33, then started upgrading it piecemeal...I've been building my own computers since then--typically using intel processors, but occasionally AMD.

cbrillow wrote on 10/25/2011, 9:01 AM

"The first microcomputer I programmed at all was an RCA single-board computer, 1200-series CPU I think. It had 256 bytes of RAM. "

Actually, this sounds like a (sorta) commercial version of the COSMAC Elf that I mentioned, that featured an 1802 RCA microprocessor and 256 bytes of memory.

And to think I had trouble writing a program long enough to use 256 bytes at first!

riredale wrote on 10/25/2011, 1:46 PM

John Cline, enjoyed hearing about your story regarding New Mexico.

We're about the same age. I worked for Apple from 80 to 86, met Jobs several times (I was a Sales Rep in SoCal selling to the Fortune 1000 and universities, did poorly with the corporations but spectacularly well with the schools). Had one semi-serious argument with Jobs after he was booted from Apple; he was formulating plans for his next machine (eventually coalesced into the Next computer) and was planning to take dozens of key personnel from Apple. I was still at Apple and urged him not to get into a legal fight that would drag on him for years. He eventually took a couple of guys and made nice with the lawyers.

Smart, hyperactive, blunt, not a very "kind" sort of person. Fathered a child and then abandoned it for years. Steve was only 1/3 of the brilliance behind early Apple, the other two being Woz and Mike Markkula, the money/marketing guru. Didn't see the 60 Minutes piece. Caused his own death by defying the doctors and family when his cancer was first found until it was too late.

My first PC? A Burroughs 206, in high school in 1967. It had been donated to the school by Burroughs as a write-off and was a dinosaur even then (thousands of vacuum tubes, drum memory, filled an entire good-sized room). The school spent a fortune on electricity to run it and another fortune on the a/c to keep it cooled. Father Steichen developed a fantastic sense of knowing which vacuum tube(s) had burned out every morning that he would power it up; he'd open up a bay, pull out a module the size of a large paperback book that had 4 flipflops (8 tubes) on it, plug in a replacement, and be ready to go.

Yeah, it was a "personal" computer because he let me in when they just set it up and I had time to kill over the holidays, so I had it for myself. I wrote a machine-language routine that would compute the height of a rocket launch given 4 variables, a simple algorithm that I'd seen somewhere. Load, add, store, loop, multiply, pause. Great stuff. Paper tape reader wasn't running, so I had to enter the commands by hand by flipping toggles.

First real "personal" computer was an HP-85 borrowed from the company. I wrote in Basic a blackjack-playing routine testing simple strategies. First real PC was an Apple II.

EDIT: Sorry I got off-topic; John's mentioning of the early days and Jobs got me going.

Laurence wrote on 10/25/2011, 1:58 PM

> Sinclair ZX81.

Vegas 11 doesn't even run on mine. Must be a lousy program. ;-)

MarkHolmes wrote on 10/25/2011, 2:15 PM

The Timex Sinclair 1000. Standard memory? 2K... but expandable to 64K. Wow have times changed.

Laurence wrote on 10/25/2011, 2:44 PM

My first computer was a two layer circuit board that was part of a PAIA Electronics modular synthesizer. All programming was done in hex code and I never got beyond entering in other peoples programs. Next was a Timex Sinclair, a Commodore 64, an IBM 8088, 80286, 80284 ... a G4 Macbook, then back to PCs after having no end of problems with the Mac.

In retrospect, I wish I had just put all that money into either Intel, Microsoft, or Apple stock. I wouldn't know as much, but I'd be a lot richer. ;-)

Chienworks wrote on 10/25/2011, 3:21 PM

I remember back in the early 80's writing printer & interface card drivers for Apple ][ DOS 3. The college's computer lab had about 20 different kinds of printers with about a dozen different interface cards connecting them. We wanted our software to be able to print text & graphics the same on any printer through any card without having to have the software know any of the printer details, so i set myself the task of coding drivers in assembly language with a common API. I allowed myself 208 bytes for the printer driver and 48 bytes for the card driver. My API exposed text methods for font sizes, styles, and quality and graphics methods with adjustable resolution, density, and scaling. It even allowed color and page orientation for those printers that supported it.

The latest HP driver i downloaded for my new HP7000 officejet was a 237MB self-extracting .zip file. More than ONE MILLION times the file size of the drivers i had written.

We've come so far. I wish we could go back!

Larry Clifford wrote on 10/25/2011, 3:37 PM

I think the first computer I owned was an IBM XT-286, w/2 5.25 floppy dirves. I think the HD was 10 MB. I am not sure because it was so long ago. Retail was $4000, but I got it for $2000 because the company I worked for bought them at a discount and wrote programs for credit unions, then sold them to the credit union.

The first computer I worked on was an IBM 305 RAMAC mainframe in the US Army in France from 1960-1963. It was all relays and plug boards, held 200 insturctions on a drum. The data was on extremely large disks that was so slow you could see the arm move. Adding 2 numbers took 1/3 second, 1/2 second if you wanted to know if the result was +, -, or zero. I worked on mainframes for 43 years, primarily as a system programmer.

Steve Mann wrote on 10/25/2011, 3:53 PM

My first PROGRAM was a stack of punch cards containing a Fortran-II calculation.

amendegw wrote on 10/25/2011, 4:26 PM

"My first PROGRAM was a stack of punch cards containing a Fortran-II calculation."I remember writing Fortran II code on an IBM 1130. It was about as "non-structured" as you could get.

"IF" statements were conditional "GO TOs". If the argument was negative you'd go to the first statement number, zero the second statement number & positive the third. Something like this:

Wow! Was that a formula for some beautiful spaghetti code!! Thank goodness they improved on Fortran as the years when on.

...Jerry

JohnnyRoy wrote on 10/25/2011, 4:38 PM

Apple ][[/img]

My first personal computer was an Apple ][+ with 64KB of memory and two 160KB 5 1/4" floppy drives. It cost me $3,200 with a C-Itoh dot matrix printer. I later added a Z-80 card so that I could run CP/M on it. I know because I still own it today! ;-)

~jr

rraud wrote on 10/25/2011, 6:51 PM

I'm a late bloomer, started on a Mac SE. 20MB HD.

Ros wrote on 10/25/2011, 7:19 PM

I remember my uncle having a TRS-80 and browsing the Radio Shack catalog which most have been archived on this site:

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/computer.html

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com

Rob

Vidmar wrote on 10/26/2011, 2:40 PM

1985 Franklin Ace 2100 (Apple IIe clone). One of the nicest Apple clones that was out there. Had to sell it to pay for college tuition one semester.

http://oldcomputers.net/ace2100.html

Vidmo

Editguy43 wrote on 10/26/2011, 4:34 PM

I remember my mom would drop me off at RaidoShack so I could play with the TRS 80 while she shopped, (Mary the owner was really cool like that)

Then around 1991 I got my own computer a 286 16mhz (that when benchmarked ran at 20mhz) woo hoo a fast one, it had 1 meg of ram, 10 meg hard drive, and both size floppys in a minitower. with a 14" RGB color monitor.

I remember when I upgraded to 4 megs of ram cost me $450 it was worth it though I then could put wordperfect in a "ram drive" not that was speed.

Man I was the king of the world till my friend showed up with a 386 (poor me)

Man things have really changed, I wish I would have kept all the motherboards I have had over the years and hung them on the wall in age order, I think that would be kinda neat.

Paul B

Chienworks wrote on 10/26/2011, 5:51 PM

"and both size floppys in a minitower."

Wow! You were able to fit both 5.25" and 8" drives in a minitower? Cool!

;-)

amendegw wrote on 10/26/2011, 6:02 PM

While we're traveling via the way-back machine, does anyone remember playing the Scott Adams Adventure games? - Available on Cassette tape.

...Jerry

TheRhino wrote on 10/26/2011, 8:02 PM

Zork!
"West of House.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here..."

LarryP wrote on 10/26/2011, 9:00 PM

Godbout S-100 CPM-80 and CPM-86. 56k of CMOS memory!

Still in the basement but not for long.

Larry

JHendrix wrote on 10/26/2011, 9:18 PM

Apple Newton