Your first computer

Mine was a Texas Instruments TI-4.... I didn't own it, but my boss at the time
let me take it home for several months. After that, I had a Commodore 64,
and later added another, with 1541 floppy drive and DUAL MONITORS!! Ok...
one monitor per computer, no relation... but I thought it was cool After that
it's a blur ... I had SO MANY computers over the years. I didn't actually ever
buy an IBM-Compatible until 2003 - every computer prior - 8088, 286, 386, 486,
Pentium I, Pentium II - ALL built myself.

But I'm a bit of a geek and LOVE those old computers. The one you have in
the photo looks like a "mid" 486 machine... might have been a late 386... but
certainly from that era. The monitor is a bit of a mystery... looks IBM monochrome,
probably amber, not green, phosphor... at least that's what it looks like to me. The
box looks IBM too... so most likely it was an IBM or VERY close "clone" that tried to
look the part.

What programs did you run on it?

Jedi

 

No pictures, but mine was a pentium 100 and it was a monster in it's time!

I can remember enjoying dial up speed in my dorm room and waiting for pictures of cars to download one line at a time!!!!

 

Sinclair ZX81 with cassette tape drive. (Used my 13" B&W TV as a monitor)

 

AST (IBM-based) 286 with 40MB HD running MS-DOS -- and weighed about 200 lbs!

 

TI 99/4 (not the /4a) in 1979

 

Commodore VIC-20 w/ cassette drive. I learned how to program BASIC on it.

Michael.

 

IBM XT. My mother worked at a law office and they were upgrading to newer machines with Windows (the XT was loaded with DOS).



Today I use a 27" quad-core i7 iMac ... slightly different, them.

 

can't find pictures or details. mid 70's; a RadioShack home computer game/computer - had a hex keypad for entering code, and a grid of LED's to light up per programming. could kinda play tic-tac-toe as I recall, and program the lights to cascade in different patterns.

Followed by a handheld racing game, of 3 lanes of LED's to race between, to make it to the top of the screen, also mid 70's.

atari 2600/apple 2+ with floppies - no tape here/.....

 

first computer I wrote software on was a Univac 1108 using a teletypewriter and a 300 baud acoustic coupled modem.

 

Technically... Intellivision master component.

Why my first? Because I worked on it to get it into production.
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Wow, a blazing fast 300 baud!

I'm dating myself, but I learned programming on a prototype RCA Spectra 70, remotely accessed using an old TTY with a 75 baud acoustic coupler.

Later, our computer club got an HP 2114B on loan from an HP salesman -- who figured that the school would have to upgrade when the kids learned how to hack their 2114.
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With access to the PDP-8s and -11s at work, it was a decade later that I finally opted for a home computer: a CoCo.
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Somewhere around here I have a first edition of the Kernighan and Pike Unix Programming manual.

 

mine was an Osborne mini computer. Dont know what model, but the monitor was joined at the hip with the computer!! This was in 1986 or so. It was already old then. Sold it for $75.00. I was so hard to even get programs for it at that time. It was considered as junk.....

 

My son and I built four HeathKit computers. The first one took every bit of two weeks to build. The wires came on spools - we had to make up each wiring harness. The monitor, obviously a monochrome, green, came in one box. We had to solder the ground wires to it, make up the wires that went to it. I believe (it's been a very long time now) that we even had to put the power supply together. The last of the four came with all of the wiring in it and all we had to do was click the various pieces together.

One of the early kits had a 300 baud acoustic modem - you plugged the modem into the computer, then took the handset from the phone and set it on top of the modem. You could hear it handshaking, then transferring the data.

This was all way before Windows and before MSDOS. I believe the early ones ran ZDOS which was the Zenith operating system. Before MSDOS, files saved on one computer could only be read on that brand of computer.

My first program for writing required that you put a carriage return at the end of each line. If you wanted to change from single spacing to double spacing, you had to go back through the document and add a carriage return at the end of each and every line. Memory in the early days was in terms of kbytes and storage was absolutely nothing compared to today's computers.

 

Mine was a Mac Plus. I got it in college and thought it was the coolest thing ever with it's black-and-white screen and dot matrix printer. I also was so thrilled that as a student I got a 50% discount from the college computer store and it was only half of the list price of $3500.

http://www.prepressure.com/images/prepress_history_macplus.jpg
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Atari 400, I remember after learning Basic at the summer computer camp I would attempt to write programs with it (& play games)
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Heh- You bunch of newbies.
10 geeks point for anyone who can tell me what this is and what language you used to program it.

50 geek points if you tell me how much memory it had.

And 100 geek points if you can write the code for "Hello World"
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Early code I learned was a simple screen saver.

RANDOMIZE TIMER
SCREEN 13
CLS
WHILE INKEY$=""
LET row%= INT(RND * 320)+ 1
LET col%= INT(RND * 200)+1
LET siz%= INT(RND * 100)
LET clr%= INT(RND * 255)+1
FOR t = 1 to 500
CIRCLE (row%, col%), siz%, clr%
NEXT t
CLS
WEND
CLS

 

With that keypad, you could only punch in Assembly language. (???)
Since Assembly is compact, 8 roms x 256, probably used all of 2K bytes total.
LOL, never took Assembly

 

- KIM-1, 6502 Assembly/Machine Language via keypad entry

- 1Kbyte RAM standard, expansion possible

- Depends on whether you were stuck with 6502 assembly or had Tiny Basic loaded (requiring the memory expansion and using the cassette port)

 

Since you know the Kim-1... there's a link in Silver (http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/showpost.php?p=139376994&postcount=53)
showing this one I sold a couple years ago. I got it for free, and sold it on
eBay for $2000, plus another $1000 for other Kim-1 stuff that came with it.
It was quite impressive. Since you don't have silver access, and the original
post in Silver was my own, here's a paste of the writeup that goes with
the picture below (just my own OP ... the rest you must be Silver to see).

And yes, it ran on Motorola Assembler - but THIS implementation came with
2 or 3 different "higher level" languages, including a BASIC interpreter, on tape,
hand keyed by the builder.

Jedi

"Here's an oldie I sold a couple summers ago... it's a MOS KIM-1 from 1976, in a FULL
implementation - full S100 16 card frame, homebuilt video driver, homebuilt printer
driver, and a bunch of other customizations. I didn't build it - I found it at a garage
sale in the "free box" in 2004 - took it home to find it ALL WORKED! Had 32 MB Ram
(a LOT in those days), with several dozen cassette tapes of programs - I tried many
of them and they all worked.

Sold it on eBay in 2007 for $2000!!, plus another $1000 for the original manuals
(The main buyer didn't need them - he had copies from the 'Net and didn't want to
pay the premium for originals). He currently has it up and running in his computer museum -
I stay in contact with him - great guy and it went to a great home.

Here's a history of this computer (not THIS box, just the CPU board):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

This old computer is now part of my Ferrari 328 GTS....

Jedi"

[tech note: turns out it's NOT an S100 buss but something different I don't recall]
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I still have mine and it still works. I fired it up on Sunday after it being in storage for over 13 years. I took this pic over the weekend.

RMX
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