Digital Art Zone

Well, my first computer was an Acorn Atom - which was contemporary with the ZX80.

I’ll show my age and say that my family’s first computer was Windows 95 and my first computer of my own was XP.

Oh boy does this thread take me back… lmao…

The first computer I ever got to play with when I was about 8 was an atari 400, I remember Tandy and the COCO2 and can remember having to use game code books to program in the games you wanted to play… I remember playing my first ever 3d game… Dungeons of Dagorath… was all wireframe graphics… but was 3d and actually had 1st person view… lmao

I learned programing in Highschool on a Unisys Icon system and I remember the big stir when the 286 came along… The year I started college, they’d just upgraded to the (then) state-of-the-art 386’s and win 3.1

*Edit* it was a huge and I mean HUGE deal when windows switched from being a dos promptt operation to a full fledged interface…

I remember in highschool in 90’s, one of my friends said that she couldn’t live without spellcheck. I was wondering how she could spellcheck with DOS. Everyone was using their new PC’s while i was still using our Tandy EX1000. It wasn’t until 96 when we finally got windows 95.

Ah, the good old days (1968).  Back when a removable “floppy” disk was nearly the size of a modern spare tire (14 inches) weighed several pounds and held a whole megabyte of data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Disk_Cartridge_2315_type.jb.jpg

Avid C64 gammer here.  Bought my first one when I was 10 I think.  Had a Vic20 before that.  A friend of mine gave me a disc box full of games that i just loved to play.

Skiriki - 08 September 2012 07:46 AM

Sean Martin - 08 September 2012 07:06 AM

Oh, you kids and your hippity-hoppity music. I remember when making an image actually meant using this flimsy stuff called… uhm… oh, right! Paper.

You mean that stuff which doesn’t have ctrl-z and you gotta use… hmmm… eraser, right?

I was also used for a now long forgotten art called handwriting…

Skiriki - 08 September 2012 07:46 AM

Sean Martin - 08 September 2012 07:06 AM

Oh, you kids and your hippity-hoppity music. I remember when making an image actually meant using this flimsy stuff called… uhm… oh, right! Paper.

You mean that stuff which doesn’t have ctrl-z and you gotta use… hmmm… eraser, right?

It was also used for a now long forgotten art called handwriting…

Ooo, I’ll play!

Our first computer was a Kaypro.  I was 4.  I played space invaders on it.  Later we had one of those TI consoles that you could put game cartridges into and play Moon Patrol and TI Invaders, which was like space invaders but with color.  There was also Hunt the Wumpus, but I think it was technically impossible to win that game. 

I did my first word processing on some knockoff IBM thing with a black screen and green text.  We were ecstatic when we saw our first Windows 3.1 machine handed down by my uncle.  From there we pretty much graduated through OSs like everyone else.  I didn’t have real internet access until college.

I came to Poser/DAZ late, though - all the way into the XP era,when V4 was just coming out. :D I did my first full new build from parts in hopes of being able to play TES IV: Oblivion on it.  I did, but ouch the load times.  Skyrim is much more efficient on any system I’ve played it on.

Taozen - 08 September 2012 07:28 PM

It was also used for a now long forgotten art called handwriting…

You scare me with these oldthink ideas. *shudder* Handwriting. That painfully slow way of expressing my thoughts. With limited editing capabilities. Poor cut-paste, and let’s not talk about erasing there either.

Skiriki - 08 September 2012 07:42 PM

Taozen - 08 September 2012 07:28 PM

It was also used for a now long forgotten art called handwriting…

You scare me with these oldthink ideas. *shudder* Handwriting. That painfully slow way of expressing my thoughts. With limited editing capabilities. Poor cut-paste, and let’s not talk about erasing there either.

Not to mention the terrible font selection.  It could take YEARS to install another one.

OK - OF here.

My first ‘puter was an IBM 7094 Mod II at Purdue - I worked second shift weekends hanging tapes and doing some Fortran programming on the side.

I held out until the IBM PC came out - and those first gen 5.25 inch floppy drives were single-side, 160 KB. And cost $540 each. And the 300 baud Smartmodem, with a hack that let you run it at 450 baud . . .

I just got the monochrome screen - the color graphics just wasn’t all that good early on. Played Colossal Cave (aka Dungeon) and Zork (1 and 2) on it, used it for writing mostly - and some programming. Picked up a used Atari 800 XL for game play and then didn’t play that many games - Age of Adventure and Wizard’s Crown, for the most part. Seems that even then, on systems of that age, my eye-hand co-ordination sucked!

And I’ve been on the upgrade treadmill ever since - dual-sided half-height floppy drives, dual-sided half-height quad density floppy drives, 30 MB hard drive, faster modems, more memory, change to an XT, upgrade to a 386, bigger svga monitor, bigger hard drives, windows, ran a one-line BBS for a couple of years, faster system, more memory, bigger hard drives - and still bigger hard drives - and yet again larger hard drives (did I say anything about even larger hard drives?). There was a brief side-trip through OS/2 and then back on the MS-Windows treadmill.

Professionally, much the same thing - IBM to Burroughs to Honeywell to IBM and then IBM - 360-DOS to MCP-V to GCOS-3 to MVS (and the upgrade treadmill - 4381-II MVS to MVS-XA to a 3090-J and then a 9672-R2 and MVS-ESA, then IBM SP-Frames running AIX) with side trips trough Raytheon PTS-1200 key-to-disk and Honeywell DPS-6 running GCOS-6 (almost exactly 100% not quite UNIX); dial-up lines to leased lines to statistical multiplexers and X.25 packet-switching, SNA, and finally TCP/IP on high-speed leased lines.

And now that I’ve retired I look back at all that and wonder - just what was so bad about pointed sticks and clay slabs?

I first learned to program (on punch cards, of course) in High School in the 70’s on an IBM 1130, which was obsolete before I was born—the school got it in the late 50’s when Sputnik scared the US into upping math and science funding in schools.

Our first home computer was a Franklin Ace—my brother chose it because it was upgradeable:  2K of RAM, but it had enough slots for 8K.  The tape-recorder cassettes they used typically had two copies of each program, as the error rate was awfully high.  And you had to listen to it for the sound later popularized by modems to know when to plug it into the computer.

SickleYield - 08 September 2012 07:47 PM

Skiriki - 08 September 2012 07:42 PM

Taozen - 08 September 2012 07:28 PM

It was also used for a now long forgotten art called handwriting…

You scare me with these oldthink ideas. *shudder* Handwriting. That painfully slow way of expressing my thoughts. With limited editing capabilities. Poor cut-paste, and let’s not talk about erasing there either.

Not to mention the terrible font selection.  It could take YEARS to install another one.

And some were almost unreadable, particularly the fonts Scrawl and Henscratch.

Skiriki - 08 September 2012 07:42 PM

Taozen - 08 September 2012 07:28 PM

It was also used for a now long forgotten art called handwriting…

You scare me with these oldthink ideas. *shudder* Handwriting. That painfully slow way of expressing my thoughts. With limited editing capabilities. Poor cut-paste, and let’s not talk about erasing there either.

...with my arthritis, my handwriting has become about as legible as a physician’s prescription note for the pharmacist.

The first “productivity” oriented computer I actually “owned” was an old 12 mHz 80286 with 4MB RAM a 20MB HDD (that took up a good part of the case interior), a DD/DS 5.75” floppy drive, MSDOS 4.01, and an Amber screen Monochrome monitor (20 MB, how would I ever fill that?). I usually used it for WordPerfect 5.5 and Lotus 1-2-3 as well as connecting to various local BBS’s.with an old Intel 144/144e Smartmodem (which I still have in a box somewhere).