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This thread takes me back.-
Started with a TRS80 (Model1)
Then a Commodore 64, Atari 800, Amiga 2000 and finally a PC
Was on a flight (BOAC) from Australia to NewZealand when they announced that the American had landed on the moon. A great cheer went up from the passengers.
...so did I.
The only thing missing is a 48K Apple ][ with dual external floppy drives for the sysop station.
..+1
My first one was a C128D - wow, a disk drive!
Look, no cassettes!
Floppy Disks ... remember them?
...hmm people were in school in July?
Mine was in FORTRAN as well, on a university IBM 360. With a chain-drive printer in a sound-deadening box. When the chain broke, we found out that the box wasn't shrapnel-proof.
One of my fondest memories is of watching a Jock learn just how fierce a geek can be when deliberately tripped while carrying a 12" stack of punch cards.
Ahhh, how I don't miss the days when Big Blue was king!
I had one too - plus a C16 and a Plus/4. Think all I got left now is this book - great book as such but code listings were full of errors (maybe intended?) so it was learning the hard way, which was quite useful actually.
I still have my Sinclair. It was working the last time I used it; which admittedly was several decades ago, but it's been kept safely stored away all that time. And I do remember watching the Moon landing; I would have been 10 at the time.
I still remember the original promos, when they reckoned you could run a power station with it . . .
(mind you, "Ram Pack Wobble" might explain some of the outages we've had round here lately!)
Cluster? nah, just the one.
I still occasionally use my Amiga.
I sold my ZX81, Vic 20, Spectrum 48k, C64, Amiga 500, to fund the next one.
After the Amiga 4000 broke and was returned repaired poorly I got a 1500 which still works and has been upgrade to ROM 4.1. Oh and a 20MB hard drive - so much roooooooooommmmm. :)
You know, I was about to make a nostalgic reference and then the thought came to me... threads like this are probably why DAZ thinks we are all a bunch of senile old farts who they hope will just shut up and eat their prune pudding (a warrior's pudding) and nod off... But you know, back in the old days we didn't have fancy computers and futuristic 3D figures... You just held your breath real long and squinted while a friend hit you on the head with shovel... Ah, the colors... And you didn't have to "connect" to nothin. Why is this forum so bright? Turn off some lights, electricity doesn't grow on trees...
Hu?.... Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.... Frrrrrap!... Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....
It's true! Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo cuuuuuuuuutttttttttttteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!
My first paying job was doing programs for the other students in my BASIC-Plus class (I was in High-school, but it was ON a university campus, so we got to take college courses for HS credit!) who were only there to satisfy the computer requirement. I'd already learned FORTRAN, BASIC, Cobol, and 6502 Machine code. It was funny, because when a student in the class asked the teacher a question and she didn't know the answer? She'd ask me. In class.
Gods, FORTRAN was wonderful....until you had to do string processing. Ugh. FORMAT statements still haunt me from those days....
Tripping someone carrying a card stack? That jock would learn just how dangerous geeks could be really fast where I was. His records would suddenly change in the computers, indicating that he was actually a Poetry major, with a minor in Mathematics, and that he'd failed all his Phys Ed courses. And his credit cards would have all been mysteriously cancelled......
The first computer I ever had was an Amstrad CPC464, complete with tape cassette drive and 64kb (count 'em!) internal RAM. I eventually 'upgraded' to a CPC6128, which had a 3-inch floppy drive instead and a dizzying 128kb internal RAM. This proved to be a pain in the rear end for reasons I can't even remember now, and I contendedly went back to the 464. I absolutely loved that thing.
I was always more of a coder than a gamer, but I did have a weakness for playing Paperboy. I also liked the Amstrad version of Scrabble, which would let you get away with absolutely anything...
'I challenge your play. VPXJZEEZ - are you sure? [Y/N]'
'[Y]'
I think I learned quite early on that a computer is only as clever as the person pushing the buttons :)
ZX81: One whole kilobyte (and half of that was used for the screen)! You had the choice of writing a SMALL program OR seeing the output!
This should be renamed to the nostalgia thread or something like that. I still miss the "hobby" feel of the Amiga -- some systems come close, but none have surpassed it. Maybe if BeOS had taken off.....
I actually worked with computers before they became cheap enough to own. Not counting some data terminals, here's the first one that I operated -
Well, as long as we've drifted into complete computer nostalgia... the first computer I ever saw close up and in person was about 1965, I was a junior in High School and had qualified for a two-week series of seminars during the summer at Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY) and they proudly showed us their computer. It was programmed with punched paper tape and would play "blackjack" on a teletype. Ooh... power.... Also saw my first chemoluminescence demonstration by Dr. Henry Eyring* there. He created a whole 500 ml beaker full of what we would now call GloStick juice. Fun two weeks for a 16 year old geek.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Eyring_(chemist)
I have an Ohio Scientific C2 with 8" floppies. It can run a version of Adventure, AKA Collossal Cave. (You're in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.)
I have an IBM 3270 AT/GX with a 75 lb monitor. It can boot SYS5 Unix and run Valid GED (a schematic entry package). The "graphics adapter" is in a separate chassis almost as big and heavy as the AT system unit. Only IBM could build such a dinosaur...
I also have a Mac G3 blue-and-white for no particularly good reason.
It does accumulate if you let it. I suspect that 360-20 ended up at the bottom of the Chesapeake bay, where the Government used to dispose of a lot of old tech. A bunch of the older stuff my last company had went to this guy's collection - ihttp://www.trailingedge.com/index.html ; it's a pretty incredible selection of older gear
OMG me too!
I miss my Amigas so much to this day and the Stereo Sid editor on my C64's with the second SID chips.
Nuts? There were several online services outside the 'web' and one, Portal, was the gateway I used to get on the 'net before the browser made the web that we know today. Compuserve was too expensive, but I was a member of QLink, PeopleLink, and GEnie and my Joe was on Delphi as well. And we continued well into the nineties. The services died off one-by-one. Even after I got on the web from my PC in '94, I was still using my C64 to access QLink and Joe kept it up even longer than I did. QLink finally closed its doors to concentrate on AoL. And even in the late nineties some companies hadn't gotten on the 'net yet. I remember having to BBS to get an updated driver for some piece of hardware I had.
Now thats one I can still find... It's in the upstairs hall closet... Along with the Alps wax/foil printer I used to make product box mock ups.
I remember agonising over whether to go for a VIC-20 or hold out for the C64. (I held out!).
At uni we had a room with a dozen 32K PETs, with external intelligent twin floppy inits and dot matrix printers (over IEEE-488). In those days you could buy 5 1/4 inch floppies singly (340 kilobytes per side!), about £3 each ($5?) I guess that cemented me going down the C64/Amiga route rather than the Speccy/Amstrad one.
We did have access to the university's ICL 2904 and 2960 mainframes, but since you had to trek over to the maths campus and back again the next day for the results, we hated using them!
I think the first computer I ever used was either a Vic-20 ot a TRS-80. My Dad used to bring the TRS-80s home rom school over the summer (he taught middle and high school math). These had floppy drives in them (2 IIRC), unlime the tape drives most people weere stuck with. The first computer my Dad bought us was a C64, which was repalced with the one that looked the the C128. I had a 1581 3.5" floppy drive that was prone to overheatingm but damn, copying those SSI gold box games over to 3.5" floppies was so much faster (plus no swapping disks out or flipping them). I did our high school newspaper using GeoPublish and GeoWorks. When the 1581 overheated, I had to use a hex editor to fix the filesystem info enough to make the disk useable.
Later on a I had an Amiga 500 with a couple floppy drives, and then an Amiga 1200, with am external hard drive with a couple hunred megs andc an iomega Zip drive that hooked up to the extrnal SCSI port I had added (I also had I think an '030 chip added). Oh man, those were the days!! I used to play around with POV on there. Lots music mods of course. Anyone remember Photgenics or FInal Writer? Of course, there was DeluxePaint. I liked V, but it was buggy. Actually knew a bit of REXX. Just a bit. Anyway, probably not a surprise I went into IT.
There was a "fun" factor back then that just isn't around anymore. Even o Mac and Linux. I think the Amiga was the all-around do-it-all hobby computer, and you could still get in under the hood and poke around. Everything is so much more complicated these days that the equivalents (e.g. Mac OS X, Linux) do not really compare. Or maybe Ihave rose tinted glasses on....
While I probably CAN remember it, I was a little too young to understand what all the fuss was about; I was about 11 MONTHS old at the time. :)
Don't forget some Amigas and Lightroom did the cgi for Babylon 5 tv series and Sequest DSV. It was so awesome. :) Seems like so long ago, yet really not so far away!
My mother has been around for so much. She started programming in the 60s with cards, she quit work to have me (1971), and then 15 or so years later went back to school, retrained, and went back to the SAME COMPANY and worked until about 8 years ago.
As an aside, it's hard to explain shifting careers to a woman whose worked at pretty much one employer her entire life.
Another cool thing: I was on a plane and chatting about the space program and a woman leaned over and told us she had worked on one of the Apollo 11 control systems. We shared a laugh at how big the things were for what they did.
My dad worked on the Apollo missions doing moment of inertia calculations. He said he'd start the "calculator" on Friday night and, if he was lucky, it'd be done by the time he finished his morning coffee on Monday. :) As nor me, I never owned a VIC20, but I do have a Commodore 64 with a cassette reader AND a floppy drive. It still works, too!