Your First Computer - Page 2

hadaso · 17 May 2003, 08:00 AM

The first computer that I really owned was the poor Pentium MMX Toshiba laptop I bought in 1997. The second one is the pentium3 500MHz on the other end of this table. Well... my wife had a PC-XT compatible withh 8088 processor that she brought with her, so perhaps I could say I owned half of it since we got married

I almost never used it myself.

My brother had a PC-XT that I used in the 80's both to program in Turbo Pascal, and also as a word processor (and flight simulator, and to play all those games, such as Digger, Round 42, ...).

But the first computer I used was the Golem B in Weizmann Institute of Science (when I was 15 years old), and then later the IBM 360 they had there. The Input was a punched card reader. The output was a line printer. The programming language was Fortran. The game was Adventure (the original one, on the IBM, after they started connecting interactive terminals to the computer).

injinuity · 17 May 2003, 05:24 PM

Hey Turbo Pascal.... lord I loved fiddling with it... that was the first language that I learned... mind you once you get Pascal right everything else seems much more simpler..... I miss turbo pascal tho..

Jinu Johnson

**psalzer** · 18 May 2003, 12:48 AM

The first computer that was in our house was a Compaq thing that my husband used to bring home from work. I don't remember exactly what it was called, but it was about the size of a coffee table. Then there was a 286 for a while and we didn't get online until the Pentium 75. With 8 MB of RAM no less. We were flying! At my new job, which is with a non -profit organzation the computer at my work station was a 133 when I got there. And they have a dial-up connection - not that I get a chance to go online except for work related stuff anyway - but that brought back memories. Happily the 133 died in short order and has been replaced by a 233 with a bit more RAM. Big difference. Now at least you can run two applications at once without freezing up too often.

mike1977 · 18 May 2003, 01:42 PM

Apple II+

chap · 18 May 2003, 03:39 PM

C64 (wonderful!)

Jessm · 18 May 2003, 04:25 PM

Atari with no HD, but ext. disk drive.

Loved to play Frogger, Pacman, Galaxian, etc, etc.

Jessica

**gpdoyon** · 18 May 2003, 10:41 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by injinuity
Hey Turbo Pascal.... lord I loved fiddling with it... that was the first language that I learned... mind you once you get Pascal right everything else seems much more simpler..... I miss turbo pascal tho..

Jinu Johnson

Hey, I learned to program first in Turbo Pascal as well!!

I LOVED Turbo Pascal and it's very structured, type checked environment. Eventually, after going through dBase, Foxpro for DOS/Win, Turbo Assembler I got to Delphi, the "grown up" version of Pascal. Loved Delphi.

- Gerry

mklose · 19 May 2003, 07:25 AM

My dad bought a used C64 for me for my 8th birthday, actually two weeks before it.

He of course also wanted to see how it worked, so he gave it to me, but did not give me any of the games that came with it.

That is when I went through the user guide and learnt Basic and how to program in it.

Problem was, I was the only one with a C64, all the other people in my class at primary school (I lived in the UK at that time) all the others had a ZX Spectrum. Wow, the "Speccy" even had a circle command and commands to draw lines. The C64 had none of that!!!
While the C64 had a much better graphics chip, you had to be able to code machine code to use it. That I didn't learn though until 2-3 years later (but Z80 assembly, I never learnt 6502).

Any of you remember: FOR n=1 TO 80: CIRCLE n,n,n: NEXT N
on the speccy?

Well, at about 8 1/2 I got myself a ZX spectum, which like a year later or so got upgraded to a Plus (better keyboard), eventually I even had a mouse.
AMX Art Studio, wow.

Best Poke for the ZX Spectrum?
POKE 35899,0
Now who knows what that poke does for which game??? hehe.

My spectrum was great, I wrote accounting programs for it to keep track of my pocket money, but the best thing I ever did where I even go like "WOW!!" today is a database with configurable fields with different datatypes, searching, etc.. I wrote that when I was 11!!

It was based on the database we used
in school back then to enter all the data for the "Dooms Day" project, where every primary school in the UK was involved in to gather data. Later this data was put onto two huge laser disks. I wish I could get that somewhere on CDROM. That Database ran on an Acorn BBC.

Another cool thing I wrote was a logo interpreter when I was 16. It was cool, could handle local variables in subroutines, evaluate expressions, it worked great!. The best thing about it was that it used EGA, and you could switch screens using hotkeys, like source view and output or split-screen mode was also possible. It even featured a debugger!!! (BTW: It was written in guess what? Turbo Pascal!! (5.0).

But somehow I lost the source code in a hard disk crash.. Grrrrrrrrrrrr!
I was so mad.
Reason for writing that was because we were forced to use a really crappy one that worked in CGA only at school.

Anyway, C64->ZX Spectrum->ZX Spectrum+->ZX Spectrum 128K -> 8088 -> 80286-16 -> 80386-40DX ->80486-66 ->80486-166-> Pentium-100 (dual processing machine) -> Pentium-200MHz -> Intel Celeron 300 MHz (ran on 450) -> IBM LAPTOP 380Z (Pentium II 266) -> Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop (Pentium 4M, 1.7GHz).

I had 16MB of ram in my 386 already, wow did it go fast, especially for DTP, I did the school paper with it. The program we used ran under Windows 2.1 I think it was, but we only used Windows 2.x for a few weeks because we quickly upgraded to 3.0 which was brand new at the time.

almost 21 years of computing and programming...

I'm getting old! LOL.

ewal · 19 May 2003, 08:57 PM

Huh - this thread brings back lots of memories.

First actual owned computer was a Spec 16k and then a 8088 with twin 5 1/4 floppies with 640k RAM - sometime early 80's I think. Upgraded that machine with second hand 10mb hardcard - wow - at first I did not know what to do with all the extra space! Then got a CGA monitor - way cool!

But first real computer experience was some word processor running C/PM. Use to hook that machine up to a dedicated service (Dun & Bradstreet) via a 300baud accoustic coupler. Then work upgraded the machine to an IBM 286 with 640k ram and 20meg H/D - I remember the IT manager saying that should last for many years!

As part of that package we also had a 1200 modem. Somewhere with that package I hooked up to JANET (Joint Academic Network) and via JANET into the Internet - as was then. Think that was 1983 - so have been cruising the internet for two decades now.

cheers
Edward

robert@fm · 20 May 2003, 04:32 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by mklose
Best Poke for the ZX Spectrum?
POKE 35899,0
Now who knows what that poke does for which game??? hehe.

Pray tell.

Best user-induced crash for the 48K Spectrum (works great on emulators as well, doesn't work on 128K models):  RANDOMIZE USR 3616

DrStrabismus · 20 May 2003, 08:59 PM

Tangerine Microtan 65 (around 1982). It came as a bare circuit board and a bag of components.

It was the end of the era where woodwork was an important home-computing skill.

sterdeus · 21 May 2003, 01:27 AM

I didnt realize 8088's did so well, it seems like everyone owned one including my family, an Epson 8088 (yes Epson used to make computers!), then we moved on to a 486 dx/2 66, PII 350, and now a P4 2.53. But the first computer I ever touched was, I believe, to be a Unix based one back in 1986 in elementary school where I used to play Gertrude Puzzle. But I mainly remember playing Winter Games and Test Drive on my friends Commodore 64, also Jumpman and Riverboat Rescue on my uncle's Apple.

admiralu · 21 May 2003, 03:40 AM

I am still waiting for my first. I finally found an affordable used computer place that carries good Dells. I should hopefully have my first later this summer! A computer major with no computer!

mklose · 21 May 2003, 07:02 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by robert@fm
Pray tell.

Best user-induced crash for the 48K Spectrum (works great on emulators as well, doesn't work on 128K models):  RANDOMIZE USR 3616

Infinite lives for one of the best games ever: Jet Set Willy.

I remember that we were talking about that game for weeks in school about new rooms that we had found etc...

mklose · 21 May 2003, 07:23 AM

Quote:

First actual owned computer was a Spec 16k and then a 8088 with twin 5 1/4 floppies with 640k RAM - sometime early 80's I think. Upgraded that machine with second hand 10mb hardcard - wow - at first I did not know what to do with all the extra space! Then got a CGA monitor - way cool!

I never had a CGA monitor, I had a hercules (green screen, 720x348 I think it was), but I did already have a 20MB harddisk, which I used on an RLL controller to give me 30MB.

GEM was a very usable graphical OS. I remember GEM draw, the first vector based line art program I ever used.

Those hard disk access squeaks, I still have then in my memory...

Also the CGA emulation program, which did not work for a lot of games, can't remember the name...

but the machine really flew with the 286-16.

The biggest speed increase ever though in my computing history was going from the 286-16 to the 386-40. Wow...
It was like 30x faster or something.

BTW: Anyone remember Fidonet?

My first internet email address:

p7.n301.r2446.z2@somefidogateway-wit...subdomains.org

or something like that. I can't remember. Was really really long.. Worked though. But not very reliable at all.

I think that was in 1991.

Fidonet Mails took like 2-3 days (really improved over time, later on it only tool one night) to reach the recipient. Unless you sent a "crash" mail, where you dialed up the BBS of the "point" directly.

International links were really flakey. Sometimes you had a great feed to Australia for 2-3 weeks, then all contact broke off, then you had a great feed from Canada for 2-3 weeks but you saw no email from Australia in the public "echos" (= Newsgroups).
It really was pioneering networking.

The best thing about fido were the bi monthly local "point-meeting" (just the BBS - typically 15 people at a meeting) or "hub meetings" (local group of BBSes, typically around 40) and the yearly net meeting (a whole bunch of BBSes in the whole region - 150 people maybe at meetings?).

Because the further away a person lived the longer it took the email to get there, people made a lot of friends in their own local area.

It was great! I really enjoyed being a fido point.

Fido was gradually, but then ever increasingly in an exponetial fashion replaced by cheap internet everywhere.
Why use a system where email takes 3 days to reach the person when using the internet it is there in seconds?

The first time I ever used the internet must have been at my dad's work in 1990 or 1989 - just looking through usenet, all the posts on pascal problems. I learnt a lot there, eventhough I was only online line like 2 or 3 times in all there for maybe 2-3 hours a time.

First time I had internet at home must have been around mid 1993 I think, maybe even late 1992 - it was REALLY!!! expensive,

17 May 2003, 08:00 AM	#16
hadaso The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Holon, Israel. Posts: 4,837	The first computer that I really owned was the poor Pentium MMX Toshiba laptop I bought in 1997. The second one is the pentium3 500MHz on the other end of this table. Well... my wife had a PC-XT compatible withh 8088 processor that she brought with her, so perhaps I could say I owned half of it since we got married I almost never used it myself. My brother had a PC-XT that I used in the 80's both to program in Turbo Pascal, and also as a word processor (and flight simulator, and to play all those games, such as Digger, Round 42, ...). But the first computer I used was the Golem B in Weizmann Institute of Science (when I was 15 years old), and then later the IBM 360 they had there. The Input was a punched card reader. The output was a line printer. The programming language was Fortran. The game was Adventure (the original one, on the IBM, after they started connecting interactive terminals to the computer). Last edited by hadaso : 17 May 2003 at 08:05 AM.

19 May 2003, 07:25 AM	#23
mklose Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Germany Posts: 693	My dad bought a used C64 for me for my 8th birthday, actually two weeks before it. He of course also wanted to see how it worked, so he gave it to me, but did not give me any of the games that came with it. That is when I went through the user guide and learnt Basic and how to program in it. Problem was, I was the only one with a C64, all the other people in my class at primary school (I lived in the UK at that time) all the others had a ZX Spectrum. Wow, the "Speccy" even had a circle command and commands to draw lines. The C64 had none of that!!! While the C64 had a much better graphics chip, you had to be able to code machine code to use it. That I didn't learn though until 2-3 years later (but Z80 assembly, I never learnt 6502). Any of you remember: FOR n=1 TO 80: CIRCLE n,n,n: NEXT N on the speccy? Well, at about 8 1/2 I got myself a ZX spectum, which like a year later or so got upgraded to a Plus (better keyboard), eventually I even had a mouse. AMX Art Studio, wow. Best Poke for the ZX Spectrum? POKE 35899,0 Now who knows what that poke does for which game??? hehe. My spectrum was great, I wrote accounting programs for it to keep track of my pocket money, but the best thing I ever did where I even go like "WOW!!" today is a database with configurable fields with different datatypes, searching, etc.. I wrote that when I was 11!! It was based on the database we used in school back then to enter all the data for the "Dooms Day" project, where every primary school in the UK was involved in to gather data. Later this data was put onto two huge laser disks. I wish I could get that somewhere on CDROM. That Database ran on an Acorn BBC. Another cool thing I wrote was a logo interpreter when I was 16. It was cool, could handle local variables in subroutines, evaluate expressions, it worked great!. The best thing about it was that it used EGA, and you could switch screens using hotkeys, like source view and output or split-screen mode was also possible. It even featured a debugger!!! (BTW: It was written in guess what? Turbo Pascal!! (5.0). But somehow I lost the source code in a hard disk crash.. Grrrrrrrrrrrr! I was so mad. Reason for writing that was because we were forced to use a really crappy one that worked in CGA only at school. Anyway, C64->ZX Spectrum->ZX Spectrum+->ZX Spectrum 128K -> 8088 -> 80286-16 -> 80386-40DX ->80486-66 ->80486-166-> Pentium-100 (dual processing machine) -> Pentium-200MHz -> Intel Celeron 300 MHz (ran on 450) -> IBM LAPTOP 380Z (Pentium II 266) -> Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop (Pentium 4M, 1.7GHz). I had 16MB of ram in my 386 already, wow did it go fast, especially for DTP, I did the school paper with it. The program we used ran under Windows 2.1 I think it was, but we only used Windows 2.x for a few weeks because we quickly upgraded to 3.0 which was brand new at the time. almost 21 years of computing and programming... I'm getting old! LOL. Last edited by mklose : 19 May 2003 at 07:32 AM.

21 May 2003, 03:40 AM	#28
admiralu Essential Contributor Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Camarillo, CA Posts: 442	Still Waiting I am still waiting for my first. I finally found an affordable used computer place that carries good Dells. I should hopefully have my first later this summer! A computer major with no computer!

17 May 2003, 05:24 PM	#17
injinuity Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 803	Hey Turbo Pascal.... lord I loved fiddling with it... that was the first language that I learned... mind you once you get Pascal right everything else seems much more simpler..... I miss turbo pascal tho.. Jinu Johnson

18 May 2003, 12:48 AM	#18
psalzer Moderator Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Long Island, NY Posts: 2,654	The first computer that was in our house was a Compaq thing that my husband used to bring home from work. I don't remember exactly what it was called, but it was about the size of a coffee table. Then there was a 286 for a while and we didn't get online until the Pentium 75. With 8 MB of RAM no less. We were flying! At my new job, which is with a non -profit organzation the computer at my work station was a 133 when I got there. And they have a dial-up connection - not that I get a chance to go online except for work related stuff anyway - but that brought back memories. Happily the 133 died in short order and has been replaced by a 233 with a bit more RAM. Big difference. Now at least you can run two applications at once without freezing up too often.

18 May 2003, 01:42 PM	#19
mike1977 Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Auburn Posts: 152	Apple II+

18 May 2003, 03:39 PM	#20
chap Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Rome, Italy Posts: 133	C64 (wonderful!)

18 May 2003, 04:25 PM	#21
Jessm Essential Contributor Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: U.S. Posts: 425	Atari with no HD, but ext. disk drive. Loved to play Frogger, Pacman, Galaxian, etc, etc. Jessica

19 May 2003, 08:57 PM	#24
ewal Master of the @ Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: West Sussex, UK Posts: 1,334	Huh - this thread brings back lots of memories. First actual owned computer was a Spec 16k and then a 8088 with twin 5 1/4 floppies with 640k RAM - sometime early 80's I think. Upgraded that machine with second hand 10mb hardcard - wow - at first I did not know what to do with all the extra space! Then got a CGA monitor - way cool! But first real computer experience was some word processor running C/PM. Use to hook that machine up to a dedicated service (Dun & Bradstreet) via a 300baud accoustic coupler. Then work upgraded the machine to an IBM 286 with 640k ram and 20meg H/D - I remember the IT manager saying that should last for many years! As part of that package we also had a 1200 modem. Somewhere with that package I hooked up to JANET (Joint Academic Network) and via JANET into the Internet - as was then. Think that was 1983 - so have been cruising the internet for two decades now. cheers Edward

20 May 2003, 08:59 PM	#26
DrStrabismus The "e" in e-mail Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 2,804	Tangerine Microtan 65 (around 1982). It came as a bare circuit board and a bag of components. It was the end of the era where woodwork was an important home-computing skill.

21 May 2003, 01:27 AM	#27
sterdeus Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Canada Posts: 182	I didnt realize 8088's did so well, it seems like everyone owned one including my family, an Epson 8088 (yes Epson used to make computers!), then we moved on to a 486 dx/2 66, PII 350, and now a P4 2.53. But the first computer I ever touched was, I believe, to be a Unix based one back in 1986 in elementary school where I used to play Gertrude Puzzle. But I mainly remember playing Winter Games and Test Drive on my friends Commodore 64, also Jumpman and Riverboat Rescue on my uncle's Apple.