Technostalgia: Remembering our first computers

Ars editors remember the computers that began their digital lives.

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[potato44819]

My dad's business 286. 640k ram and an aftermarket EGA card along with a logitech 3 button mouse. 10MB HDD, 5.25" floppy drive, 3.5" drive later installed, and then we discovered the salesman lied when he said we could put more ram in that model.

 

[Baeocystin]

Oo! Oo! Can I play too? I wrote a post on this a few years back!

 

[drosboro]

With my dad as the technology specialist in the Faculty of Education at a major university, we spent a lot of Christmas breaks huddled around whatever device my Dad had brought home that year. The Apple II+ was probably the first computer, which would have been maybe in 1980 when I was three. We had pretty much each of the II's from that point in (plus, e, c, gs), and we'd sit there and write stupid games in BASIC for hours. Then it turned into Macintosh 128k, SE, II, LC, LC II, and so on from there.

 

[milatchi]

Commodore Amiga 500 in 1991. I played a lot of "Wayne Gretzky Hockey" on that thing.

 

[dlux]

Not from my first computer, but I just happened to come across this:

(This also explains why the NSA wasn't such an unfettered data-hoarder back in the day.)

 

[nostrada_]

Commodore PET 2001, with integrated tape recoder (aka nass storage device) 7 KB. I am old.

 

[joshv]

I too got a TI 99/4A for Christmas, but I actually had no idea the thing could play games. Or if I did, there was no budget for them - so I was stuck at the Basic prompt. I also hadn't a clue that one could code in something called "assembly", or that there were places where you could find programs to key in (whether in basic or assembly). So I just puttered around with the Basic manual, saving my crappy little programs off to tape.

 

[valkyriebiker]

My first exposure was on Univac mainframes. It was a funny device, using 36-bit words, octal notation, and one's complement -- making negative zero possible.

I learned Fortran and assembly on that computer. My bosses were apparently pleased enough with my work that they permitted me considerable recreational time. I got to design and write a number of cool system utilities that no one knew they needed until they saw them -- and a few games, too.

Those were the days........

 

[Matt Wallis]

Apple Lisa, 1MB RAM Upgrade, 10MB HDD. ROM mod to make it a Macintosh XL.

 

[hotball]

My first computer is an IBM PC/XT clone made by Acer (with a weird model number "710"). My father bought it after my sisters and I went to a computer class, in 1988. It's not state of the art even for its time (with only 768KB RAM and 10MHz 8088 and Hercules compatible monochrome display), it didn't even have a HDD (though my father bought a 20MB HDD for it a few years later). I learned a lot of programming (including BASIC, C, and x86 assembly) on this computer.

 

[David Hovis]

My father was a computer science professor and the first computer to make it home was an Osborne Executive running CP/M.

Fond memories of playing Zork I and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on the tiny, built in CRT display.

 

[charlie don't surf]

My first computer: Digi-comp 1

Purchased ~1965 mail-order from Edmund Scientific for $5.

I win.

 

[Tamaaya]

My first computer was a Commodore 16, which is basically a cut-down Commodore 64 with a better BASIC (v3.5 instead of v2.0). I only had one game for it, Jack Attack, but I played the crap out of that and programmed it with this cool spirograph-style circle program in the manual that came with it.

The first computer I bought with my own money was a Centris 660av in the mid-1990s, which I used to finish school with and then study at uni. I ended up getting the first in a long succession of iBooks/MacBooks in 2001 with the second-gen "icebook" model (still have the box), and haven't looked back since.

 

[mdmph]

That's, uh, a slightly NSFW choice for an Apple II game.

 

[dmsilev]

Commodore PET, followed by an Apple II+. The latter was the one that really introduced eight year old me to computing. I learned BASIC on that thing, played Zork and Choplifter and so on, eventually started writing school papers in (anyone else remember Bank Street Writer?).

It was eventually replaced by a 286 clone machine (a 40 meg hard drive? Luxury!)

 

[cateye]

Commodore VIC-20. I was 12 years old. Got it for Christmas. I had asked for an Atari 2600, and sulked for a week like the ungrateful spoiled brat that I was, until I finally set it up and realized how much more it could do than just play 'Pitfall.'

While I never did become a programmer or computer scientist or anything of the sort, it still was the nexus for the next 30 years of my life, both hobbies, career, friendships, and more.

 

[ws3]

This thing is way older than me, but I have learned enough about it to know how totally awesome it was for its time. Old IBM card processing equipment was basically electromechanical magic.

Here's a nice 4min video on keypunching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVwzYN6BP4

 

[dlux]

mdmph[/url]":2ztyubwx]That's, uh, a slightly NSFW choice for an Apple II game.

If that's all it takes to be NSFW these days then the terrorists have already won.

 

[SeismoJones]

Radio Shack Color Computer with a cassette drive for storage.
Like most early computers, it connected to your existing TV.
I learned BASIC on it and wrote a game based on the movie WarGames.
What I was most proud of - I found some obscure BASIC commands in the manual it came with. MOTOR ON and SOUND ON (IIRC).
After the program data I recorded an explosion sound on the cassette. When the game was won, the screen would paint (slowly) a mushroom cloud, the cassette drive's motor would turn on and play the explosion sound.
This probably sounds stupid to you younger guys but at the time there were no such things as sound cards and wav files.

 

[The Sam]

My first computer was a Tandy TRS-80, but we were poor and it was a hand-me-down so this was well after the TRS-80's heyday (this would've been in the early 1990s).

 

[jimbofluffy]

My first computer was an IBM PC like pictured in the article. My second computer was a Compaq portable:

Spoiler

I don't know what happened to either of those. I still have my third computer which is a Compaq 486:

Spoiler

Mine still had a 5.25" floppy drive instead of a CD drive. I still have that one with Freedos on it currently.

 

[hfm]

TRS-80 Model I hand me down from my grandfather. Had the expansion interface and 2 5.25" floppies. As temperamental and lovable as the Millennium Falcon. It was like 1982.. I was 11. Did a lot of great coding on that thing. Man those were the days. Got his Model III after that, going from 16K to 48K enabled me to finish a graphic adventure I was working on. C64 after that, then an A500 in the late 80s. I really loved the trash 80s and the C64, but owning the Amiga was definitely an experience that will never be replicated. So much innovation and love in that metal, plastic, and silicon.

 

[mycroftxxx]

My high school was too poor and backwards to grok computers, so my first machine was the university PDP-11 running Berkeley Unix in the basement of the engineering building. Writing program with ed (vi was deemed too much a resource hog) on VT100 style terminals (although none of them were actually VT100s; some clone that I don't remember). Did a couple of punch card projects on the IBM 360 too, but just because my Fortran professor wanted us to use the WATFIV compiler. For my senior research project, my professor got me an account on the VAX 11/780, and I learned how to steal somebody's working JCL to send batch jobs to the IBM, no punched cards needed. Didn't encounter a personal computer until I bought a PC-AT clone in 1988, 512 KB of RAM + a 3.5" floppy - rocking'!

 

[Oz7]

Refurbished IBM PC 8086 running DOS, GW-BASIC then QBASIC. It had a DD- 3.5 floppy and no hard disk.

Oh and I remember looking longingly at those Tandy Ads.

 

[valkyriebiker]

charlie don't surf[/url]":1r3ucnef]My first computer: Digi-comp 1

Purchased ~1965 mail-order from Edmund Scientific for $5.

I win.

Edmund Scientific, what a great resource! I loved buying lenses and prisms when I was a kid.

 

[ws3]

While not technically mine back in the day (I had an Apple IIe) the Macintosh II was one of the earliest computers I spent a lot of time using:

I still have it in my basement, but my wife is always bugging me to get rid of it.
I don't want to just pitch it in the (electronics recycling) dumpster, so what should I do with it?

 

[Wingsy]

My first was a Southwest Technical Products hand-built computer (MY hand) with a whopping 8k of RAM. First program was tic-tac-toe, hand coded in assembly language and entered one byte at a time, in hex. Later on, when I got my cassette drives and assembler, I built an interface using 2 D/A converters, 4 hand controllers with a simple joystick and a "fire" button, and used my oscilloscope as the game screen. You controlled your "dot", which moved at a constant speed on the screen and could fire up to 4 projectiles (blinking dots). If your projectile hit his dot (or even your own), it would flash into a bright circle and disappear for a few seconds. Your "hit". I remember 4 of us, all huddled around that tiny scope screen, playing all night long.

We've come a long way baby.

 

[potato44819]

ws3[/url]":3mj21504]While not technically mine back in the day (I had an Apple IIe) the Macintosh II was one of the earliest computers I spent a lot of time using:

I still have it in my basement, but my wife is always bugging me to get rid of it.
I don't want to just pitch it in the (electronics recycling) dumpster, so what should I do with it?

Ignore your wife

 

[Chuckstar]

Am I the only one here who can't stop laughing at the PDP-10 ad? While the diverse workforce may have been ahead of its time, everything else just screams 70s. Complete with philodendron in a braided rope hanging basket! (I'm sure someone will correct my horticultural identification/spelling if necessary).

If you told me it was a 2013-era parody of 1970s advertising, I'd absolutely believe it. Is there a Poe's Law equivalent for advertising? "If your ad is so over-the-top stereotypical, it will be mistaken for parody." It even gets perfect the thing that so many early computer ads did: people using computers in postures/set-ups that no one ever would. Could you even type in the position that guy's sitting at the terminal? Wouldn't you feel weird working in a room with a terminal at some random orientation in the middle like that?

 

[fablefox]

I loves Edmund Scientific.

My first PC was a refurbished PC clone with monochorome monitor and a single floppy. Lots of disk swap.

Don't remember much.

My second was a PC with CGA monitor. This time TWO floppy drive. 8 Mhz. The first with a mouse.

Third was a PC with SVGA / VESA and 80 mb hard disk. CD-ROM drives. Received around 8 CD games from Sound Blaster - including Ultima 8 and a motion video game on Sherlock Holmes. That was awesome.


However, interestingly, I think CGA palette and VGA palette is beautiful. Even though its just pink greenish, and the other was limited to 256 color, The Legend of Kyrandia book 1 is beautiful (now available at gog dot com).

Sometimes I run Ultima 6 (also available at gog dot com) with dosbox set to CGA just for fun.

 

[jbrodkin]

dlux[/url]":2ihefrz3]

mdmph[/url]":2ihefrz3]That's, uh, a slightly NSFW choice for an Apple II game.

If that's all it takes to be NSFW these days then the terrorists have already won.

I hadn't even noticed when I chose the image, but yeah, seems pretty innocuous, I'm pretty sure Ars readers are mature enough to handle it.

 

[ewelch]

First computer I used was an IBM mainframe in the basement of the Administration building in college, Fall semester '73. Punch cards and a terminal were all I actually saw, besides the paper printout -errors and all.

I used IBM PCs in grad school '84 through '88. Bought the first computer of my own in '90. An Epson 8088 from Montgomery Wards. Obsolete before I got it home and running.

 

[Pygmy Surfer]

My first computer (and first gaming console, I suppose) was a TI 99/4A as well. TI Invaders, Parsec, Munch Man - that system had some pretty sweet games

 

[Wolvenmoon]

I'm not as old as I thought I was! Awesome!

 

[Visigoth]

Perhaps not technically a computer but my first introduction was using a Children's Discovery System which I guess is more like the LeapFrog things of today. Still have it and what cartridges I had for it. Should put some batteries in it to see if it still works. The first real computer was a Commodore C64 which I later upgraded to an Amiga 500. After that I jumped to the PC world. Still kind of miss those old C64/Amiga games.

 

[syvaidya]

It seems that Sinclair ZX Spectrum was not popular in US. I have great memories of programming in very limited BASIC on Spectrum 48K and later 128K. And, oh! the horror of using tape cassettes for storage. You never knew when the tape will stop loading.

 

[Martin_AA6E]

My first computer was the best in several ways. In the summer of 1960 (+/-), I attended an NSF-funded high school science program at the University of Denver. (It was good to be a techie in those post-Sputnik days.) The center of action was the big room, noisy and over-cooled (some things don't change) that contained the Burroughs Datatron 205 computer, with many racks of vacuum tube logic. We coded in machine language which we wrote on special forms we then transcribed to paper tape on a Flexowriter. "RAM" was a magnetic drum of maybe 4K 40 bit words. Words were stored in bi-quinary format (not binary, not bcd), and floating point was supported. (Check http://tjsawyer.com/B205home.php.)

It was great to learn on bare metal with no OS and no programming language in the way. The architecture was fairly simple, although it was hard to manage the long drum latencies.

Because of its nice blinking lights, the B205 console later got roles in several sci-fi movies. (http://starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=45)

My career continued on the IBM 1620 and other more "advanced" machines, but then I had a relapse with MIT's TX-0 computer around 1969, another bare metal system (almost), but this time with transistors and core memory.

I suppose nobody learns computers this way anymore. It is not the same if your first computer is the Raspberry Pi or one of its ilk, where you just can't work on bare metal without heroic effort.

 

[scoobygang]

Ostensibly my first was a Sinclair ZX81. Although it was such a pile of junk that, in a way, I don't really count it. It would crash if you bumped it - honestly, just a gentle nudge, and you'd lose the game you were loading. And by loading, I mean manually typing it in from a magazine

My first true love was a Commodore 64. Ohmigosh that was a wonderful machine!

 

[Daros]

My dad brought home a PC1 on the day it came out, later added on the 10 MB hard drive and 1MB RAM. It took a full five minutes to do its memory check each time it booted.

He later bought me a PCjr and modified the side car to get me to 640KB ram.