What was the first computer you used?

Discussion in 'Computer Science & Culture' started by Zillion, Mar 31, 2018.

  1. Zillion Banned Banned

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    9
    For me, that would be the Windows 98.

    What about you?
     
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  3. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    3,864
    USN bought a bunch of IBM types with 286 processors. I had no clue as to how to run it, so I went to the local book store and showed the guy the letter saying what we were getting. He gave me a book. This was 1987. I worked on a dumb terminal onboard a warship before that, but the things we could do were severely restricted. Evidently nuking San Fernando wasn't allowed.
     
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  5. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    T I 99/4, with 256 bytes and a green-on-grey monitor display, 1983. The next model had speech synthesizer and primitive graphics. In '84, we had computer games like Alpine Climber and an asteroid shooter, plus an interactive adventure story-game that takes place on a ship. (I never did find the alarm clock. )
     
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  7. Stoniphi obscurely fossiliferous Valued Senior Member

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    3,256
    Intel 8086 with floppy discs, then an Amiga A - 2000 (9.5 Megs of RAM!!!), then a little Apple Black and White.....
     
  8. someguy1 Registered Senior Member

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    CDC-6400 at college. Typed FORTRAN programs onto punchcards, handed them to the system operator at the counter. Depending on how busy they were, it would take a few minutes to a few hours to get my output. Got good at clearing jams in the keypunch machine.
     
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  9. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    13,077
  10. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    3,522
    DOS 3.something or other.
     
  11. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    are you
    trying to figure out the age of the members ?
     
  12. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    CBM 4032.
    Didn't have a drive, so we had to just leave it on for the whole summer.
    The flashing green cursor made it hard to sleep.

    I didn't get to punch cards until high school.
     
  13. Zillion Banned Banned

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    No, I'm just curious about the first computer y'all used.
     
  14. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    54,036
    Macintosh 128k and IBM 5150.
     
  15. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    I learned BASIC on a PDP-11 (8-inch floppies were really floppy). Then Fortran on a Xerox Sigma 9 (I used a key-punch to enter programs on cards because the terminals were always busy - and I'm a slow typist too). My brother had a PET 2000. The first computer I owned was Commodore VIC-20 and then a Commodore 64 (I still have a VIC-20 and a 64 that would probably still run.) I also had a Radio Shack Pocket Computer. My other brother had a Timex Sinclair. At present, I have a Dell PC running Win98 on a 2G hard drive (that is not a typo), an HP PC running XP and an Acer laptop running Vista. I'm typing this on an HP PC running Windows 7 at the Public Library.
     
  16. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    That's an OS, not a computer.

    My first real computer was a Commodore PET (with the really bad keyboard.) I followed up with a Vic-20 and an Apple II.
     
  17. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I had a VIC 20 too! Never got a 64. My friend had the TRS 80.
     
  18. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    My first was the Commodore 64 as well. Next, an overclocked XT clone (8086 @ 10Mhz).

    Then, onward through the fog!

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    I've built more than 10k, so they tend to fade together...
     
  19. Baldeee Valued Senior Member

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    2,226
    Commodore 64 was my first.
    With PCs I started out on a lowly 8086.
    Them were the days, when 40mb hard drive was a thing to impress your mates with, and ram was 512k if you were lucky!
    But then at university I had an 8486, which I then upgraded to a DX2/66 variant with the addition of a maths coprocessor!
    After that things got much quicker much quicker!

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  20. Edont Knoff Registered Senior Member

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    Atari 800XL - Power without the price!
    C64 got all the fame though. But it had some features that the Atari was lacking.
     
  21. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    39,397
    I taught myself BASIC programming over a couple of days when I was ill as a kid, on a tiny Canon computer (can't remember the model) with a one-line display (dot matrix LCD, probably about 8 dots by 320) and maybe about 1 K of user memory. It was a bit like a glorified calculator, but it was programmable, and you could even control the display dot-by-dot to make little games.

    The first proper PC I owned was an Atari 800 (which came out a few years before the XL models). It was a better machine technically than the Commodore 64, but didn't sell nearly as well. Like a lot of computers of that era, the CPU was a 6502 microprocessor, which could address a whopping total of 64 K of memory. In the Atari's case, 16K of that was unusable system memory (for housing the on-board hardware BASIC and the OS in ROM), which left 48 K of memory for BASIC programming and data (which I managed to fill up a few times with over-ambitious games programming).

    The Atari machines, like the Commodore, also had a few nifty subsidiary chips to supplement the CPU and provide sound and graphics. To do anything complicated you had to interface directly with the hardware in Assembly language ... or do a lot of PEEKing and POKEing with BASIC. It was a great way to learn about how computers really work underneath.

    I had friends who had Vic 20s, Commodore 64s, Apple IIs, TRS 80s and the like, and even came across the occasional BBC micro and Sinclair.
     
  22. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    I had a programmable TI-57 calculator - 50 program steps that you had to key in every time you turned it on.
     
  23. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Circa 1951-1955 when fresh out of college, I used what was called a card-programmed calculator.

    It was created by non-IBM employees connecting several punched card devices. Each punched card contained one 3-address command. A deck was read & the commands were executed.
     
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