Discussion Topic |
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MisterE
Trad climber
One Step Beyond!
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Topic Author's Original Post - Jul 18, 2009 - 11:41pm PT
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When and what kind?
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Ricky D
Trad climber
Sierra Westside
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Jul 18, 2009 - 11:47pm PT
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IBM PC Junior with the Screaming 8088 along with a Princeton Graphics color monitor I bought from some Middle Eastern guy at a unmarked industrial building in Northridge. Of course by color - I mean the text could be green or the text could be orange.
As for the year - had to be late 84 or early 85.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Jul 18, 2009 - 11:48pm PT
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Commodore-64
Delivered a paper on using them for factory automation to the local American Ceramic Society way back when.
Got an interview offer from 3M after. Didn't go for it.
Developed my own electrical estimating program for may contracting business later. My wife did the books on one.
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Scared Silly
Trad climber
UT
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Jul 18, 2009 - 11:49pm PT
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First -
Commodore 16 - circa 1979-1980
HP 34C Calculator
Current -
MacBookPro
Dell - Linux Box
HP 64 Node GPU Cluster
Just my local resources, i.e. not counting the super computers I work on from time to time.
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Ricky D
Trad climber
Sierra Westside
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Jul 18, 2009 - 11:55pm PT
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Yeah - but did you have a floppy copy of Pong?
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Climbing dropout
Trad climber
Vancouver, BC
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Jul 18, 2009 - 11:58pm PT
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Well I didn't own it but I treated it like it was mine back in 1983 cutting code at Bigfoot Computing ....
Digital Equipment Corp. PDP 11/70
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Jingy
Social climber
Flatland, Ca
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Jul 19, 2009 - 12:02am PT
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2003 - '04 - iBook G4
still using this computer today.....
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Ricky D
Trad climber
Sierra Westside
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Jul 19, 2009 - 12:07am PT
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Jingy was Amish?
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stevep
Boulder climber
Salt Lake, UT
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Jul 19, 2009 - 12:28am PT
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Commodore Vic20, upgraded to the 64 when that became available.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 19, 2009 - 12:34am PT
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Throw your computers away and recapture your own brain ......
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jul 19, 2009 - 12:53am PT
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One of my first computers was digital - I used my fingers. The other one was pre-installed wetware, with self-programmable software.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Jul 19, 2009 - 12:58am PT
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Jingy was Amish?
What do you call an amish guy with his arm up a horse's ass?
A mechanic.
Edit: First computer was some weird IBM thing I short-term leased for a few months around 1979 or so.
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ß Î Ø T Ç H
Boulder climber
the ground up
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Jul 19, 2009 - 01:17am PT
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WEB TV was so ghetto , but pretty fun anyway .
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 19, 2009 - 01:27am PT
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first computer I ever programmed...
IBM 1620...
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pyro
Big Wall climber
Calabasas
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Jul 19, 2009 - 01:39am PT
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I'm with warner!
use Ur cell Phone!
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apogee
climber
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Jul 19, 2009 - 01:45am PT
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
Sprocketville
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Jul 19, 2009 - 02:46am PT
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in 1963 they installed cables from stanford university to Grant Elementary School in Los Altos, the PhD handling the program was named Mr German.
real cool dude, way ahead of his time.
the 4,5 and 6th graders all had IBM selrctronics wired into the server at stanford.
it spat out automated math tests with a 10 second timer on each one, with a repeat of the question after the first timeout.
people loved that thing, you could enter the answer before the ball stopped, as it had to retrace once for some weird reason.
so a perfect score with the fastest possible time, day after day, was what the buzz was about.
it was a very effective teaching tool, even the slackers got into it.
plus, you had 5 minutes alone in the closet.
you could just let the machine run and get a zero while you rub one out.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
Sprocketville
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Jul 19, 2009 - 02:59am PT
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i will be a SOB, it is Mr Jerman, and not 1963, but 1965:
the sh#t you find on the net:
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:iMPsGB3V8eIJ:suppes-corpus.stanford.edu/techreports/IMSSS_83.pdf+grant+elementary+teletype+machine&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
dang, memory like a steel trap:
"As each student took his turn, the machine printed out "please type
your name." The student spelled his name by typing, using the hunt-and-
peck method for the most part.
If his name was incorrectly spelled, he
was informed "This name is not on the student list, try again.
Please
type your name." A proper entry set the program in operation and the
first problem was printed out, leaving a blank for the correct response.
The machine was programmed to position itself at the blank so as to have
the response properly placed.
A correct response was reinforced by the
appearance of the next problem. An incorrect response was indicated by
the word "wrong" being typed out and the problem itself being repeated.
A second error on the same problem was followed by the message "wrong,
the answer is
," the correct answer being displayed.
The problem
itself was then given once more to allow for a correction response.
An
error on the correccion response would cause the previous message to
reappear. The next problem would then be presented.
A 10-second time
limit per response was set.
If a response was not given before 10 seconds..."
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Jul 19, 2009 - 05:19am PT
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First model Mac, 6 mhz, no hardrive, each 3.5 inch disk had a 35k OS on it.
I still have it, and it still runs. Who is up for a game of Mouse Stampede™?
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hooblie
climber
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Jul 19, 2009 - 05:20am PT
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hey, i went to grant school till 5th grade in '61-'62. i do remember "new math" which we called SMSG for stanford math study group, and "logic" class en mass in the cafeteria. i had a microscope, chemistry set and a very nice slide rule. plus the summit of black mountain under my 10 year old belt.
in jr. high, we went to an evening school and i got my novice class "ham radio" licence, WN6SDL banging 75 watts of morse code as fas as costa rica.
the divided drawers of my rock collection had room enough for spare vacuum tubes. a seven transistor am radio was a marvel indeed.
Woz was my model of a nerd, one class ahead of me at homestead high, and his pocket protector brought the genre to my attention. strange looking guy and i'm proud to say i passed up the opportunity to haze him though i witnessed some of it, causing me misgivings for not sticking up for him.
at UC Santa Cruz, in '69 i was in the earth science department, though i poked my head into a few classes in what was mysteriously called the department of "information science" but that was enough to satisfy my curiosity. i was dreaming of glaciers, flying overhead thru the stereoscope.
by then we were highballing it to the valley in a '55 chevy wagon with a couple el cap vets, and watching the construction of the bookstore. cranes were swinging heavy timberframe into place, and alaska was booming. corporate disdain and data phobia set in... hell the shift key still whips my ass.
first computer rather unique, an 8086 xt, one piece module with built in fax/scan, answer/phone, 10" b&w touchscreen display, 640k, 40mb, a canon
looking back, the low angle apron of the techno wave drove me and my analog onto rocky, blue collar shoals just as the cool kids dropped in, layed a bottom turn across my corduroy knickers, and shot upface to spank the silicon lip. i'm still digging sand outta splitters and patchin' up my carhart knees
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Jul 19, 2009 - 06:04am PT
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Too funny, Hooblie!
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rlf
Trad climber
Josh, CA
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Jul 19, 2009 - 08:41am PT
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DEC PDP-11/23 running RT11.
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ec
climber
ca
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Jul 19, 2009 - 10:12am PT
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a used Macintosh Plus
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the Fet
Supercaliyosemistic climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Jul 19, 2009 - 11:18am PT
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Circa 1980:
Rented an Atari 400 for a month. Didn't like the membrane keyboard.
"Upgraded" to a TI994A. I still remember being amazed that I wrote a program, saved it to an old tape recorder, loaded it back onto the computer and it worked. But mostly played "Hunt the Wumpus".
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Wes Allen
Boulder climber
KY
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Jul 19, 2009 - 11:59am PT
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C-64 was first.
Worked on a bunch of PC's and Macs, just didn't own one. (8088-386dx2, mac plus - quadra 950)
mac classic
then 2vx
LC4
powerbook 145b (black and white!)
powerbook 165c
several pc' that I built (sometimes two or three running at a time)
Dell laptop (kinda pos)
Dell laptop (pos)
Powerbook g4
1st gen macbook pro
iMac g5
currently the last non unibody macbook pro
next? Probably Mac Pro
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nature
climber
Tucson, AZ
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Jul 19, 2009 - 12:06pm PT
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hey werner... you first.
anyone ever been in Werner's office?
LoL!!!1166
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
Sprocketville
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Jul 19, 2009 - 01:07pm PT
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wow hoobie, did you ever know a guy named rich zenkere?
maybe a detwillier or a sandhagan?
mrs myers?
mrs gusman
miss kanogeris?
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Chinchen
climber
Flagstaff?
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Jul 19, 2009 - 01:21pm PT
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Apple IIe. 1984 Christmas I think. I was programming games in basic when I was 10. I should have stuck with that.....
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Mark Hudon
Trad climber
Hood River, OR
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Jul 19, 2009 - 02:59pm PT
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1984, A Mac SE with a big ol honkin 20 MB hard drive and 245 KB of RAM!
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Jul 19, 2009 - 05:09pm PT
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MacPlus with 512k and no hard drive = $1650
Later shopped hard and bought a 130 meg hard drive = $1300
Later upgraded to a better mac and shelled out $655 extra for 64 megs of Ram
Unfortunately, the cheaper computers get, the less money I have to spend on them.
I really feel sorry for those guys who spend $250,000 on a Fairlight synthesizer whose features could have their asses kicked and more for a $1000 software package now.
Or guys who spent $100,000+ on betacam video cameras.
Technology, giveth and taketh away
Peace
Karl
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doktor_g
Social climber
Mt Shasta, CA
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Jul 19, 2009 - 05:56pm PT
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The year was 1985 and it was a beige Commodore 64. 64K RAM!!!!
I even bought a 'Datasette!'
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
10 PRINT "Hello World!"
20 GOTO 10
30 END
>>Run
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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steelmnkey
climber
Vision man...ya gotta have vision...
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Jul 19, 2009 - 06:06pm PT
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Started out on punchcards and Fortran on the PDP-11/70.
First "personal" computer was this one (1982/83):
Wish I had a photo of it... I peeled off the cover and wired in a surplus keyboard with bright yellow and orange keys that I got from Jameco.
From there, I grad-ee-ated to the Trash-80's, Commodore 64, then the IBM 360's
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Jul 19, 2009 - 08:19pm PT
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Yur all a bunch of Uber-geeks. You're all refugees from the origins or Rec.climbing ain't cha'?
I do remember in my first years of college feeding punch cards with data on them into a machine the size of a refrigerator.
But when I first heard of a guy owning his own computer in 1980 or so, I thought "WTF, what do you do with a computer?"
peace
karl
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MisterE
Trad climber
One Step Beyond!
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 19, 2009 - 08:32pm PT
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I'm closer to the Jingy end of technological discovery -
The first computer I actually owned was clunky desktop PC a friend gave me when he updated to a lap-top in 2000.
I had not even used a computer until two years prior, when I was on staff at Patch Adams' Gesundheit Institute.
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rmsusa
Trad climber
Boulder
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Jul 19, 2009 - 10:19pm PT
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Gads! I was working with supercomputers, building climate models at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. One of the guys had a wife who ran a couple of restaurants. They hired me to put together a payroll program for them, so I bought a couple of Intertec Superbrains (I called them Birdbrains) and wrote one in Basic. Z80, 32K main memory, that I upgraded to 64K for 250 bucks. 24 x 80 character display, two 120K floppies. It ran CP/M. There was a compiled basic available for it, as well as SuperCalc and WordStar. This was 1979.
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Eric Beck
Sport climber
Bishop, California
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Jul 19, 2009 - 10:30pm PT
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TI-994A. 16k memory. $300. Computed e to 100 decimal places in BASIC.
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storer
Trad climber
Golden, Colorado
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Jul 19, 2009 - 10:35pm PT
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DEC PDP-8. Boot up with toggles then paper tape RIM loader, c1970.
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happiegrrrl
Trad climber
New York, NY
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Jul 19, 2009 - 10:40pm PT
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The first one I owned was a used Mac in about 1994. The cool thing about it was it had sound bites. Press an icon and it would have different few-second sounds. My most often used one was a Homer Simpson sounding one that said "Reee Laxxxxx."
Yep, that and word processing was about all that thing could do, and yet I played on it constantly. "Reee Laxxxxx......"
The first one I ever touched was in tech school, about 1985. Floppy disks and DOS. I could NOT keep all those stupid code things straight and was often frustrated. One day the teacher said "Terrie, the computer does not respond to you hitting it."
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k-man
Gym climber
SCruz
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Jul 20, 2009 - 12:03am PT
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My first was a TI (Texas Instruments) with an 8088.
No kidding, I paid more than $800 (in the '80s!) to upgrade it from 128k to 256k.
And it was Smokin' hot...
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squishy
Mountain climber
sacramento
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Jul 20, 2009 - 12:04am PT
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
Sprocketville
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Jul 20, 2009 - 12:45am PT
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every one of those boxes is in the mt view computer history museum, if you are ever in the area, it is quite a huge exibit.
starts out with the abacus and slide rule, thru mechanical calculators and "levers", right into vac tube main frames, the cray 1 and 2, and so on.
the cray needs to be drained of freon before scope probes can be hooked up.
then it can only run for 100 milliseconds before it melts.
so you need to know where to look and when for debugs.
the nitrogen machine was a dismal failure due to the extreme thermal cycling, it broke a few parts every time you drained and filled it again.
talk about a total nightmare.
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Fuzzywuzzy
climber
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Jul 20, 2009 - 01:31am PT
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Kaypro bought from Lauria 1983?
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Mungeclimber
Trad climber
sorry, just posting out loud.
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Jul 20, 2009 - 02:52am PT
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C64, but mostly played Donkey Kong on it with an atari knock off joystick.
didn't do computers much after that til Apple invaded the schools in HS. even then novelty.
then later in college a Packard Bell pc from Costco. Windoze 3.1 I think. writing became easier. twasn't til got to silicon valley that computers became something fun to play with.
been Dells since then, besides the one I built or acquisitions from family.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Jul 20, 2009 - 02:52am PT
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512 Karl, that was refferred to as the "Fat Mac". Those were the days...
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Jingy
Social climber
Flatland, Ca
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Jul 20, 2009 - 11:00am PT
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Late bloomer... Poor... and without a need for a computer was have most of my life has been....
Yeah.. part Amish!
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nutjob
climber
Berkeley, CA
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Jul 20, 2009 - 05:19pm PT
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Commodore VIC-20, with cassette recorder ~1984, it melted when my house burned down.
I remember typing programs out of a magazine to let the keys correspond with audio frequencies then could play music on the computer keyboard. Also remember some program to make a ball bounce around the monitor.
Next computer was a Mac-128 a few years later? I still have floppies for that thing with a few games. In school we used Apple IIc, then IIe, then IIgs. I followed the nerd path and spent my junior high lunch recesses in there reverse engineering the games written in Apple Basic. The more complicated games were binary compilations, so breaking them while running resulted in gibberish (to us at least).
We used a hole puncher to "unlock" the floppy disk copy protection and put our personal data stash (games etc) on the back-side of disks assigned to us for word processing projects.
That year I had my first experience with losing all my work... scratched floppy disk after a project was complete! Good times....
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nutjob
climber
Berkeley, CA
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Jul 20, 2009 - 05:28pm PT
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Oh, have to share one more computer story :)
Seventh grade, I was a bit of a handful. In the middle of the year we had a new music teacher from Australia, and of course had to give her hell to find where the limits were! We had a new teacher because earlier in the year, one of my buddies pissed off the old teacher so much she slapped him in the head and knocked him off his chair. He made a fuss about it, his mom made a fuss, the parents made a fuss, and then she was gone. But that slap? He totally deserved it.
Anyways, seventh grade, mid-year new music teacher from Australia. My first punishment: write 100 times "I Scott @#$@%#$%@#$ will not do whatever jackass stunt I did in class and disrupt students any more" or something like that.
This was the perfect opportunity to test my newfound computer skills. From the command line of an Apple IIc:
10 LPR# 6
20 PRINT "I SCOTT @#$@%#$%@#$ WILL NOT.... "
30 GOTO 20
RUN
I'm fudging a little bit on the syntax of that LPR#6. But the short of it is that it sent the output to the dot matrix printer. And in the final print-out, the first line showed the word "RUN"
I was smug as hell and turned the papers into my Australian music teacher. Turns out she used to teacher computers in Australia.
Ouch. You can guess it was a long year.
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maestro8
Trad climber
Sunnyvale, CA
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Jul 20, 2009 - 07:29pm PT
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No love for the "Trash-80"?
I didn't get the cables for the tape recorder for quite some time, so every time I powered the machine down, I had to re-write my program the next time I wanted to use it. It wasn't like I had anything better to do...
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TradIsGood
Chalkless climber
the Gunks end of the country
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Jul 20, 2009 - 07:44pm PT
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I think it was a GE-635. (1971) Ran DTSS. No punch cards anywhere on campus. Grad students who came to study physics could not believe that there was ubiquitous computing across the campus. They thought 2 runs a day from punch cards in a computer center was great.
One guy had so much fun he wrote a program to make HP plotter draw a Mobius strip. These X-Y plotters had little syringes for injecting ink into the little drums.
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Anastasia
climber
Not here
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Jul 20, 2009 - 09:37pm PT
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My first was an LC II Macintosh, bought it in 1993!
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reddirt
climber
Elevation 285 ft
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Jul 20, 2009 - 10:30pm PT
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first in the household:
it was "portable" & came w/ it's own haul bag.
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/ibm-5155-transportable/index.html
IBM Portable PC 5155
Model: model 68
Introduced: February 1984
Retail Price: US $4225 (w/o employee discount)
Weight: 30 pounds
CPU: Intel 8088 @ 4.77MHz
RAM: 256K, 640K max
Display: 9-inch amber displayCGA graphics, 80 X 25 text
Storage: Two 360KB 5.25-inch disk drives
Ports: 1 parallel, 1 serial, CGA video
OS: IBM PC-DOS Version 2.10 (disk)
I remember playing King's Quest in monotone on it.
my current computer is 2.4 lbs. That's 27.6 lbs difference.
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Short4Bob
Trad climber
Morgantown, WV
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Jul 20, 2009 - 10:33pm PT
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First I used?
My dad's Trash-80 at his office (crashed flight simulator planes on it). Learned BASIC on an Apple II-e at school. Played video games on an Atari 800, although we did have Pong before that.
My first computer that was mine-all-mine was a Packard Bell 8086 with a gorgeous amber monitor. The other people in my dorm were envious -- it was screaming fast, and most of them had typewriters. You couldn't print any papers at night, though. It sounded like you were torturing the words onto the page with that dot-matrix thing (also cutting edge).
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ontos
Trad climber
Washington DC
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Jul 20, 2009 - 10:36pm PT
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Tandy 1000; no HD, upgraded to dual gigantor floppy disks. BC's Quest for Tires and Hitch Hiker's Guide were games of choice. Good times, circa 1985.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
Sprocketville
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Jul 21, 2009 - 04:00am PT
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ok, bad focus shots from the museum...
apple proto
bendix
only 5 mil:
Control Data
circular slide
core dump
hand made core
disk drives
scary, minute man missle computer in the nose:
vacuum tubes
strategic arms computer vac tube main frame
this is what was protecting us from the nukes back in the day...
oh, and the hi tek minute man.
with that type of wiring, you would be nervous too.
so while you are at your work station with your GUI, be sure to enjoy a smoke while you spot the incoming nukes.
(notice ash tray on left)
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
Sprocketville
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Jul 22, 2009 - 03:07am PT
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this was missing so i grabbed it off the net.
one of the Cray 3 "bricks."
the machine has hundreds of these hand wired nightmares.
same wire color, wtf?
a small person gets in the middle of the cray to do the final wiring which fills the center of the machine.
big buss bars for all the juice and cooling.
cray
this thing reminds me off a brain on crack:
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