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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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