Your First Computer Was?

[SYZ]

In the half-century since the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, computer technology's
evolved in some pretty giant leaps.  

Even though the  Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)  was a cutting-edge technological
marvel in its day—considered to be years ahead of the field—current comparisons confirm
it would be massively outperformed by even the most elementary computers of the 21st
century.  The iPhone in your pocket has over 100,000 times the processing power of the
computer that landed man on the Moon 50 years ago.

Apple developer Forrest D. Heller made headlines recently with a blog post in which he
outlined all the various ways in which one USB-C charger model on the market—the
Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2, running on a Cypress CYPD4225 microchip—was vastly
superior to the Apollo's performance, in both speed and memory.

"Many USB chargers have a microcontroller with a CPU," Heller writes. "Some are less
capable than the AGC.  Some are more capable than the AGC."

However, some commentators insist that all these kinds of comparisons are contrived and
off-base, arguing that the focus on purely technical specs—rather than the elegant way in
which the AGC was designed to operate in concert with NASA's other equipment—means
any match-offs are a red herring.

[no one]

HAL 8999.7.92

[Paleophyte]

It was very reliable, which was good because if it crashed setting the date again was a nuisance.

[Cubeology]

In 1984 I learned BASIC on a TRS-80 in school. After that, I used various word processing machines in the Navy. Then I had a big gap and the first computer I actually owned was a custom-built 386 that I built.

[Cheerful Charlie]

Sinclair ZX-81. I had to get out my soldering iron and assemble it.

[Cavebear]

Well, my FIRST computer was the one at the data center at Univ of Maryland in 1969.  You had to write a program, enter the code onto keypunch cards, bundle them, and submit them to the data center.  There was always a line.  If you were lucky, late at night, you got back the results in an hour.  Usually, you had a single keypunch error on one card and it botched the program.  I HATED typing keypunch cards!  

Eventually, you got all the cards right (after waiting an hour for a free keypunch machine) and the cards ran a program and you got some results.  I was really good at writing Fortran and COBOL code, but terrible at typing cards.  I was even sought out by other students for debugging code logic.  I gave it up because I thought typing cards was too boring.  Had I known about the coming PC age, I might have stuck to it.

My Fortran teacher assigned us a final exam to program blackjack/21.  I turned that in the next day.  It was perfect.  So I asked if I could try chess.  He laughed (saying no way).  And, yes, I failed at that.  I could not keep the pieces from moving off the board.  But I had a shoebox full of cards to try it.  The data center balked at the volume, but I had an approval from the teacher.  

I probably came "this close" to being a billionaire.  But politics was more interesting.

My first own computer was a Commodore 64.  Then a 128.  That seemed amazing.  Does an Atari count?  I have SO MANY game badges from both...  LOL!

The office got Convergent Technology (C3) computers in the early 90s (I think).  Multiplan spreadsheet and some word processor.  I went right at the Multiplan and used all the functions and sheet-links.  I crashed the system.  Well, we had 10 "regions".  I set up an identical page for each region and a total summary page that added them all together.  They hadn't anticipated all those links.  They tried to blame ME for overusing their software.  Well, it didn't come with warnings about that.

I should have applied for a testing job with them.  I always was good at finding flaws.  But I like the place I know more than a new place.  We got Windows computers after that, though.  I think my bust of the C3 software had a lot to do with that.  

I got a Windows at home around 1995 to match the office computers. Why learn 2 different systems?   Explored that fully.  Excel was confusing at first because it treated cells opposite of how Multiplan worked, but I caught on, and liked it better.  Plus, it dealt with links a lot better.

I had too many problems with Windows crashing by 2008, so I switched to Apple after discussing it with some friends who had it.  Finder is great.  Loved it ever since.

I bought a Windows 10 computer last year just to stay in touch with it (I don't mind having 2 computers and the Windows is stand-alone, which has some security advantages).  Excel is a great way to keep secure passwords on a standalone, for example.

So that's my experience with computers.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

HAL 8999.7.92

SAL here. We should get together and make them fight.

[abaris]

In the half-century since the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, computer technology's
evolved in some pretty giant leaps.  

Even though the  Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)  was a cutting-edge technological
marvel in its day—considered to be years ahead of the field—current comparisons confirm
it would be massively outperformed by even the most elementary computers of the 21st
century.

Even the Texas Instruments calculator I had for school in the late 70ies outperformed the mission computer.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Did it even have a processor? How much of the work was done on the ground and passed to the abacus that went to the Moon?

[Inkubus]

Compaq LTE Elite.



120 Mb hard drive, 4 Mb ram and some sort of 86 decahertz processor. £1,400, fucksake.

[trdsf]

Mine was a Digi-Comp I:



My first digital computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000:



...which I still own, although my oldest computer is a Terak 8510/a:

[mordant]

TRS80 Model 1

I think I got it in 1977, it was the newest tech one could have, a computer you can have at home. Not in the picture is a cradle for the phone receiver. There was no internet per se, but you could call other computers and converse. There was also Compuserve that would connect you to a variety of "bulletin boards".

This was my first also. I didn't personally own it; my boss at the time (small trucking company I was dispatching for) handed it to me and said, "you're a smart guy, make this do something useful for us."

It was quickly expanded from Level I BASIC and 4K of RAM to a real operating system and full Microsoft BASIC with 48K of RAM and four single-sided, single-density floppy drives, each storing 95K.

The first elaborate program I produced was a vehicle maintenance and repair tracking system. It was not a hit with our chief mechanic, because it exposed him for the fraud that he was. But it got me hooked on the potential for making an actual difference with automation.

Before long we had a Tandy Model 6000 running Xenix and driving four terminals, and I was spending probably 75% of my workday writing software.

My first computer I actually owned was a TRS-80 Model 4 with 128K of bank-switched ram and two floppy drives (up to 184K storage each now) and, eventually, a 5 megabyte hard drive that I recall set me back $2,000. Eventually I also started a word processing business on the side, creating resumes and employee training manuals and graduate term papers and the like. I nearly bought an old DEC PDP-11 with 8 inch floppies that came with a competitor that was trying to sell out, until I realized my little trash-80 was more capable than it for what I was using it for.

I had a daisy-wheel printer with a collection of font wheels and wrote a custom printer driver that would pause printing when a font needed to be changed. The thing was loud enough to wake the dead. Fun times.

Of course the HP LaserJet I and more ubiquitous word processing software put an end to that after a couple of years but it allowed me to save enough money to put out my own consulting shingle and the rest is history.

[Dom]

TRS80 Model 1

I think I got it in 1977, it was the newest tech one could have, a computer you can have at home. Not in the picture is a cradle for the phone receiver. There was no internet per se, but you could call other computers and converse. There was also Compuserve that would connect you to a variety of "bulletin boards".

This was my first also. I didn't personally own it; my boss at the time (small trucking company I was dispatching for) handed it to me and said, "you're a smart guy, make this do something useful for us."

It was quickly expanded from Level I BASIC and 4K of RAM to a real operating system and full Microsoft BASIC with 48K of RAM and four single-sided, single-density floppy drives, each storing 95K.

The first elaborate program I produced was a vehicle maintenance and repair tracking system. It was not a hit with our chief mechanic, because it exposed him for the fraud that he was. But it got me hooked on the potential for making an actual difference with automation.

Before long we had a Tandy Model 6000 running Xenix and driving four terminals, and I was spending probably 75% of my workday writing software.

My first computer I actually owned was a TRS-80 Model 4 with 128K of bank-switched ram and two floppy drives (up to 184K storage each now) and, eventually, a 5 megabyte hard drive that I recall set me back $2,000. Eventually I also started a word processing business on the side, creating resumes and employee training manuals and graduate term papers and the like. I nearly bought an old DEC PDP-11 with 8 inch floppies that came with a competitor that was trying to sell out, until I realized my little trash-80 was more capable than it for what I was using it for.

I had a daisy-wheel printer with a collection of font wheels and wrote a custom printer driver that would pause printing when a font needed to be changed. The thing was loud enough to wake the dead. Fun times.

Of course the HP LaserJet I and more ubiquitous word processing software put an end to that after a couple of years but it allowed me to save enough money to put out my own consulting shingle and the rest is history.

Back then, floppies were not available yet, but there were places called computer swaps, where a lot of early parts were shown and sold. I went to one of those and saw a floppy and started asking a ton of questions, and the vendor was trying to get to other customers too, so a dude behind me started answering me. That dude was to become my husband. I bought a floppy then too, it had no case, so it ended up in a cigar box as housing. Worked out fine.

[jimhabegger]

Not counting a homemade mechanical one, my first one was an IBM 1401, some time in the mid 60's. It was at a branch of a university, and anyone could just walk in and use it, any time. The programs were on punched cards. The operating system was a card called a "cold start card," that would load the next card or two and execute the commands on them. There was a program that would play melodies on a radio placed on top of the computer. The melody was determined by a card added to the back of the program stack.

Later, at the main campus of the university, I played with an experimental drum-memory computer in the electronics department, and I wrote documentation for an assembler and for an interpreter that someone had created years before, without any documentation.

[adey67]

IBM Aptiva
6 GB HDD
AMD Athelon processor, 450 Mhz
32 MB RAM
I can't remember the FSB speed but it was pretty lamentable.

[jimhabegger]

The person in the picture is not me. I was younger than that.

[Astreja]

One of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I

It could only count up to 111 binary, but it was all mine. 

[Mr Greene]

Oric 1, still have it and even some of the cassettes.

[Deesse23]

C64, ca. 1984

[Free]

Pong

I actually have this on display in my computer shop:

[jimhabegger]

Pong

"Pong" reminds me of the first computer virus that I saw, in 1983 or 1984, on a DOS system. It attached itself to system executables, and had a ping-pong ball bouncing around on the screen. We must not have had an installation disk for the system, because I remember manually removing the virus from all the executables. Or else, maybe I never thought of re-installing the system?   I do seem to have a habit of doing things in the hardest and most complicated way I can find.

[mordant]

Pong

"Pong" reminds me of the first computer virus that I saw, in 1983 or 1984, on a DOS system. It attached itself to system executables, and had a ping-pong ball bouncing around on the screen. We must not have had an installation disk for the system, because I remember manually removing the virus from all the executables. Or else, maybe I never thought of re-installing the system?   I do seem to have a habit of doing things in the hardest and most complicated way I can find.

I had a client once running accounting software on a DOS machine and they had an early LAN running in the office. One day the boss' son came home from summer camp with a pirated game which he played on one of the office computers. The whole office acquired something called the Nop virus, named after the "no-operation" instruction used for do-nothing alignment padding in assembly language. It was a zero or "null" byte, and what it would do is randomly write nulls into all the files on your computer.

I spent a couple of days eradicating and cleaning up after that. No backups, of course, despite that I had left detailed procedures for same.

[Antonio]

HP 386SX

[adey67]

The person in the picture is not me. I was younger than that.

Didn't know you enjoyed wearing skirts Jim, what a revelation.  

[Aegon]

Y'all old