ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Remember Your First Computer?

My very first PC was actually an Atari 2600 with a programing module.

Then I moved up to a Texas Instruments TI99-4A, which had cartridges and you could hook it to a cassette recorder and save your programs!

Next I had a hand me down Commodore 20, which was their version of an XT with an 8088 processor. I upgraded that one with a second hard drive (for a total of 40mg), a color monitor, a math chip,and an external 2600 baud modem. You could watch the charaters come up on the screen as you downloaded a page from a bulletin board (remember those?)Had 560k memory, but using software tricks you could imitate extended memory with hard drive or co-opt some of the video memory. It ran at a full 4MB speed.

Also, check out this link: http://www.tulip.com/news/article.asp?nid=109
Commodore 64's are coming back!?

Speaking of Triassic Computers (Single End-User / PC type),

Has anyone used (or built) an Altair?

Talk about a lot of work involved when programming something simple!

The machine I used in 1980 - 1981 was one of those TI machines (Texas Instruments - sold under the "Radio Shack" name), with the Cassette Tape player (for data R/W). Monochrome (White on Black) 9" monitor, QUERTY key board, 4 KB RAM, ??? CPU speed (most likely a Z-80 ???).

Moving up to a Model II (TRS-80) machine in the mid 1980's was like jumping from the Stone Age to the Industrial Age!

Scott35

Scott,

It was Tandy which sold under the Radio Shack brand(*). The TRS-80 series did indeed use the Z80 CPU, at various clock speeds in different models. Here's a link to the TRS-80 Model I .

I'd seen the Model I in magazines when it was launched, and actually got to "play" with one. I was about 11, and in the town in which I lived at that time there was a computer place. None of the glitzy stores of today, of course -- It was a dingy little old back-street store with dusty windows, and all sorts of bits and pieces stacked everywhere. A real computer store, in other words!

(*)An aside: We had their stores in Britain, but they went under the Tandy name rather than Radio Shack.

Scott... Funny you should mention Altair, my dad and I built one of these in 1975 when they came out. It was a kick soldering in all the components, then finally programming the beast by hand through the front panel (a program of say 150 steps would only take somewhere around 1000 switch flips!). A month or two later we got really fancy and bought a 13" Zenith (Black and White of course) television and a conversion kit, made by Pickles and Trout (have no clue why I remember that name), that required using a soldering iron to cut an access panel in the back and removing a few pieces and piggybacking a small board into it, to produce a monitor. Over the next several years we had every input device known to man, including punch tape, cassette tape, burning EPROM's, and finally 8" floppies. Adding a keyboard required an extra card. My dad got a hold of a model 19 teletype and converted it into a printer at a blistering 13 baud (about 60 characters per second, yes characters, not words!). My dad helped Wang develop Tiny Basic, and things took off from there. The operating system we ended up with was CP/M and many of the commands there still work today in DOS mode. For my birthday one year my dad got an entire copy of the CP/M library. At the time it was the only shareware available, and required 65 floppies at a cost of about $3.50 each. No wonder a technique was developed to cut an extra write protect notch in the disk and then flip them over to write on both sides.

I can remember being shocked the first time I saw computers being sold preassembled, absolutely heresy, kind of like buying a mobile home instead of a house!

West of House

You are standing in an open field, west of a white house with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

>_

Mystery House! I wish I still had a copy , I never did complete it.

Ahhh!

I thought that was Zork?
I was just thinking about that game yesterday. The kids were selling a bunch of their old CD games at a Garage Sale, and I started thinking about Games I used to play.
(for hours and hours .... and hours...)


Bill

You are at the end of a road, outside a small building.....

Some people take their games quite seriously:



If you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, go here .


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 08-25-2003).]

Yes,
I remember the names that people that us computer-liking types used to be called in the 80's.
Mind you, it all washed over me at the time, having a good grounding in BASIC and COBOL really set me up for programming PLC's.
Most of the people that hassled me at the time are flippin' burgers at McD's now!.

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. SERVER-DRONE.

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
MCD-RESTAURANT.

DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01 MONEY PIC 9(4)V99

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
PERFORM UNTIL END-OF-SHIFT
DISPLAY "MAY I TAKE YOUR ORDER?"
ACCEPT CUSTOMER-ORDER
PERFORM GET-CUSTOMER-ORDER
DISPLAY "THAT WILL BE",TOTAL-AMOUNT," PLEASE"
ACCEPT MONEY
SUBTRACT TOTAL-AMOUNT FROM MONEY GIVING CHANGE.
PERFORM GIVE-CHANGE-TO-CUSTOMER
PERFORM HAND-CUSTOMER-TRAY
DISPLAY "THANK YOU FOR VISITING MCD. ENJOY YOUR MEAL"
END-PERFORM
PERFORM GO-HOME
STOP RUN.