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

I owned one of these, and was happy to print out about eight pages to hand out during my training of electricians.

I did, however have some experience with my old Olivetti and Royal typewriters --

Antiques for sure!!

[This message has been edited by Joe Tedesco (edited 07-01-2002).]

Joe!

Got my first 'computer' at Toys R Us the Vic-20 and then the Commodore 64 soon afterwards. I used to enjoy writing basic programs for them.

Bill

I think I was in seventh grade and we were learning on the radio shack TRS 80 I believe. We had one computer nerd teacher for the whole city and the rest of the teachers knew nothing about computers. We played ALOT of "Oregon Trail"
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
* * * * * *
***** * * * * *
* * * * * *
***** ***** ***** * *
Must have used miles of paper printing stuff like that out!

That last one actually spelled my name when I did it. Oh well you get the point.

Anyone for a game of ZORK ??


Bill

Had an associate that, through a fluke, (timing) became a serviceman in his building of the orignal IBM PC. He insisted that the orignal came with *4KB* of RAM and as a pricey option, 16KB.

With two full-height floppy drives, (180KB ea.) you could run "VisiCalc." Wordstar was orinally offered for the pre-DOS "CP/M" operating system.

Ah, memories....

I started "playing computers" in about 1977 with an old mini system at my school (I've forgotten what model it was). Changed schools and went on to using the college PDP-11/40 via an ASR33 teletype, and another old mainframe (Elliot 803) that was donated to the school. They eventually bought a Research Machines 380Z.

My town at the time had one computer shop. Not the glitz and glamour of today's store back then -- just a dingy little back street shop in the low-rent district with circuit boards piled high and open systems on every flat surface. I remember drooling at the then new Commodore PETs and TRS-80s, just imported and at an astronomical price.

First system I owned was one I built from a kit called the Acorn Atom. (I'm not sure if that was ever sold in the States.) About a year later I'd left school and was in work, so I treated myself to the newly launched BBC Micro, also made by Acorn. There's still a lot of support for that computer over here.

I acquired/used various CP/M systems after that -- North Star Horizon springs to mind. I still like the simplicity of the old CP/M software. Who needs a Pentium processor with a 1000Gb drive just to write a letter anyway?

HaH! That brings back some memories!
I had ColecoVision, then Intellivision.
I used to play Zork on my Atari 800XL in 1985?
I also had a speech synthesizer that I built from and a computer magazine. They had the program in there that I had to type in by hand, so I learned a little basic. It took a while:
Line 0001:.......
Line 0002:.......(or something like that)
It sounded really cool, and would say whatever I typed.
My computer now still doesn't talk, although I'm sure there is a program out there.

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.

>_

Don't recognize that one '66, but how many here have the magic words XYZZY and PLUGH etched into their minds?