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?

Zork

I've spent many hours playing Zork years ago, about '84... With help from friends, we managed to solve it. This was way before the 'net where cheats and walkthroughs are plentiful!

Return to Zork was fun, but Zork Nemesis has stumped me. That darn sliding puzzle!

Myst just blows me away... I can't solve it when using the cheats!

My favorite basic "trick" (verrry basic)...

10 x=x+1
20 print x
30 goto 10

run

How far will an Apple IIe count?

Gee, I must be getting past it!

I remember a time when for some BASIC interpreters that first line would have to have been:

10 LET X=X+1



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-28-2002).]

That looks more familiar...
I remember LET,GOTO,10,15,20,etc.
I wasn't a pro, just copied what others wrote. I am still a programmer wannabee, and only know hack html. Does anyone else remember talk being about AT or XT computers? What was that all about? I was 16 in '84' and was esthatic when we went from ATARI 800XL to a HP with a printer and 5.25 Floppy.
(ps)Thanks.I Downloaded Zork & played again for the first time in 17-18? years. Fun & Funny.

My first attempt at becoming "puter literate" was a used 486 in '96..... it was a contraption with wires going everywhere, that I knew absolutely nothing about. I mostly played boring things like solitaire and black jack. Finally gave up on learning how to do anything with it. Donated it to a domestic violence shelter,they needed one and I didn't want to dust the one I had anymore!
Then in '98 one of my room mates introduced me to the internet on a PB 486 - and things started making more sense. Helps to have a geek in the house, isen't that right '66?

My first computer was very similar to the one in Joe's image. It was a TRS-80 which had a 9" CRT [Monochrome, of course!] and used a Cassette tape [typical Audio Cassette] driven on an external player for loading Basic Interpteter and the OS [What our modern machines do at bootup]. Also, Applications could be saved to and read from the tape drive.

It was a nice little machine! Display and Core [the actual Corn-Puter] were in a common case, and the keyboard plugged into it via a DIN-5 setup. Tape deck used 3/16" Phone plug / jack.
The machine was [I believe] Z-80 CPU based and had a whopping 4K memory!

One of the first things I did on it [besides playing the included games] was to hack up a simple For-To-Next loop
10 P AT 80:[some rude text usually ]
20 GOTO 10
run

Then I got into some basic BASIC , and altered a few of the App's included with the machine.

My second machine was another TRS-80, but this was a Model II [2]. It was Z-80 CPU based, with a "HUGE" DRAM of 64K!. Also sported a Low Density 8" Floppy Disk Drive [A:], with ability to connect an external Floppy Disk Drive via SCSI port. Had a 12 or 13" Monochrome CRT and QWERTY keyboard built in to the common case.
Also had a Daisy Wheel Tractor Feed Impact Printer.

All work had to be written in BASIC code, then saved to a floppy. Booting required [of course] the bootable floppy disk - which contained the interperter and the operating system [TRS DOS]. Needless to say, if that bootdisk became corrupted or lost, the machine refused to do anything after POST [AKA IRQ 80h - non system diskette. reboot system, or the even older "Cannot load Cassette BASIC, Restart"].

What a giant leap it was to go from the Model II, to a PC! My first was an 80386SX based machine with a 14" color EGA display and a Hard Drive!!! 1 MB of DRAM [30 pin 100 ns type].
That machine got upgraded as time went on and $$$ became available. I still have it and will never get rid of it, because it was my hands on self teaching tool. Very sentimental to me.

Used an 80286 based PC in conjunction with the 386, then moved up to an 80486DX2 for about 2 months prior to buying my first Pentium based machine, which was a P5-166 Mhz, purchased in late May of 1996.

Wow, my life story again!

Scott S.E.T.

I still love the old 8-bit CPUs like the Zilog Z80. The fact that it's survived so long and become used as a secondary processor for disk controllers, keyboards, etc. just shows what a great CPU it was. Full credit to the 8080 for starting it (the Z80 was designed as an "extended 8080" and will run 8080 code).

The Acorn machines I mentioned above were based on the 6502, which was also used in a lot of the Commodore machines of the time. A teacher at my old school had a homebrew 6800-based system which I played around with sometimes as well. Each of these CPUs had slightly different register combinations and addressing modes.

Lance, you mentioned the XT and AT. The original IBM PC (model 5150) was launched in 1981 with the 8088 processor. The XT (eXtended Technology) came out a little later and I believe had a hard disk fitted as standard. There were many clones of course, and some of these used the 8086 CPU. The later AT (about 1984?) went to the 80286 processor with its full 16-bit data lines.

I have a Pentium system loaded with WWW browsers etc., but I still have an old Tandon XT clone that I use for simple word processing, accounts, and so on. It has MDA video and I run it with an original green-phosphor IBM monitor. For hours working on documents, I still believe that today's Super-VGA color displays can't hold a candle to that old mono system for clarity.

It has only a 20MB hard disk (remember when they were commonly called Winchesters? ), yet with word processor, accounts software, SuperCalc, Turbo Pascal, assembler/debugger, and a whole load of other things it still has only half of the disk in use most of the time.

The installation routine of some modern software wouldn't even load into that space.

Paul,

Like your reply! I have some older Bunko-Ramo Controllers which were used at Teller Lines for connecting the Terminals to the LAN. These were used all the way upto 1998 and contained a Z-80 CPU. They worked just fine, and probably would still be in service to this day - except for the Mandated "Y2K" Compatability upgrades which caused all the older equipment to be tossed.

IBM's system 4700 used the same approach [4702 Controller running Teller Terminals], but I am unsure of the CPU type [likely to be an Intel 8088, since the 5.25" diskettes contained PC DOS and the Controller's code].

IBM equipment at the branches still boots with 3270 Emulator as a TSR, and now include support for NTFS, FAT / FAT32 [MSDOS] and lately has support for Ethernet 802.3 [10 / 100 Base] within the OS/2 enviroment and on-board. Previous versions only supported 802.5 [4/16 MB Token Ring], so installation of a NIC in the bus was required for Ethernet LANs.

I agree with you 100% about using Monochrome Monitors for Word Processing [when hard copies will be printed only with black fonts - kind of gets hard to have multiple colored fonts end up the way you want them hard copied when viewed on Mono VGA, or Mono EGA / CGA / etc.]. Using simple pixels on the screen isn't such an eye strain!
My first CAD application [on my 386] looked much better on a monochrome display, as opposed to color [My EGA monitor could be switched from color to Mono].

Hey, was that 6800 / 6502 CPU a Motorolla IC??? [class 6xxx]
Just curious.

As to the IBM PC / XT, I seem to recall the PC 5150's bus architecture had 8 bit ISA bus only, and the XT's started using 16 bit ISA slots with the 8 bit ones. Possibly a few more instructions in the ROM BIOS to deal with the 16 bit. Think the PC came with 64K of DRAM, and the XT came with 256K. Also think the XT had an adapter containing 16K BIOS extensions [XT Hard Disk BIOS Extensions].

Speaking of Intel CPUs predating the 386 class, wasn't the reason for the 80186's quick demise due to IBM ignoring Intel reserved interrupts? That CPU combined an 8086 Processor with several Peripherals into one IC [DIP???].

I remember the Winchester drive term from my 286 and 386 time period. Was that drive a 30 sector / 30 MB SCSI drive??? [hence the 30/30 term fitting the Winchester Rifle].
On that subject, anyone remember MCA? The first Plug-and-Play Architecture. If IBM wasn't so "IBM-ish", that architecture might have been used for a few more years, at least by the Clone Builders here and there, instead of only found in Big Blue's machines like PS/2 or System 70.
A friend brought me an IBM PS/2 80486DX2 based PC which used MCA only, and wanted me to put in sound, SVGA adapter and an Internal MODEM. Took me almost an hour to explain why I could only connect an External MODEM [Via DB-9 Serial Port], but nothing else! This was around 1997.
He wasn't too happy when I suggested it was a really good Word Processing machine or something for simple Internet use.

Ahhh, feels good to talk like this again!

Scott S.E.T.

Scott35--5150, eh? A true-blue insider! I don't want to nauseate anyone, but HTML sure reminds me of WordStar.

My first pc was a Macintosh 512K with an external disc drive and daisywheel printer way back in 1985. I remember going to a software store and buying a word processor program made by some company called Microsoft...who knew? We had the old TRS-80's at school in the so called computer lab. I dont think two TRS-80's really constitutes a computer lab anymore.

[This message has been edited by arseegee (edited 06-30-2002).]

Some early brain damage... Me and these two other guys worked at a place where we could get hand-me-down PC stuff for almost nothing. We were titled “electricians” but we did our share of geekey stuff to support our division.

It was all obsolete but completely “True Blue” IBM. We’d get 5150 PCs, 5151 expansion chassis with their goofy ¾-inch umbilical cords, 5160 XTs and 5170 ATs. Many had 3270 emulation cards that seemed to be sort of an early form of blazing pre-ethernet, giving coveted access to the almighty Oracle base through pricey 4-wire data circuits. Early PC serial/parallel ports were termed “aux” and “prn” before comx and lptx. ATs had an idiotic 1.2MB bios configuration disk.

Most common add-on board had a hardware clock and 384KB of that mysterious “above 640” memory. There were lots of 20-40MB hdds and hideous failure-plagued 10MB removable media; riding in notched frames of the ATs in an "optional" hatcheted ½-height drive bay.

This was all pre-mouse…with those beautiful 100?-key “Selectric Touch” keyboards jealously guarded… IMO they still have not been even closely copied—much less outpaced—in feel and reliability.

Used Qmodem and Telix terminal emulation software along with WordStar and Lotus v2.x. Remember LIST, Xtree and Phil Katz?

One of us was this crazy guy who would write dos executables in assembly language so we could do remote equipment polling and control on water-distribution pumping and 115/12kV substations at a 5000-acre site. The place had its assortment of asphalt and dirt roads. The electrical-system polling had a ~5-mile daisy-chained RS-423 leased 4-wire data line.

The crazy guy’s code was very compact and permitted power-failure restart to save us a few trips from after-hours phone calls. It all ran 24/7/365; 3 shifts with few complaints.

Those PCs have since made chock blocks. Original prices on the stuff must have been stellar.


[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 06-30-2002).]

My first computer was a stock IBM XT with two floppies and a whopping 256K of RAM. Over the next year I added a 20 Meg Seagate MFM hard disk ($440.00, or $22,000.00 a Gig(as opposed to today's $1.47 a Gig)) and an EGA Graphics Adapter that came with an offer for a new fangled program called Windows for $15.00. Windows 1.01. Still have the disks and docs. I'd cut my teeth back in school on text based control of the output and immediately fell in love with with the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) set up in windows and promptly put together my Elec. Cont. proposal contract using the bundled word processor, Write. No more hand written contracts for me, No Sir.

The first computer experience, though, was gained through the indirect access to an IBM System 360 Model 60 mainframe at Iowa State U back in the late '60s. When we were first introduced to it, we were shown the new ferrite toroid memory cores, card about three foot square with a wire mesh, much like a window screen, that threaded through the tiny ferrite doughnuts. This core memory was a great improvement over the spinning drum, three foot wide and four foot high, that was read by a row of brush contacts that would sweep along the outside of the drum. Highest speed Random Access Memory. We'd submit our program exercises to the high priests that served the machine, and get back out printed output a day later. The printers were kept under acoustic shields to protect the priest's ears from the noise created by the chain of printable characters, that was longer than the width of the output paper, that was struck by a hammer as each impression was left on the paper. We'd put the programs together one line of code per punch card at a time. We'd try to do things like solve an "Instant Insanity" puzzle, the Rubick's Cube.

I thought that even though the Commodore products (Vic 20, c-64, c-128) were sold in Toy stores that they fairly sophisticated. They had some self-learning programs that taught basic programming and I found them quite interesting. Through 'peeks' and 'pokes' we could create new characters (and control individual pixels) and sounds. Even though the 'serious' people had machines like the Pet, XT, or AT they seemed quit envious of what the C-64 could do with Color and Sound. It was a lot of fun.

Bill

It's amazing how one forgets details that were once indelibly etched into the brain. Did the bus go to 16-bit on the XT? I thought that happened on the AT?

I'd always been led to believe that the Winchester handle came about from the famous rifle and IBM's code for the hard drive, but I'm not sure whether that code had any relationship to sectors/capacity.

The 6800 is Motorola. 6502 was Rockwell, if I recall correctly.

Bill,
Most BASICs of the time had PEEK and POKE, but the Acorn BASIC implemented in the Atom and the BBC Micro I mentioned used really neat ? and ! operators to address a byte or a 16-bit word. It took a bit of getting used to at first, because many other BASICs used "?" as an abbreviation for PRINT.

One piece of hardware I really wish I'd kept was a big Triumph-Adler daisywheel printer. It weighed a ton (well, probably about 40 lb.) and was slow, but the print quality was fantastic.

As the subject of keyboards has been mentioned, does anyone else find that the PC keyboard has developed more than a few quirks over its development?

Look at the original PC keyboard, and the CTRL key is in the correct place, to the left of "A". It was still there on the first AT keyboards, so why did somebody decide to move it? (I have a neat TSR which hooks the keyboard interrupt and swaps CTRL and Caps Lock.) Similarly, who decided to move ESCAPE up away from the main key area? I grew up always expecting it to be immediately to the left of "1." (The first AT keyboard even had Esc on the right with the numeric pad!)

The original PC keyboard also adopted the annoying layout of having "\" between left Shift and "Z". For some strange reason, it is still there on modern British PC keyboards even though it was moved back to a more sensible place on American versions. I use a U.S. keyboard normally, but if I have to use somebody else's (British) keyboard here, I'm forever hitting \ or | by mistake.



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

Paul,

As I recall, the XT was an 8 bit bus with a 16 bit processor. It'd run 16 bit code, two samples per processor execution. Before I migrated up to a 386, I was running "Windows 286" on that lowly machine. I thought I was patient, but when I installed my first copy of Excel for Windows, I learned about 30 second refreshes. When I then output the table in graphic format, the wait turned into minutes.

Al,

Thanks -- That what I had in mind, because the XT retained the 8088 CPU of the original PC, and while the 8088 is 16-bits internally, it has only an 8-bit external bus.

Some of the PC/XT clones used the 8086 processor, which is equivalent to the 8088 but with a true 16-bit bus.

What a clown I am!!!

Just dusted off the old books plus IBM stuff and just like you guys said, the XT had only 8 bit ISA bus! [my short term memory is bad enough, now the long term is crashing too?!!]

For some darn reason I was thinking the XT's 8088 ran the 16 bit ISA with twice as many clock ticks - pushing the complete word through the internal 16 bit registers by breaking the word into two Bytes, which ran serial thru the 8 bit external registers.

Don't know where I came up with this one, or even why!!! Man, talk about latency! there would be about 4 times as many wait states from that one, even with instruction prefetch queue [pipeline]!!!

As everyone mentioned, the 80286 was a 16/16 CPU [16 bit inside, 16 bit outside], which allowed for 16 bit bus usage.

What a dope! Need to go back to "Old School" or go over the Triassic Period Books more often!

Sorry about the "Flinging O' Poo-Poo Info"

Bjarney, I remember that Word Processor - Wordstar! We had Wordstar Gold for DOS [like version 1.xx or something]. Now that was as far from WYSIWYG or "User Friendly" that an App' could ever be!
Yes, it does look like HTML tagging big time!

Had this, along with a variety of old DOS App's, which ran absolutely flawlessly on my 386 machine [80386 sx 16 mhz - the classic "Affordable 386" CPU; 32 bit inside, 16 bit outside, or simply 32/16].

My all time favorite Utilities were X Tree [mentioned earlier], Norton Utility for DOS [got that around 1994], Copy QM for copying floppy disks, Autosketch for DOS, and a DOS based shell type "Menu" App' for running different programs with a mouse click, instead of typing stuff at the Command Prompt. Got it for free and it was really cool.

Old Windows [3.0 and 3.1] ran really slow on that machine! Too much disk cache going on! [only 4 MB of 100 ns DRAM!]. Never tried old Windows on the 286 [standard mode sucks!].
Windows 3.1 and 3.11 for workgroups ran with very few GPFs / IPFs on the 386 in "386 enhanced mode". Large App's took days to execute, Print Jobs took even longer! [one reason was my legacy HP laser printer had only a serial interface, the other was my Epson MX-80 printed only in one direction and retraced each line when Windows drove it].

Scott S.E.T.

Just look at how many later word processors and text editors adopted the Wordstar control-key commands, or a slight modification of them (Ctrl-S/D/E/X for cursor movement, ctrl-R/C for Pgup/PgDn etc.).

Wordstar really was a great word processor right from its early CP/M days.

Many Winders ‘shortcut’ keys are the same as were Wordstar’s in 1986 or before…like <ctrl><left-cursor>, <ctrl><right-cursor>, <ctrl><home> and <ctrl><end>. The “inverted-T” keys—much less a mouse—weren’t there early on.

Many folk nowadays also forget that not all terminals in the "old" days had cursor keys, page up/down, and so on, so Wordstar and many other packages were designed so that they could be used on even the most basic terminal.

And for those units which did have extra cursor/function keys, there was no standardization as to the codes produced by these keys. Remember having to install each code manually if your terminal type wasn't listed?

"Laptop" concept ~60 years ago...1943
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/R/R09/R0906-72dpi.jpeg

Discovered a new toy! It can store jpeg pictures on a CD and then they can be viewed on DVD player as a Video CD, so after the burn the Computer can rest!

What is the new "Wi Fi" technology?

What will this do to the DSL and other fast lines?

Anyone have any recommendations for a PDA?

I used to get in trouble in grade 8 for playing 'Star Trek' on an Ohio Scientific Teletype. It must have taken 10 minutes to load the game off the punchtape, and 5 minutes to print out the screens when you moved 5 spaces. 'K' for klingons, 'E' for Enterprise, and '*' were stars.

WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) is a catchy name for the standard otherwise know as 802.11B.

Joe,

I've been using a Compaq Ipaq PDA for almost two years. The MS PocketPC OS and software integrates seamlessly with Outlook. When I'm done with work, I use it at choir to capture the song(s) that needs the most work so I can practice later. It has been a great unit.

I also note that Toshiba has been getting high marks for its PocketPC PDA in the last months.

Al

Scott35

I too remember the TR(a)S(h) computer. We had the color version though. I also remember playing Pong for HOURS. Now my daughter has been playing games on the computer before she was 2. She is now 7 and surfs the internet, only on sites approved by me, pretty much every day. We were watching a mini-concert on the computer and I was thinking when I was her age I was excited when GI Joe came out with the action grip.

ElectricAL

Thanks for the advice, I am still going to wait. Seems like they come out with ne toys every week! I have a drawer full of gadgets.

Thanks,
Joe


[This message has been edited by Joe Tedesco (edited 10-26-2002).]

My first was also a Vic-20 with a tape recorder!

goto
next
for

can it do this?

Wow! What version of Word is that?

I gotta upgrade!

(LOL!)

Looks good, but it's running under Windows.

It'll crash as soon as you select any of those worthwhile options....

http://www.funnydoodle.com/images/fp-151.jpg

http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html

i'd like this one please,
cream & sugar too

I still have my IBM XT. I think it's 1979 or 1980. It running speed is 2mb. The 286 was 16. That was when you had to know all the commands to have it get you anywhere, doing the old C:/ prompts and stuff. No internet connection as it wasn't available at that time. Had 5 1/4" drive. Could hear the fan running from the other room. I don't think the trash man waould evern take it, still up in the attic. It has one of the first color monitors a CGA (color graphic adapter)

Vic 20s! I remember using them in day camp when I was littler. "Shift and Clear, disappear" was how we remembered to clear the screen.

In 3rd grade we had Apple II+ computers and then the Apple IIe. In High School we had Macintoshes.

My own computer was at first a Texas Instruments TI994/A, with a tape recorder. I remember sitting and typing in those BASIC programs that were oh-so-thrilling.

I then moved up to an Apple IIc. I still have the thing. One could get eye damage from trying to read the tiny screen...

Mr. Tedesco:

Relative to WiFi, a neighbor of mine is trying to set up a service that will serve those locally who are not able to obtain DSL.

I am one of the fortunate DSLers. Just down the block is where the fiber begins, so those folks are out of luck. My friend has been testing sort of a cellular model that will utilize a DSL line via the WiFi equipment. Pop the wireless card into your Palm or Laptop and you have an internet-live computer. Just keep a spare battery or two ;-)

As to having a lot of gadgets around, yes, the technology changes so quickly that I go by the general rule that once I buy something, it's already obsolete...

Fortunately, the 'net has some great places to compare prices, such as http://shopper.cnet.com/ which will give you price comparisons from many different sources.

Have fun!

We were introduced to computers just as I started High School.
We got to use one of the first of the Apple computers and had it hooked up to an old B/W TV in the "computer room",(there was only a single computer in this room).
Later on, we moved up to the latest BBC computer and we all got a taste of BASIC programming.
Then the Beeb MkII came out and we thought it was Christmas!.
About this time I left school and bought a kit to make a simple Z-80 based computer called a TEC-1B, from a company in Australia and it had all sorts of add-ons, but by todays standards, it could really do much, not long after I bought an Amstrad and had it, until the power supply mysteriously blew one day.
I replaced this with a Amiga 500, a computer I still have today, although it's uses are pretty limited.
And these days I am using a Compaq with all sorts of rubbish inside it, including lots of nasty Windows stuff!.

I had a BBC Model B for some years as well and they were a pretty nice little micro. They still have a big following in Britain today and BBC-related stuff shows up on eBay all the time.

Before the BBC, I built an Acorn Atom from a kit. This was virtually the predecessor to the BBC, as it was Acorn which extended the design and sold the BBC on it for their computer literacy project.

In the days when I was still at school and unable to afford a computer of my own I had to "make do" with the school computers: We had a Research Machines 380Z micro, and a room which was full of an old Elliot 803 and its peripherals. The local tech college had a PDP-11/40 at that time, and we had a terminal at school, or I'd go down to the college's "terminal room" some evenings. That had something like twenty or more ASR33 teletypes clunking away in it -- It was almost like working in a machine shop!

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.

Paul,

What was that?

A reference to Trumpy's comments about programming in COBOL and the people who hassled him that are now flipping burgers.

I guess you've never seen COBOL ?

Have a look here for what some real COBOL programs look like.
http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/examples/default.htm

I had a VC20, if I'd try I guess I could find it on the net( so you too!

Here you go Gloria:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=252



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 10-10-2004).]

Wow,

This thread takes me back a few! The first that I owned was an Apple IIc. Man. I remember spending hours pounding in lines from a magazine, only to get "syntax error line 1045".

There was an earlier post about not having a "LET" command. AppleSoft did not reqire it, it would also let you do a "FOR without NEXT".

The first one that I used was a TRS 80 and an IBM System 34, that was in high school.

Memories...........

Dont worry, I had just seen a "type mismatch" error, I was so delighted!!! LOL!