O.T. Do you recall your first computer? WOW

[johnniebear]

Have some fun recalling your first computer..

As my wife and I were cleaning out basement, I found an old  manual for my first computer.   My first computer was a Commodore,  it used a  cassette recorder to load the programs and I can only remember it a some sort of Lunar landing game and I don't recall much after that,  and few years later I moved up to a IBM PC Jr.

You guys & girls that are in your 20's,  might recall what your parents had.

So what was your first computer?


Take Care
John..

[Audrey_M]

I missed the whole DOS thing. Thank goodness.

In college, way back when, I had to take a computer course and learn FORTRAN (business major). I was hopeless, in that I would build infinite loops into my program. This was before the days of the PC. And heaven forbid that one would accidentally shuffle/misplace the order of the punch cards.Can't say that was ever my excuse.

In the 80's, I worked on Wall St. and the Finance "geeks" were the ones who used PC's. I used the mainframe computer that was specifically tailored to the trading and sales workforce. I did do a highly complex analysis of Money Market Funds and our market share using a PC and was so dependent on the Finance people for guidance. Even though I outlined my project in advance, we pushed the PC (with the real floppy discs- 5 1/4") and Lotus to the max. They told me if I ever wanted to do an analysis again, that I should use the mainframe computer!

In 1995, I was living in Antigua and we got hit by a major hurricane that did a lot of damage to the island. I was lucky to be able to use other people's computers for relief efforts. Loved it when I would write the Minister of Education's first name Rodney and spell check would come back with Rodent. LOL.

Moved stateside in 1996 and knew that I would have to become computer literate in order to rejoin the workforce. Bought my first PC with the hard "floppy" discs. Also bought a very good book to learn at my own pace with Microsoft Office products.

I've only taken one computer course, which was an advanced course in Excel. I was ahead of the class. They did not go into Visual Basic and this is an area outside of my proficiency.

Hard to believe the amount of memory in my first computer vs. what there is now, just like it is hard to believe the size of the first mainframe computers. They took up rooms of space and have nowhere near the capabilities of the average home PC today.

Thanks for the walk down memory lane.

Audrey

[johnniebear]

Boy have things changed,  I printed out numerous Happy Birthday banners on those old, loud dot matrix printers.

John..

[RedFlame]

I had a very used ibm computer that used DOS.  It scared me, I would hit a button and things would disappear.  I had mine set up for word processing only and had a dot matrix printer that I sometimes had to 'hand guide' the paper when printing.  

I made alot of emergency calls to my best friends husband who had to 'talk me down' and give me different codes to try.  

It was scary.

Red

[madmelissa]

My brother and I had a Commodore 64 that took both floppies and tapes. I must have been about 5 and my brother 9, and I remember him teaching me to do simple programs on it, mainly ones that would display simple pictures on the screen out of ascii characters when you typed:  run "whatever you named the program"

I had a game called "Little Computer People" which was the early 80s version of the Sims. One little 2-D guy in a 2 story house that you could feed, play simple games with, and annoy to death by making his phone ring over and over.

Gee, computers AND life were so much simpler then!

Melissa

[poker247]

I hand a Tandy computer.... my monitor was a 13inch color TV and my harddrive was a cassette player LOL

[jean_619]

I didn't get my first computer until I was 15.  It was DOS command line and did not have a hard drive -- you ran all of the programs off of the 5 1/4 inch floppy.  Before that, in grade school we had the ones that used cassette tapes.  Memories ...

[Quixotic1]

In 1981 we had the new Apple 2.  It was a big box and doing stuff on it seemed like working voodoo.

Q

[Sailorsong]

Like ess I predate even the primitive computers. My first experience with computers was while in the Navy. They had just installed one on a ship I was serving on for the missile fire control system.  The previous one was mechanical, but this one was electronic. It was 8 feet by 6 feet cabinet with magnetic core memory, and transistors of the processor logic. The programs were all loaded via paper tape reader. I quickly discovered that I had a natural talent for working with computers as I could just look at the lights for the instructions on the front of the computer and could read what the instructions were.

Right after I got out of the Navy I went to college for computer engineering And with each of the programming courses I would have all of the required programs written within the first week of the course. Before I even got my degree the head of the engineering department of the company I worked for promoted me to the position of Hardware design engineer because of the work I was doing for him and the company had applied for a patent on one of my designs.

My brother and I were working for the same company at that time ( before any kind of home computer came out) and we had tried to get the company to put out one of his designs as a home computer. But they insisted that no one would want a computer in their home. Both my brother and I had one of these computers in our homes. My brothers was still running around 10 years ago until the floppy drive died and he could not find another one as they don't make them any more.

Up until I joined the last company I worked for I always had one of the companies computers(IBM PC) at home so I never had to buy my own. I worked at that time on special computers designed for the DOD. At that time I bought a commodore 128  for my daughter and we use to spend hours on end playing games together on it.

Dennis
  

[essdipity]

I didn't actually own a computer back when. I even predate most of the clickety clack models, though what were called Trash 80s (Radio Shack) models were getting popular, along with similar other inventions.

Mainframes were what I learned on. No GUI interface, just command-driven, so I learned a bunch of operating systems, and as this sort of thing evolved, I wrote dozens and dozens of user manuals for various OS, such as VAX/VMS, Unix, X-Windows, etc.

But before I got that job, I took classes in a lot of Computer Science and Info Systems subjects, all at night, after my day job. I borrowed a weird modem that literally attached to the phone, and ran at 300 baud. I would start printing out my homework programs in whatever language it was, on a teletype machine, believe it or not. No monitors then. I'd get in the shower, and when I got out the program would still be clicking along. You can imagine how long it would take to print out a COBOL program at 300 bpi.

If I was using one of the computer lab terminals, I was thrilled to get a Decwriter. Still no screens, but they ran at 1200 baud. Whoopie! And of course, fanfold paper.

Once I got my job at the university I of course had my own terminal, and as time passed, various upgraded equipment, including PCs and Macs. I had a terminal for use at home, so that's what I did, but I wasn't much interested in the early personal stuff because under DOS, and later, I think, the word processing programs still lacked proportional spaced fonts, so there were, I think, always 96 character lines. Didn't look great. I used mainframe programs, particularly LaTex, to get great output.

Well, apologies for boring everyone silly with this stuff. Haven't really thought of it in years. But it's been a nice stroll down memory lane.

ess

[Lulu54]

It was an Atari computer that I bought used from my nephew - he was always much more advanced.  It took the 5 1/4" floppy disks which the 20-somethings here probably have never seen.  The printer was atrocious and took the paper with the notches on the side. And it was very noisy, making a clacking noise as it printed.

The one after that was a Macintosh - the second generation one.  

I wish I still had both - they are collectors items and in demand for exhibits.

Lulu