What was your first computer?

[rcguy1]

MY first computer was an abacus. Then I graduated to a slide rule.

[ricoman]

Sounds like there are some old-timers on this thread.

[DereX888]

OMFG, is that a *SCREEN* in the middle of this thing!?
Did it come as a set with magnifying glass?
(jokes aside, it is cool iMHO)

[rumplestiltskin]

Recommended reading: Hackers by Steven Levy which may be found here: http://tinyurl.com/5q84w2

It was the Osborne that reminded me.

Also track down episode four of the first Connections series (by James Burke), "Faith in Numbers"

[MaDmiZe]

First computer (if you can call it that) was vic-20 inthe early 80's had a cassette tape drive and a 1200 bps modem. Used it as a remote terminal to access the server on campus from my house. Kept me from having to sleep in the computer lab.

Updated that to a c-64, then later a 80286 that I got as a box of spare parts from a friends dad. Had to buy most components and put it together, bought my first hard drive....105mb cost over $400. Now 500gb cost $105.

56k modems came much later and we thought they were the bomb (compared to 1200 the 2400....big jump to 14k) now we all run cable or dsl at 6mb and complain : )

By the way I still have the vic-20 and the comodore-64 and a huge collection of games on 5 1/4 discs.

[Ai Haibara]

OMFG, is that a *SCREEN* in the middle of this thing!?
Did it come as a set with magnifying glass?
(jokes aside, it is cool iMHO)

Looks a little like the Commodore SX-64, actually. (that picture reminded me of it; I didn't have one, but my uncle did.) For pictures of the SX-64: http://oldcomputers.net/sx64.html

[edDV]

My Dad got the CP/M KayPro II in the early 80's and wrote three novels on it. It came with Microsoft Word and Perfect Writer,etc. I was using an Apple II Plus + VisiCalc at the time but switched to the IBM-PC + Lotus 123 in 1983.

[SingSing]

This Mark 1 mechanical computer is still on display at Havard University's Math department lobby, when I walked by a few years ago. It is rated in C.P.R. ( Computation Per Revolution )

If you are the operator of this relic, please step forward.

[edDV]

My Mom ran Hollerith card sort machines during WWII for the British Railway. The card sort was used to route civilian and war related cargo to rail cars. The rail office was a prime target for Nazi bombs. A 500 lb Nazi bomb was defused at the rear of her house. Much of her neighborhood was destroyed.

After the war, Hollerith was renamed to IBM Corp.
http://www.officemuseum.com/data_processing_machines.htm





Recently, my mom lost her brave fight and died this past Tuesday.

[jagabo]

Is that your Mom? She's hot!

[Amish Electrician]

286 SX with CGA monitor 5 1/4 drive & 20meg hd My buddy asked me what was I going to do with all that hard dive space. DOS 6.0 those were the days. I recall putting windows 3.1 on it had to get a 3 1/2 floppy took all day to load all those floppy. [/img]

[DereX888]

OT

Recently, my mom lost her brave fight and died this past Tuesday.

Man, my sincere condolences :/

[John-Paul]

edDV - sorry to hear that...

[Webster]

@edDV
My sincere condolences. No matter what anyone says, it is hard to loose a loved one.

[jagabo]

Recently, my mom lost her brave fight and died this past Tuesday.

Sorry to hear that. If I had seen it before posting I wouldn't have made the flippant remark.

[edDV]

Thank you all

[SLK001]

PDP-11. You "bootstrapped" the thing by inputting a loader via front panel switches that needed 16 sixteen bit words to load a paper tape reader that would read your program from the paper tape.

The output was from a line printer.

It was later upgraded with an 8" floppy disk that held a whopping 160kBytes of data (WOW! Who could ever fill up one of these??).

[DereX888]

PDP-11. You "bootstrapped" the thing by inputting a loader via front panel switches that needed 16 sixteen bit words to load a paper tape reader that would read your program from the paper tape.

The output was from a line printer.

It was later upgraded with an 8" floppy disk that held a whopping 160kBytes of data (WOW! Who could ever fill up one of these??).

Well, I never worked with such devices, but I'd say bits and bytes are the same regardless of the way you input them (paper tape with holes, magnetic tape with impulses, etc etc). Data feeds changed for faster and larger formats because the machines got faster and could process more, but aside of speed and capacity we are still using today exactly same binary technologies and concept as people 50 years ago - our machines just do it faster (which is also relative - when I'm watching Vista desktop running quad core newest CPU with oogles of RAM at office, I swear the first desktops I worked on - Pentium I PCs with Windoze 95 - were much faster and more robust in responsivness )

[Webster]

when I'm watching Vista desktop running quad core newest CPU with oogles of RAM at office, I swear the first desktops I worked on - Pentium I PCs with Windoze 95 - were much faster and more robust in responsivness )

Heck, we have computer I'd used at work for a scintillation counter which is an Intel 386 running at a blazing speed of 33 MHz (ISA card) with DOS 3.11 boot up (via floppy disk batch file) and ready to count in less than 30 seconds as compare to my work computer which is a E8400. The darn thing take almost 2 and a half minutes to boot up from off to the time it load MS word and ready for typing. Sometime I think technology is going backward......

[DereX888]

. Sometime I think technology is going backward......

hear hear!

[jagabo]

Yeah, I used to encode HD h.264 videos on my 6502 processor and it was so much faster than these clunky quad core CPUs we use today. And those beautiful 40 character green text displays were the bomb!

[DereX888]

Yeah, I used to encode HD h.264 videos on my 6502 processor and it was so much faster than these clunky quad core CPUs we use today. And those beautiful 40 character green text displays were the bomb!

who was talking about encoding?

BTW today morning just out of boredom I installed Win2K on that quad core machine. Man, it really flies compared to when it had Vista. Everything is instantenous.
The only problem was with Windoze itself (I made my last updated W2K installation disc in 2006, so you can imagine - there were about 60 new patches & hotfixes to be installed since then, ~100MB total download, took me like half an hour to do the updates) and Dell's website wasn't helpful at all with finding drivers. I used XP drivers when there was no 2K drivers (few I had to do simple modifications to install) and it took me another hour to do so, so its not for those faint hearted
But it was worth it. I proved to our new IT guy that same machine with different OS can be spectacular (he said that W2K "is too old and won't run on this" LOL where the hell they teach them this crap nowadays, at Microsoft's Vista Advertising Department or what? )