What was the first computer you used?

[AlexS]

In the quizz forum there were some references to old computers that twigged my memory of some of the old 'technological marvels' that were around.

What was the first type of computer you used, when and what were some of its outstanding features?

The first computer I used was an Olivetti Programma 101, in the late 1960s. It sat on the desk, had flashing red & blue lights (red was baaad) and printed out on a roll of paper about 70mm wide. Programming was by magnetic cards which could also be used for data entry. From memory, it had thirteen registers, some of which could be split if you accepted a loss of precision. jobs that would be done on the fly now used to be left to run overnight, so the cleaner could switch it off before the job finished.

The nicest computer I ever used was a HP9845, a desktop (if you had a bloody big desk) with 64k. Basic was hardwired into it and you could buy graphics, maths and other ROMs. You could buy a hard drive that was about the size of a washing machine, and it came with an inbuilt thermal printer. There were a host of peripherals, including line printers floppy drives, cartridge tape drives, plotters and a digitising tablet, and you could drive them all at once. A great machine.

[Alix]

The first "real" computer I used, as opposed to a handheld or desktop model, was an Elliot 803 installed at RMIT in Melbourne in 1967. It had 400 characters of mercury delay loop memory (that's right 4 hundred).

It was programmed in real binary machine code although you actually input the commands in hexadecimal (I can still remember that x41 was the ADD instruction). It had paper tape input and output.

You had to use a separate teletype machine to create the input tape and then fed the output tape back through it as a printer.

This machine was used for many technical and scientific calculations. It was amazing how efficient and compact your code had to be to fit at all.

Ah, memories.

Allan

[scooter]

Apple II I think, at high school in 1981ish, with the card reader for inputting instructions.

Commodore 64 was pretty good in the next few years too.


Cheers..................Sean

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

Hmmm... one I built from an article in an ETI mag (I think). Real 8 bit stuff... 8xDPST switches and momentary toggle for data entry and 10xLEDs for output. :rolleyes:

Little did I know that 'twas to be the start of a terminal addiction...

(Still got my Vic-20... and C=64... and C=128D... and several Amigas from A1000 thru to A3000... and a shed full of PC-XTs thru to modern day. Not a single Apple though, a bloke has to keep some standards! :p:D)

[RufflyRustic]

The first computer I used was an OHIO made in 1871, woops, 1971 :D It had the screen and monitor all in one and ran the best games loaded from a cassette player I still remember that game, even though I can't remember the name of it :rolleyes: I taught myself very basic BASIC on it, you know, this type of stuff:

10 print "Hello"
20 print "Is this as good as it gets?" etc etc

I'm so glad we are past that now :)

[masoth]

Not sure of the date but certainly early 1960s - huge open reel tape machines housed in air controlled comfort. Specialists who operated them wore coveralls, caps, and shoe coverings. Bank upon bank of these most impressive things (in Canberra) were 'toured' by gaping admirers through wall sized windows.
The entire component closed down on a Friday for servicing and started again about 24 hours later.
I think the information was fed onto the tape via punched cards.

soth

[masoth]

....... and I should have said the performance of these behemoths was less than the Commodore 64.

soth

[Sir Stinkalot]

MicroBee at school?

Apple IIc at home.

[Dangermouse]

First I used was in the 70's, a Wang 2200. 8k of memory. first version the school had was fitted with a cassette player. The following year a huge advance was made with dual 5 1/4" disk drives. high tech stuff, that was!
First machine I worked on professionally was a univac cp901. 128k of memory. core memory too - every memory location was a series of ferrous donuts in a lattice of copper wire. 1 donut = 1 bit. only got retired a few years ago, too (the machine, not me :oo:).

[Stuart]

TSR80 at school, followed by BBC
Apple ][e at home (and I still have a functional one in my office. Also have a working ZX81, but never actually did anything with it).

Anyone hang onto any of the core memory? Would love some for my little historical computing collection (it's actually a pretty poor collection, but interesting none-the-less)

[Gumby]

Commodore 64. :oo:

Remember those adventure games. Open Door, look left, get ball.... :rolleyes:

[Honorary Bloke]

When I joined the Air Force in 1964, they said "you'll be a computer programmer, my son" and I said "what's that?" and they said "Da*ned if we know, but that what it says on the punched card here."

So, an IBM 7040 with 64K of memory (each hard-wired and housed in large, walk-in cabinets), 6 large standing magnetic tape drives, largish operator console with many flashing lights, and a 1200 lines per minute printer. All in a refrigerated room. :)

Program input was through use of punched cards, data input/output on the mag tapes. Code was written in MAP (Macro Assembly Programming) with instructions based on individual registers, such as Long Left Shift, Short Right Shift, etc. Also accepted COBOL and Fortran, but much less efficient. Many programs ran overnight and would print out one line of data every hour or so. :oo:

Also had PCAMs (Punched Card Automated Machines) used to sort the cards, etc. These were programmed using perforated bakelite plastic boards and individual plug connections to turn certain locations ON or OFF.

All rather primitive, but we thought it was the bee's knees. :cool:

[snowyskiesau]

Univac 1108 mainframe in the early 70's. I didn't know much about using it but I did know how to fix it when it broke.

[Gumby]

but we thought it was the bee's knees. :cool:
You seem to have taken on an unhealthy interest in the knee of a bee lately Bob. That's twice in 2 days you've been on them.

Anything we should know ? :D

[Honorary Bloke]

You seem to have taken on an unhealthy interest in the knee of a bee lately Bob. That's twice in 2 days you've been on them.

Anything we should know ? :D

Arrghh, you've caught me out. :(( I've a bit of a bee knee fetish, if you must know. Something from a childhood trauma, no doubt. :D

[Stuart]

Played a bit with card programming as a kid - the school I went to when I was 9 allowed us to write cards to request a print out - a calendar or similar, with a picture.

Still remember my (self-selected) username: "Black Panther" (I said I was 9)

Got to 14 & 15 and got into teaching myself machine language (and assembler) on the 6502 processor. LDA #80 :)

[craigb]

IBM 360/22

This was an upgrade to the 360/20 which came with 32K of core (so called because each bit of storage was a magnet (magnetic core) with a bit of wire wrapped around it))

Anyway, the 360/22 had an extra 32k of "core" bolted on to it. This memory incidently was made by the Ampex corporation which were the duck's guts in recording equipment at the time.

I wonder if they are still around.

Anyway, in those days, if your company had a computer, then you were a player!

Funny thing is that my el-cheapo MP3 player that I paid the princely sum of $49 for has 1G of memory. :rolleyes:

So it goes.

[ubeaut]

Late 70's early eighties had a TI 44a 16kb that attached to telly or RGB monitor and ran programs from cartridges or a cassette player or real to real tape recorder.

Used to spend hour programming it from books filled with computer code.

One program took my son and and me about 26 days to type in then another week to debug and at the end of that we pushed the enter button and a very, very basic graphic of a tap came onto the screen and had a drip of water come from it every now and then. after a while some little green lines began to spread across the bottom of the screen then another row of little green lines above it, then another and another and another until the tap was obscured form view. Just as we were beginning to get bored with watching the grass grow a sign came on the screen saying. CUT THE BLOODY GRASS WILL YA!

We loved it and all our friends came to see it and marveled at it with us. Those were the simpler days when everything was fresh, new and exciting.

Graduated to a Commodore 64 then graduated again to a Commodore 128 then got my first IBM an XT and went back into the dark ages of computing before slowly working the way up through the 286 386 486 etc that was about when I drew level with the Commodore 128.

Since then I have always built my own and will never go back to a store bought one. Now running a couple of pretty high-end lightning fast mean machines. Bugger... just talking about it makes me want to go out and do a major upgrade again.
:U

[JDarvall]

This hewlett packard pavilion thing.

[BobL]

Mine was a PDP 8 with 4k of RAM that we had to share with dozens of other staff and students. When it broke down for a month, in desperation I hired my 4 early teenage brothers (who in those days worked for hamburgers and Cokes) to do my project calculations using hand held calculators. It took the five of us a solid day to do what the computer could do in a few minutes, which included reading the data in from paper tapes. Considering I was only allocated a few minutes per day to begin with I sort of could keep up for about a week till the brothers asked for a raise I could not afford.

[journeyman Mick]

Can't remember what brand or model it was but in my last year of High School (79) we did a project on the computer in the library. Said beast was the size of a small cash register and we were required to enter and solve a bit of basic arithmatic on it. We were each given a punchcard about as high as a post card and maybe twice as long. After diligently listening to the instructions I managed to produce a card that wouldn't read or work at all. :((

Progress appears to have been made and I can now (mostly) work with the buggers but I still hate them.

Mick

[bsrlee]

First 'computer' thing - the old hard wire noughts and crossed machine at what is now called the 'Power House Museum' in Sydney - they still have it & occasionally bring it out on display.

First personal electically powered computing thing - a Sony(?) Elsimate calculator with glowing green numbers (still got that too, needs new batteries)

Then Apple IIe, Amiga 2000, x486 and Windoze......

[Schtoo]

A mate's Vic 20.

I aint that old... :U


The really silly/scary part of all this is, that if you add up the enormous computing power of all these 'firsts', they get trounced pretty hard by my new mobile phone...

(You know you are living in Japan when you get some new technology, you cant use half of the features and the other half you don't really want...

Like TV :tvh:...)

[Iain]

Mak (lost some keys and no SEE) 570K with the 800k eksternal drifer, dot matri printer, noisy sod of a thing, kost klose on $5k, needed 1 floppy to start and another to safe.

Help, lost 4 keys on bottom left korner:(( I kan spell but the beast won't play.

[Doughboy]

At school 25 years ago I had one of those scientific calculators. I read somewhere that it had more 'computing power' than the computers they used to land mankind on the moon. Does this mean sending Buzz, Neil and Co to the moon was a calculated risk????:o :p

Pete

[Tankstand]

A Tandy MC10, basically it was a joke! A good intro to Basic tho':roll:

Even had the expansion pack doubling the memory to 8K!

http://users.bigpond.net.au/jagf/mc10.html Not my page, just a link to a picture and description of it.

[bitingmidge]

The first was in '69. I have no idea what it was or how big or anything, I just know it was a useless piece of stuff. Lots of grey-green cupboards that looked more like a footy club locker room than a computer, and the people who were allowed in to push buttons wore dust coats for crying out loud.

It was at QIT (now QUT) in Brisbane, and I'd spend days putting squares on stupid cards for someone to punch so the machine could draw me a simple Pert programme I could have done in ten minutes by hand.

This experience, plus the tales of thousands of others with stories similar to Neil's (about spending weeks making the thing draw a dripping tap) convinced me that I needed a computer, not a hobby, so I bought a Mac!

Actually it was an Apple Lisa the world's first GUI integrated business machine. Within a year the Mac was released, and in nearly 25 years of fairly heavy use I have never had to type a line of code, or write a macro. (the odd cut and paste of Java into a webpage doesn't count! :; )

Strangely, all the DOS and other users back then used to bag us no end because we had a strange contraption called a "mouse", and used to waste so much time chasing a cursor round a screen, when it really only took a month of Sundays to learn a few keyboard commands and you don't need it at all... it was a "toy" computer.

Those same boffins now give me a hard time because my mouse has only one (actually no) button or scroll wheel.

P
:D

[Cliff Rogers]

1st one I used was a 1950's Control Data (?) at RAAF School of Radio in '77.
1st one I was trained to repair was a Perkin Elmer Interdata 7/32C Mini in 1979.
1st one I owned was an ETI S100 buss project that I built myself in about 1980.
1st PC clone I owned was an IPX twin floppy job in 1985 & I got 2 10Mb HHDs & a controller for it in 1987. I used to back up one HDD to the other. :p

[Grunt]

Dick Smith System 80, couldn't afford a TRS-80.


Commodore 64. :oo:

Remember those adventure games. Open Door, look left, get ball.... :rolleyes:

Gumby,

Do a search for Text Adventure Game and you'll find a copy of it out there in Internet land.

[KRH]

Myriad Computer in 1979 - already over 10 years old - 16KB of ferrite core memory, and it managed a RAAF air defence system. Followed by many others in RAAF and civilian life.

1st personal computer - around 1981 Dick Smith thingy 8KB memory, cassette tape interface and TV for screen, followed by Apple clone with twin 360K floppy drives, then XT clone and various newer computers onwards to now where they are just a commodity item.

[Driver]

The first one I owned and learned how to use was a Sinclair Spectrum Z80 - sometime around 1981. It was a clever design. The whole thing was housed in a black keyboard about the size of the one I'm using now, minus the RH one-third. You had to plug it in to a TV for a monitor and a tape cassette recorder for RAM. There was a small thermal printer available. It used a silver-coloured paper roll.

You could buy some proprietary software on cassettes but it came with a pretty good manual that taught you how to use Sinclair Basic. I was very proud of myself when I wrote a program for cost estimating steel structures. (This was in the days when I was a structural engineer / project manager).

I've probably still got that little machine somewhere. Hmmmm......:rolleyes:

[Shedhand]

My brain :roll:

then

a stupid PDP8 which was always broken down and shared by about 150 people on a roster.

[Eddie Jones]

I worked in computer support from 1982 till retiring 2 years ago, not sure what the FIRST computer I used was - Probably a PDP-8 - but certainly my favourite one was given to me once as a birthday pressie.

It was from Dick Smiths. A small piece of green plastic with 5 holes for the fingers! Oh and there was a bit of that green twistie-tie too. That was the memory!

Eddie

[martrix]

MicroBee at school?

Apple IIc at home.

word, me too except the Microbee was at home.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Microbee_logo.gif (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee)

[outback]

1st, dunno what it was, same deal as Ruffly, you had to learn a heap of crappy commands just to see a word on the screen. It was really more of a programmable calculator than a computer.

2nd Microbee. Loaded the program via the audio cassette hookyuppygadget.

[MICKYG]

Vic 20, Commodore 64, TRS 80, and then ibm type clones.

Regards Mike:doh: :doh: :doh:

[scooter]

...a terminal addiction...

[groan] :D


Remember those adventure games. Open Door, look left, get ball.... :rolleyes:

Hobbit was one I think?

[Landseka]

Well golly-gee, don't tell me I was thoe only person to own an Atari 400? :rolleyes: What a machine it was, 16K memory I think, Cassette tape storage, 51/4" disc drive stand alone for $400 odd I think, membrane keyboard. (actually I still have it)

This was very early 80's and I vividly recall getting everything home & powering up only to find I just had an expensive calculator. Rang the shop and was told I would need the 'optional' basic in a cartridge if I wanted to do more than calculating. :o,

I'd love to sell that geek a car, then sell him the 'optional' engine. (but only if you want to drive the car sir)

Regards

Neil

[Hoppoz]

An Apple IIe with monochrome green screen and used to play StarTrek which repesented the Enterprise with an "E" and Klingons were "Ks"

Hoppoz

[rrich]

The first one, that I actually put fingers on...

RCA - 301

First one that I programmed...

IBM - 1620

First personal computer...

IBM 370/155
(It was all mine during second trick. Until a VP saw me using the system one evening. He asked me, "Are you aware that the corporate financial informaton and human resource information is on this system?" My answer was, "Yeah, but it is on those other disc packs and I never spin those up. I'm just debugging this program." The next day I had an operator for my PC. :D )

Other systems that I've repaired or programmed
RCA Spectra/70
PDP 8
PDP 11
VAX
DECSystem 20/20 (A real POS)
CDC 6500, 6600, 7600
IBM 360/50, 370/167
GE/PAC 4020 and 4010
A system (APZ something, I can't remember the name, the North Electric version was ETS-4) for Telephony switching by L.M. Erickson (I believe that Telstra has/had some of these)
Interdata 7/16 and 7/32

At home we've had either access to a remote system or an actual PC since 1971.

[Wood Butcher]

The first computer that I used was a Dick Smith VZ-300. Similar to what Tankstand mentioned earlier (http://users.bigpond.net.au/jagf/mc10.html) by the looks of things. Used to spend hours programming BASIC games into it and recording them onto tape if we thought they were good enough (out of memory the tapes were 5min long)

Sort of lost interest after a while till the old boy bought a xt 086 which had 2 x 5 1/4" floppy drives which I thought was fantastic. Then for the huge upgrade to a 5 mb HDD and eventually a colour monitor. I still had this until only a few years ago when I gave it to some friends that are interested in collecting old working desktops. Still goes too!

[Stuart]

[groan] :D
Hobbit was one I think? Yup, and Zork, and a whole heap of others. Think one of the best derivations (around the 386 time) was Gateway, an adaption of a book by Frederik Pohl.

http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/images/galleries/86/86_1_medium.gif

Then there was Ultima (Exodus Ultima 3 was my favourite), can still remember most of the commands - each key on the keyboard was a different action (a)ttack, (b)oard, (c)ast, (d)escend, (e)nter etc etc

http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue53/14-2.jpg

I have a few GB of these early games, part of my collecting obsession. There's a great book called "Hi Score" which is a gloss-over look at gaming history.




Those same boffins now give me a hard time because my mouse has only one (actually no) button or scroll wheel.

P
:DYou probably are too proficient with what you have, but if you want the best of both worlds, the Apple Mighty Mouse is an awesome bluetooth mouse. (looks like it is only 1 button, but you can left & right click, has a wheel etc etc). Great for us PC users converting to mac.

[Cliff Rogers]

Anybody remember 'Hunt the Wumpus' (sp)

How about Scott what's'isname's Adventure series?

And what about Startrek?

[Harry72]

TRS80 for me, we used to make our own games for it!
Still bloody addicted to games now...

[craigb]

And what about Startrek?

Yes mate. Many wasted hours playing that on a 3270. :oo: :D

In fact, I think it was the last computer gane I played. Either that or Adventure. :-

Here is a history:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/maury/games/space/star_trek.html

[Big Shed]

Sinclair Z80, followed by Microbee with a hard drive, man I thought it was Xmas!

[zenwood]

I remember marking 'punch' cards with pencils or textas at school and sending them off to be run on an IBM mainframe, probably a 360. Programming with APL was a nightmare to say the least, though it did have the advantage of compactness.

Earliest one I actually used was a HP9830:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/98xx/9830pr3m.jpg

it ran Basic, and we used to play a grid-based 'Star-Trek' game on it. That was fun, until we learned to work out the firing angles using the arctangent function. Then the school got a tandy TRS-80

http://www.weller.to/wcc/trs/wcctani__01l.jpg
what fun watching the casette tape memory spin.

Shortly after, Moore's law kicked in, and we were blown away by the awesome speed of the HP9835:

http://www.decodesystems.com/hp9835a.jpg

Though the keyboard on this was crap compared to the 9825.

The first IBM 'personal' computer was introduced shortly after that, but I thought it looked very kludgy. I used a Prime something-or-other for my thesis, getting serious about the joys of FORTRAN77, and LaTeX, then got introduced to the first macintosh . . .

[AlexS]

I remember marking 'punch' cards with pencils or textas at school . . .

That's easy compared to punching in programs on a Holerith punch.:rolleyes:

[craigb]

Well when I started out there were teams of ladies who spent their days punching a programmer's code into an IBM 029 Holerieth punch card machine.

Then we'd get a tray or two of these cards (each tray held 4000 cards) that we'd feed into the 025 card reader.

Drop the tray and it was a case of "4000 card pickup" :oo:

Still the cards were way better than the paper tape which was a complete PITA.

Almost as bad as decollating 5 part paper (shudder).

[graemet]

My first computer was a Microbee 32 that ran its operating system from an audio cassette player, then the Microbee 64 which had a SS SD 3 1/2" floppy drive built in, but no hard drive. Still, it ran Wordstar and an accounting program called Multiplan and put its output into a dotmatrix printer. I later got a database called BeeBase. My first floppies cost $10 each - SSSD!
I computerised my business with a 286 clone and a 20 megabyte hard drive that the software developer assured me would be more than I'd ever need.
I'm still using that management program with, I guess, hundreds of upgrades, now running in Windoze. It was faster in DOS.
Cheers
Graeme

[silentC]

The maths master at high school had a programmable calculator the size of a briefcase. He used to program it to display a yoyo in 0's and 1's.

My first hands on experience was a TRS 80 at school in 81-82. My first computer was a C64 (chucked it out last year). Used it mainly to play games (Google 'MAME' to download and run some of those old games on your PC).

[Stuart]

Wordstar......there's a story behind that program....

On my first ship, the Marine Engineer Officer was VERY much against new technology, specifically computers (god help him if he had ever been posted to an ANZAC - computer controlled engines...really the whole ship was a floating computer).

I was using one to write up my notes and he demanded that "Real engineers don't use computers, real engineers climb over steampipes and trace systems"

He used the ship's laptop to write correspondence, using Wordstar 2000. However, not all the functions or benefits of a computer where known to him. He would write a letter, print it out, then take a pencil and jamb down the delete key. He would time how long a line would take to delete and work out that "Arr...just enough time for a cup of tea...."

The idea of save, select all, new document etc were beyond comprehension.

Another brief story about him: he was in the wardroom one evening, and turned on the tv and video. Turns out one of the previous users had left a video in the machine (before females were allowed to serve on front-line naval vessels fwiw). Just then the XO escorted his guests (male & female) into the Wardroom for a drink, and the MEO freaked. He was in such a state trying to block the tv with his body, he couldn't work out how to turn the machine off. He resorted to ripping the power cord out of the wall (it was hardwired in).

[silentC]

That reminds me of one night when I was up at the local golf club. It was during the World cup and they had one of the big TVs tuned to a game on SBS. We were all drinking away after the game and I happened to look up. There on the big screen for all to see was one of those movies that SBS is famous for, right in the middle of the, erm, action. It was Japanese from memory. You've never seen a shift supervisor move so quick!

[Stuart]

Ah - SBS. The National Geographic of the modern era.