What was the first computer you used?

[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:



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


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:



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.

[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"

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.