What was the first computer you used?

[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.

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.

[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...


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 ...)

[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????

Pete

[Tankstand]

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

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

[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.

[Grunt]

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

Commodore 64.

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

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.