What was your first computer?
One capable of doing word processing, and not a "I bought an electronic calamalator back in 1973" answer please. :)
My first computer was an Atari 800XL, slightly newer than my best friend's Atari 400. Link goodness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family
Naturally, my school had to be different, and they had a TRS-80 on a cart for the students to use 1 hour a week. Link goodness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer
The one good thing was that learning BASIC meant I could program either computer to do tasks reasonably well.
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M$22 Answers
Pulled out the rom, plugged that into a friend's rom-reader, read it in order to determine the addresses of all the I/O ports, used that info to write a new boot and bios, burned that onto an eprom, plugged the eprom into the rom socket, and booted it up as a CP/M system with 2x9 inch floppy disk drives, and a SuperSoft C compiler.
Main application was: Designed, built, and wrote a driver for an interface card to plug into one of the computer's I/O ports, and wrote an application for recording, editing, and playing music from-and-to a Rhode's Chroma, which was (still is) a very good synthesizer, but which was built-and-sold with a custom interface (called a Chroma interface) and not a MIDI interface, because MIDI didn't get declared and agreed upon as a standard protocol until six months after Rhodes had already designed, built, and started selling Chromas.
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M$
20 print "!"
30 c = c + 1
40 if c != 10 goto 20
50 print "Vic 20"
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M$
It was interesting that most of my friends in school had C64's, and they thought a "Fast Load" cartridge was cool. Yeah, let's shave 20 seconds off of load time!
Ah, the VIC-20 (VIC = Very Intelligent Computer!): 4 kilobytes of RAM, cassette drive, 8" green monitor (40 x 16 text display)...I can't say I feel nostalgic.
My across the street neighbor had the Vic 20 as well - and he had a totally pimped out switch box system that allowed you to switch from antenna to Atari 2600, to the Vic 20 mounted on the wall.
Commodore. I had one of those too. The 64 came after that right? Commodore made a business computer ( the B-something or other) with a 5 1/4 floppy drive that was about 18 inches long. I saw it in a Computer Shopper (I think) and convinced a romance writer to buy one. It was a dinosaur but it started her career. (It was before the Pet)
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M$
The first computer I OWNED was an Apple IIe.
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M$
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M$
The first computer that I truly bought and paid for was a AMD Athlon 3000 64 with 512MB of ram, 120GB hard drive and a Sapphire ATI 9700pro
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M$
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M$
My first what you might call "proper computer" was an IBM Thinkpad. I'm not sure of the model number but it may have been something like this:
I believe it was Intel 386 based, ran Windows 3.1, Excel 3, had a floppy drive, and a state-of-the-art 14.4kbps PCMCIA modem. Oh, yeah, it was mono.
I think that was in about 1994.
But I used a lot of computers at work, uni and school long before I ever had one of my own.
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M$
I saw so many ThinkPad's at the bank that my eyes would glaze over when someone would show me a new one. Imagine how much fun it was for IT to track & supply security cabling for 5000 of those. :)
I'd love it if someone made something in the form factor of a Psion 5 using up to date tech. Imagine that with a color touchscreen, plenty of RAM and a fast processor! :)
Owned all the Psions from 3 thru 5mx.
I'm definitely a Psion fanboy. :D
Sorry for showing you another one... :)
Loved the Psion series 3, even more the series 5. PDA's have more wistles and bells today, but non is as good as those were.
My first one was a Synclair Z80 (not many will know that one), but the first capable of word processing was the TRS-80.
I used its Deluxe Paint software to learn coloring & basic animation, the time before i got hold of Photoshop. Later i learned Scala, which made great presentation effects.
Amiga A500 in Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500
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M$
AND a TRS-80.
We were so funny. Typing in programs line by line to do silly things, or to play games. We all thought we were computer science material, until a few years later when we tried to learn machine languages... Ooops.
One Christmas not too long ago I hauled out my old TRS-80 and wrote one of those stupid little programs that "talks" to you.
"hello, whats your name"
"Doug"
"Hi Doug, How are you?"
etc. etc.
AH the memories of days gone by.
Check out the sources below for some more good memories.
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M$
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M$
When I went to high school, they were cool - they had 20 Tandy 1200 HD's! The HD stood for "hard drive". I learned DOS quickly after that. :)
http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n6/36_Tandy_1200_HD_Winchester.php
The original TRS-80 had the huge 5 1/4 drives. It was better than IBM which had only one.
My first computer was an IBM386 which I got window's 3.1 to install and used it for Game's basically.
I was able to restore it to perfect condition when I first bought which back then you window's 95 just premiering and AOL hitting the tube.
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M$
My life.
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M$http://www.westfieldnj.com/eis/ComputerEducation/Samples%20of%20Student%20Work/COMPUTERS%20-%20Bogen,%20Matt%2002/oldapple
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M$
I owned a Franklin which was an Apple II Plus clone. They were sued out of business. It was better than the Plus because it had one of the first numeric keyboard.
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M$
Press play on tape.
:P
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M$Man, I spent sooo many hours with that thing.
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M$
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7lAhguZWdE
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M$
It is one of my favorite computers, I still own it.
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M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
This was not really mine. Texas Instruments manufactured these in Lubbock, Texas. My wife was taking classes at Texas Tech University. TI gave some of these computers to the University library. If you were a student, you could check them out for a weekend. My wife brought one home for me. It was instant love. Almost better than sex.
The first computer that I owned was an Atari 600XL. I bought one on the recommendation of Consumer Reports. That taught me never to trust Consumer Reports for computer recommendations. The 600XL could not even be hooked up to a cassette for recording purposes. I quickly switched to the 800XL.
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M$
