Thread: What was your first computer?

1. I had two; the TI-99/4A and the Atari 800XL

2. Not sure what we were using in HS (1982) for our CAD machines. (for work?) A IBM series mainframe (not sure which) running a Nike home-brewed application. Circa 1988ish

3. Not 100% sure but thinking a few years into 80's with CompuServe

Originally Posted by LER

Another one with a PDP-8/L. This was in my High School for the first 2 years (1972-1973), the replaced with a HP-1000(?).

I thought I was the only one here that remembered the old DEC stuff.

PDP/11 was the first one I worked on for a living (1980), later replaced by a VAX-750. I'm still using an XP system with software that emulates the VAX hardware and runs VMS 6.2. Saves us a ton of money over DEC (HP) maintenance contracts.

Worked on one of them in the summer of 1980 at Ball State University...

They had a kick ass, text based version of Star Trek that they hated us playing on the hardcopy terminals

My first computer that I owned is/was a Northstar Horizon (4 MHz Z-80A that ran Northstar DOS with 80 KB 5" floppies or CPM). I had to write my own machine language drivers for the Matrox video card when my original I/O-based S-100 card died.

The first computer I used and wrote code for was an IBM 1130 at Notre Dame back in 1973. I wrote a FORTRAN program to compute Prime numbers and print them out to the line printer.

First e-mail? I guess it was Graffiti at Purdue University around 1976. But it only allowed messages within the system, not between computers. That would be my VAX mail account back in 1979. I got a GEnie account in 1984.

Originally Posted by mdonnelly

I'm still using an XP system with software that emulates the VAX hardware and runs VMS 6.2. Saves us a ton of money over DEC (HP) maintenance contracts.

Is that SimH? I had that running on my old HP luggable. It worked remarkably well, but I did not get the version that had network support, which limited what I could do with it.

Roland- The Chemical company I worked for bought a Northstar computer for the accounting office. They never could get it to work so after 2 months of Northstar reps working on it took it back and gave us our money back.

MITS Altair
Honeywell 1250
Unsure on email, sometime in the '80s

Originally Posted by Foxbat

Is that SimH? I had that running on my old HP luggable. It worked remarkably well, but I did not get the version that had network support, which limited what I could do with it.

No, this is Charon-VAX from Stromasys. Costly to acquire, but less expensive than re-engineering all the software for another platform. It does emulate DECNET on PC network cards, plus I can ftp and telnet into it. In the years since we got it, I've moved most of my programs off to a PC platform, but there's still a FORTRAN 77 program on there that I haven't moved.

1. Atari 130XE
2. Apple IIe
3. 1993