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
 
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.
 
mdonnelly said:
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.
 
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.
 
Owned: 386 model with DOS. I do not remember the brand.

My first exposure was in college for programming course. In those days everyone was connected to the mainframe using a terminal window. Probably IBM. I did Pascal and FORTRAN, and Basic.

Did not start using email until hotmail.
 
My first experience was using an IBM 360 at our state university's 100th anniversary engineering exhibit in the 1966-1967 academic year. I could beat the computer at every game it was programmed to play, except tic-tac-toe, in which we always tied, and I could solve math problems faster than anyone else could enter them into the computer, so I figured that computers were a fad and decided to pass on getting in on the ground floor.

The first I owned was a Radio Shack something-or-other that had 256K of RAM, which was more than enough to run Deskmate, and I think its operating system was DOS 2.0. I wanted more RAM, but couldn't come up with the $100 needed to buy a 1 MB add-on.

1) ...It was a punch tape teletype terminal connected to the Dartmouth College system...

My former business partner studied computer science at Dartmouth under professor John Kemeny in that era. Kemeny was one of the developers of BASIC. A mutual friend of ours at UNH became a computer hacker in the early 1970s. UNH was one of the schools that was part of Dartmouth's incipient "time sharing" system, and anyone at a UNH computer terminal could simply dial a four digit "Centrex" phone number and get connected to that computer from UNH, with the school paying for the telephone and computer time, so my friend guessed correctly that if he were off campus, he could accomplish the same thing by preceding that number with the school's three digit "exchange" number of 862-. My friend's theory went untested until he got up enough balls to walk into Kewitt Computation center and walk out the door with an entire computer terminal including an acoustic coupler. He then abused the computer from his home until one day his father said , "I don't know where you got that stuff from, but get it the hell out of here!"

The geniuses that set up the security for Dartmouth's computer system weren't smart enough to think to use "control characters" to conceal passwords. When a user entered his password, it was physically typed onto the paper in his terminal, and then the computer hastily overtyped several characters to obscure it, but my same friend who stole the terminal had other skills as well, like evenly erasing the top layers of ink, and so he would take the contents of the computer center trash cans home and successfully retrieve some powerful passwords. When he got access that way to the account of a professor who had, "line print" permission, he made the line printer print random numbers until an attendant finally shut it off.
 
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1. The first computer I ever owned was a "laptop": Tandy 1100FD. It looked something like this:

Tandy1400fd.gif


Notice two floppy drives! It didn't have a hard drive and had only 720 KB of RAM, but it's amazing how much I was able to do on it! It even ran Xerox Venura Publisher software and Borland compilers!

2. The first computer I ever worked on? Those were mainframe computers with punch-cards! One of the first computers I actually touched and spent a lot of time working on was a "mini" computer PDP-11:

pdp11-44.jpg


3. First email? I don't remember. I think it was in late eighties. Way before Mozilla or even Gopher! ;)
 
Another one with a PDP-8/L.
I used the PDP-8 for a year and then we got a Processor Technology Sol (CP/M) with dual 8" floppy drives.

The scoreboard at my university baskeball pavillion (Ralph Miller Court) was driven by a PDP-8 up until the early '80s.

Our favorite sport in high school was placing an AM radio on the box and playing "music tapes" through the paper tape reader.

To be a true geek, you had to be able to use the paddle switches to load in the tape reader bootstrap from memory (your brain).
 
1) Timex-Sinclair 1000, middle 1980s
2) TRS-80 model I, late elementary school, early 1980s
3) 1987, BITnet.
 

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