First computer I USED was a Burroughs Business Computer, at Junior College program for High School Juniors who were sufficiently advanced...in 1970. The Disk Drives (it had two) were the size of Laundry Washers - you stopped them, checked that you had safed the read/write heads, flipped open the top access and pulled out a stack of disks that was two feet high - 40kbits per discpack, and swapped in the other platters. The computer programs were input by use of Hollerith punchcards, first written in flow charts in ALGOL/COBOL, and Math was in FORTRAN (still have the templates) and then punched on Hollerith cards. Woe unto you if you dropped the cards while walking across campus - you could spend hours restacking them, and if one got dirty or folded, or lost, then you had to go back and repunch them. Output was on the cards, too. If you wanted a printout, you took the cards over to the line printer.
When I got to College, my experience with computers made me the on-campus guru...at the computer lab, those of us in the inner sanctum wore white LabCoats, and we were on Dartmouth Time-Sharing with use of an IBM 360, complete with Cylinder drives that had the unimaginable Gigabytes of memory!! I probably used half a million dollars of U.S. Government budget money, playing LEM! We used old teletype machines that were tremendously loud, to print both our output, and to punch the tapes of our programs - inch-wide yellow tapes with lots of holes. The teletype machines were nearly as loud as jackhammers, and the room full of them were munching away all day and night, working at 100 baud, and later faster machines of 300 baud. Ahh, the smell of hot machine oil and paper!!! Best time to get anything done was from about Two in the AM to about Six.
Interestingly, at the time, MinuteMan Missiles were being de-commissioned, and the "brains" were pretty capable numeric processors - at the Academy, we had access to them as surplus, and we made an attempt to get them wired up to use for a powerful number cruncher. I worked on that project for a while with the professor, but it was not completed before I Graduated, in 1975.
First Computer owned, was a used IBM PC1, with a whopping 16k on the motherboard, 8066 chip, @4.77 Mhz, with single-density, single sided floppy disc drives of 180k storage capacity. 11-inch (IIRC) green phosphor monitor. I paid over $2000 for it in 1982, complete with EPSON 9-pin dot matrix printer - it is still going!!! Dos 1.1.
First "Laptop/Transportable" was a Radio Shack TRS - 101, ran on AA batteries. I used it to program the drive parameters of Sea-Land Container Cranes faster for the good drivers, and S L O W E R for the stupid ones, to keep them from wrecking. It was 1984.
