First computer was an BBC Master 128k. I refused to ever sell it but early this year when I dug it out for some Chuckie Egg I found it had died. I am lead to believe that the timetables in most UK train stations and airports, the really big ones made of dot matrix letters, still run on BBC Master computers. 20+ years after installation.
Familys first PC was a Pentium 166, 64megs, 4 gig, windows 95 affair.
My first was a Digital PDP 11/40 running RSX. Not mine, exactly, but the physics lab where I worked, and I more or less owned it. I spent many a night hacking the kernel, poring over crash dumps.
I remember upgrading RSX on the teletype console. You selected all your options, and then when it started linking the OS image, it said, "Now would be a good time to get a cup of coffee". And about 45 mins later it would finish. There was even a paper tape reader, not that I ever used it. Yeah, good times.
IBM 1620 that us three computer geeks were allowed to use at the school board office every weeknight from 6-9pm (never did figure out how to change our grades!).... All the flashing lights on the front panel denoting operations and memory positions was just TOO cool. Had to have an air conditioner blowing on the back of the 1620 to keep it cool enough. Had to punch paper cards to program (fortran) and send through a card reader. Did have a hard drive, believe it or not, that was about 50MB, but the disks were removable and about 16 inches in diameter (four platters). The printer was a huge beast (line printer) that really got your attention when it decided to output.... Fond memories playing three dimensional tic-tac-toe on it... at least the 1620 was transistors and not tubes.
Commodore 64 was my first, then a TI994A followed shortly after. I learned how to program these things and had a good old time
Years later I hit the BBS scene with a 486/DX4/100, 8mb of ram, and 14.4 cardinal modem. Ahh, the good old days of war dialing, hacking, phreaking, and introduction to the Anarchist Cookbook...
I loved that time period, I'll never forget any of it.. fond memories
I forgot the name of my first computer.
That was definitely 8bit and I believe they called it MSX.
Then I bought Apple II. That roadrunner game was fun, even if i hated to wait till the stupid casette load the program from the tape. Then XT, AT, 386, skipped 486, then pentium.... etc. For some reason, all of them except 386 were AMD, not intel.
As ziplock said... I miss that time too.
I stayed awake whole night by my brand new 286 with shinny monochrome monitor to chat with other guys in BBS. I was so sure that my 10MB Kellog HDD can hold all games in the world. But obviously I was wrong I think, because that bast**d died on me before I had a chance to collect all games in the world. I thought my 1200bps modem just not able to cut it. I thought what I need is 2400bps modem.
Anyways, its all good days. I still go out with friends from that time.... and I still got the keyboard I used with my 286.
Tandy 1000 green screen. No hard drive, no mouse, dot-matrix printer and sweet, sweet DOS. those 5" floppies were ACTUALLY floppy! None of this 3.5" stiff "floppy" crap!
Who's digging up the old threads? My Dad has been a programmer since the 60's, so I've been around computers since the beginning. Of course we didn't have a mainframe at home, but we had an 8088 as soon as they came out, I still have it somewhere in the garage. I have a collection of punch cards, reel to reels, miles of white and green perforated paper with billions of lines of code on it that Dad used to sit and read at night to try and find the bugs.
I've been playing games since they were text based turn by turn. The first graphical game I remember playing on the pc would be Space Quest.
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