[CM] What was your first home computer?

[RS Wood]

From the «guy in the back with the Cray, sit down please» department:
Title: Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Home Computer?
Author: he...@slashdot.org
Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2017 00:50:00 -0400
Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/R-8G1BsgeRw/ask-slashdot-what-was-your-first-home-computer

We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s
BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:
Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
remember your first home computer? This usually provokes a flood of fond
memories about primitive specs -- limited RAM, bad graphics, and early versions
of long-since-abandoned operating systems. Now I'd like to pose the same
question to Slashdot's readers. Use the comments to share details about your
own first home computer. Was it a back-to-school present from your parents? Did
it come with a modem? Did you lovingly upgrade its hardware for years to come?
Was it a Commodore 64 or a BeBox? It seems like there should be some good
stories, so leave your best answers in the comments. What was your first home
computer?

[image 2][2][image 4][4][image 6][6]

Read more of this story[7] at Slashdot.
[image 8]

Links:
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[8]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/R-8G1BsgeRw (image)

[Andreas Kohlbach]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:01:58 +0000, RS Wood wrote:
>
> We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s
> BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:
> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
> remember your first home computer? This usually provokes a flood of fond
> memories about primitive specs -- limited RAM, bad graphics, and early versions
> of long-since-abandoned operating systems.

This depends on the point of view. For many of us Commodore 64 users
(my first love btw.) with its 64K (while many others had still 16K) was
top of the line. And have you seen this smooth scrolling in Game XYZ?
Awesome!

Of course that's nothing by today's standards.

> Now I'd like to pose the same question to Slashdot's readers. Use the
> comments to share details about your own first home computer. Was it a
> back-to-school present from your parents? Did it come with a modem? Did
> you lovingly upgrade its hardware for years to come? Was it a
> Commodore 64 or a BeBox? It seems like there should be some good
> stories, so leave your best answers in the comments. What was your
> first home computer?

No modem. Poor me could just afford a datasette (not even floppy) and a
joystick, and was happy as can be.
--
Andreas
You know you are a redneck if
the home shopping operator recognizes your voice.

[Jon Elson]

RS Wood wrote:

> Do you remember your first home computer?

In 1976 I did a project using the Intel 8008, using commercial development
boards. I then made an 8008 system with 256 bytes of SRAM and a keypad/LED
console. Obviously pretty useless, but I proved I could actually build a
working system.

Then, I got an S-100 backplane, an 8080 CPU board and some memory boards.
I slowly built up the system. I started with paper tape, then got a floppy
controller and floppy drives, upgraded to a Z-80 CPU, more memory, etc. and
CP/M.
By 1981 I had a 10 MB Winchester SASI hard drive, and by 1982 or so, 9-track
mag tape backup.

Jon

[hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com]

On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:

> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
> remember your first home computer?

To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
used?

Personally, I was using computers for about 20 years until I got one
at home.

(FWIW, the first computer I used was a GE Timesharing System.)

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
> used?
>
> Personally, I was using computers for about 20 years until I got one
> at home.
>
> (FWIW, the first computer I used was a GE Timesharing System.)

my first "personal" computer was 360/30 ... I got student programming
job ... and they normally shutdown the datacenter from 8am sat. until
8am monday ... and I got the whole datacenter to myself ... although
48hrs w/o sleep made monday morning classes a little hard. It was then
upgraded to 360/67 and univ hired me (still undergraduate) fulltime to
be responsible for production systems (and I could still have the
datacenter from 8am sat. until 8am monday).

I have had online terminal at home since March1970 .... terminal didn't
turn into home computer until early 80s.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

[Roger Blake]

On 2017-04-17, The Newest Other Guy <new> wrote:
> Vic-20 with a tape drive, and a 19 inch TV as a monitor.

First one I actually owned was an Interact, an 8080-based system with a
built-in "high speed" 1500 bps cassette drive and whopping 16K memory.
This was part of the first wave of home computers that were sold in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, most of which failed.

The Interact hooked up to a TV set using a built-in RF modulator and low-res
bitmap graphics. One of the cassette tapes is an early version of
Microsoft Basic.

I still have it though it no longer works. In fact I can see the box up
on my shelf as I type this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interact_Home_Computer

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1004

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger Blake (Posts from Google Groups killfiled due to excess spam.)

NSA sedition and treason -- http://www.DeathToNSAthugs.com
Don't talk to cops! -- http://www.DontTalkToCops.com
Badges don't grant extra rights -- http://www.CopBlock.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[JimP.]

First computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1 kilobyte of ram, a
13" B&W tv, and a castte recroder/player. I later got the 16 Kb
add-on. And a large rubber band to hold it in place. That was about
1984.

About 1990, I bought an Amiga A1000 second hand. I bought an A500
second hand and I was able to fix the daughterboard so I had 3.5 megs
of total ram, with 512KB of chip ram. I have an A3000 with 2 SCSI hard
drives in it. One a 105 meg, and the other is about a 52 meg, or
smaller hdd.

Sadly, I'm currently using a Windows 10 crap machine. It looks like a
desktop, but it uses a laptop adapter to provide it with power.
--
Jim

[Alan Frisbie]

On 04/17/2017 04:01 AM, RS Wood wrote:

> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
> remember your first home computer?

Of course!

In 1974, I had been following microcomputer computer developments for
about two years, starting with the Intel 4004, followed by the 8008.
My employer, NCR, was one of the first customers of the 8080, and I
was programming it even before the public announcement in April, 1974.

Since native development tools were almost non-existent then, we did
all our development on the DEC PDP-11. This would have a significant
influence on my later purchase.

In November, 1974 I got my issue of Popular Electronics with the Altair
8800 on the cover. The list price of the CPU (in single quantities)
at that time was $360, and the price of the case was almost the same,
so the advertised price of $439 made it a no-brainer -- I ordered one.

However, deliveries were delayed, which changed the course of my
computer hobby. In February, 1975 DEC announced the LSI-11. Since
I was already in love with the PDP-11 and its considerable capabilities,
I called MITS and canceled my order for the Altair.

It wasn't until late that year that I was actually able to take delivery
of my DEC LSI-11 boards: CPU with 4K 16-bit words memory, one serial
interface, one parallel interface. and a backplane. A piece of
surplus TRW equipment provided a power supply and a case. I bought
DEC's paper tape software kit and joined DECUS (the DEC user's group).

My paper tape reader was a little box with a wire frame to guide the
tape, an optical sensor for the holes, and a desk lamp to illuminate
the tape/sensor. The tape was drawn through by hand. You had to
be careful to not pull the tape too quickly, as end-of-line processing
might cause you to skip a character or two. I didn't have a punch,
but did my development and punching at work during lunch and after hours.

I had hard-copy output in the form of an IBM Selectric I/O-Writer I
had found at the Dayton HamVention swap meet. I built a device to
convert from ASCII to Selectric Tilt/Rotate code. Keyboard input
from the Selectric was too difficult (half-duplex only), so I used a
surplus ASCII keyboard.

Eventually I upgraded with a Chrislin 32 KW memory card. By that
time my new employer (Xerox) offered employee discounts on Shugart
floppy disk drives, and I was able to get a deal on a controller
from Andromeda Systems, the start of a long relationship. I never
stopped upgrading whenever I could find a "deal", rarely spending
list price, and usually buying surplus.

Over the years, my original LSI-11 system evolved through the 11/73,
a MicroVAX-II, several DEC Alphas, and an Itanium (IA-64). Yes,
I do have multiple PCs, but the DEC systems are still my first love.
And yes, I still have that original LSI-11 system!

Alan Frisbie

[Gene Wirchenko]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:01:58 +0000, RS Wood <r...@therandymon.com>
wrote:

[snip]

>We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s
>BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:
>Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you

>remember your first home computer? ...

[snip]

A TRS-80 Model I. Later systems could do a lot more, but there
was a sense of community that I have not seen since.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[isw]

In article <5ujesd-...@raspberry.therandymon.com>,

RS Wood <r...@therandymon.com> wrote:

> From the «guy in the back with the Cray, sit down please» department:
> Title: Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Home Computer?
> Author: he...@slashdot.org
> Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2017 00:50:00 -0400
> Link:
> http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/R-8G1BsgeRw/ask-slashdot-what-
> was-your-first-home-computer
>
> We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting
> 1980s
> BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:
> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do
> you
> remember your first home computer?

Homebrew CP/M box using an S-100 backplane with a Z-80, 56k(!) of memory
and a dual PerSci 8" floppy drive. Later added a homebrew 300 baud modem
with acoustic coupler (ultimately modified to direct connect), a Calcomp
30" drum plotter (gutted and reworked with homebrew drivers to make it
listen to something like HPGL), and a hacked IBM Selectric terminal used
as a printer.

Isaac

[Ant]

Texas Instrument (TI) 99/4A. My parents bought me one back in the 80s. I
was scared of it. And then, I found out it could do computer games like
my Atari 2600 and arcades. Haha. Then, came more computers later on as
shown in my http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/toys.html history. :P

--
Quote of the Week: "I like ants, in chocolate. Crunch, hummmm." --unknown
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://antfarm.home.dhs.org (Personal Web Site)
/ /\ /\ \ Ant's Quality Foraged Links: http://aqfl.net
| |o o| |
\ _ / Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail privately. If credit-
( ) ing, then please kindly use Ant nickname and AQFL URL/link.

[Alfred Falk]

hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote in
news:6b0e2181-b0e1-4137...@googlegroups.com:

> On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
>
>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a
>> reaction: Do you remember your first home computer?
>
> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
> used?

IBM 1620 in 1967. It was already obsolete and I could play with it quite
freely.
IBM 360/65 in 1967. For more "serious" work.
DEC PDP-9 in in 1968. I was actually paid to program that.
PDP-10 in 1970 (timesharing access only, although I was allowed in the
computer room once, for some reason that I don't remember.)
CDC Cyber70 in 1972.
PDP-11/50(?) running Unix in 1974.
and so on.

> Personally, I was using computers for about 20 years until I got one
> at home.

Data General Nova 2 in 1983. Still have front panel and all boards.
So that's 16 years from first use.
Data General Eclipse C/330 in 1984, which is still taking up room in my
basement but it hasn't been turned on for a decade or two.

First PC at home was 386Dx40 in 1992.

[The Real Bev]

1977, an 8080 machine put together by a local company called Computer
Power & Light. Details to be provided later by my beloved husband...

We narrowly escaped buying an Imsai because the Byte Shop guys kept
selling the machine they were building for us to someone who --
presumably -- was willing to pay more. After a month or so hubby
threatened to throw a chair through their plate glass window unless we
got our money back. We cashed the check immediately.


--
Cheers, Bev
"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime
is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin
is stupidity." -- H.S. Thompson

[Andy Leighton]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 19:54:41 -0500, JimP <solo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> First computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1 kilobyte of ram, a
> 13" B&W tv, and a castte recroder/player. I later got the 16 Kb
> add-on. And a large rubber band to hold it in place. That was about
> 1984.

The first one I owned was a ZX Spectrum 48K which would have been
bought in early 1983 when I was still at school - with savings and
Christmas money. My first significant purchase.

I had previously played with Commodore PETs (owned by the school),
and an Atom, UK101 and Nascom-1 (owned by staff or reasonably well-off
kids). Also the school moved to the Beebs pretty much as soon as they
came out, although only a couple at first.

--
Andy Leighton => an...@azaal.plus.com
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
- Douglas Adams

[Bob Eager]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 08:06:09 +0000, Huge wrote:

> On 2017-04-17, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com <hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>> On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
>>
>>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a
>>> reaction: Do you remember your first home computer?
>>
>> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
>> used?
>

> ICL1903S, IIRC. Programmed in FORTRAN on 80 column cards.

Mine was an Elliott 4130, installed at the University of Kent just before
I arrived in 1970. 24 bit word oriented machine.

I started with interactive BASIC and soon progressed to 4130 assembler,
with a bit of FORTRAN thrown in.




--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

[Stephen Wolstenholme]

My first home computer was a pair of voltage controlled oscillators.
it could add two numbers and produce tones to represent the product.
It was great for producing music and I seriously thought about making
one to sell. Then Robert Moog had the same idea!

Steve

--
Neural Network Software for Windows http://www.npsnn.com

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 13:58:52 -0700 (PDT)
hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

> On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
>
> > Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a
> > reaction: Do you remember your first home computer?
>
> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
> used?

That would be an IBM 1130 at the CCAT, followed by a DG Eclipse at
the same place. It was delivered in two stages for some reason (money
probably) and so was initially referred to as the partial Eclipse. Next up
was an original TRS-80 (one of the first in the UK as I was working at one
of the franchises chosen for the first delivery), then the IBM 370 at
Cambridge University.

> Personally, I was using computers for about 20 years until I got one
> at home.

Not quite that long, but it must have been around 10 years before I
owned one. I had computers at home on various occasions (mostly Torch model
C) before that but they weren't mine I just had them to do work on, usually
finishing with "Your programs done. You can come and collect it and your
kit. Don't forget your check book" - I was one of the few who *always* got
paid (and on time) in those wild crazy days of the early 1980s computer
business in Cambridge.

I didn't have my own computer at home until I bought an 80286 PC
clone which mostly ran XENIX - I still run unix at home.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

[Ian McCall]

On 2017-04-17 19:05:57 +0000, Andreas Kohlbach <a...@spamfence.net> said:

> On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:01:58 +0000, RS Wood wrote:
>>
>> We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s
>> BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:
>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
>> remember your first home computer? This usually provokes a flood of fond
>> memories about primitive specs -- limited RAM, bad graphics, and early versions
>> of long-since-abandoned operating systems.
>
> This depends on the point of view. For many of us Commodore 64 users
> (my first love btw.) with its 64K (while many others had still 16K) was
> top of the line. And have you seen this smooth scrolling in Game XYZ?
> Awesome!

Commodore pulled a bit of a con trick here though - it had 32k by most
system's standards, with the other 32k being ROM. In terms of usable
memory 32k put it on a par with the BBC B and behind my own first
computer, the ZX Spectrum 48k.

That said there was plenty else to recommend it of course - hardware
sprites, the incredible sound chip that got me into writing music. I
still have a full C64 (C15N datasette, 1541 snail drive, GEOS mouse,
MMC64 flash adapter to load from memory card) set up not three yards
from where I'm typing this now.

And I -shall- beat the third mission of Psi 5 Trading company within my
lifetime. I damned well shall.

Cheers,
Ian



--
Check out Proto the album: <http://studioicm.com/proto/>

[philo]

On 04/18/2017 03:31 AM, Andy Leighton wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 19:54:41 -0500, JimP <solo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> First computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1 kilobyte of ram, a
>> 13" B&W tv, and a castte recroder/player. I later got the 16 Kb
>> add-on. And a large rubber band to hold it in place. That was about
>> 1984.
>
> The first one I owned was a ZX Spectrum 48K which would have been
> bought in early 1983 when I was still at school - with savings and
> Christmas money. My first significant purchase.
>
> I had previously played with Commodore PETs (owned by the school),
> and an Atom, UK101 and Nascom-1 (owned by staff or reasonably well-off
> kids). Also the school moved to the Beebs pretty much as soon as they
> came out, although only a couple at first.
>

If one considers the processor, then my Radio Shack calculator purchased
in 1975 with a 4004 cpu would be my first "computer."

(Still have it and it works.)


The first actual computer I owned however was the Ti99/4.

I purchased it in 1982 when the price dropped to $50.

I no longer have it, but the for some reason still have the cassette
recorder I used with it.

[Nyssa]

The Digi-Comp 1 in 1963. The box proclaims "first real operating
digital computer in plastic."

For those unfamiliar with this gadget, it's a kit to put together
a manually shifted 3-bit "computer" that will do simple binary
arithmetic.

The New Jersey company advertised in magazines such as Popular
Science back in the olden days, and I ordered it via snail mail
with a money order when I was a youngster.

And yes, I've still got it in the original box with the instruction
manual, unassembled now.

As for my first "real" home microcomputer it was a Franklin
Ace 100 with 64K memory. It was an Apple-compatible clone
that ran AppleDOS. I added the color chip (4 amazingly low-
res colors!) and later a couple of Apple floppy drives. One
thing that the Ace had that the Apple didn't was the ability
to type in lower case without an add-on and the full 64K out
of the box. Paired it with a Zenith monitor.

A few months later I added on a Z80 card that allowed me to
run the CP/M operating system including WordStar and several
other (for the time) higher end business and programming
packages.

Nyssa, who sometimes wishes she could have kept that Franklin
Ace system

[Walter Banks]

My first home computer was a PDP8 home made clone.

I then bought or built a number of other computers from evaluation
boards or kits. KIM-1, a M6800 around a Motorola evaluation board,
an OSI kit with three processors and a M68000 built around a
Motorola 68K evaluation single board.

Later (1979) I bought a PDP-11 from the assets of a company that had
gone bankrupt. Finally a real computer that I used for software development.

In the middle of all of that I built the worlds simplest 300 baud modem
I am sure it wouldn't have passed any standards tests but actually
worked quite well. It had FSK going out (at more or less the right
frequencies). To decode it had a filter whose center frequency was
between the two tones and used the filter to clock a D latch sampling
the incoming signal. The phase shift across the center frequency was
used to resolve the data.

w..

[Andy Leighton]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 08:29:59 -0500, philo <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:
>
> The first actual computer I owned however was the Ti99/4.
>
> I purchased it in 1982 when the price dropped to $50.

I don't think many Ti99/4s turned up in the UK - I am not sure it had
a PAL TV output. Plenty of Ti99/4As of course but they were still 199
GBP in the summer of '82. Which was the same price as the Atari 400.
The Vic-20 was 179 GBP at the time IIRC.

[Morten Reistad]

In article <slrnofbjmg...@azaal.plus.com>,

Andy Leighton <an...@azaal.plus.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 19:54:41 -0500, JimP <solo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> First computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1 kilobyte of ram, a
>> 13" B&W tv, and a castte recroder/player. I later got the 16 Kb
>> add-on. And a large rubber band to hold it in place. That was about
>> 1984.
>
>The first one I owned was a ZX Spectrum 48K which would have been
>bought in early 1983 when I was still at school - with savings and
>Christmas money. My first significant purchase.
>
>I had previously played with Commodore PETs (owned by the school),
>and an Atom, UK101 and Nascom-1 (owned by staff or reasonably well-off
>kids). Also the school moved to the Beebs pretty much as soon as they
>came out, although only a couple at first.

My first computer was a TI59 programmable calculator. That is where
I got permanently hooked on making the machines do work for us. This was
in 1976.

Later I got a vic20, and had PET8000's home for development work
for a local outlet. I made quite a bit of money on that front, as
well as credibility with the sales people that owned all the PETs.
This was 1980-82.

Then they let me have the country's very first C64 at home one
Christmas (on loan, for evaluation), complete with 220-110 volt
big transformer etc, before it was really approved in EUrope.

I ended up doing quite a bit of 6502 assembly. I can still remember
bits of it in direct hex.

And then there was the DEC20 at my college.

-- mrr

[Daiyu Hurst]

On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:

> From the «guy in the back with the Cray, sit down please» department:
> Title: Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Home Computer?
> Author:

> Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2017 00:50:00 -0400
> Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/R-8G1BsgeRw/ask-slashdot-what-was-your-first-home-computer
>
> We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s
> BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:
> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
> remember your first home computer?

A Processor Technology SOL-PC. I was subscribing to Popular Electronics at the time, and a prelim version was featured in the July 1976 issue. For $40, they offered the PC board, assembly & test instructions, and a theory of operation manual. When it came, I started scrounging for parts. I got parts from James Electronics, Allied, Radio Shack, and a local firm owned by Steve Roberts of The Recumbant Bicycle fame. it took me a year and a half to get it mostly operational, which included trips to Ray Borrill's Data Domain in Bloomington Indiana, where I met future Dr. Dobbs author Michael Swaine. I had it housed in a cheap BUD box since I couldn't afford the nice cabinet. I used it mostly to log into the CDC6600 at IU Bloomington and the DEC-10 at IUPUI. I also used it to log into Ward & Randy's WRBBS, the first computer BBSm, where I met John Draper. I lost it along with my job and my house in 2011. But my memories will linger a bit longer.

[Michael Black]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017, The Real Bev wrote:

> 1977, an 8080 machine put together by a local company called Computer Power &
> Light. Details to be provided later by my beloved husband...
>

That's true. Everyone talks in terms of a specific brand, but soon after
the Altair came out, there were so many boards and replacement parts
available that one could put together a generic S-100 system. All those
Godbout and Morrow boards. I have a Processor Technology board from about
1977, I got it free much later, that's 16K of RAM, a pretty penny when it
came out. But it used the S-100 bus, so I assume it would work in any
S-100 system, and I gather they were better at dynamic ram than Altair.

> We narrowly escaped buying an Imsai because the Byte Shop guys kept selling
> the machine they were building for us to someone who -- presumably -- was
> willing to pay more. After a month or so hubby threatened to throw a chair
> through their plate glass window unless we got our money back. We cashed the
> check immediately.
>

IN the mid-eighties, Jerry Pournelle in his endless column in Byte wrote
about one 68000 based system where one of the programmers screwed the
computer to the side of their desk, because otherwise someone would come
along and grab the computer, and ship it out, demand was so great, but
each time that meant software was delayed.

Michael

[Michael Black]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017, Ian McCall wrote:

> On 2017-04-17 19:05:57 +0000, Andreas Kohlbach <a...@spamfence.net> said:
>
>> On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:01:58 +0000, RS Wood wrote:
>>>
>>> We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting
>>> 1980s
>>> BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot
>>> readers:
>>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction:
>>> Do you
>>> remember your first home computer? This usually provokes a flood of fond
>>> memories about primitive specs -- limited RAM, bad graphics, and early
>>> versions
>>> of long-since-abandoned operating systems.
>>
>> This depends on the point of view. For many of us Commodore 64 users
>> (my first love btw.) with its 64K (while many others had still 16K) was
>> top of the line. And have you seen this smooth scrolling in Game XYZ?
>> Awesome!
>
> Commodore pulled a bit of a con trick here though - it had 32k by most
> system's standards, with the other 32k being ROM. In terms of usable memory
> 32k put it on a par with the BBC B and behind my own first computer, the ZX
> Spectrum 48k.
>

Yes, there was a contradiction. It did include 64K of RAM, when most
computers didnt' out of the box. So one could make use of much of it,
except you needed the right software. But yes, it tied up half the
address space, when other computers were more efficient. The Apple II
could use 48K out of the box, the ROM and hardware used up only 16K.

I think there were tricks for the C64 where the BASIC was copied to RAM,
so the firmware could be modified. I know that happened with the Radio
Shack Color computer on it got 64K.

Michael

[Quadibloc]

My first home computer was a Timex-Sinclair 1000, and shortly after I moved up to a Commodore 64.

The first computer I used was a PDP-8/e running Cinet BASIC at my high school, and then at University I next learned FORTRAN using WATFIV on an IBM System/360 Model 67 running under MTS (the Michigan Terminal System).

John Savard

[Quadibloc]

On Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 12:23:42 PM UTC-6, Michael Black wrote:

> I think there were tricks for the C64 where the BASIC was copied to RAM,
> so the firmware could be modified. I know that happened with the Radio
> Shack Color computer on it got 64K.

Yes, I remember doing that so as to give it a typewriter-pairing keyboard.

John Savard

[Charlie Gibbs]

On 2017-04-17, The Newest Other Guy <new> wrote:

> On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:01:58 +0000, RS Wood <r...@therandymon.com> wrote:
>
>> We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting
>> 1980s BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot
>> readers: Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a
>> reaction: Do you remember your first home computer?
>

> Vic-20 with a tape drive, and a 19 inch TV as a monitor.

I had already been programming professionally for over 10 years, but my
first home computer was an IMSAI 8080, built from kits. It started out
with 8K (two RAM-4A boards), although I later bought a 64K board which
was originally populated with 16K worth of 2Kx8 static RAM chips
(pin-compatible with the 2716 EPROM). Every Friday on the way home
from work I'd stop at the local Heathkit store and drop $16 on another
chip, and eventually built the board up to 62K; the other 2K was
reserved for the boot ROM and scratchpad storage on the floppy
controller board.

But that came after I scraped up the bucks for the floppy disk system;
I started out with tape storage. I didn't have any cassette units,
but did have a couple of reel-to-reel recorders. I broke into their
motor circuits and built a little relay box which could switch them
under computer control. To generate and decode the signals for the
tape units I used a surplus Bell 202 modem. I later upgraded to a
CUTS board which gave better reliability, although not much more speed.
My printer was a Teletype model 35RO, and my terminal was a surplus
Uniscope 100, for which I hacked up a driver to handle its protocol.
Later I replaced the terminal with a Heath 19, and the printer with
a Centronics 102A.

I wrote a CP/M emulator for the CUTS system; it would emulate BIOS/BDOS
calls for the tapes (except for random access, of course). I wound up
downloading MODEM7 from a local BBS and running it under the emulator.
I also wrote some CP/M utilities (including a Life game which used the
H19's block character set to play on a 48x80 grid) - when I finally
upgraded to floppies and real CP/M, these programs all ran without change.

When the IBM PC came out, I considered it a big yawn. It wasn't
until the Amiga came out that I got excited about a new machine.
I got an A1000 in March 1986, then upgraded through the A2500 to the
68060-based machine that I used until just a few years ago. I don't
think I've ever had a purely native MS-DOS/Windows home machine,
aside from an early laptop or two that I used for work purposes;
my current home machine, and the laptop I'm writing this on, run
Linux with Windows XP under VirtualBox for work stuff.

Thinking about getting a Raspberry Pi...

--
/~\ cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!

[Michael Black]

So your SOL didn't have wood panels like the one from the factory?

Michael

[Jon Elson]

hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

> On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
>
>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction:
>> Do you remember your first home computer?
>

> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
> used?

OK, in 1970, 360/50 in FORTRAN and some emulators in computer science
classes. The Turing machine emulator was truly a hair pulling experience,
it took so many states just to move the tape back and forth X many
positions.

1971, a LINC which had graphical output, was pretty cool, but quite slow.

1974 or so, Data General Nova.

1975, got a job, and worked on a succession of PDP-11's, finally ending up
with an 11/45 running RSX-11M. (We tried Unix, but as an all-FORTRAN shop,
Unix FORTRAN had a number of serious problems.)

1979 or so, we moved up to a VAX 11/780, and I was in heaven!

Jon

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 14:32:09 -0400
Michael Black <et...@ncf.ca> wrote:

> I think there were tricks for the C64 where the BASIC was copied to RAM,
> so the firmware could be modified. I know that happened with the Radio
> Shack Color computer on it got 64K.

Yep it was a fairly common trick of the time, at reset reads go to
the ROM, writes go to the RAM. The startup code looks odd reading data and
writing it back in the same place then there's an IO instruction or access
to a special address and reads come from the RAM from then on. By the time
I used it in the Torch it was a well known technique.

[Andreas Kohlbach]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:45:25 +0100, Ian McCall wrote:
>
> On 2017-04-17 19:05:57 +0000, Andreas Kohlbach <a...@spamfence.net> said:
>
>> On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:01:58 +0000, RS Wood wrote:
>>>
>>> We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s
>>> BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:
>>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
>>> remember your first home computer? This usually provokes a flood of fond
>>> memories about primitive specs -- limited RAM, bad graphics, and early versions
>>> of long-since-abandoned operating systems.
>>
>> This depends on the point of view. For many of us Commodore 64 users
>> (my first love btw.) with its 64K (while many others had still 16K) was
>> top of the line. And have you seen this smooth scrolling in Game XYZ?
>> Awesome!
>
> Commodore pulled a bit of a con trick here though - it had 32k by most
> system's standards, with the other 32k being ROM. In terms of usable
> memory 32k put it on a par with the BBC B and behind my own first
> computer, the ZX Spectrum 48k.

The ROM was "shadowed" into the RAM, no?. But if you wanted you actually
have far RAM for you own. Assuming you wrote your own service routines
and stuff the C64 usually does itself you might get some 60K.

BASIC announced "38911 BASIC BYTES FREE", which is already more than
32K. If you don't need BASIC (thus the "C64 command line") at all you can
use this space too. Don't need screen output? You can blank the screen so
no one sees the garbage writing program data into screen RAM at 1024-2023
($0400-$07E7) and have yet another 1K RAM for yourself. Plenty of more
options.
--
Andreas
You know you are a redneck if
you ever been arrested for relieving yourself in an ice machine.

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?

I bought an Atari 520ST. A big disappointment. You couldn't do anything
with it. It came with the lamest imaginable Basic interpreter and a Logo
turtle. I joined a local Atari club, but nobody was interested in
programming so I quit.

I had had much more fun with my father's Xerox 820 (CP/M) office
computer, with its CBASIC and Pascal compilers and Z80 assembler. I
created a PACMAN clone. I produced polyphonic Bach's chorals with the
"IN 30" and "IN 31" assembly instructions. I produced computer graphics
with the graphic characters. I created a radio amateur's competition
logger that computed distances between contestants, etc.


Marko

[Andreas Kohlbach]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 13:58:52 -0700 (PDT), hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
>
> On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
>

>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
>> remember your first home computer?
>

> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
> used?

Used as in "Go to a mall and hack on some on display"? ;-)

That what I was doing starting about 1981 or 1982 when Commodore VIC 20
or Atari 8bit showed up at electronic retailers in malls. Shortly after
the C64. Lots of kids like me were there. Amazing it was rarely the case
you could not find a free machine for yourself. And never any of the
staff kicked us out even though they knew we weren't buying. Friends then
also bought computers (most had C64) so I ended up at their homes
later instead. Took until 1984 until I had my first own C64.

[Rich]

In comp.misc Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote:
>
> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>
> I bought an Atari 520ST. A big disappointment. You couldn't do
> anything with it. It came with the lamest imaginable Basic
> interpreter and a Logo turtle.

The Atari ST's were Atari's offering to compete with the Apple
Lisa/Apple Mac that were released just a year or two before. Those
(the Lisa/Mac) were in some ways the beginning of the "your computer is
for consumption, not creation" mindset that is now everywhere. And
with that idea in mind, it is not surprising they did not ship with
much for programming them, the expectation was that buyers would be
"users" (of someone else's creations) and not "creators" themselves.

Fast forward, and now we have locked down tablets where you only get to
install programs that "daddy-steve" has preapproved as suitable for
you.

[Brian Reay]

On 17/04/2017 20:05, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:01:58 +0000, RS Wood wrote:
>>
>> We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s
>> BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:

>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you

>> remember your first home computer? This usually provokes a flood of fond
>> memories about primitive specs -- limited RAM, bad graphics, and early versions
>> of long-since-abandoned operating systems.
>
> This depends on the point of view. For many of us Commodore 64 users
> (my first love btw.) with its 64K (while many others had still 16K) was
> top of the line. And have you seen this smooth scrolling in Game XYZ?
> Awesome!

As you say, it depends on your point of view/definition.

If it is something people would probably recognise as a computer- ie
with a QWERTY keyboard and a decent display (even if it was a TV), then
a UK101- built from a kit.

If, on the other had, you count a very basic uP system, with a simple
display and keypad as found on a cheap calculator etc, then various home
made beasts- an SC/MP was the first as far as I recall.


--

Suspect someone is claiming a benefit under false pretences? Incapacity
Benefit or Personal Independence Payment when they don't need it? They
are depriving those in real need!

https://www.gov.uk/report-benefit-fraud

[Brian Reay]

On 17/04/2017 21:58, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
>

>> Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
>> remember your first home computer?
>

> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
> used?
>

Ferranti Pegasus, my school had one- it was one of a had full of
schools to have its own computer. It was installed in the mid 60s and
'died' maybe 1970/1, when we switch to using the local Town Hall ICL
machine.

The Pegasus pretty well filled a classroom on the ground floor and had a
small 'substation' outside.

We prepared programs on paper tape, left them to be 'loaded' etc. and
collect the results, which came on paper like giant loo roll (none of
the modern 'line printer' stuff).


When we switched to the Town Hall ICL machine, the process was the same-
save the results came on line printer paper and turn around was next
school day.

It was Uni, in 1976 (I had a working gap year) before I got to use an
interactive machine- Basic on a Data General Nova. There were, of
course, other machines as part of the Uni computer network.

[Robert Swindells]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>
> I bought an Atari 520ST. A big disappointment. You couldn't do anything
> with it. It came with the lamest imaginable Basic interpreter and a Logo
> turtle. I joined a local Atari club, but nobody was interested in
> programming so I quit.

The Atari ST had several good free C compilers for it, you could write
whatever software you wanted.

I ran Franz Lisp on mine too, it was a lot cheaper than a Sun workstation.

[Andy Leighton]

Yep the ST was quite capable although the original 520ST was a little
lacking when compared to later models. Certainly fairly easy to write assembler
on, and there were replacement BASICs that were better than the supplied one.

[Dave Garland]

Home? In 1965 when college was my "home", an IBM 1620. The computer
operator taught us the startup routine and showed us what window to
climb through if the center was locked. (Also introduced us to the
term "chad", a candy jar of which sat on top of the console.)

After that, mebbe 1984, a Morrow MD-3 (CP/M) after I started lusting
after the boss's Ozzie. I had to be able to justify it as a business
expense, and Apple wasn't in the running as the keyboard was crappy
and lowercase was an extra-cost option (the Xerox was just too
expensive). And I did write a few games using character graphics on
the ADM-31A monitor (with an aftermarket PROM), as well as a few
commercial programs. Then, of course, IBM swamped everything else.

[Michael Black]

I thought the Atari 520 was great, certainly it was more in my price
range. I spent $300 in 1989 for mine, it was a clearance item.

It had great potential, and at that point lots of programs (I was buying
ST Format that came from the UK, for the cover discs, still floppies then.
And I picked up a copy of the Mark Williams C COmpiler when some local
dealer was dropping the Atari, so it was cheap.

The problem was, my ST was flakey. I got it, it worked as far as it could
without a floppy drive. MOnths later I get a floppy drive, and the ST
isn't working. The power supply had a problem, which I fixed, but one of
the RAM ICs was damaged. I was lucky, one was noticeably warmer than the
rest, so getting that out and a new one in fixed that problem.

But there wsa something else wrong, maybe the reason I got it cheap.
Every so often it would scramble a floppy disc, which made it too
unreliable, so I eventualy gave up on it. I did like it, it gave me a
68000 without the cost of a Mac. When I did get a Mac Plus in late 1993, a
hand me down with a flakey connector to the deflection coil, it felt
lacking. I had to get a hard drive, my first, because a single floppy
drive wsan't very useful, and a second one from Apple (they being
non-standard) was almost as much as a hard drive, so I went with the hard
drive. But the speed and greater memory just seemed to be used up with
the GUI operating system, like I'd moved forward and then back two steps.
The Atari had more built in hardware (of a more universal kind) and seemed
snappy enough.

I was even lucky, at a local amateur radio flearmarket, I bought bunch of
Atari ST boards that were in various shape, so I did have spare parts, but
I just never got my Atari ST going reliably.

ALmost thirty years later, it was such a different time. Now, so much
better hardware is out there on the used market, and if anything breaks
down, it's easy and cheap to find a replacement. Circa 1989, the computer
world was bigger than the hobbyist world, but not by that much.

Michael

[Jason Howe]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 23:40:29 -0400, Michael Black <et...@ncf.ca> wrote:
> ...But the speed and greater memory just seemed to be used up with

> the GUI operating system, like I'd moved forward and then back two steps.
> The Atari had more built in hardware (of a more universal kind) and seemed
> snappy enough.
>

I jumped right from an Atari 8-bit to a 68k Mac about at about the same
time. I too felt that I had whole lot of computer in front of me that
was really busy drawing pictures for me. My Mac turned out to be all
sorts of flaky and pretty much swore me off Apple products for 15 years.

> I was even lucky, at a local amateur radio flearmarket, I bought bunch of
> Atari ST boards that were in various shape, so I did have spare parts, but
> I just never got my Atari ST going reliably.
>
> ALmost thirty years later, it was such a different time. Now, so much
> better hardware is out there on the used market, and if anything breaks
> down, it's easy and cheap to find a replacement. Circa 1989, the computer
> world was bigger than the hobbyist world, but not by that much.
>
> Michael
>

So yeah, my first was a hand-me-down Atari 800 from my Dad. This was c.
1986, I was about 6 years old. Dad never really did anything with the
800 and I didn't see him touch a computer again until the Windows 95
era. C. 1993 when the family got a new Mac, I never really took to it.
Neither did Mom (She used to program Wang and IBM minis before kids). She never
felt it was a "real" computer. Typing this now, I remember when I was
about 8 or 9, Mom helped me learn how to program on the Atari in
BASIC...that's an awesome memory that just came back :)

Anyway, I don't still have that original Atari 800 (I lost it to water
damage in the late 90's), but was able to pick up another one a few
years ago, and am actually typing this response on it now, using it as a
terminal to my linux box. I do still have my original 810 disk drive,
though it is awaiting repairs.

--
Jason

[Mike Spencer]

I wrote a toy program for an IBM 1620 (yes, cards) circa '64 and
played with someone's Apple ][ in '80 but I finally got my first home
computer in '87. I made a large hand-raised copper curry pan with
cover, all properly tinned, swapped it even for an Osborne I with a
printer with the extra dBase II package. Got an 80 column card and a
14" external monitor later; subsequently collected up 8 O1s and my
wife wrote her master's thesis on one of them.

Learned BASIC, Z80 assembler and C on that machine. I even managed,
after what I still think were some clever hacks, to compile XLisp on
it but it left only enough RAM to handle a dozen lines of lisp.

It was already obsolete when I got it but I remain grateful that I got
it and started there. Not a career hacker or techie so it was a sort
of last chance to learn the fundamentals of how hardware and OSs
worked before the basic stuff all became buried in fancy graphics,
difficult addressing schemes, serious O/S technology etc.

The migration to Unix (which I could log into from my O1), then to
Linux at home (with a few years' stopover in MS-DOS 5 until I could
afford a 1st gen Pentium) wasn't hard.

--
Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada

[Gene Wirchenko]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 20:06:25 -0700, Gene Wirchenko <ge...@telus.net>
wrote:

>On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:01:58 +0000, RS Wood <r...@therandymon.com>
>wrote:
>
>[snip]

>
>>We've recently seen stories about old computers and sys-ops resurrecting 1980s
>>BBS's, but now an anonymous reader has a question for all Slashdot readers:

>>Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you

>>remember your first home computer? ...
>
>[snip]
>
> A TRS-80 Model I. Later systems could do a lot more, but there
>was a sense of community that I have not seen since.

Morten mentioned his was a TI-59. I was thinking of more
conventional computers. I had a TI-58 then a TI-59 before the TRS-80.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[ma...@mail.com]

I got a Kindle Fire last year, nice machine, but it now asks me if
I want to play some sort of lotto when it starts. Back to the Ipad
I used before, which is cracked, but it too wants to know if I want
to sign on to iTunes.


--
greymaus.ireland.ie
Just_Another_Grumpy_Old_Man

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:

> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>
>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?

(Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
paperweights?)

>> I bought an Atari 520ST. A big disappointment. You couldn't do
>> anything with it. It came with the lamest imaginable Basic
>> interpreter and a Logo turtle. I joined a local Atari club, but
>> nobody was interested in programming so I quit.
>
> The Atari ST had several good free C compilers for it, you could write
> whatever software you wanted.

Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of that and wouldn't have known where to
look for them. All I saw was a catalog of pricey software I couldn't
afford. And besides, I wanted to *create* software, not *buy* it.

I did use the builtin Basic to create an 68000 assembler. An arduous
task with the idiotic "IDE." I still remember that project as one of my
best summer vacations. Too bad I never had an opportunity to build
anything with my assembler; the first choice would have been an
assembler written in assembly language.


Marko

[Larry Sheldon]

On 4/19/2017 04:55, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>
> (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
> paperweights?)

My first was an XTish clone bought from an Iranian (I think, might have
been an Indian) operating out of a store-used-as-a-factory in the
Hillsdale Shopping Center.

It had the standare stuff, plus an outrageiously huge 20 megabyte drive
and a collection of add-on boards to emulate a UTS 20, or a TTY 28.

>>> I bought an Atari 520ST. A big disappointment. You couldn't do
>>> anything with it. It came with the lamest imaginable Basic
>>> interpreter and a Logo turtle. I joined a local Atari club, but
>>> nobody was interested in programming so I quit.
>>
>> The Atari ST had several good free C compilers for it, you could write
>> whatever software you wanted.
>
> Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of that and wouldn't have known where to
> look for them. All I saw was a catalog of pricey software I couldn't
> afford. And besides, I wanted to *create* software, not *buy* it.
>
> I did use the builtin Basic to create an 68000 assembler. An arduous
> task with the idiotic "IDE." I still remember that project as one of my
> best summer vacations. Too bad I never had an opportunity to build
> anything with my assembler; the first choice would have been an
> assembler written in assembly language.

--
quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
-- Juvenal

[Peter Flass]

Odd, mine doesn't.

--
Pete

[Nyssa]

Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>
> (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home
> computers just paperweights?)
>

I actually used the Franklin to write some software as
well as for word processing and playing the occasional
game or two (anyone remember Beer Run for Apple ][?).

I sold a couple of smallish programs to an outfit that
published an on-disk "magazine" called Softdisk. I still
have my copy of 'em around here somewhere although I
no longer have a compatible system for the disk.

I also ran a (very) small consulting company back when
small businesses were first getting into microcomputers.
Left that when Sperry hired me on for bigger things.

My pop had several other microcomputers for experimenting
and trying to use with amateur radio and packet: Vic20,
Commodore64, Commodore128, Atari 800 among them. I did a
couple of BASIC programs for the Vic and Commodores for
calculating antenna lengths and satellite dishes and such
for him to play with.

So yeah, they were used as something besides paperweights.

Nyssa, who still has a lot of spare and refurbished
equipment around currently acting as paperweights until
she finds time to fix 'em up

[David Jones]

Ah memories. Mine was one I hand soldered in high school back in the 1970's. It was an Elf 1802 out of a Popular Electronics article. It had a whole 256 bytes of ram, to LED hex displays, and the programs were entered with toggle switches.

David

[Bob Eager]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:55:24 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>
> (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
> paperweights?)

My first computer was an Advance 86B:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=507

I used it to write a book on PC-DOS.

--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

[Richard Thiebaud]

On 04/19/2017 05:55 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
> paperweights?)

Games, programming, and bulletin boards.

[Jon Elson]

Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?

So, I was making all sorts of gadgets, and used the computer to assist.
When wire-wrapping, I had a program that took a net list and a table of chip
locations, and output a table of wires to install, with the length
precomputed to color codes.

I wrote cross-assemblers to generate code for various embedded projects.
I maintained a phone # list for a group of friends.
We had a computer club, and I sometimes wrote articles for it.
I helped Steve Ciarcia answer his mail for Circuit Cellar magazine.

When I finally got my "dream machine", a uVAX-II, I set up a program to
collect environmental data (temperatures, energy usage, air conditioner and
furnace operation, etc.) and log it. I made some animated videos for
people.

Jon

[Michael Black]

In the early days of "home computers", Byte would cover the programmable
calculators coming to market. It was all kind of vague then, so news of
the LSI-11 (and a group buy from a California club) was news, as were the
TI programmables etc. The calculators lacked I/O, but if you had specific
things to do, they might be the best choice at the time. A bit later, it
was all sorted out, and calculators were seen as calculators, not
computers.

About 20 years ago I was finding early programmable calculators at garage
sales. So I spent about five dollars on a TI-58 complete with the
printer. I also have an HP programmable from about the same era, plus a
few early scientific calculators, all bought for about five dollars each.
And then I no longer found them at garage sales.

Michael

[Michael Black]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2017, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>
> (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
> paperweights?)
>

I wanted one in 1969 or so, so when I finally got one, a KIM-1 in 1979, it
was basically for the sake of having a computer. It had 1K of memory, and
a calculator style keyboard and readout, so there was a limit to what I
could do with it. So I learned about computers, and learned to program.
I'd hand assemble programs, since there was no room for an assembler.

Then in 1981, I got an OSI Superboard II, which was a big leap forward,
all of 8K of RAM, Microsoft BASIC in ROM, an ascii keyboard, and a video
interface, hooked up to a surplus monitor that had no case. So I could do
more things with it, but still nothing much practical. I played with
BASIC, but decided I'd rather stick with assembly language.

It was 1984, when I got a Radio Shack COlor COmputer, with a floppy drive,
that I finally had a computer that could be used for "useful" things, ie I
used it for writing, replacing my typewriter with it. It was still
limited, but better than before.

It was easier to just buy a new computer ever few years than try to
upgrade something that wasn't well designed for upgrading, though I know
people added endless things to their KIM-1s, and I could have added a
floppy drive to the OSI, but the price was expensive.

Michael

[Kerr Mudd-John]

Looxury, kids todae ect.

I 'ad matchbox, and it could play NIM!
tell a lie, it were noughts and crosses:
http://makezine.com/2009/11/02/mechanical-tic-tac-toe-computer/

</4 yorkshiremen accent>

--
Bah, and indeed, Humbug

[JimP.]

I wrote programs in AmigaBASIC on my A1000 and A500s. A dice program
that roled in one side increments from 1 side up to 1e6 sides. I could
add to each die or all the dice. Some weapons in AD&D did damage of
1d6+1 hit points. I later on wrote a larger program that kept track of
the game calender, how long the adventure took place, trhe to hit
tables, moon rise and set, sun rise and set. Along with lunar phase.
The later is needed when checking for the possiblility of werewolves
about.

Dragon magazine had an article in one of their issues on how to use
dice to decide on the game weather. I wrote a computer program that
gave the result as I felt that the 5 to 10 minutes of dice rolling
could be done better by a computer.
--
Jim

[Jack Myers]

In alt.folklore.computers RS Wood <r...@therandymon.com> wrote:
> Do you remember your first home computer?

In 1997 I, being between jobs, briefly considered purchasing a
homebrew 4004 system from a hobbyest who was moving upstream,
but reason ultimately prevailed. My next employer provided a
home terminal for the mainframes and my office was four doors
away from the microcomputer lab, so there was no need for a PC
at home. By 1980 my circumstances had changed and I saw a
classified ad in _The San Jose Mercury News_ for a single-
board 64K byte Z80 system. DBA Stanford Computer Company in
Santa Cruz had intended to manufacture an integrated keyboard,
monitor, and computer. They got a bad wave solder job on their
initial batch of 60 boards, so they were reworking and salvaging
what they could. I put down a small deposit. Big Blue announced
their IBM-PC during the interval before I returned to retrieve
my new board and two eight-inch floppy drives. I provided the
power supply and a terminal. Later I added a homebrew time-of-day
clock and printer interface. Meanwhile the company was on the
ropes, eventually killed by FUD a year before IBM shipped
product. A few years later I came across two identical boards
in the bargin bin at a surplus store selling for $5 apiece.

I purchased Microsoft Multiplan and later Write, a text editor.
When I was in school I could never interest my advisor in a
numerical experiment that I proposed. I ran that experiment
steadly on the Z80 in the STOIC development environment at home
to my immense personal satisfaction. After the IBM-PC came out
it benchmarked slightly slower than my Z80 on the sieve test.

--
"Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they
should live next door and just visit now and then." --Katherine Hepburn

[Walter Banks]

On 2017-04-19 5:55 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>
> (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
> paperweights?)
>

My home built PDP-8 was mostly a challenge to get working. Once I got
focal to run and the standard PDP-8 standard software I pretty much
didn't do anything with it.

I wrote quite a few programs on the OSI a combination of systems
programs, games and some AI stuff I was playing with. I used the OSI to
implement a couple macro languages a lisp like language and trac/SAM.
The OSI based computer was reasonably capable but a one of built using
OSI boards and a case I built that had two back-planes and two floppies.
It was a floppy two holer one motor two slots. It was donated to a
computer museum a few years ago. My surprise was it still booted when we
tried after at least 20 years being powered down when I donated it.

After I bought the PDP-11 it became a working computer that I wrote a
whole lot of embedded system development software on it. I wrote about
80 cross assemblers and about half dozen compilers on the PDP-11. By
this time I was using UCSD Pascal on the PDP-11 later ran UCSD pascal on
an apple ][ and later yet on an IBM PC.

w..

[Andreas Kohlbach]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:55:24 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>

> Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
>
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>
> (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
> paperweights?)

Where was this asked?

Considering the Commodore 64 the most sold computer ever there would had
been a lot paperweights out there.

I learned BASIC and assembly on it.
--
Andreas
You know you are a redneck if
you ever been arrested for relieving yourself in an ice machine.

[Dan Espen]

ma...@mail.com writes:

> I got a Kindle Fire last year, nice machine, but it now asks me if
> I want to play some sort of lotto when it starts.

Perhaps you enabled the ES screen saver?
It recently showed me an ad on unlock and I promptly
disabled it.

Whatever it is, you have something obnoxious installed.
No need to abandon the whole machine, just uninstall the
nasty app.

If I remember right, when I bought the Fire, it came with
an option for no ads. Of course I was more than willing to
pay more for the option.

--
Dan Espen

[mick]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 03:31:12 -0500, Andy Leighton wrote:

<snip>
>
> I had previously played with Commodore PETs (owned by the school), and
> an Atom, UK101 and Nascom-1 (owned by staff or reasonably well-off
> kids). Also the school moved to the Beebs pretty much as soon as they
> came out, although only a couple at first.


I've still got my Nascom-1 :) Don't know if it still works though, I've
not run it for many years now.

[Michael Black]

I still have my KIM-1, from 1979, but the keypad was flakey and in trying
to fix it, I made it worse. But I could hook it up to a terminal,
assuming the rest still works.

I have my OSI Superboard II from 1981, it was working the last time I used
it, circa 1984, but it's just sat around since then, so I might have
damaged it in some way.

I have my three Radio Shack COlor Computers, I guess I have two IIs and
one III but also some spares. The main one was working until early 1994
when I moved to a used Mac Plus.

So the up to the Mac Plus, I have all my computers, including the Radio
Shack Model 100.

But after that, computers lost a lot of their uniqueness, so there seemed
less reason to keep around once I finished with them. I have some Macs,
including a 68000 laptop, but that came later. An Apple II and an Apple
IIGS, an Amiga 500, , an INtel 8085 single board computer. A couple of
Sun 3/50s, bu all of these came later, used or hand me downs, and I never
used them as primary computers.

I had others, but along the way decided they weren't worth keeping.

Michael

[J. Clarke]

In article <elpev1F...@mid.individual.net>, news...@eager.cx says...

>
> On Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:55:24 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>
> > Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
> >
> >> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> >>
> >>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
> >
> > (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
> > paperweights?)
>
> My first computer was an Advance 86B:
>
> http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=507
>
> I used it to write a book on PC-DOS.

First one I used was an IBM 360 at University of Florida, also first one I
programmed.

First one I was paid to use was a Lockheed running a computer-output
microfilm system.

First one I owned was a Heathkit Microprocessor Trainer, followed by an H-
89 CP/M machine.

First one I was paid to program was an HP 3000, however I was quickly put
to work porting everything the company used from that to the PC.

[Morten Reistad]

In article <od87b5$vtr$1...@gioia.aioe.org>,

Walter Banks <wal...@bytecraft.com> wrote:
>
>On 2017-04-19 5:55 AM, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> Robert Swindells <r...@fdy2.co.uk>:
>>
>>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:46:46 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>>
>> (Nobody has yet offered any responses. Were the home computers just
>> paperweights?)
>>
>
>My home built PDP-8 was mostly a challenge to get working. Once I got
>focal to run and the standard PDP-8 standard software I pretty much
>didn't do anything with it.

For me it was about software, primarily. It still is.

I did a number of basic and 6502 assembly consultancy jobs, some
of them very well paid.

I did an asdic driver for a quite big array of sonars, and I
still see the chip as current in the inventories of the vendors.
It is 507 bytes of very hand-coded 6502 assembly. 511 including the
two start vectors, but they fixed that in hardware later.

The immediate, "naive" version had ~730 bytes, properly
assembled with linkable constants. Then we (mostly I) started
shaving the code. Getting to ~530 was sort of easy, but from
there I struggled. Using instructions as constants, and then
changing the programl to use different instructions so I got
the constants I needed was a quite iterative process.

The real, hard limit was 512 (really 508) bytes of ROM and
2048 bytes of RAM, since that was a finite limit in the version
of 6502 they used.

All timings were based on the instruction times.

-- mrr

[Mok-Kong Shen]

I didn't have money to buy a home computer until the quite modern ones
came up. However, I guess the following story might eventually be of
some interest to a few of the readers.

The very first computer I used was in a university in 1958. It was a
German-made Zuse 22 and was shared (at any time only one person) round
the clock by faculty members and students. It had a ferrite core fast
memory space of 32 words only and an external storage on a rotating
drum of 8K words. Program codes in assembler language and data were
punched on 5-channel paper tapes (correction of punching errors was a
fairly time-consuming task). Because of the highly limited fast core
memory space, one could for reasons of efficiency only store a couple of
frequently needed constants there and the space of the rest of 32 words
was used as a temprary storage of assembler commands (often even have
to be modified) and data, being continuously input from the drum
storage for processing purposes. When processing errors occurred, one
modified the content of one or more of the 32 fast memory words bitwise
on the console oneself.

M. K. Shen

----------------------------
http://mok-kong-shen.de

[Ivan Shmakov]

Elektronika MK-85 in c. 1992 (yes, I'm that young.) BASIC,
2 KiB SRAM, 60 x 7 dot matrix display (with a spacing column
every 5 pixels; thus giving 12 5 x 7 characters.) Some claim
it was the world's first ever 16-bit pocket computer. [1]

Reportedly, its case and LCD designs [2] were copied from Casio
FX-700P [3], but otherwise these two machines had little
(if anything) in common.

Followed by several ZX Spectrum clones, and then an Am386-based
PC in late 1995.

MK-85 came with a book of ready-to-type BASIC programs, which
I explored somewhat mindlessly for a time. And then, while
trying to change one of them, "it clicked"...

Speaking of books; likely the first ones on computing I ever got
were the ones by Hisahiko Hasegawa [4]. That was in 1988, the
same year they were published in Russian. Strangely enough,
I never got hooked on manga, though.

[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/?curid=118667
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mk-85.JPG
[3] http://pocket.free.fr/html/casio/fx-700p_e.html
[4] http://worldcat.org/search?q=isbn%3A4274072924

--
FSF associate member #7257 58F8 0F47 53F5 2EB2 F6A5 8916 3013 B6A0 230E 334A

[Ian McCall]

On 2017-04-18 19:46:46 +0000, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> said:

> I bought an Atari 520ST. A big disappointment. You couldn't do anything
> with it. It came with the lamest imaginable Basic interpreter and a Logo
> turtle. I joined a local Atari club, but nobody was interested in
> programming so I quit.

Wow - very, very different experiences. Same machine almost (Atari 520STFM).

My own home computing journey has gone: Spectrum -> C64 -> ST -> Mac LC
-> various PCs, some interesting, some not -> 12" Powerbook -> various
Macs -> various Macs plus a gaming PC.

The ST I had was -fantastic-. There's the games, which were good
(although the sound was a massive disappointment after the C64). But
further than that it was the first time I really got into useful
productive software.

1st Word Plus, the incredible Signum. Timeworks. Then there were the
MIDI ports, so I got into writing music with Steinberg Pro 12 and a
couple of MIDI keyboards. Emulators - it could run Mac software faster
than a Mac Plus and with bigger screen space on the utterly gorgeous
SM124 paper white monitor. I also had a Vortex 286 fitted, meaning I
could run DOS and code in Turbo Pascal etc.. GST C, for £20, is how I
taught myself C as well.

We had very different experiences - the ST was one of the most
productive machines I've ever owned.



Cheers,
Ian

--
Check out Proto the album: <http://studioicm.com/proto/>

[Osmium]

The 1040ST was the most satisfying computer I ever worked with. An
instruction set that didn't look like it came out of a science fair
project, a superb monitor, lot's of incredibly imaginative software. If
you weren't happy with what was happening, you could disconnect the hard
drive and limit the damage. My hard drive was terribly loud, I fixed
that with a resistor to slow it down. I quit using the ST to check out
this "object-oriented" language thing - a much over-hyped idea, and I
never got back to the ST. For some reason I focus on the wonderful
Tempus text editor this morning.

But I agree with the OP, the packed in Basic was a truly awful thing and
524K bytes had to be a PITA.

I didn't like the "slanted" function keys, I thought they would look
very dated in a few years. I think that was my biggest gripe. And, of
course, the documentation could have been improved.

[Daiyu Hurst]

On Tuesday, April 18, 2017 at 2:52:03 PM UTC-4, Michael Black wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017, Daiyu Hurst wrote:
>
> > On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
> > A Processor Technology SOL-PC. I was subscribing to Popular Electronics
> >
> So your SOL didn't have wood panels like the one from the factory?

No. It came with no case at all. For a while, it just sat on a table
connected to its power supply (from PowerOne ?) and a salvaged keyboard
from a TI Silent 700. I had to hack up a little board to change the
sense of the keyboard strobe. Later, I acquired a "Crate" from Objective
Design, a bare-bones extruded aluminum S100 frame and PSU. I bought a
Thinker Toys WunderBuss for that, soldered one of the S100 connectors
upside down, and hacked a Mullen S100 extender card so that it fit into
the SOL-PC's S100 slot and the upside slot on the WunderBuss. That's how
I added more memory and such to it (I had a Godbout Econoram III dynamic
memory board). It broke my heart to lose that.

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Ian McCall <i...@eruvia.org>:

> On 2017-04-18 19:46:46 +0000, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> said:
>
>> I bought an Atari 520ST. A big disappointment. You couldn't do
>> anything with it. It came with the lamest imaginable Basic
>> interpreter and a Logo turtle. I joined a local Atari club, but
>> nobody was interested in programming so I quit.
>

> [...]

>
> The ST I had was -fantastic-. There's the games, which were good

Never tried to play a game on the ST. I wanted to program.

> 1st Word Plus, the incredible Signum. Timeworks.

Some software, I presume. I didn't want to buy software, I wanted to
create some.

> Then there were the MIDI ports, so I got into writing music with
> Steinberg Pro 12 and a couple of MIDI keyboards.

Didn't have a MIDI keyboard.

> Emulators - it could run Mac software faster than a Mac Plus and with
> bigger screen space on the utterly gorgeous SM124 paper white monitor.

Didn't have any Mac software, either.

> I also had a Vortex 286 fitted, meaning I
> could run DOS and code in Turbo Pascal etc..

Didn't have any DOS code.

> GST C, for £20, is how I taught myself C as well.

That would have been something, but having been accustomed to being able
to program with a computer out of the box (TRS-80, VIC-20, Commodore-64
at school and friends), I resented the fact that the computer on its own
was useless.

> We had very different experiences - the ST was one of the most
> productive machines I've ever owned.

Good for you.


Marko

[Daiyu Hurst]

On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 4:58:53 PM UTC-4, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
>

> > Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you

> > remember your first home computer?
>

> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
> used?

A CDC6500 at Purdue University, in 1974, now restored and part of
the collection at Living Computers Museum+Labs. Pictured here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByJs3HoO8aRVQWNXa1dFRGdybEE

[Scott Lurndal]

>On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 4:58:53 PM UTC-4, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
>> On Monday, April 17, 2017 at 7:15:05 AM UTC-4, RS Wood wrote:
>>
>> > Whenever I meet geeks, there's one question that always gets a reaction: Do you
>> > remember your first home computer?
>>
>> To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
>> used?

A Burroughs B5500 in 1974, followed by a PDP-8 in 1976 and an HP-3000
1977-1979, VAX 1979+, ITEL AS/6 (MVS), Burroughs Medium Systems
(B4800, B2900, B3900, B4900, V3[48]0, V4x0, V5x0), Motorola 88100
VME systems, Unisys S/8400 (88k), Unisys OPUS (MPP using Intel P6),
SGI Origin...

First home system was a Motorola 88k VME system.

[Stephen Wolstenholme]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2017 13:58:52 -0700 (PDT), hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

>To me, the significant question is: What was the first computer you
>used?

If I ignore tinkering with analog computers the first digital computer
I got my hands on was a LEO III. I got into programming using LEO
machine code and never got the hang of CLEO.

Steve

--
Neural Network Software for Windows http://www.npsnn.com

[Michael Black]

I was just making a joke. I remember an article from someone about
building the SOL, and he spent a lot of time getting the wood panels
perfect, and he wrote about that.

So I was jokingly expecting that you'd have put some wood panel on
whatever case you had used.

Michael

[Charlie Gibbs]

The first piece of data processing equipment I got my hands on
was a Univac 1004 at the office where my uncle worked.

http://www.ithistory.org/db/hardware/sperry-rand/univac-1004

He brought me in for a few days in late 1965 (I was 15 at the
time) and I worked with the operator, running cards through it
and the sorter and collator that supported it. I even got to
wire up a spare plugboard with a small program of my own.

Later I got into another Univac shop and played with their
9300 (their answer to the 360/20); I subsequently got my
first programming job working in that shop.

--
/~\ cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!

[philo]

On 04/18/2017 12:06 PM, Andy Leighton wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 08:29:59 -0500, philo <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:
>>
>> The first actual computer I owned however was the Ti99/4.
>>
>> I purchased it in 1982 when the price dropped to $50.
>
> I don't think many Ti99/4s turned up in the UK - I am not sure it had
> a PAL TV output. Plenty of Ti99/4As of course but they were still 199
> GBP in the summer of '82. Which was the same price as the Atari 400.
> The Vic-20 was 179 GBP at the time IIRC.
>


I liked mine, it had game cartridges and I could also program in BASIC.

Eventually the game port burned out but I was able to sell it for $25

[Bill Findlay]

1965

first played with: SOLIDAC <http://www.findlayw.plus.com/SOLIDAC/>

1966

first ran a program on: Ferranti Sirius
first programming job: ICT 1903

1967

university CS lab: EE KDF9 <http://www.findlayw.plus.com/KDF9/>

1984

first home computer: original Macintosh

Others <http://www.findlayw.plus.com/#Used>

--
Bill Findlay

[Daiyu Hurst]

Nah. Walnut sides would have looked incongruous in my
unfinished basement lab.

[Peter Flass]

I liked it too. I think it was the first computer I actually owned, rather
than worked on. My daughter got her start as a programmer writing BASIC
code for the TI. Mostly I played games, because it was so much more
limited than anything I was used to and not too expandable, but the games
were a lot of fun. I sold it, later bought another one in a garage sale,
but got rid of that one in an attempt to clean up the basement.

--
Pete

[Peter Flass]

I think there was a system with wood panels. OMSI maybe?

--
Pete

[Daiyu Hurst]

On Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 5:42:40 PM UTC-4, Peter Flass wrote:

> Daiyu Hurst <> wrote:
> >> So I was jokingly expecting that you'd have put some wood panel on
> >> whatever case you had used.
> >
> > Nah. Walnut sides would have looked incongruous in my
> > unfinished basement lab.
> >
>
> I think there was a system with wood panels. OMSI maybe?

That sounds familiar. Also, the Northstar.

[philo]

I used to go out to bars and play video games to the tune of $20 a
night, then figured out a computer would be cheaper!

[philo]

The very first computer I ever used was amd IBM/360

Took FORTRAN-IV in 1968 and could not believe we had to use punch cards.

I thought for sure there would have been a better way to do things

[ma...@mail.com]

On 2017-04-20, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-ko...@t-online.de> wrote:
>
> I didn't have money to buy a home computer until the quite modern ones
> came up. However, I guess the following story might eventually be of
> some interest to a few of the readers.
>
> The very first computer I used was in a university in 1958. It was a
> German-made Zuse 22 and was shared (at any time only one person) round
> the clock by faculty members and students.

was it a German university?

> It had a ferrite core fast
> memory space of 32 words only and an external storage on a rotating
> drum of 8K words. Program codes in assembler language and data were
> punched on 5-channel paper tapes (correction of punching errors was a
> fairly time-consuming task). Because of the highly limited fast core
> memory space, one could for reasons of efficiency only store a couple of
> frequently needed constants there and the space of the rest of 32 words
> was used as a temprary storage of assembler commands (often even have
> to be modified) and data, being continuously input from the drum
> storage for processing purposes. When processing errors occurred, one
> modified the content of one or more of the 32 fast memory words bitwise
> on the console oneself.
>
> M. K. Shen
>
> ----------------------------
> http://mok-kong-shen.de

--
greymaus.ireland.ie
Just_Another_Grumpy_Old_Man

[Anssi Saari]

Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> writes:

> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?

I had a Commodore VIC-20 and then 64. Mostly I played games. I did do a
little programming (on the Commodore 64), using the awful included basic
and also assembler but I don't remember doing any specific project. Just
tinkering, trying out various little things.

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Anssi Saari <a...@sci.fi>:

I don't know how awful the C64's basic was, but the TRS-80 basic was
actually fun to work with even though:

* It had only 4 kB RAM.

* There were 26 numeric variables: A thru Z.

* There were only two string variables: A$ and B$.

* There was only one (numeric) array variable: A().

* No line renumbering support.

We shared one TRS-80 in our high school's computer club, and made all
kinds of fun programs. For example, one of us created an elaborate
graphical solitaire program that let you observe the computer play the
game by itself in real time. Pointless but impressive and fun to watch.

In fact, the TRS-80 experience gave me a conviction that I knew
everything there was to know about software development. I went on to
study computer science but was wondering what they could possibly teach
me about the subject anymore...


Marko

[jmfbahciv]

ROTFL. Did you find out that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?

/BAH

[Charlie Gibbs]

On 2017-04-21, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote:

> In fact, the TRS-80 experience gave me a conviction that I knew
> everything there was to know about software development. I went on to
> study computer science but was wondering what they could possibly teach
> me about the subject anymore...

Sounds like your typical CS weenie. Presumably you outgrew that...

[Charlie Gibbs]

On 2017-04-20, philo <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:

> I used to go out to bars and play video games to the tune of $20 a
> night, then figured out a computer would be cheaper!

Blast from the past! I used to drop eight or nine bucks at the
local arcade playing Tempest until I finally posted high score.
A computer club buddy had a sit-down version of the game and I
borrowed the schematics and ROM listings, hoping to write a
6502 emulator, but that fell through the cracks. I think someone
eventually did do a multi-game emulator that could have done it.
It would be nice to play it again; I'll have to look up that
emulator in my copious free time (hah!).

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
> Blast from the past! I used to drop eight or nine bucks at the
> local arcade playing Tempest until I finally posted high score.
> A computer club buddy had a sit-down version of the game and I
> borrowed the schematics and ROM listings, hoping to write a
> 6502 emulator, but that fell through the cracks. I think someone
> eventually did do a multi-game emulator that could have done it.
> It would be nice to play it again; I'll have to look up that
> emulator in my copious free time (hah!).

on Kooser in south san jose in what was old supermarket bldg,
not quite the first ... but close
http://showbizpizza.com/info/promo/ptt/ptt_ad_1977winchester.pdf

several of us spent a lot of time playing space invaders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders

Also on periodic visit to Tymshare ... they show a game of adventure
that they had gotten from SAIL PDP10 and port to vm370/cms. I have
process where they mail me a monthly tape of VMSHARE files ... tymshare
made their cms-based online computer conferencing sysetms free to user
group SHARE as VMSHARE starting in AUG1976 ... archives here
http://vm.marist.edu/~vmshare

... in any case, I get a copy of adventure with source. I make the
executable available on the internal network ... and will send source to
anybody getting all the points
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure

internal network was larger than the arpanet/internet from just about
the beginning until sometime mid-80s ... some past posts
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

[Andreas Kohlbach]

On Thu, 20 Apr 2017 14:44:27 -0500, philo wrote:
>
> On 04/18/2017 12:06 PM, Andy Leighton wrote:
>> On Tue, 18 Apr 2017 08:29:59 -0500, philo <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:
>>
>> I don't think many Ti99/4s turned up in the UK - I am not sure it had
>> a PAL TV output. Plenty of Ti99/4As of course but they were still 199
>> GBP in the summer of '82. Which was the same price as the Atari 400.
>> The Vic-20 was 179 GBP at the time IIRC.
>
> I liked mine, it had game cartridges

Mine (C64) didn't. Well you could have but wasn't the primary way to get
software in. Tape or floppy were.

> and I could also program in BASIC.

I think there was only one 8bit home computer not coming with BASIC as
primary programming language built in. The reason BASIC gained popularity
during the 80s.
--
Andreas
You know you are a redneck if
you've ever shot somebody over a mall parking space.

[Andreas Kohlbach]

Same here. But the bar was nice to have around while playing. Anyway I
continued visiting bars and arcades in the 80, but completely switched
over playing pinball, while playing video games at home.

[Andreas Kohlbach]

On 21 Apr 2017 15:52:28 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
> On 2017-04-20, philo <ph...@privacy.net> wrote:
>
>> I used to go out to bars and play video games to the tune of $20 a
>> night, then figured out a computer would be cheaper!
>
> Blast from the past! I used to drop eight or nine bucks at the
> local arcade playing Tempest until I finally posted high score.
> A computer club buddy had a sit-down version of the game and I
> borrowed the schematics and ROM listings, hoping to write a
> 6502 emulator, but that fell through the cracks. I think someone
> eventually did do a multi-game emulator that could have done it.
> It would be nice to play it again; I'll have to look up that
> emulator in my copious free time (hah!).

It's called M.A.M.E. - for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
<http://www.mame.net/>. In the meanwhile it merged with M.E.S.S. Now you
can emulate anything what has a CPU and somebody wrote drivers (is called
what is used to emulate certain hardware of a machine) for.

I use it since about 1997. Besides listening to music from your favorite
era there is nothing else close of bringing the blast from the past than
emulating old hardware and software.

[Andreas Kohlbach]

On Fri, 21 Apr 2017 15:00:21 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>
> Anssi Saari <a...@sci.fi>:
>
>> Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> writes:
>>
>>> Ok, all this hardware. What did you do with it?
>>
>> I had a Commodore VIC-20 and then 64. Mostly I played games. I did do
>> a little programming (on the Commodore 64), using the awful included
>> basic and also assembler but I don't remember doing any specific
>> project. Just tinkering, trying out various little things.
>

> I don't know how awful the C64's basic was [...]

It didn't had dedicated commands for video (like "draw" or "plot") or
sound. You had to POKE into registers directly.

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Andreas Kohlbach <a...@spamfence.net>:

> On Fri, 21 Apr 2017 15:00:21 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> I don't know how awful the C64's basic was [...]
>
> It didn't had dedicated commands for video (like "draw" or "plot") or
> sound. You had to POKE into registers directly.

Oh, how nice it would be if that worked with modern computers.

In these days, one of the last and most advanced things for an aspiring
programmer is to place a colored dot on the screen. It used to be the
first and simplest thing in the time of the early home computers.

It was that colored pixel that gave the early excitement to the Apple II
owners. How disheartening it is to have to be buried under tons of
frameworks in modern computing.


Marko

[Gordon Henderson]

In article <87d1c5i...@usenet.ankman.de>,

Andreas Kohlbach <a...@spamfence.net> wrote:

>I think there was only one 8bit home computer not coming with BASIC as
>primary programming language built in. The reason BASIC gained popularity
>during the 80s.

Jupiter Ace. It ran Forth.

Gordon

[Quadibloc]

On Friday, April 21, 2017 at 12:42:45 PM UTC-6, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:

> I think there was only one 8bit home computer not coming with BASIC as
> primary programming language built in. The reason BASIC gained popularity
> during the 80s.

I can think of *two*.

There was the Jupiter ACE, which I thought was a Timex Sinclair 1000 with a
different ROM, so it had FORTH built in instead of BASIC, but according to
Wikipedia, it had at least some of the additional features of the Spectrum.

Then there was the VideoBrain Family Computer from Fairchild, which had a form
of APL built in instead of BASIC.

John Savard

[Andy Leighton]

According to Wikipedia the VideoBrain didn't even come with APL - it
was an extra purchase.

Neither did the Tangerine Microtan-65 - that only had 1k of ROM (I
guess there were other bare bones single-board computers that equally
provided no programming language such as the MK14).

Also I think the Microtan had its processor (a 6502) clocked at
750KHz - which must have been amongst the slowest out there.

--
Andy Leighton => an...@azaal.plus.com
"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
- Douglas Adams