What is your earliest computer related memory?

Well I match you in one of those two areas.

Work, in the early 1990's. It was a county mainframe. No PC's. We had to take turns to use it, to look up county related information. Only one for each dept. First PC was mid 90's, and I had no clue what anyone would ever use the internet for. Was horrified at the idea of chatting with unknown people.

1977 freshman college "January Term" course. I went to a fairly unstructured college and in January we each took a single all day month long class. I took computer graphics. Programming in APL. Phone couplers and CRT terminals. I loved it. Three hours would go by and it seemed like 20 minutes. I remember telling my mother about it and she scolded me, saying, "When are you going to take classes that will help you get a JOB?!"

(snicker)

significant memories (in no particular order)

stripping led and sound chips from star wars toys

old atari and comodore consoles (yes I missed the whole punch card era, and than heavens)

first computer I used for more than games apple 2e (back when they had the awesome modems that could hack LD)

introduction to BBS management (and software piracy) hp 286

first hardware mod: c64 tape backup for cartridge games

first actual new computer I owned: aquarius (also my second hardware mod)

first BBS I co-sysoped on: Amiga 2000 pirate board with mostly german PBX/CC hackers

first game I played obsessively: Civilization (followed by Pirates)

first computer I actually bought and payed for myself: AMD a7

first actual programming class I payed to take (as opposed to self learning) VB6

first actual IT job: computer lab manager for a college

first personal web server apache 1.3 (I think) with PHP and mySQL (versions forgotten) running off of Afraid.org dynDNS sub domain

first competitive online game I really loved: Tachyon (also the first game I decoded file formats for, and made public mods/installers for)

current main rig 2.4ghz(OC 3.2)Intel 4 Gb Ram RAID 1 ~ 1Tb GTX280oc

Brings back memories. When Radio Shack mostly sold parts, I would get LEDs and mercury switches and other bits with my friends so we could mod our Battlestar Galactica toys.

1970s... as a school kid going on field trips to the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. The computer was behind a glass wall and I couldn't care less about it.

Now I am its slave.

Wow! A great selection of memories and each stirs something in my own murky pool of memory. Thank you!

Here are a few more memory joggers:

Sinclair programmable calculator kit
Compukit UK101
C/PM
NewBrain
dBase II
FoxBase (Blew away dBase on performance)
Apricot
StarLAN
ICL OPD (One Per Desk)
Prestel
Compuserve comes to the UK - One node in London for the entire country.
Worlds Away (What ever happened to the Dismal Swamp?)
Network stress testing (aka after hours multi-player Doom)

... I guess there have been a few developments since then.

Rime

I was using an abacus in a previous life.

If it wasnt for the TRS-80 the Priest at school was showing us, I wouldnt be here.

My dad still thinks computers are a total waste of time.

Wargames, and Atari.

One of my first computer memories was when my parents showed me how one little pixel could mean the difference between bucket filling a shape vs. the whole canvas. D:
And now I'm a digital artist. Wooohoo.

Kind of lame compared to the other posts but hey, I guess I'm just young!

Ah, the mid 60's, helping Mr Beacham my Physics teacher make a computer with three banks of switches and lights that could add or subtract depending on the program switch setting.

Pep (I still have the logic diagram somewhere.)

Between my sophomore and junior years in high school, at a summer math program, we had a Teletype connecting to Dartmouth Basic. I don't know why people have trouble understanding the ASCII rubout character, it made perfect sense to me.

The following year, I actually saw and used an IBM 1620. One of the interesting features of that machine is that it needed to have the arithmetic tables loaded into core. You could really get some creative results by deliberately misprogramming those tables. I didn't really do much on the 1620, but I did learn how to operate and program a keypunch, as well as using the stylus punch approach to program Wang calculators. It was obvious to me back then that the manual punch card technology was unreliable.

One day, back in 1984, my mother turned up at my home with a huge metal contraption which turned out to be a Xerox XT computer with 2 X 5" floppies, 8088 CPU, greenscreen monitor and a 'Massive' 64k of ram. Actually not too sure about the amount of memory it had, but it did run CP/M and came with a short instruction manual. My mother, bless her soul, had this idea that I was a genius of some sort and only needed the right trigger to unleash my powers to wite some music recording software, build the needed interface hardware, etc., etc. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I'd only ever managed 10 lines of Basic and gave it up as a bad job.

As it turned out, that Xerox XT gathered dust and was eventually sold to pay for my all-new Sinclair Spectrum 48k and a Micon MIDI interface which came with an 8-track 20,000 note step-time sequencer. Wooo! I was finally able to link up all my MIDI and CV-and-Gate bits'n'pieces in my home studio into a single synchronised system recording onto my trusty Fostex X-15.

Three albums later, my mother turned up with an Atari STFM for me with stern instructions to 'get rid of that toy and use a proper computer'. That Atari stayed with me for my next 8 (maybe more... I never kept track or things) albums until I started building up my own PC's (we're in the 386 & Windoze 3.1 era by now) and made the transistion to PC computer systems. Since then it's been an endless downhill upgrade-o-rama.

While it is not technically called a "memory", the first was a 7473 Dual J-K Flip-Flop with Clear. The first memory I actually had was a 7489 64-bit Random Access Memory.

I remember seeing a black box thing that plugged in the telly to play tennis go pop.

LOAD "$",8

Press play on Tape...

The Spectrum was marvellous. I don't have a real one anymore, but I often use an emulator version.

I'm envious.



Yes, that puzzled me a lot. Was it a way to cut down the cost?

Also, I gather the machines had only one level of subroutine call; that must have been a bit limiting. Still, the 1620 holds a place in my heart, even though I've yet to see one

Did you actually put one together? I remember those things as being tiny, tiny; so I'm impressed if you did.

Am I right in remembering they used reverse-polish entry? Or was it one of the earlier Sinclair calculators which did that?

Lyons Electronic Office - in the Science Museum on a school trip.

Yup, built one of each. I was not exactly rich and had to cut corners to keep cost down.

On the UK101 I didn't purchase a case, I just mounted the board on a wood base for rigidity. Helped with cooling... I also passed on chip sockets for all but the memory, hard soldering chips to the motherboard I'm amazed it worked at all.

Oh - I also still have Volume 1, Issue 1 of Personal Computer World (plus, I think the rest of the first year of issue - I gave away the subsequent years) I would devour each issue as I got my grubby little hands on it, couldn't get enough.

To follow Talarus' lead - my first memory would be of

hehe I remember well

I remember my dad accidentally putting a music cassette in and pressing play. But I can't remember what happened... except Dad cursing at himself and a few weeks later going and buying the separate floppy drive. We never did actually purchase software for the C64...

Joe 90 and the BIG RAT.