What is your earliest computer related memory?

Than I am suitably impressed. Such would be way beyond my skill level, even now.




The UK101 is another I've never seen outside of a magazine or the internet. No chip sockets except for the memory? Boy, oh boy, that was risky, to say the least! Do you always live that dangerously? You could have ended up with a very expensive paperweight!



Oh yes, those were good magazines. I remember an advertisement in a business oriented mag for a computer with a whole megabyte of chip memory! How things have changed.

mmmm mine goes back to the Navy in the 1970's - decca hi-fix systems and satellite navigational positioning. In the 1980's I was very avante garde with the 16-bit sega mega drive....I probably started with sonic the hedgehog. Though I well remember asteroids, space invaders and the blip-blip of tv. tennis

I remember visiting my uncle's house and him showing me how to play Monkey Island on his 386. (^_^)

I sincerely cannot remember the make and model of the computer, but I do remember sending away for programs that I had to enter, line by line, into the computer, save on a cassette tape or large floppy and run/play.

I remember the long hours "programming" manually and wondering why there wasn't an industry built up around buying these games and programs that came on a cassette tape or large floppies.

Long before the above, however, I had a friend with a computer that had a tiny screen and, at the time, a kickass text based baseball game.

And long after, sitting in my University's computer lab, glaring at my modem when it refused to connect to the University mainframe where... GASP... I could chat with other people on the computer from all over the University!

Fast forward again and I remember the birth of the Internet (and death of the BBS', for which I was a cosysop of a 5 line Amiga BBS), and how the first "website" (text based back then) I went to was Northbound Leather from Toronto ON. I remember waiting forever to download a picture from their website to my hard drive and being so incredibly excited at the potential for sharing information globally.

Good times.

...that you copied off your mate at school using two tape recorders plugged together while keeping very quiet in case extra sound was picked up by the in-built microphone!

I loved the early attempts to prevent piracy.. Jet Set Willy had a code you had to type in every time you ran it using a coloured grid of four colours to stop you photocopying it. I just copied the grid by hand using letters in place of colours......

My neighbor had a VIC 20 with that damn thing, when I borrowed it to use with my C64 it kept burning out the fuse in my computer. Mom got a little mad at me for stealing all of the fuses from her Camaro.

My very first computer related memory had to do with a book the local TV repairman gave me--"Build Your Own Digital Computer" (or something like that.) Which is sometimes described as the "paper clip computer" book.

It had a 2bit "bus" 16 bits of memory which were composed of paperclip switches, read instructions off of "drum memory" which was a large juice can covered with paper where the instructions were punched out. and was otherwise composed of switches, small light bulbs, wooden framing components, including thread spools paper clips and other assorted odds and ends.

I remember seeing the first "real" "build a computer" project in Radio Electronics magazine, and seeing the Radio Shack TRS80 on a full page in Allied Electronics catalog, I read Byte magazine almost religiously back then.

The first time I ever got to SEE one was an Atari 800 playing "Star Raiders" on a 7 foot high projection screen TV set, where I experienced a moments vertigo. The first one I actually owned was something called an Ineract Model One, rebranded "Model R" by Protecto, the company that bought them up and sold them as surplus. I learned about cassette head alignment from that one.

Then I got a Commodore Vic 20, which was the first in a long line of Commodore computers, until they closed shop, when I bought my first PC compatible, which was a. . .Hewlett Packard something or other. Since then I've been rolling my own, except for one very cool looking Sony computer, that had a flip down keybard and happened to be a very cool DVR for its time.

First one I used was a friends, one of those Sinclair things you sat for hours putting in the code only to find there was an error hours later.

I had an Atari console but the first real computer I had was an Amiga 512 (think it was?) followed by the Amiga 1200. Amigas were great, shame they lost out to PC.

October, 1965.

Do I win?

in 1965 at work I was using a Wang computer and the IBM 360 (I think,) with punch cards. My first computer was a slide rule. my first home computer was an atari 400. eh eh.

my dad was an electronics engineer. in the mid 70's, he bought a kit from Heath Kit & built a microprocessor. I think it used machine language. right after that, he brought home a Commodore Pet. my brother & I spent hours typing in & debugging code for games.

First programming experience: Typing stacks of FORTRAN punch cards to submit to the computer center to run on an IBM 360...or, more likely, to fail due to a typo or logic error. We didn't get phone couplers and direct access to the computer via BASIC until later.

First computer game: Pong. In a bar.

First encounter with a personal computer: A geeky friend took me over to his house to show me the computer he'd assembled from a kit...an IMSAI 8080.

My own first PC: Gateway? Micron? I forget, but we ordered it after the Geek researched Computer Shopper and PC Magazine for months. It ran Windows 3.0. It connected to the Internet with something called Compuserve. It had both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives.

What amazes me the most is the way that everything has been reduced to digital data for computer manipulation. In the beginning, numbers were what computers did. Math. Accounting. Then came text, and word processing was born. Then audio...and still images. Both began at a rudimentary level, but gained rapidly in realism. We got 3D images and models. Finally moving images.

Everything except solid objects...and with 3D "printers", one can argue that even that is beginning to happen.

My first programming experience was writing a crude "notepad" program in basic for the Pet computer, when I was in 5th grade, for my elementary school so that students could type up stuff for which I think was for announcements. I've always wished that I could have gone back to that time to implement word wrap, LOL

Oh yes, Monkey Island; one of the best adventure games I ever played!

The only significant code I ever wrote that ran first time was on a Sinclair Spectrum - which I think was rebranded as a Timex something or other in the USA.

It was an application that asked what booze I had in the house and suggested possible cocktails, compete with a graphic of the right type of glass to use and correct colour of the drink - written on New Year's Eve while consuming a bottle of Glenfiddich.

Pep (Sad, eh?)

The first thing I read on it:

HAMURABI: I BEG TO REPORT TO YOU,
IN YEAR 1 , 0 PEOPLE STARVED, 5 CAME TO THE CITY,
POPULATION IS NOW 100
THE CITY NOW OWNS 1000 ACRES.
YOU HARVESTED 3 BUSHELS PER ACRE.
RATS ATE 200 BUSHELS.
YOU NOW HAVE 2800 BUSHELS IN STORE.

LAND IS TRADING AT 24 BUSHELS PER ACRE.
HOW MANY ACRES DO YOU WISH TO BUY?

lol, i tried programming my own "oil company" simulation game, i think it was inspired by tv series Dallas , i actually ran out of lines since it was limited to 9999 ..LoL !


.

3d0g! 3d0g!

PR#6

Let's see .... first decade in Random Access Memory

"This is a DEC Rainbow..."

chicklet keyboards

rescuing a Hazeltine 1420

flippies

learning to program while Carter was president

"When modifying your computer, if you drop the soldering iron do NOT try to catch it!"

yellow paper tape spewing from a teletype

buying an Apple ][ (no, not a //e or //+, a ][)

learning to whistle a 300 baud disconnect signal

8080 assembly

You know...I wonder if LL is using this sim to figure out how many new regions to create?

"Don't solder naked".

in the 1960's at work, an IBM #1986 (I think was the model #).. Probably before most of you were born. I think everything went through phone lines back then. To Chicago and back to the West Coast in about three (3) seconds. Purchased my first pc, oh some 40 years later. Heck no, I am not old, just getting started.

This seems to be a version for the Oric.. but I had it on my Speccy too

Yes, that is probably good advice too.