What is your earliest computer related memory?

I'm getting a little concerned about the age of some of you. How long ago was that??? I was born into Macs and PCs and all this. Am I right? Many of you are pre-1980s in chrono age? Its interesting.
How about TVs? And classic shows?
Or Radios with the Cat's Paws?

Might I ask what you all did on computers that werent games or word processors or have the internet?
Please dont tell me you did math homework.

Some of us have given explicit dates, so yes, some of us are obviously pre-1980 vintage. I'm very close to 40, and that doesn't look so old compared to some who've posted here. We didn't have a colour TV in my family until I was nearly ten or a VCR until my mid-teens (they'd been around for much longer, but were seen as an incredible luxury for a long time). As for "cat's paws" in radios; I think you must mean cat's whiskers. Crystal sets had been old-tech for a long time when I was a kid, but still around for teaching purposes.

What did *I* do on my old computers? Why assume there weren't games? If they weren't available, we wrote them!

When did internet start - was I around before then? I just remember the internet. Maybe just a little before it But I wasnt into computers then, I was into rock and punk (and still am)

The internet has been around a lot longer than people think, but in the state most people think of it, around 15 years? The dates I remember are end of '94 for the number of websites to top 10,000 and the dotcom boom and Google becoming well-known around '99-00.

You can make arguments for all sorts of dates, but effectively the internet went public in 1983 . . .

Pep ( . . . which should be distinguished from the world wide web which CERN released in 1992.)

PS If you want a nice summary: http://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history4.shtml

So, I'd be about one year old ish. Humph.

You win. Bigtime. In 65 I was 6 and I had just met the acoustic modem. We did have a plug in digital calculator though. Burroughs.

The first computer I actually de-gutsed was an air data computer flown on a C123 Provider ( I think, I only had the grey box) that sported a 128k rotating drum memory.

The first computer I owned was a Pertec PCC 2000 in the 1979 - 1980 frame. Mainly because I worked there.

A Wang computer? As in Whang Wang? hahaha

Oregon Trail.

Best old school pc game ever...until you broke a wagon wheel and died of dysentery.

Oh ya, and I remember my uncle was like super rich when I was like 10 and had a fancy apple pc and my cousins who were all boys 'hacked' into his game 'Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of The Lounge Lizards' because it was password protected for adults only. I was like woah.

Wonderful to read all this. The thread is NOT a waste at all. I remember my highschool had one apple in 1982. We had one 35 minute lesson a week, and 30 kids would watch the two nerdiest boys get to actually *touch* the keyboard. No one else got a chance. Then I found some old thing and taught myself bits of BASIC.

That was mine, too

Tapes were a nightmare. That's about the only aspect of 8-bit computers I really don't miss.

Sorry; this means nothing to me. Would you or Phil explain, please

Computers these days tend to work right out of the box, and I suspect the vast majority of owners never do more than use the applications they come with (or others they buy).

I don't have figures to back this up, but I am willing to bet that a higher percentage of buyers of early computers at least had a go at entering lines of code; or had a try at writing their own program, even if it did nothing more than say "hello".

ROFL!

It also means nothing to me, so I can't help with an explanation. Or maybe she's referring to Beeching's axe, but that had nothing to do with Bletchley Park. I think she was probably asleep when she wrote it

I've never been a games player (except for Lemmings, on which I was hooked). I bought my first computer in the early 80s (an Oric 1 with 64k of memory, including the 16k of ROM) for the purpose of running my video library. So the first thing I did was learn to programme it in BASIC, and it did what I wanted for the library. After that I learned to programme it in machine code, and then I opened it up, drew the circuit and learned how it all worked. I even added a chip to get more RAM is use for machine code. The 16k ROM overlaid the top 16k of RAM so that that RAM was never used. Adding the chip allowed me to use it.

That wasn't my first encounter with a computer though. I posted about that earlier.

Beeching! Of course; it makes sense now. Thanks, Phil.

An excellent example. I think we tended to be more "under the bonnet" about computers back then than the average user, perhaps new to computers, is now.

You're probably right. I imagine people and cars were the same. When cars first came out, the owners would learn how the engine worked and be able to fix it. Later, people just bought cars and had no interest at all in how the engine works. That's my imagination - a general view.

That's my perception re cars too. But perhaps with computers, there is also the matter of complexity.

8-bit computers could, in theory, be understood in their entirety. One could read the ROM and take it apart (in terms of the code, I mean), and even use bits of it (or call routines); one could learn just where in memory the screen was mapped; or even how that memory was translated into a signal for the TV screen. It was, in theory as I say, transparent: it could be known inside-out.

But that isn't the same with today's fancy, all-singing, all-dancing machines. I haven't a hope in hell of knowing how the one I'm using now works in the way I could my lovely ZX Spectrum. I suspect the OS are written by teams of people (maybe even they don't understand all the ins-and-outs of each other's code?). It's just not the same, somehow.

I do program when I have a problem to solve. But you know what? More often than not, my first port of call will be to start up the Spectrum emulator, and do it in BASIC or Z80 code.

Don't get me wrong: I like today's marvellous machines. I just don't "know" them in the way I could 8-bit machines.

Just loving all these tales, really excellent - thank you

First game: Wrote a ballistic simulation for the Sinclair calculator. It gave you a target at a random distance and you had to decide an angle for a simple cannon to try and hit it. It would then tell you how far short or long you were. You had three tries to hit it.

This was all just digits in a small display and all of the 'fun' was in the imagination and the machine-mind feedback... what a nerd

First 'real' game I recall ran on the UK101 and was the text based Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Once again the beauty of this game was all in the imagination. It helped to have heard/read/seen the story line

Later I recall running Mandelbrot plots on something like a 286: starting the plot, going to bed and then seeing how far it had got in the morning

More fun stuff in the commercial world:

Having to compsurf hard drives for NetWare... zzzzz
Setting dip switches and jumpers on LAN cards to make the darn things work.
Being able to have a backup boot partition for a NetWare server on a floppy disk
Having to decide whether to go with 10 or 20 MB hard drives and settling for the 10 MB because nobody could need 20 MB

The car analogy is a good one. Used to be I could name every component inside a computer and tell you what it did or roll off specifications, bus speeds, power draw... these days it's like opening the hood of the car - what the hell *is* all this stuff????

I also think some of us older birds must have the same relationship to computers that a couple earlier generations had with automobiles. It's hard to think of a world without cars yet some of us recall the days before computers.

The pace of development is staggering.

Rime

OMG! I just realized that link I gave for the Hitchikers Game has an online playable version!

Anyone who wants a trip down memory lane for real or a taste fo what things were... check it out!

I won't be doing much work today

Rime

No; smart people are cool. I'd like to be one!

Imagination is the thing. What I loved were the old text adventures: you are in a small, dark room; there is a door to the north; you can see a lamp. Wonderful, wonderful adventures.