Nostalgic for your first computer?

by AlmostAtheist 40 Replies latest jw friends

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  Nosferatu

  Behold!

  

  Unfortunately, I didn't have the floppy drive nor the interface (that thing under the monitor). I only had a cassette deck hooked up to it. I had games that I painstakingly punched into the computer from a book. My TRS-80 had a really bad space bar, and I eventually ended up using shift-0 which did the same thing.

  I eventually moved up to a Vic-20 where I pretty much learned how to program in BASIC. After that, I moved up to a C-64 where I learned much more programming, and even a bit of hacking. I had a friend who also had a C-64, and his constant hacking of my programs taught me about creating better security for them. I eventually made a trojan horse and hid it in one of his programs (really, you couldn't see it if you typed "LIST"). It left his floppy disk in a horrible mess that only I could clean up. Of course I didn't :)
• 

  BurnTheShips

  This was my first computer :

  A Sinclair ZX81 - no colour and as far as I remember, no sound either and definately no hard drive.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX81

  Mine too! I was just a kid. That keyboard sucked. And I had no tape drive, I would painstakingly enter those BASIC proggies in there and after a reboot it would all be gone.

  Good times. Good times.

  Burn

  EDIT. Mine was actually the Sinclair 1000. I think the ZX-81 designation ws for the UK market.
• 

  Nosferatu

  I had the rubber keyboard that went over the ZX81's membrane piece of crap. Didn't really help at all.

  I didn't like the ZX81 / Timex Sinclair for two reasons:

  1) It was black & white

  2) It had only 1k of RAM, and without the 16k RAM pack, you could only write a program this simple:

  10 PRINT "HI ";

  20 GOTO 10

  Any more and you'd run out of memory :)
• 

  greendawn

  It would have been useful if you people that began using computers from just when they got affordable, gave the dates that you got your models to help get an idea of how home computing developed over time.
  
  I was a latecomer in the game, back in April 1997 I got a high specs PC with a Pentium 200 MMX processor, the most advanced at the time, 32MB of RAM, a 2.2GB Hard Disk, a 2MB Graphics Card and a 33.6k modem.
  
  These of course look primitive by today's standards, just ten years later.
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  TD

  It would have been useful if you people that began using computers from just when they got affordable, gave the dates that you got your models to help get an idea of how home computing developed over time.

  Apple ][ --> 1979
• 

  AlmostAtheist

  >>It would have been useful if you people that began using computers from just when they got affordable, gave the dates that you got your models

  Interact --> 1982? 81? somewhere in there

  Dave
• 

  Leolaia

  That's great to find the old Syntax newsletters online. Guess that means I can throw out my own copies?

  Radioshack was the second computer I used, in high school in 1985 and 1986....I used it mainly to type up Duran Duran lyrics.... :)

  After that, I used a Mac (sans hard drive) in 1988 when I went to college. I loved the Mac.
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  White Dove

  I have MS Vista. I miss the Millenium edition. Vista is too slow.
• 

  Twitch

  LOL

  Strange. I was into computers and learned BASIC and PASCAL in high school and binary, octal, hex and some programming in college. I tooled around on buddies' Commodore VIC20 and 64 a bit but never got my own PC 'til the mid 90s'. A Pentium 100Mhz, 64Mb, 1G HDD machine as I recall.
• 

  Nosferatu

  I remember using the old CBM / SuperPET computer lab in high school. Everyone had to take turns loading the word processing software, as there was only one floppy drive.