so, what was it?!

[slipstreamsurfr]

So, out of idle curiosity........

What was the first computer you ever owned. As well as a memory of it.

And then, what was the first computer you ever used in school and in what class?

The first computer I ever owned was a Sinclair ZX81 with the 16K memory add on and the electrostatic printer. I remember seeing the adds for first the ZX80 and then the ZX81 in Creative Computing and ordering it from England.

When it got here I hooked it up to a 12" black and white TV and a cassette recorder I bought from K-mart. I learned BASIC on that little machine with it's membrane keyboard, the annoying habit of crashing if you wiggled it and the top-heavy memory upgrade would glitch out on you. I also learned NOT to store your cassette tapes with your programs stacked on top of your b&w tv, especially not on the side where the flyback transformer was. /grin

My first computer I used in school was a TRS-80 Model 1 and ModelIII. It was in our Computer Science elective we could take in High School. I think I was a Junior, so this would have had to been around 82 or so. The shielding in those things were horrible. You could stand across a 30 foot room and aim a bulk tape/disk demagnetizer at the monitors and thumb the switch and watch the display twist. That model 1 was the first disk based machine I ever used. On it I wrote my first program bigger than 16K, a variation on the colossal cave adventure. I remember the week it grew so big that it would only load/run on the disk based model 1, not the cassette based model 1's because of size. I was so proud of myself. :)

Anyway, that's my two earliest computer memories, what's yours?!?

Comments

[smallerdemon.livejournal.com]

I am old man. There were no computers in high school when I was there. It was a small town and a small school in Alabama 1979-1983, so, no computers.

First computer I ever owned: Macintosh Color Classic. :) 32bit processor on a 16bit data bus. Nice, eh?

Currently I'm hacking away at home with a dual processor 1.8GHz G5.

[slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com]

(chuckle) not so old, about the same age as I am then. Tandy gave a LOT of those TRS-80 Model 1's and III's to the schools in my area since we were within a stones throw of the Fort Worth headquarters.

I once had a mac plus! Now plugging along on a b&w g3 400, a dell laptop, and I have entirely too many retro computing devices in my house. Nice g5. Pretty!!

[pat-trick.livejournal.com]

first computer my family ever owned: a mac se 30, black and white screen, purchased in 1986 (87?).

first computer that /i/ ever owned is the blue and white g3 that you've got somewhere around your house, purchased in 1999. ;)

i have no recollection of the first computer system we used in school, other than it involved the turtle widget program. it was used in a special topics class after school that i participated in.

[slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com]

your b&w has recently been upped to 768 meg of memory, two 17" lcd displays, tiger and is still running strong.(could do with a processor upgrade, maybe a cheap g4 600) :) It's turned into my primary home computer. Now all I need to do is find a cheap ibook to replace the dell laptop from the office. :)

involved a turtle widget.... hrmm... any idea of the year date? Could be one of any number of based systems from apple II's to ti99's. Being school based, more than likely an apple IIe or IIc if it was anytime before or near 1985.

a se30 eh? that was a hot machine for it's day. My roomate had a standard SE, I eventually had the plus and I remember Skip drooling over the se/30 when it came out. You can get an asante ethernet card for the se / se30's and run tcpip on them nowdays if you want a REAL retro experiance with system 7 and an early netscape I think?

[pat-trick.livejournal.com]

i suspect it was an apple ii of some flavor.

i also remember being completely awed by the simple shell script that my next door neighbor had set up on her dos box that always said, "Good morning, , I hope that you are in an excellent mood today!" whenever she logged onto the computer. it had amazed me at the time that the computer had been able to tell who she was. :)

my fondest memory of the se 30? playing dark castle and beyond dark castle.

[ariel817.livejournal.com]

Haha.. I remember setting my dos prompt to %andy so if I was on C drive it was Candy, or D drive and it was Dandy.. to poke fun at my friends (particularly the one that started this conversation thread!) who named their computers. :)

[ariel817.livejournal.com]

The first computer I ever had was a Vic 20 that cost $44 from Kmart. I think the tape drive I hooked up to it cost almost as much. Eventually I upgraded to a Commodore 64 and it's "lumbering hippo" of a disk drive. Had an analog modem that you had to put the handset into the acoustic cups, until some anonymous ddialer gave me a real modem -- real meaning 1200 baud, I believe! I used to get the Compute! magazine and laboriously type in basic code, and I had a few cartridge games. I was the first person (in my school, I think) to turn in a book report on computer paper (fanfold greenbar) -- written in Quick Brown Fox, a word processor, and I didn't know enough to know how to set top & bottom margins, and the teacher fussed because my text ran right through the perforations, so I didn't separate my sheets.

In high school (10th or 11th grade, maybe? so '84 or '85) I took a computer math class that was structured programming in basic with a horrible teacher, and I ended up helping a lot of my classmates. Also took an applications class the semester before that and learned word processing and spreadsheets, but I don't remember what flavors of either. I know we had Apple IIe and IIc's at school.

I remember the first Lisa and later the Macintoshes in the stores, and sitting down and playing on them.

I remember playing Loderunner a lot on Tandys in Radio Shack when I worked there. And selling an old TRS something or other that had a big spiff (kick back to the salesperson who actually managed to sell it) on it because it was so old.

I remember starting my job here in Texas in 1987, and the Tandy 1200 that was mine to use (and the only computer the company had at the time). *shudder*

I remember the Commodore 128 and the one with the tiny built in screen. I remember monochrome monitors and when page white screens came out, instead of glowing yellow or green. And how I had a color monitor briefly at work, until Bruce gave it away, or took it over himself (which was okay, because our accounting software was quickbasic based, and locked up in color anyway.)

The first computer I bought with an 80 meg hard drive for work, and wondering what on Earth I would do with all that space. Having to replace the harddrive with phone support from Skip because we'd bought it from Comp USA and the drive was bad (isn't that where y'all worked?)

The first network, EasyLan, that replaced the "sneakernet" concept, and how great it really did work.

The first time I screwed up knowing I should "restore" a "backup" and being there til Midnight while Bob untangled our mangled data and Bruce looked on -- and realizing about 10:30 or so why it had happened, NOT that I was going to say anything!

Saving logs of ddial chats with Bob while he provided tech help so I could study it later and learn DOS commands...

The first PC clone we had in the house (well, apartment) was yours, I think.. you were letting us "store" it there, although I don't remember why anymore. :) I'm sure it was an 8088 processor, and seemed way cool and very, very different from the Commodore.

The time when EasyLan finally died, and you helped us migrate to Windows For Workgroups 3.11 (fairly new at the time) and spending a fortune bringing Kathy's PC up to 1 meg of memory!! And having the nifty Windows For Workgroups Dos add-on, so we didn't have to put every machine up on Windows.

And remember Dr Dos? Hahah.

And... of course........... the classic -- "It just wants to know where the F1 key is" which has to make it into any computer reminiscing!

Okay... so that was more than 2 memories. *blush*

[slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com]

I had a vic20 also, I think it was computer #3, after the zx81, and while I still had my model 1. I had the pathetic vic modem (300 baud) that you had to unplug the handset from your phone and plug in the spiral cord into the modem. It was cool, had sound, and color, and basic again! I think I bought it in 84 or 85? A borrowed c64 when I had my first apartment in Garland. The turbo xt clone was built in that apartment and then loaned to you because I didn't have room for it when I was living on L's floor in Arl. after I left Garland. I didn't get it back until after my apartment with Skip. I remember the sound of Impossible Mission on Randy's c128 to this day. :)

Remember the old lisa I got from Computrac in the 90's? That was a blast, and the original mac128 that we gave your grandmother. She knew how to use a single button mouse almost from the first instant. I'd forgotten about converting your network at the office to a windows for workgroup setup with the DOS wg client. weird how I forgot about that until just now.

I've got Mikes model 4 and a couple of cassette based mod III's and a model 1 without an expansion interface in storage, I may have to go pull those out soon and try to book one up. Interesting note, when I sold my model 1 with it's expansion interface, serial card, accoustical coupler, printer, I sold it to a Radio Shack manager who was going to use it for his books at the store.... The people you meet at the sidewalk sale. The money from it went into building the turbo XT box you used........

wow..... thanks for helping me remember

[ariel817.livejournal.com]

Hahah.. yeah, Impossible Mission and Dino Eggs.. those were the games! How many times did I go to bed and wake up and find Randy and Roger still playing the next morning?! Personally, I liked Impossible Mission II much better!

I do remember your old Lisa, and of course the Mac 128 and how good she was at pool, was it not? You sure brightened up her days with that machine!

The WFW conversion was a BIG thing at work, I'll probably never forget that. I think I still have the dos add-on floppy disk somewhere -- or maybe I threw it out a couple months ago when I ran across it.

I remember my first brush with the Internet and the WWW -- probably on that XT turbo clone you built... taking forever and forever to load a page, and it was just a page of more links, and I wondered why on earth would I want to wait around that long for just more things to click on and wait for?

I remember the daisy wheel printer we had at work.. and the 9 pin dot matrix printers we had, of course. Printouts of general ledgers on greenbar paper....

[slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com]

I remember us getting slipknot? working on your home pc so we could use the lynx text browser on OMEGA through the college dialup to see the net before any of us got an ISP account. Man, that was slow.

I can be accused of wrapping christmas presents in greenbar one year. (hangs head in shame)

[ariel817.livejournal.com]

Hahah... you made me laugh out loud truly with that last line!

Yeah.. I remember lynx.. don't know if it was slipknot or some other name... but I do remember what you are talking aou

[ariel817.livejournal.com]

Argh.. *about! That was SLOW and a LONG time ago!

And yet.. not so very long ago.. Rebecca was already born.. seems like it should have been longer ago than within her lifetime!

[jabber.livejournal.com]

Atari 800, with a whopping 64k. My father used it to telephone into the work mainframe. I used it to play games. Eventually, BASIC became one of the more interesting games I played. :) Still have the casettes with my first programs someplace.

The school had a few trs-80's, and I would get yelled at for making them do things my teacher couldn't grade because it was in excess of the assignment.

[slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com]

I liked the Atari's, I think that if they had developed a semi-reliable floppy system for them eariler, that they would have really taken off. They would have had it all then, color, sound, cartridges, and floppys! My friend had an 800, and had terrible times with getting cassettes to load reliably on his. He even had the atari tape dive for it.

My high school teacher ended up useing me as an unpaid TA to go around and help teach the others in the class basic at the computers. We had some that just weren't getting it and he was sorely pressed for time with getting to everyone. I'll never forget Mr. Hendrix. He was quite a teacher, and a good friend.