slipstreamsurfr: (Default)
slipstreamsurfr ([personal profile] slipstreamsurfr) wrote2005-08-22 03:49 pm

so, what was it?!

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?!?

[identity profile] smallerdemon.livejournal.com 2005-08-22 09:24 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com 2005-08-22 09:30 pm (UTC)(link)
(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!!