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.

[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.

[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*

[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.