so, what was it?!
Aug. 22nd, 2005 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slipstreamsurfrSo, 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?!?
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?!?
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 01:28 am (UTC)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....
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 02:10 am (UTC)I can be accused of wrapping christmas presents in greenbar one year. (hangs head in shame)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 02:32 am (UTC)Yeah.. I remember lynx.. don't know if it was slipknot or some other name... but I do remember what you are talking aou
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-23 02:33 am (UTC)And yet.. not so very long ago.. Rebecca was already born.. seems like it should have been longer ago than within her lifetime!