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

[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.