When did you get into computers?

[Ausimax]

We take Computers so much for granted today, we can email around the world in seconds, send and receive photos digitally, and download massive programs on-line, it started me thinking of when I got my first computer and what it was.

I got my first computer in 1978 it was a "Dick Smith VZ200" probably not familiar to readers in the US but those in GB would have known it as the "Sinclair". The whole computer was contained in the Keyboard, the monitor was a TV-set, the Operating System was on dynamic memory, and it had 16 Kb of RAM  & no floppy drive - the programs were loaded from or saved to a cassette tape recorder.

But Hey! this computer had colour display and a 4 colour printer/plotter that printed to 4" roll paper with 4 stubby ball-point pens.

The programming language was "Basic" and if you wanted the computer to do something you had to write the program to make it do it.

Tell us about your first PC.

Max

[pcraft]

My very 1st was a Vic20, it had a total of 5K of ram and that included the operating system and all..
Sheesh, thinking back, that was  close to/or around 25 years ago.  How time flies...

http://oldcomputers.net/vic20.html

I had no interest at all in computers at the time.. My Uncle was the instigating force that convinced
me to purchase one.. I remember him calling me and asking if I was going to buy one, like it was
yesterday.  I said, "What the heck do I need a computer for."  His argument was that my son,
who was in grade 3 or so, would think his Dad would be stupid not knowing anything about computers.
His argument must have struck a nerve..  lol

So shortly after, off the wife and I went to purchase one...  lol  I progressed along to the Amiga which
was sold with 64 K of Ram and later upgraded to 1 Mb of Ram that cost me about $750.00.  (Can
you imagine, $750 for 1 MB of Ram installed.. I guess I was hooked by then.)  lol

Thanks for asking Max...  Hope to hear more from other forum members..   :up:

Best of regards,
Robert

[kiska]

Got my first one 3-4 years ago. A macbook.

[cmpentecost]

I was a freshman in college in '82, and remember taking a required computer basics course.  We were supposed to write some extremely basic software program, or probably more like it, a "function, such as making 3 + 3 = 6".  It was so over my head that I remember sitting in the computer lab and having a computer major do the program for me.  Then, in about 1990, while working for Hartford Insurance, we went from paper files to computer files, using the Wang computer, which was all DOS.  I got laid off by Hartford in '95, so started playing with my boyfriend's (now husband) computer, which was DOS, and loading Prodigy for internet.  I remember getting a new computer with Windows 3.1, but couldn't begin to tell you what the RAM or harddrive capacity was.  My, times have changed, haven't they!

Christine

[Dave]

My first computer was purchased around 1990. It was a Packard Bell with 100 mb hard-drive and 2mb Ram that was expandable to a whopping 5mb. Did I mention the dot matrix printer. Those were heady days my friends. Heady days indeed.

Dave

[zapphnath]

My first computer was a TI99-4a from Texas Instruments. 

10 PRINT "hello"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

"Ack!! How do you stop this thing?!?" - "Pull the plug!!"

Some years later, my brother got a Windows 3.x machine with the expected specs.  I remember thinking how I wish we could afford to upgrade to the new Windows 95, which would have required an upgrade to the system just to run it.

I, finally, got around to buying my own PC about 3 years ago.  After that one got fried (learned the hard way the difference between a Surge Protector and a six-pack with an "On/Off" switch) I bought my current system from the classifieds.  It's an all-powerful 500MHz P-III.  I'm not complaining (too much) about it, though.  It will run Photoshop while listening to netcasts without much slowdown.

[glennab]

Great question, Max.

My first experience with a computer (if you could call it that) was back in the early 60s -- a typesetting monstrosity that spat out punched tape which was then fed into another machine (computer???) to actually justify and print out the type.  I also worked as a typographer for 3 years on a proprietary computer system.  I used my first Mac as a consultant for a newspaper, and it was one of the earliest models. I remember being such a newbie to REAL computers that I had to run the "mouse maze" to learn to use the thing.  I picked up everything else on the fly (using the first version of Pagemaker) and managed to get an issue of the paper out -- half from the computer and half pasted-in copies of line art.  What fun!

One of my most interesting experiences was going from totally manual work at a flexo printing company (We had to use a revolving table and camera to do our trapping, and we had a gargantuan room-full of camera that did the step-and-repeat negatives for plate-making.  When we got computers, I was in heaven, because the step-and-repeat camera could take as long as 45 minutes to create one negative, and then the negative would have to be inspected with a loupe and dust specs opaqued with a pen or carved out with a knife.  Once the big camera got so hot doing a long step-and-repeat that the glass cover exploded.  Enter the Quadra 800 Mac.  Step-and-repeat took a matter of seconds, trapping was a no-brainer and the film was CLEAN!  Woo hoo!

Thankfully, I left the printing company and moved to where I am now -- doing mostly design work.  I got my own computer in 1998, right after I took the job I have now (used my retirement from the old job to get computer, software and peripherals because after being laid off from another job, I had the opportunity to do freelance work -- but no computer.).  I still have her -- my faithful old G3.  Love her to pieces.  Then when I joined OPR I realized I'd need more power (it literally took hours to create any amount of hair with the brush and smudge tools on the G3), and my tech guy told me that the G3 could give up the ghost at any time.  So I burned the numbers off my credit card and got a whiz-bang Mac Pro, CS2 and a kick-butt Apple LCD monitor.

All you youngsters who grew up with computers can't begin to appreciate what they accomplish and the speed with which they function the way those of us who did everything manually back in the stone age do.  I love being in the "future!"

Glenna

Robert -- $750 for 1M of ram!  I just bought a memory stick with 4gigs for less than $50.  Amazing!

[pcraft]

Yeah, I know Glenna...  That's how long ago it was that I bought that 1 Mb of Ram...  lol

Talk about stone age, eh???  lol

Pssst... pssst...  That was installed by the experts too...  lol

[Johnboy]

I got involved with computers at work. The first one was an Apple IIc with 28K of memory. Used a database program, I can't remember the name, to track production orders. I even taught myself Applesoft Basic so I could write a printing estimating program, and then improved it by using code from a magazine called Incider. Then came along the Wang. Our Wang spoke COBOL which I didn't know. I later got familiar with the language just before the machine became a boat anchor. I remember going to a week long school on how to use the Wang utility programs to set up files to track those good old production orders. Had to have a student covert that printing estimating program. The Mac eventually took over in the office. That printing estimating program became a Filemaker project on the Mac.

My first computer at home was an Apple IIe with 64 K of memory, duo disk drive, and dot matrix printer. Then about 3 or 4 years later at the urging of our youngest daughter who was in college at the time I got a Mac LC470 with 8 meg of memory and I don't remember how large the disk drive was. Thought that was the cat's meow at the time. Then about 4 years ago I moved up to the iMac (round base with flat screen) with 512 meg of memory and 80 Gig hard drive.

Both of our sons-in-law are in computers mostly on the networking side and web work. So I guess I'll always be close to a computer some where.

Johnboy

[Ausimax]

 
Hi,

Sounds like most of us Wrinklies started off at about the same stage , when Power Computing was King, and we spoke about memory in Kilobytes.

My second computer (1982) was a Amstrad PCW 256, a computer and dedicated word processor - had 256 Kb of RAM, that was BEFORE you loaded the operating system from floppy disk - no hard drive - green screen monitor - and dot-matrix printer - the operating system (can't remember what it was called) is what Bill took and developed into Microsoft DOS - still used programs written in Basic - it was my computer till 1996 when I bought my first Windows based machine,  I still have it packed away in a box somewhere, won't load the OS because the drive belt in the floppy drive is cactus.

Glenna, you burnt the numbers off you card for the Mac! Have a go at what a powerful computer cost- this add from a 1984 computer magazine.



No wonder we weren't all rushing out to buy a machine with a Monstrous 44 Meg hard drive and colour monitor, for A$11,800, 1984 Dollars.

Max

[glennab]

Max, that's astonishing!  Now I remember why it took me so long to get a computer.  And contemplate how much we can get now for those prices!

Just as an aside, I bought a couple of robot cleaners last year -- one vacuums and one washes the floor.  I just got an UPGRADE for the Scooba (floor washer).  They're phenomenal!  Even ten years ago I wouldn't have believed I'd be in possession of such wonderful technology.  I'm living the sci-fi I read when I was a kid!

Glenna

[nitehawk]

  My first computer was an Apple IIGs. It had some ram, but I can't reminder how much.  It had a 5.5 and a 3.5 floppy, both of which were the source of the programs that were used. There limit was 786k. 
  The year we got them was late 1989.  We ordered the setup in November and they weren't going to be delivered until after Christmas, so I put pictures of the on a board and wrapped it as a Christmas present to the family.
  That was a Christmas I'll not soon forget.  California had an earthquake on October 17 and we were right on the fault line.  It was a 7.1 and really shook thing up a bit.  I can remember unwrapping the presents in the family room with the sheets blowing in the wind where the fire place used to be.  Our area in Gilroy was built on a flood plane right next to a river which made the soil not very stable in an earthquake, when the earthquake stopped we kept shacking.  It was a very shaky beginning for our computer experience to say the least.

[kjohnson]

Mike, yea Gilroy the land of quakes & garlic.

[VBrestorer]

   Glenna's experience with computers reminds me somewhat of my own.

   My very first experience with computers was in 1968 – I was in college taking a Numerical Analysis course, and had to write a program in FORTRAN (remember that?).  To get the program into the college's mainframe computer, I had to create and submit punched cards.

   After graduating college and teaching high school for a couple of years, I took a civilian job working for the US Navy as a programmer.  Specifically, I worked with a team of about 300 civilian contractors, civil servants, and military personnel to develop and maintain Command and Control programs for Cruisers and Destroyers that were part of the Navy Tactical Data System (NTDS).  The computers I first worked on were developed for the Navy by Sperry-UNIVAC to Navy specifications.  They were "ruggedized" [meaning built to withstand shock from explosions, rocking from ocean waves (the computers were actually mounted on springs), and salt air], and were about the size of a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer.

   Like Max's Amstrad, these monstrosities didn't have a resident Operating System (OS) – the OS was part of the program that was loaded in from 9-inch magnetic tape reels.  The tape units themselves were adjunct monstrosities about the same size as the computers, and had two tape drives, an upper and a lower.  All that the computers had resident was a BIOS program called a 'bootstrap'.

   The programs themselves (we're talking about something on the order of 1 million lines of code) were modularized (i.e., broken up) by function (tracking, navigation, surface operations, etc.), and a typical "printout" of each module was a fan folded, bound listing about 6 inches thick.  To create our programs we first submitted our "code sheets" to the Keypunch unit where the code the programmers had written on the sheets were typed onto punched cards.  Each card was keyed in twice – the first actually punched the holes in the cards while the second typing verified that what was on the punched card was correct.

   After a day or so, depending on how backed up the Keypunch Unit was, we would pick up our punched cards, add them in with the other trays of cards [generally each tray was about 4 feet long, and a full program (not just one module) required 12-to-15 full trays], and submit them to the Compiler Center to have the program compiled, listings generated, and those 9-inch magnetic tapes produced containing the program's object code.  Then it was back to your desk for desk debugging, and correcting any logic errors or compiler-detected syntax errors found.

   Once you got a 'clean' compile and felt like your part of the program had some chance of running without crashing the computers, you scheduled "mock-up" time where you'd go with your magnetic tapes and listings down to a part of the building where mock-ups of actual Command and Control spaces like aboard ship were.  Since these mock-ups were used during the day for training ship crews on how to use these systems, our (the program developers) mock-up time was after-hours and on weekends.  More than once I've attended debug sessions that started at 1 AM and ran until 6 AM.

   Notice that so far in this description of my first experiences with computers I haven't mentioned monitors – there weren't any.  At the top fourth of these computers, at about eyelevel, were rows of blinking lights which presented the binary contents of the instruction currently being executed, and the binary value of the seven indexers the computers used as pointers into tables of the programs, etc.  And there were also numerous toggle switches for various purposes.

   If your program wasn't working right, you'd try to pinpoint where the error was in your listing, develop a fix, and then 'patch' the program "in core" by stepping through it one instruction at a time (once you'd set a 'program halt' in the neighborhood of where you suspected the error to be).  When you got to the instruction you wanted to alter, you 'punched in' your change by pressing in the lights of the register holding the instruction.  The computers were 30-bit 'machines' so each register was 30-bits long (represented by 30 lighted buttons).  For convenience, the convention was to divvy-up the 30-bits into ten 3-bit segments.  Unlike today where the Hexadecimal (base16) notation is used and 4-bits make up 1 byte, since '30' can't be evenly chopped up into segments of 4, we chopped it up into ten segments of 3-bits per byte and used the Octal (base8) notation.  For example, binary ' 0 1 1 1 0 1' equates to Octal '35' or Hexadecimal '1d'.

   I'm sure this is WAY more detail than most care to read about, but my intent was to give those who 'stuck it out' a feel for how things were in the computer world before desktop workstations, and PCs and Macs were developed.  I got started in this business soon after computers switched from using vacuum tubes to transistors and magnetic core for memory.  Thankfully, over my computing career from 1972 to 2004, the punched cards, centralized compilers, and only hardcopy listings being your view into a program were replaced by desktop computers.

   For my 'off the job' experience, my first PC was a Leading Edge computer.  I held off buying a PC until about 1978 when you could get one that actually had a hard drive.  This first PC of mine had two floppy disks (A and B), and a whopping 10 mb hard disk (C).  (Which, by-the-way, is why our boot disks are conventionally named 'C' although computers almost never have two floppy drives anymore, and, now days, rarely have even one.)  The computer itself had about 128K of RAM, and came with MS DOS, GW Basic, and the Leading Edge Word Processor.  Including the Citizen 9-pin dot matrix printer I bought with the computer, the setup cost me about $2,800 in 1978 dollars.

   At the time of my first PC's purchase, we (my wife and I) thought of it as hobby equipment for me like other guys bought golf clubs and/or fishing boats.  But soon after getting it hooked up, my wife started seeing the word processor's potential for easing some of her tasks so wanted me to teach her how to use it.  I'm happy to say, our marriage survived that ordeal.

     Me:   Now type in "C:\Document".
    Her:   (After typing in "C:\Document RETURN")  It didn't work – what's wrong
                     with it?
     Me:   I  d i d n ' t  say hit RETURN, did I?

      ... and so it went.

   1978 is also the year my son was born so he literally grew up with a computer.  By 1982, between my wife and my son, I was having to schedule time for myself on my home computer, just like at work!

   There have been many computers since that first one, both at work and at home.  Both my son and my daughter have at least one computer of their own in their homes, and my son has followed in my footsteps working as a senior systems analyst on projects for the US Joint Forces Command.  (We live in the Hampton Roads area of Tidewater Virginia, a military-industrial complex so the government is a primary employer in this area.)

   Now that I've retired, computers are a hobby of mine, along with photo restoration.  I currently have five computers in the house.

   I guess I meandered off-track from the original topic, but thanks for the opportunity for me to take a stroll down memory lane.

Larry

[cmpentecost]

Hi Larry,

You were into computers long before I was, but I remember that binary stuff, and the punch cards.  As for teaching someone how to use a computer, my husband had this idea that I should teach him Photoshop.  It lasted one short lesson!  Now, he just gives me everything he wants done, tells me what he wants, and he leaves the room!

Christine