Just to complement the thread about the first computer you owned... do you remember what was the first computer you ever used?

The first one I ever used was a mainframe back in my undergraduate days, some 30-odd years ago, I forget what model it was, but I'm pretty sure it was an IBM or ICL machine, which had to be programmed (in either Algol 60, Fortran IV, or Cobol) with decks of punched cards... tho we did have a few terminals, from which you could run your programs, which consisted of a type-writer type console with a roll of paper to serve as what we would now call a monitor. I also remember we had a PDP11 which had to be programmed in assembler, again with punched cards.

Oh happy days.

I remember in 1995 (when I was 5 years old) the school had these old old computer with a trackball and a keyboard.. I think they were IBM and we would start a program and it would take about 2 minutes to load and the pixels were as big as a binder...

Elementary school...1990-1991...some beginning Apple computers (I don't know the specs...I was 5!!!). They had *gasp* color screens, and those huge black floppy drives. They played all sorts of learning games, (very old school) and Oregon Trail...I miss that game....*wistful sigh*

yup, those are like one of the first computers i ever used.



lol, did you ever play the game or did you just hunt. "you shoot 1000 pounds of meat, you can only carry 100 pounds" we used to get in trouble for that all the time. then when i did try to beat the game, class was over.

I actually played it...but my party kept dying of dysentery. I only beat it once...I think I did a jig in my chair. However, you described the actions of the boys in my class perfectly.

TRS-80 Model III, computer class.

the first computer i ever used was an Acorn!!!! my old old school actually still uses them!!!OMFG!

Atari (forget which model. The one with the keyboard console)

Not counting CRT terminals in a mainframe environment, it was a Vic20.
Regards,
John

It was a BBC Microsystem v2 (believe me there was nothing micro about it) in school back in 1984, typing and playing a game called Granny's Garden.

Apple II I think (such a lovely all green screen)

Not sure. It was a terminal that had a punch card device to store the programs and data. I was only 17 (1978), and it was at State Library. I wish I still had those punch cards.

The TRS-80 and PET computers that were in the Library. They were also my first introduction to RPG games. They had this fun little RPG game that I used to love.

Old Mac computer at school. I'd say around 1991, so I was aroung 7 or 8. It was the kind with the keyboard built into the computer.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum with its rubber multi-function keys that were set to program in BASIC. It took Houdini standard dexterity to be able to get certain commands when learning to type would have been easier. After that it was a BBC-B. I never did fill a complete C30 cassette.

After that it was an ICL 2904 mainframe computer, which filled a massive, air-conditioned room all on its own.

Yes - I am old.

my frist computer when i was like...6 years old in 2000..a windows 98...back then i didnt even know about computers...i didnt even really touch it...ive only had 2 computers....my 98 which is gone and my XP Home right now...im probly gonna get a Vista when it comes ot of BETA or a X64 dual core processor 1GB ram and 1TB memory for my bday
hahah

Mine was a 1995 Mac. They were grey. thats all i remember from those school days.

I thought it would not be inappropriate to mention in this thread that the Personal Computer has just celebrated its 25th anniversary. It has certainly come a long, long way!
Regards,
John

1980 - First computers - TRS80 and an Atari 400.

True story:

1974 in high school, the first "math lab" was a storage closet with a live telephone and an old ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph) teletype terminal with paper tape puncher and (pneumatic) reader attached on the side. It used an integrated accoustic coupled modem; the kind with two rubber cups that you put the telephone hand unit into after you dialed up a remote mainframe manually! This was in St. Louis county, Missouri, USA. St. Louis was and is the home headquarters of the aerospace industry giant McDonnell-Douglas Corporation. So we dialed up this free phone number that they had "donated" to public schools access, to connect to their McDonnell-Douglas Automation Division (the data processing division).
The modem was probably only around 200 baud rate (max?) and when it printed out, the terminal made the characteristic chinka-chinka-chinka sound across the paper.

I (and my math wiz buddies) learned BASIC programming by individually working through a long series of programming tutorials (maybe 20 or 30, kindly provided by McD-D-A.) "online", dialed up to the remote host mainframe computer. Each took maybe an hour to complete. The only visual I/O we had was the paper print (tractor pin-feed) in front of us coming out of the teletype. So the Read, Q/A format was very stop and go, as we typed in answers, and waited for the send, analysis, and reply to come back over the phone and slowly print out on the teletype, read that and continue, stop and wait, type, enter, stop and wait, etc.

All programs had to be typed in first on it's "console" (no video display of any kind) which was like a stiff electric typewriter keyboard with a few extra mystery keys (non-printing characters, or whatever). Then you'd have to "save" your program input by sending the listing to the paper tape hole puncher mounted on the console side. It probably only punched out just a few characters (a column of 8 holes each) per second. So a long program could take maybe half an hour to auto-punch as the 1 inch wide yellow paper ribbon roll spit out the punched tape in a "spaghetti" pile on the floor. To take it with you (for later input) you had to wind it up by hand into a loop (about the size of a shot glass) and fasten it with a paper clip to keep it wound up. Storage was problematic. A few of us quickly realized that a gazillion tiny paper "chads" quickly collected in a waste hopper under the paper puncher, and salvaging that replenishing stash of confetti for later pranks was easy!

To input any stored program, we had to manually feed the lead-in of the paper ribbon into slot and the pinhole tractor feed chugged the paper through the reader passing each column of holes (1 ASCII character byte each) in series across a line of air-jet holes that aligned with the holes (or unpunched paper bits) in the paper ribbon. The logic was obviously binary, with a bit hole either unpunched or punched, and the corresponding bit jet of air was then either blocked (high pressure at sensor) or unblocked (relative low pressure at the airjet sensor). And so the "program" was read in one byte at a time serially, as long as the paper ribbon continued to chug past the pneumatic sensor "reader". I guess the last code or two was probably an EOF = End-Of-File code. Before long we buddies got to where we could just visually inspect the linear series of hole grids and "read" decode them mentally, or else transcribe them with a pencil, writing each column character out 1 by 1 on the ribbon itself. It was the pinnacle of uber-geekness back then, and impressed (or else really scared) our classmates, and rightly earned us Geek Gods status.


Later in college courses we "used" (i.e. programmed) DEC PDP-11 mini-computers, but the storage medium was the then-standard IBM style punch cards, and we carried our "programs" around in cardboard boxes containing precisely sequenced, and neatly stacked rows of huge stiff paper cards, each about the size of a business mailing envelope. Woe and severe misery befell any unfortunate or clumsy oaf who didn't tape his/her card box closed, and happened to accidentally drop it, spilling the contents out randomly or scattering them across the road or parking lot in a strong wind. There was no recovery and resorting your scattered cards if any program was longer than about a dozen or so cards. Typically a "program" was hundreds or even thousands of cards long, and a semester course's final project program might well fill 2 or 3 boxes. Also there may have been several shorter programs organized in a single box, and once those cards got dumped and mixed up together, forget it. You had to scrap all of them!
The only recourse if yours got spilled, lost, stolen, damaged, etc. was to trek across campus to one of the keypunch utility rooms and feed stacks of blank stock cards in the input hoppers of those monstrous noisy machines (about the size of 2 office desks stacked together) and wait while your program slowly punched out again, and then ever-so-carefully, manually pick up the stacks of punched cards and correctly sequence and physically orient them, chunk after chunk, as you filed them back in your cardboard storage box. That chore made for a lot of desperate middle-of-the night panic sessions at the punch stations. (A particularly mean prank was to surreptitiously insert a discarded waste card randomly into someone's boxed row of cards when they were not looking. If you were smart, you kept an eye on your box, kept the cover closed at all times, and never left it unattended.)

Of course the payoff was at the end of the semester after your last programming project was graded, you might be one of those few celebratory (or else frustrated) geeks who trekked up to the roof of your dorm or tallest accessible building on campus with your card boxes under arm, and waited for a strong wind, and then opened and emptied box after box of the fleet of flying cards to the four winds and watched them fly away far and wide. It wasn't an uncommon sight and the knowledgable upper classman knew when and where to watch for these "sky shows".
Just don't get caught by the campus cops for littering! (They knew where to camp out in wait for those perps coming down off the roofs, so it was sort of a semester end party for them too, I guess.)

But then after graduating college, I got a job and the first micro I owned, programmed, and used extensively for years was the Commodore 64 "home computer". I still have 1 or 2 working units in storage!

Over & ouch,
L.

Now tha that is a story...

Are you still a programer?

Guess the DVD is something... Get alot of punchcards onto that little plastic thing

omg what is all this....the oldest computer ive ever seen and ever owned or used was a Windows95

Crikey - somebody is older than me. I used punch cards at one point but never got around to learning how to read them. I simply wasn't a Geek God, even if I did have the body of one.

Yeah, those were the good ol' "high tech" days!

Check out this Wiki page for complete description and photos of those old dinosaur machines:
Punch card (or "Hollerith card", or "IBM card")


L.

Nice pics I wonder if someone still has an old functioning one somewhere... probably in a musuem or university...

Apple IIe, I think it was IIe, in 1982 or 1983.

Used Basic language for programming. One pixel was about 1/4 inch square.

5 and 1/2 floppy disks, I still have the one I used in high school, and the one I used later in college when I took Pascal.

No mouses (okay, mice) or anything like them.

The only command I remember is gosub, and I don't remember what that means. The paper was pale green and off-white striped with the punch holes along the side that the printer used to hold and move the paper. The paper was I think about 10 inches wide, and looking through the printout for programming errors was a chore indeed.
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Incidently, I have heard that the punch card technology was actually based on a kind of loom. These looms had a series of wooden bars with holes equally spaced apart. In some of these holes little pegs would be placed. The wooden bars were linked by small chains and would rotate around a gear in which the bars would fit into slots. By pressing down on one treadl of the loom, the bars would advance to the next one, and by pressing down on the other treadle, the pegs would cause certain shafts of the loom to rise creating the shed that the thread would pass through. This technology allowed the weaver to make far more complex patterns without having to use a zillion treadles. As you can see the peg or lack of peg relates to hole or lack of hole in the punch card which in turn relates to a 1 or 0 in binary code. By the way, I have actually used such looms: They are called dobby looms, and at least some are made by AVL looms in California.

Orange Blossom

I'd like to add that the first teminal I ever used back in those days (the mid 1970's) didn't even have a monitor. It was not much more than a glorified typewriter with a roll of paper for it's output device, which was actually quite useful because you could take it away for reference.

Mine was a Radio Shack TRS-80 with 4K of RAM, which my uncle later upgraded to 16K.

We had those in the fire stations until about 1988. It was a back up to our radio system. I believe they called them teletypes. We would receive the printed dispatch about the time it came over the radio.

That brings back memories.

The first computer I used and owned was an EINSTEIN TC-01 those were the days, still have the beast, and it works!

Spectrum, 1990
then ATARI

Awk good ole days as i remeber my dad bought like 3 computer for his bussiness and a laptop i didnt nw about she was a wagon hi!!! Wel it was in 1998 as i remember she was a weapon me dad payed top prices for it then noob!!! It had 20gb of hdd now i have 1000gb lol intel pentium 2 make gateway model dont now some laptop running on windows 98se. But the thing is i told me da i needed a new lap for school and i got an alienware i had to contribute but i was happy anyway my da is stilling using the gateway and she still is goin stong lol!!