Gday...

The first computer I used ...

and one of these -

.... both provided at work.

My first 'personal' computer was in 1996 - Pentium 100 but no idea what it all had now

cheers - John

Gundog wrote:

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In another thread a member recanted where he started in computers, so as a bit of a laugh what was the 1st real computer you owned (Amiga's etc don't count)

My 1st real PC was an IBM XT with 256k of RAM no Hard Drive and twin 360k 5 1/4 Floppy Disk Drives with a green phosphor screen.........which I added a 3.5" Floppy Drive and a bit later a 10Mb MFM Hard Drive and an EGA monitor.

 

How things have changed now

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 What with that? lol, my first computer was an Amiga 500 back in 1991. Originally only with 512KB RAM and an internal 3.5 inch 880KB floppy drive.

To this I added an extra 512KB RAM ($200 ?) which I modded so it was all fast RAM, with a bit of surgery to the motherboard, and an external FDD.

Piggy backed (physically soldered directly onto the original chip) the Amiga 2.1 OS eprom on top of the original Amiga 1.3 eprom with a switch between the chip select pins.

I added a SCSI interface (about $500) to which I also added another 4MB of RAM (about $480) which gave me a total of 5MB of RAM.

Added a SCSI 110MB external HDD ($560) which I had to build into a box with a power supply from a PC because the original power supply couldn't hack it with the extras.

Designed and built an automatic select box so that both the mouse and joystick could be connected at the same time and select between the two by pressing a button on either device.

Borrowed an audio digitiser and cloned it by completely drawing the component layout, photo copying the copper side of the board and etching my own board which I drew by hand, then assembling it. (worked first time too, and they were worth between $200 and $300 from memory).

Got a 4800 Baud modem and used to frequent dial up bulletin boards. (pre the dubya dubya dubya)

Used it for all the usual computer stuff like writing letters, report writing for work, spreadsheets, DTP, games, music using "trakkers" to build and edit sequences of digitised sounds to make music. I also used it for CAD design and learning programming in Amiga Basic and Assembly Language. Actually my son also used to program and wrote a program to solve simultaneous equations when his class were given about 50 to complete over a weekend as a punishment for some reason .

Oh yeah... eventually I bought a PC.... 386 with 4MB RAM 200 odd MB HDD... what a boring machine.

-- Edited by 03_troopy on Friday 31st of October 2014 09:54:20 AM

Back in 1979 I was statistician on Groote Eylandt (mining company) & I used a very large main frame - took up a whole room.

My first micro was a Motorola 6800 (1977?) and I remember having to write an assembly language program that operated a remotely controlled toy vehicle.

My first computer was a 16KB Microbee which I built from an Applied Technology kit that consisted of a bare PCB and all the components. That would have been in the late 1970s.

The first computer that I encountered in my work (1981?) was a Commodore PET with 4KB RAM and 8KB ROM BASIC. It had an audio cassette for storage. I interfaced it to an Instron tensile testing machine via the PET's IEEE488 interface plus a little bit of electronics that I designed. The software that I wrote for the job fit easily into the available 4KB. It monitored the force and displacement of the samples and plotted a stress-strain graph on a thermal printer.

In 1981 I went to work for a US CADCAM minicomputer manufacturer. Their machines were Data General Nova/Eclipse clones.

In the early 1990s my first PC was a 286 with 1MB RAM. My first modem was 300 baud, my first FDD was 360KB, my first HDD was 10MB, and my first monitor was monochrome.

BTW, if you want a nostalgia hit ...

bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf

On the other thread I mentioned the IBM PC leading on to the XT, then AT. But by the time the IPM PC came along I had 8 years of experience.

I started operating a GE 225, it had a 19 switch console, and a you boot loaded it through a card reader (paper cards), that gave it enough smarts to read the real program from tape. It had two banks of four tape drives, a printer, a cheque reader (it was in a bank), and it did all the processing for a major bank in NSW. I remember how much faster it went when the memory was upgraded from 8K to 16K, and that 16K was a cabinet 1m square, and 2m high. It was a great old machine in 1974.

The first computer I owned was an Ohio Superboard, with a 6502 processor, I built that in October 1978, used an audio cassette as a tape drive, monochrome screen, and 64k of memory, then I learned basic.

I have been VERY lucky, I stumbled into the world of computers, and I have lived through a very exciting time.

I used to think the growth had to stop, but now I know the systems are just going to get smaller, and faster.

If anyone wants a glimpse of the future, just research Graphene.

Sorry to bore everyone with my memories.

 

1st one was a 486SX I think , in 1993,,, anyway took to home and POURED OVER MANUAL as to how to use it. Fairly slowwwwwwwwww. Spent hours setting things up and started a spreadsheet or whatever it was called then????  with all my business customers, names etc (the reason for the purchase).

Anyway the next day the shop that sold it rang. Have you got a DX?

Me: a what?

Shop: a DX.

Me: what's a DX???

Shop: A computer.

Me:  Yeh I bought one yesterday.

Shop: Well it's not yours.

Me: I paid in full for it.

Shop: Yes but it's not yours.

Me: Oh yes it is.

So you can see we were going nowhere at all and something had to change before I hung up.

So I repeated the above and said it's mine.

Shop:  AT LAST SOME CLARITY - I think you have the wrong model.

Me:  Oh

Shop: yes you purchased a SX and we think we gave you a DX.

Me: Is that a problem???????

Shop: Yes the DX runs faster and costs more and the customer is here for it.

Me: OK so you want to do a swap eh. But I have files on mine (or someone elses) so what do I do.

Shop: How big is it maybe we can put it on a floppy and copy it.

Me: I'll bring it back ASAP, it's a pain in the bum already.

 

WHAT'S CHANGED - had a windows Trojan fixed today, froze my screen, etc etc $125 to get fixed by great computer guy,, now reloading software etc etc. Pain in the bum.

 

-- Edited by Baz421 on Friday 31st of October 2014 10:06:18 PM