First computers

I wanted an OSI bad – as a “spec geek,” they blew away all the competition at the time. But as a high school student, the VIC 20 was all I could afford.

My favorite thing about the OSI Challenger was how it would actually show the BASIC listings streaming down the screen as you loaded a program from tape…

I still have a dozen or two Creative Computing magazines in a box in my attic. Now THAT was a great computer magazine! Ever see their parody issue?

Add me to the list of TI99/4a members. I remember programing a turn based spacewar/star fleet battles kind of game on there and having it take like 7 minutes to load off of the tape. Of course I overclocked the tape recorder and then it loaded in only 5 minutes. ;)

– Xaroc

My first was a Timex-1000 which was really just a rebranded Sinclair ZX-81. I had it figged out with the wopping big 16K memory pack. W00t! I taught myself Z-80 assembler with that. I also taught myself patience waiting for programs to load from my cassette recorder.

It wasn’t very long before I got fed up and blew a wad of cash on an Apple //e.

The funny thing is that Z80 assembly programming is STILL useful to know

Really? What type of apps are still using it? I didn’t think there would still be Z-80 chips or equivalents around.

A C64 and Bard’s Tale. Ah, those were the salad days…

Really? What type of apps are still using it? I didn’t think there would still be Z-80 chips or equivalents around.[/quote]
The Z80 is still used heavily in embedded apps. Check www.zilog.com and www.rabbitsemiconductor.com. You can get Z80 (or derivatives) running at 50MHz with a meg of RAM and a pile of flash complete with TCP/IP connectivity for pretty damn cheap, with C compilers and toolkits and the whole shebang.

Scary, huh?

We got mine at Sears. I think it was a 386. There was a little LCD on the front with an 8 on it. Then I could press the “turbo” button and it would go to a 12. I didn’t notice a difference, but it was still kinda fun. I would press the button when I started up a program and make spaceship sounds like the program was Buck Rogers taking off. I was pretty impressed by that.

Nobody I knew had the first clue about computers. I think we actually returned four computers to Sears because I “broke” them and nobody knew how to fix it, including the people at the store. One time we had to return a computer because I deleted the DOS directory to make room for a game. I think it was an Ultima game.

I still think it was worth it…

First computer was a Franklin Ace 2000 for the family with dual 5 1/4 disk drives and a monochrome greenish monitor… basically an apple 2 clone.

etc

I was a Cosby kid.

mmm… Parsec… with the speech synth.

I fucking owned Parsec. Don’t even front.

I too was part of the TI posse, at least as far as first “real” computers go.

Tunnels of Doom kicked ass.

“My” first computer was my mother’s New England Telephone UNIX terminal, where I would happily play Go Fish and Rogue after my mother was finished working in the evenings. I also played Zork, but being only three or four most of it was a bit beyond me, although I remember being pretty thrilled with myself for being able to find a key and actually pick it up.

My second computer was that Texas Instruments computer that wumpus linked… was it called the TI-80? What memories that pleasant and charming boot-up screen brings back. Our TI-80 may actually have existed concurrently with the Unix terminal. My favorite games were Hunt the Wumpus (which still has the ultimate end boss in the history of video games), Face Maker and this game where you were a mountain climber dodging birds and falling boulders… anyone remember the title of that one?

My father, whom has a history of taking idle past times like music collecting and substance abuse to ludicrous extremes, actually ended up getting addicted to Hunt the Wumpus. He had just given up alcohol after about twelve years of Charles Bukowskiesque binge drinking, basically because my mother threatened to leave him, and he fought off the DTs by playing Hunt the Wumpus pretty much twenty hours a day.

I remember coming downstairs in my doctor dentons in search of a glass of milk at about three am and find him hunched in front of the TI keyboard, his entire body contorted into a seemingly impossible to maintain position that might be dreamed up as an excoliating measure for particularly sadistic Buddhist monks. His eyes would be large, yellow and bloodshot like an Ed Roth drawing in Cartoons magazine; he would violently tremble and jactitate from head to toe. But somehow he managed to maintain a level of almost beatific calm every time the screen went red with pixellated wumpus jaws and the Wumpus theme song ominously blared his death at him. His “Wumpus” period lasted about four weeks, until my mother threatened to leave him if he didn’t stop playing Hunt the Wumpus. So he took up smoking.

Anyway, my Dad won’t even touch video games anymore, basically admitting that he is afraid he would waste the rest of his life in front of them if he ever plays one again. I think he probably has the right idea.

Anyone know of a good emulator for the TI?

TI 99 4/A. Woot I learned BASIC at the age of 7. I had Hunt the Wumpus and Parsec as well, but no speech synth. :( The sound stopped working on the unit after a couple years anyway.

The first system I owned was a Vic 20, my parents bought it for my birthday, complete with cassette unit and a small television. I still have them out in the garage. In 8th grade my school had TRS 80s which was my first exposure to computers. I graduated on to Atari 400s and 800s in high school, which lead me to getting an 800xl instead of a Commodore 64 as a graduation gift. I remember typing in the programs from Compute! magazine all night long and then spending another hour searching for the mistyped character…
My dad and I bought a Commodore Colt next, their IBM AT/XT clone.

TI-99. Parsec beat the shit out of Defender.

An Altair that I ordered from Popular Mechanics, waited almost a year for it to be delivered, then built it from the kit. 8 toggle switches on the front to program it with.

An Ohio Scientific - very cool machine. I would kill to have it back, I sold it way back when. Wanted to get a Northstar, as I recall that was the one with the cool walnut side-pieces.

Trash-80, then moved into the Apple world. I had one of the first Apple II’s, I remember calling their support line one night and the Woz answered and we chatted for about an hour. That was the nature of the hobby back then. Then I got an Apple II+, but made sure I got an integer card so you could reset out to the * prompt. An Apple //e, and Apple //gs (signature model), a couple of Macs. At one time I had a room with an Apple II+, an Apple //e, and Apple //gs, a Mac, an Atari, and an early PC. My wife laid down the law at that time - care and feeding (hardware and software) was getting too expensive. ;)

Wow. No one I’ve ever talked to has ever heard of OSI before… I wonder whatever happened to them. Here are some pictures, though.

http://www.digidome.nl/ohio_scientific_instruments.htm

The TI994/a option is a glaring omission from the poll considering all the TI-ers who’ve posted so far. Count me as another one. I learnded to program basic copying programs from the 99’er magazine. Loading from tape would make hours seem like days, though. I had a lot more patience back then.

Back when I was a kid, the kid down the street and I used to have arguments over which was better, my C-64 or his Apple, that easily eclipsed any Linux/Windows fanboy argument of today.

OK, so that was the first computer I owned. The first computer I ever saw was some years earlier – I must have been in first or second grade – and I have only the haziest recollection of it. Some guy who lived across the street had it, and my parents took me over there one day to see it. It was a typewriter-type thing – no monitor, all output was to paper. And it had some kind of rink-a-dink BASIC program on it (presumably quickly written up by our neighbor) that would ask you your name, age, etc, and then output it into pre-written conversational text – sort of an extremely primitive Eliza. Anyway, at the time I sure thought it was cool. Anyone know what machine it might have been?