My first experience with any computer was punching FORTRAN programs onto cards in highschool and having them shipped off to be run on an IBM 370 mainframe. You then got all the compile errors the next day.
My first encounter with a micro was the Commodore PET that was purchased by my highschool. They stuffed it into a room and that suddnely became the highschool computer lab.
Depressingly, but not surprisingly, I’m older than the Timemaster. So my first encounter with a computer was similar to Tim’s, except that it was an IBM System 360.
My first computer was a C-64 and I got it for my 6th or 7th birthday. It was a second-hand unit with literally tons of games, more than 100 I think. Bubble Bobble, Commando (I actually preferred the derivative “Who Dares Wins”, but Commando had cooler music), Summer Games, TMNT, etc, it was all good.
I remember being mystified why I had to type “RUN” just to start a game, I remember being annoyed at the endless cassette loading times, I remember having so much fun with that machine. My dad gave it away when I was 13. I wasn’t playing it anymore then, we had a PC by then, but damn I would have loved to have it today.
I begged for a Sinclair, but my parents thought $100 was too much, so instead they got me the Basic Programming and keyboard controllers for my Atari 2600 (which I won in the Kellogg’s Stick Up for Breakfast Contest). The controllers and cartridge were like $60 and allowed you to program a clock, Pong, and
10 PRINT “I wrote a program!”
20 GOTO 10
I finally got into this gifted students program that sent five of us up to Lafayette College once a month for a lecture from a prof. there, most of which sailed way over our heads. It DID get me a library card, and access to a terminal in their computer lab, where I sat for hours playing Adventure. My parents thought I was running simulations of how neurons worked.
There were many school/university/friend computers between then and the first computer I owned, which was a PC clone with 512K of memory and two floppies (no hard drive).
My first experience with any computer was punching FORTRAN programs onto cards in highschool and having them shipped off to be run on an IBM 370 mainframe. You then got all the compile errors the next day.
Man, I remember when I used to think punchcards were the coolest thing ever. They were, like, the future.
First home computer was a Trash-80, though–the first CoCo. It somehow managed to be even less sexy than punch cards, with its cassette tape data storage solution.
I had Parsec and Tunnels of Doom and Blasto and the Extended Basic cart and Hunt the Wumpus and a bunch of other stuff. Had the voice synth too. That computer rocked!
Thank god Compute! released MLX - a godsend for those of us who liked typing in pages of Basic listings. With MLX we could type in pages of hex characters instead - but at least it was checksum’ed on the fly ! LOL!
To this day I still think the early Compute!'s were the best general computer magazine ever released. And the best Commodore-specific magazine was The Transactor. Nothing has come close since.
Oh and maybe Kilobaud Microcomputing - reading about bubble sorts with sinkers - oh what fun I used to have !
My dad used to bring back PCs from work when I was a kid - a very early proprietary HP model I can remember, which had a touchscreen - way cool when you’re five or so. As well as an IBM PC/XT, back in the days when the memory check on bootup took what seemed like hours. I spent a lot of time on the free games that came with it, despite them all being complete shit…
But the first computer I ever could call my own was, like most British kids of my generation, a ZX Spectrum.
I hated MLX… For some reason, I found the DATA statements easier to type. I only typed in a few programs over the years, though… The only time in my life I ever yelled at my little sister was when she tripped over the power cord of my new C64 as I was about an a half-hour into typing in Hawkmen of Dindren from Compute!, without having saved yet. And then, after I typed in the whole thing, it was yet another case of a program that had an error, so it wouldn’t work anyway till you typed in the code fixes from the “Caput!” section in the following issue.
I worked at Compute! from 1989 till 1994 (first real job after college if you don’t count AMnews, the Amiga news magazine that committed suicide a couple of months after I got there), and it was SO cool to meet all of those guys after years of reading the magazine. “Holy shit, I’m editing Jim Butterfield’s column! He taught me everything I know about BASIC!” I also edited Orson Scott Card’s column for a while – that gave me a lot of confidence about being a professional writer. His columns were great, but they had the same goofs the rest of us make…
The first computer I used was when I was 6 or 7 or something and my Mom dragged me to some scary lady’s house where she had a bunch of different computers set up and she taught general computer usage and BASIC and LOGO and other things I really don’t remember. I think I used a TRS-80 more than the Atari (400? 800? No idea). I’m not sure what the hell my Mom was thinking I would get out of that.
A couple of years later we bought a C64 with a couple of cartridge games, but once we got the disk drive and I discovered Temple of Apshai and the EA role-playing-games, that was the beginning of the end for me.
Atari 1040, for the built in MIDI ports. That, + B&W monitor, Roland MT32, and Creator software, set me back around 8000 francs, what, close to $1500, and all the stuff was used. Two days later I picked up Bruce Artwick’s SubLogic Flight Simulator because it was the only game at the store that ran in B&W. And although I did do some MIDI stuff, I spent most of my time trying to shoot down biplanes in WWI mode, so I guess the writing was on the wall.
First ever was the BBC Master. Original Sim City, Palace of Magic, Defender and a wicked boxing game called By Fair Means or Foul. Great days, great times.
The summation checksum program for Compute’s Gazette BASIC programs could not see the difference between
2000 DATA 111, 121
and
2000 DATA 111, 211
My youthful eyes spent many hours combing over DATA statements trying to find errors in seemingly correct lines of code.
Whereas, the MLX checksum could recognize that reshuffled letters were errors. And, since they were hex codes, I’d shave up to 16 keystrokes per line by typing in 2 alphanumerics instead of 3 numbers and a comma.
Too bad I didn’t learn to touch type until 9th grade (1987-88). I probably wasted 10% of my childhood hunting and pecking at a peak rate of 10-15 wpm.
We were all masochists, though. Why else would we type in page after page of double-columned hex and data statements? Typing in the BASIC programs had educational value, but the ML programs were drudgery. I was really glad when they started releasing the programs on disk. I couldn’t afford it, of course, but my next-door neighbor’s dad had a subs…
Although an OSI was the first computer I owned, the first piece of computer equipment I used was an ASR-33 teletypewriter connected by acoustic coupler modem at 110 baud (!) to an Amdahl pretending to be a 370 running “CALLOS” among many other language and system options. This was on the CUNY network in 1976 I think; my high school had some piddlingly small number of virtual dollars to spend on it a month. CALLOS was an environment running under VM I believe and giving access to Basic, APL, and Fortran interactive environments.
The ASR-33 had a paper tape punch/reader, and it was on a hard tile floor, so when it was printing (on that horrible brittle roll paper) and punching at the same time, it would actually vibrate so violently that it would walk across the room and smack into other nearby teletypes.
The ASR-33 had probably the world’s worst keyboard for speed, since there was a sort of a sticky internal latch on the heavily springloaded keys so you actually had to punch down the key with a jab of your finger instead of just pressing on it. On the other hand, the positive response was very obvious as the crunch of the key was immediately followed by the massive blamm of the typewriter stylus thing on the platen. The paper was often so cheap and brittle that the superpowerful impact on the platen would sometimes rip little letter-shaped holes in the paper. If the ribbon wore out, you could still read the output because the indentations were so deep, which might well have been a designed-in feature.
Next year our school got some 300 baud (!!!) VDTs with advanced acoustic couplers capable of supporting that blazing speed. 300 baud was so amazingly fast compared to the ASR-33s that it seemed like no one would ever have a need to go faster than that…
VDTs with advanced acoustic couplers capable of supporting that blazing speed. 300 baud was so amazingly fast compared to the ASR-33s that it seemed like no one would ever have a need to go faster than that…
I remember the transition to 1200 baud, and the ridiculous comments that “I can’t read faster than 300 baud anyway!”
If you can’t read faster than 300 baud… you’re fucking fired.