This one’s for Supertanker and Desslock:
I was introduced to computerized legal research in 1978 on a Lexis Deluxe Terminal:
A 300-baud modem was hidden under the desk that housed the keyboard and dot matrix printer. It filled in the text on the swivel-armed black and white monitor one line at a time.
I’ve got an old external modem kicking around. The hispeed light comes on when it connects at 2400 baud.
Gadzooks! Just to show you how quickly lawyers embrace technology, when I started as a clerk in 1992 that firm had one of the ugly red Lexis terminals, which still used a 300 baud modem. I got a lot of brownie points by setting up a PC that used a 14.4 modem instead.
I loved adventure. I wondered if anybody else had ever played it besides me. The only parts I can remember right now - there was a bird, cage, and you chased something off with it. I played it on a terminal which I believe was hosted from Ohio State.
My first computer was an Apple ][c. My dad bought it used for me Christmas 1985 so I could play Ultima III. I actually prefered playing games on my monochrome green monitor to my friends C64. I thought the color looked crappy.
At the risk of being called really old again (along with Dean), I played adventure on an Amdahl (IBM 370 clone) mainframe clacking away on a 3278 display station. XYZZY
The ubiquitous Ubiq! Twice as many chicklet keys as a PC Jr!
My first computer was an IBM PC XT that my dad brought home from his business when they upgraded to an AT.
The thing was huge and it had what they called an “expansion unit” that held two 5 meg disks that were “full height” and weighed like a thousand pounds each.
The thing actually had the original Hercules Monochrome Graphics Adapter that did some kind of mutant 720x348 resolution or something. Amazingly, the Sierra games actually supported the thing.
Good times.
My first was an IBM PCjr with the extra 64KB of RAM (for a total of 128). Along with it, my dad had purchased a special PCjr-only version of King’s Quest 1 - it took advantage not only of the machine’s 16-color palette, but also the three-voice sound effects! Those were brilliant - the sound of the Rushing River’s rapids was essentially static being blared at top volume, the birds’ chirping sounded like a sample from a bad techno song, and the goat’s baa-ing was not unlike someone chanting while vomiting, or something similarly crazy.
And yeah, Compute! absolutely ruled. It was easily my favorite magazine as a kid. 99% of what I’ve learned about programming, I learned from typing in those programs (and the ones from Family Computing too, although generally those sux0red when compared to Compute!'s) and then modifying them as I saw fit. But I was never able to port Laser Chess from the Amiga to the PC, a fact that saddens me to this day. That game looked nifty.
See the funny thing is that I had no idea what kind of mainframe I was playing on. It was just called “the computer” for us little noobs.
That summer I spent at Penn State playing in the polymer science lab. We got a brand new machine to do gas chromatography (I think that’s what it’s called. You heat up the sample and see what gasses are there.) Anyway, the guy also left us a disk with Trek on it, so we all fought over who got to use the machine. Basically it was hours spent heating up the sample, during which you could play Trek, then five minute of actual computer analysis which you printed out and took to your grad student overlord.
That was the summer I tried to combine Kevlar and Saran. I had visions of being hailed as the inventor of bullet-proof saran wrap. “Gun toting thugs break into your kitchen? Pull out that frozen roast wrapped in Kevlan™ and use it as a body shield!”
Alas, the laws of physics and chemistry decreed that it was not to be. (sigh)
My high school had an Ohio Scientific. One of the neat things was the character set, which by default had symbols for buildings, planes and tiny little people. It was not long before I had written a BASIC program in which the plane dropped bombs on the buildings and the tiny little people, which proved so popular that usage restrictions were put on the computer.
Later that school year a friend of mine wrote an amazingly faithful rendition of PAC-MAN for it in assembly language that he assembled to bytes by hand. He then had a BASIC program POKE the bytes into memory and run them.
(btw, my first computer experience was in third grade with a 110-baud Teletype with a paper-tape punch)
The first computer I ever USED was an old VAX teletype terminal. Memories of Oregon Trail…B A N G.
The first computer I ever owned was a VIC-20 that I won at a national student council gathering in Kansas City back in 1983. I soon replaced it with a C64, on which I wrote most of my term papers in college.
I went to high school for part of my freshman and sophomore year in Minnesota around 80-81. They had a computer lab with a ton of PETs, an Apple II, and a couple of Trash 80s. There were also a couple of VDTS and about a half-dozen printing terminals, one of which had a previously-maligned-in-this-topic 110 baud modem.
We’d actually fight for the printing terminals over the VDTs because you could bring your printout home and pore over your conquest. We were doing multiplayer gaming after school and during study hall over MECC (Minnesota’s educational mainframe system) back in 1980. There was a sector-based, text-only space war game. We’d all lurk on the system and wait for someone from our rival high school to appear, then we’d gang up on him from all sides. Then after they kicked us out of the computer lab at 5 we’d compare our kill recordings. It was a like a LAN party in really slow motion.
(And no, none of us were dating anyone at the time – why do you ask?)
When I started highschool, my dad bought a printer for my C64. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to buy a word processor and was forced to write my own…
[size=6]WongRite[/size][size=2]TM[/size].
No they’re not, they’re bloody kids. I operated an IBM 370.
My first computer was an Atari 800.
My Dad had a bunch of machines that I got to play with from the time I was about 5 or so, including a room filling machine with puchcard readers.
At some point he got an OSI that he brought home. It had a 6502 and Z-80 processor built in.
It had an 8" floppy drive, and it could play games! Star Trek and a few others.
The yellow button on the front could double its speed 1mhz to 2 mhz!
The Atari 800 was better. No machine played a better game of asteroids. Once I got my Wico joystick life was very, very good.
Hmm… as far as actual ownership goes, I think I was the proud owner of a very short production run gray 64K color computer (before the standard white “64K coco” came out.) It looked like the original 16k version that my uncle and parents had but had a much nicer keyboard. Apples were so expensive… damn rich kids.
poke 65495,0 – things were much nicer on the coco’s 6809 after running that statement (just so long as you remembered to set it back before you fried the poor thing).
Trying to remember my earliest tech gadgets and some favorite games… generally one computer was sold to make way for the next:
Arise!
I wasn’t sure where to put this, but I got a kick out of seeing an old photo my wife found of the computer I had when I lived in my first apartment (it was my first PC, bought when I was in college in 1994, though this picture would have to have been in 1996 or so). I see Cigars, Magic cards, and exercise equipment so … nothing has changed in 22 years, except the quality of the cigars and the computer, I guess. :)
First computer I ever messed with was my dad’s Heathkit H8 sometime around 1979 or so.
He had the sweet 8" floppy drive for it, too.
Commodore PET, then C64, then Amiga, then (after college) PCs all the way down, starting with a cheaply bought 486 that ran Windows 3.1.
The first computer I had was a giant 286 that later got upgraded to a 486 (new motherboard presumably). I remember trying to play Quake 1 on it. It did not crash, but the FPS were in the single digits probably.
Later, I had some issue with the 486 motherboard and it would not boot. So I bought another 486 motherboard. Then I wondered what would happen if I switched the BIOS chips on the two motherboards. I ended up with two non-functional motherboards. :facepalm:
Then I was gifted with yet another 486 computer, which lasted for a few years before I replaced it with my first Pentium II computer.
