The Passage of Time

[Bird]

My first computer was a 286 with a massive 1 meg of memory

Ron, actually my first computer was a Radio Shack "color computer" that I hooked up to a 13" color TV for a monitor. It had 32k of memory (Radio Shack had just come out with that model upgraded from the 16k of the earlier one), and it hooked up to an ordinary portable cassette recorder for storage. The printer used a 4.5" wide roll of paper; like a cash register paper roll, only wider, and it actually printed with 4 tiny ball point pins; 4 colors.

 

[jimg]

My first computer was a PDP8 running the Basic runtime system. It had no hard drive, 4k words of memory and toggles on the front....for setting the boot loader which would suck the rest off a paper tape. The only peripheral was a teletype w/ integral paper taper reader/punch. I shared this machine w/ the rest of the kids in my high school who knew how to program. This was before the age of the IBM PC.

 

[jinman]

Yep, Jim, did you have a daisy wheel printer to go with that hard drive? I thought I had just about the ultimate rig back then.

Bird, my first printer was a thermal printer that used special paper rolls. The letters on the paper faded if exposed to the sun.

The next printer was an Epson JX-80 color printer. It had a 4-color ribbon and was a large dot matrix printer. I also had an Epson plotter that used four ink pens and could produce both text and plots. I never bought a daisy wheel printer, but I set up several Diablo daisy wheel printers at UT Dallas. My favorite discovery was a typewriter with a serial port that could be attached to my computer for letter quality. I still also have an HP Laserjet III that I happily paid $1600 for when they were selling most places for $2000.

I built my first PC. It was a Heath-Zenith HS-151 (I believe that's the right number). I actually soldered components and DIP sockets onto the PC Boards. I bought it on a Friday and worked steadily on it until it was finished. I even built a monochrome monitor to go with it. The whole thing was finished on Sunday afternoon. I plugged it in, turned it on, and it worked.

On Monday, I went back into the old Heathkit store on Ross Ave. in Dallas to get something else. They thought I was coming in for help and were shocked when I told them my computer was up and running.

I bought that computer because I could get it for around $2500 and the IBM PCXT was selling for around $4000. If computers were still that expensive, The Internet would probably still be called Arpanet.

 

[Bird]

Jim, I've seen the paper and the results of the thermal printers, but never used one. Just went from the little 4.5" wide paper and 4 little ink pens to a dot matrix to a daisy wheel to my first and now second ink jet printers.

Of course I've gone from "color computer" to black & white monitor to orange print to green print and now to all kinds of colors.

As for building computers, I did change the cooling fan that went bad on this computer, and I installed a second hard drive, and for both of those jobs, figured I was probably in over my head.

 

[Cottonhawk]

My first computer is the same as jimg .... a PDP8 with 4k!
That was long time ago.

 

[RedRocker]

I had a TI 99, but didn't know what to do with it.

 

[jimg]

My first computer is the same as jimg .... a PDP8 with 4k!
That was long time ago.

LOL...yup, a long time ago. That was just about the time electronic calculators were hitting the market enmass. My brother got one of the first TI 4 f(x) models for the enormous sum of $110. I opted to use my slide rule thru HS and into the first yr of college. I eventually got one of the HP calcs and never looked back. Sadly I no longer have my slide rule....wished I did though. It was a cheap plastic job I bought at SuperX for a quarter.

Did you work on any other DEC gear? After I left HS and the PDP8 I used the PDP11 extensively in college and my first couple of jobs. If I could find a working unibus 11 w/ RSXM+ Id buy it. Ive used every mdl of DEC gear from the 8 on.

I was in college about the time all of the precursors of todays PC were hitting the market -- the Commodore Pet, the various TI mdls, the Timex hand held, the Byte and the various Heath Kit mdls. Being a college student I was too poor to buy one though. Those were fun days!!!

 

[RobertN]

The first one I worked on was a VAX 11-780. Just had a terminal(orange screen) with keyboard in my office. And, most internet was email or news groups, if you could figure out how to access the outside world. First "site" I was on was Homebrew Digest; most of the places I vsited were email digests. HBD did survive in to the world wiwbe web...

I remember going in to the computer room; the 11-780 main terminal did not have a screen. It used a printer instead.

Funny, after years of using MS based PC's, I still miss the old VAX-VMS editor.

Remember when the first PC's came to our area too. 5" floppies, monochrome monitors, no mouse... One of the Dept managers got it. It was a real wonder. Hard Drive? What's that? One day, one of the managers got a 20MB harddrive; we were in awe.

My first computer is the same as jimg .... a PDP8 with 4k!
That was long time ago.

 

[Bird]

That was just about the time electronic calculators were hitting the market enmass. My brother got one of the first TI 4 f(x) models for the enormous sum of $110.

I believe in 1972, the one I got was called an SR 10. I know retail price at the time was $100, but I had a friend working at TI and he got it for me for $72. The calculator I currently use is a TI-1766 solar and light powered that I bought on June 19, 1984, for $12.67 including tax.

 

[California]

Kids!

I started in front of a card sorter. Soon advanced to the collator (it merged cards according to logic wired temporarily onto a board) and the keypunch.

The university's programmer put the boxes of cards - the entire student registration database - in the back seat of his VW and took them down to Petaluma to run on a 360-20 to print reports. But he had to take his program cards clear to IBM's Big Iron in San Francisco - a 360 with 64k core (ram) to compile his programs into runtime decks.

I too got a $100 TI 4-function calculator when they first came out. Dataman made the first one on the market but it was clearly cheap junk. TI soon followed with this business-quality version.

Then a HP financial calculator. That was my secret weapon going through my MBA when the profs were still teaching books of tables.

My first real computer was a TRS-80 Mod1 Lev2 with 4k ram, cassette storage etc. I bought it for work, and ran the statistical analyses that otherwise required a month's wait to get scheduled on the mainframe plus cost several hours time charged to the project by the 'real' programmers.

I won't bore you with events subsequent to the release of the IBM-PC.

Here are a couple of old classics I'll eventually put on ebay. A Tandy 102 portable (purportedly the last OS that Bill Gates worked on personally) and a HP 16C Programmer's Calculator.