[Computers] How did you get started?

It started in the 80's when my brother brought home a Texas Instruments TI-99. I remember him programming a game called Goblin and I was hooked. I'd stay up niiiights programming in basic.

Then my other brother brought home a Commodore 64. That was the fun machine because we had so many games. It was also my start into the world of Bulleting Board Systems (BBS) with the speedy 300 baud modem. Jeeebus, sharing files was so tedious! I'd start a transfer for a game, go out and ride my bike for hours and the file would be done when I returned. Heaven forbid someone picked up the phone and wrecked the connection. What was that transfer protocol.... x-modem? lol

Then came my 286-12 with the cool TURBO button. I think I had a 2400 baud modem.

Next was my 486DX/2-50 with my fancy Zoom 9600 baud external modem.

Followed by the Cyrix 6x86-166. I still used my 9600 then.

Followed by the P3-500. Hoooray for 28.8!

And now I'm on my P4-3Ghz. Hooray for broadband!

I still bring out my C=64 to play some games when I'm feeling nostalgic. In ways, I think those simple games are more fun then the current XBox/PS2 games with a jillion buttons to push.

What was your computer upgrade path?

I started on a Commodore PET. The teacher had a 'teachers PET' with double the memory (16k, I believe)

Yes the first computer I used was a COMMODORE PET as well, with the tiny green built in screen at school, in the 80`s.

regards.

I started with a Commodore PET: 8k bytes RAM, chicklet keyboard, cassette drive, 40 character by 25 lines monochrome display. Only $1200 CDN in 1978.

Next was a Commodore VIC20, then a Commodore 64. Then a couple of garage sale Macs. Then the PIII Dell box I still have.

Greg

oh, man...
Started with a Tandy - learned some BASIC along the way.
Tried a Commodore 64, but mostly for the games
Jumped onto a 286, 386... mastered MS-DOS along the way but never really got into programming.
I still remember the first calculation I did on my Pentium box: a surface grid that took more than 16 hours on my previous 'puter. It as done in under 5 minutes.
I skipped the Pentium II and went straight to a PIII-550

I got on the 'net when everything was text... remember Gopher? When Mosaic came out, it was... what next?

Arkayne, have you looked into freeware emulators?

Emulators are the best thing since processed cheese! Although personally, nothing beats using software on the actual machines.

Jeez...

I first started with a commodore 64, then started playing around with basic on those apple IIe's they had in school. Then my dad (who worked for Emulex at the time) brought home this huge rack with a 8086 system on it. That's when I learned how to build computers. I couldn't tell you how many computers I've been through...I've had just about everything from the old 8086 systems to the new(er) AMD Duron system that I built for myself.

I had a little more fun with basic on my 386 system...the only thing I had the patience to program was this sound loop that would start the system speaker at a low tone, then go up to a really high pitch...almost to the point that it was undetectable by the average human ear. I found that to be extremely effective in annoying my parents from afar.

I remember the Tandy and Commodore computers like you all mention, but I never had one or used one, so I was a late bloomer. I didn't get into computers until I read a small book about them while in the U.K. and then I was motivated to learn. When I returned to the U.S. in 1991 my father and I took a DOS based business computers course (Word Perfect, Lotus 123, DBase IV) at a community college. After learning DOS on a 386mhz it was easy to pickup Mr. Gate's windows environment.

My bro and I shared a C64 as kids. That gave us the incentive to go with dad to the hamfests, to get piles of cracked games! I couldn't tell you the hours I've spent playing (and waiting to load) C64 games.

I actually listen to sids and remixes all day via some Shoutcasts:
Kohina - Old School Game and Demo Music - http://213.134.108.17:8000 <-Game music from many old platforms, sids included.
C64 (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) - http://nectarine.esuna.co.uk:8002/
C64 (SLAY Radio) - http://212.73.29.83:8000 <- Only C64 remixes, but Weds they have a live show(Eastern 2p-7p) hosted by remixer Boz, which is fantastic.

After the C64 we shared dad's Sharp laptop and did BBS-ing. Then shared another of dad's PC's until the end of highschool, when we bought all our own stuff.
Oh, and everytime I wrote shared, I meant fought like vicious animals over...
I actually snagged my 2nd chicky because I was so pissed he was hogging the thing one night, I left the house and ended up hanging out with a girl I knew from school, into the wee hours of the morning.

Played on the TRS-80 in school simple goto and print commands.
Then actually had a prgming class using a Apple 2e [IIRC].

Bought first PC - 286, 8 Meg memory upgraded to 16, 20Meg HD
then 486 SX - [or was it SUX ]
then PII 333
now a P4 - 3Ghz. I turned out that I usually skip generations [not intentionally]. Although I have nothing against AMD, I have yet to own an AMD.

Maybe next time. dunno. Just not familiar with them.

Man, remember when the 2 gig harddrives were huge?!?!?!?

Danno.

[edit: forgot, at one time, did have a portable pc 8088, 64k Mem, 720K floppy drive &monochrome lcd display]

I first learned BASIC in 1975 in hiigh school. We didn't have monitors yet, so we used honest-to-gosh teletypes. Programs were store on paper punch-tape. I can remember deciphering and being able to read the punch holes in the tape by sight.

IIRC, we were limited to 64k of memory...but I have no idea what brand or box we used. It had to be kept in its own air-conditioned room to prevent overheating.

I played around with a Sinclair 64 when they came out (1979 I think), then pretty much ignored computers for the next 15 years. We bought a couple of off the shelf boxes during the 90's, but I mainly played games and only surfed a little.

Then came my disability in 2000, and with so much free time I began to get myself back up-to-date computer-wise. I taught myself simple HTML, and began to tinker with my PC's innards and became confident enough to build my own boxes...(the only way to go, BTW.) I do need to add Java, php, and maybe eventually some Perl and Python (or even C++) to my computer programming skills. eventually .

And I'll let you guys judge whether I've gotten back to the forefront I was at some 30 years ago in high school...although to be honest, the computer world has changed so much since then that I don't think there's any real comparison. There's simply too much to learn for one average joe to get their head around the whole thing (languages and all.)

danielo_d said:

Man, remember when the 2 gig harddrives were huge?!?!?!?

Danno.

Click to expand...

Dude, I remember when 500 MB was huge.

LaserFreak said:

Dude, I remember when 500 MB was huge.

Click to expand...

I remember not being able to afford a 10MB drive.

JM-99

Hmm... I started with an Apple Macintosh 580. And later, an IBM-compatible Micron Pentium 100MHz. Using a 2GB drive as a paperweight right now. I got on the Internet with the onset of AOL and 14.4 kbps modems. I wish I were there for Gopher and BBS. :/

Jumpmaster said:

I remember not being able to afford a 10MB drive.

JM-99

Click to expand...

I knew someone would top me! You can't fit anything of today's standards on one of those.

My buddy had a Tandy TRS-80 with the cassette tape drive. IIRC the 7th grade we did DOS programming with the Apple IIE. Geez, shure makes you feel old to remember those machines.

In engineering school around 1973 we took a class in Fortran programming. We punched the program onto cards, fed the cards into remote cardreaders spread around campus, linked to the University's mainframe, and 5 minutes later your output would print out. A couple of years later I took another course involving programming and we used remote CRT terminals connecting into the mainframe.

At my first job the company had an old IBM 1130. It had about 16k or memory and a large removable hard drive that held about 1MB. The company had a card punch and a very large line printer.

Later on that company got a minicomputer with a Motorola 68000 processor running Unix. We had about 6 terminals around the office and could run Fortran and C programs, and do a little bit of word processing.

Eventually that company switched to PC's and an internal network with a Novell server.

I remember seeing the PET as I was about to graduate from college. The IMSAI computer kits were available, along with another company that I can't remember off the top of my head. I wanted to buy one of these but it wasn't until many years later that I realized it would not have done what I wanted.

I bought one of the early IBM PC's when they came out. Mine had 256k of memory and dual floppy drives. The whole thing cost about $4000 back then. Later I was in Austin and stopped by a tiny little company called CompuAdd. They were selling hard drive kits so I bought a 20MB kit. The 10MB kit was $400 and the 20MB kit was $450. I didn't know why I might need another 10MB but since it was only another $50 I bought it.

Later I met some guys that built and modified their own computers so I decided that there was no reason I couldn't do that. Eventually my IBM PC has 2- 20MB drives, then a single 60MB drive. From there I bought a 386/25, then upgraded it to a few different 486's, then got into the AMD versions of the Pentium. My hard drives went from 20MB to 40 to 60 to 120 to 383 to twin 383's to 1.2G to 20G which is where I'm at now. I'm doing more digital photography so I'm about ready to add a couple of 120G drives.

In college I programmed in Fortran. When we got the first minicomputer running Unix I got into C. When I got my IBM PC I got into Turbo Pascal. When I started running AutoCAD I started programming in AutoLISP. Most recently I've gotten a bit into Borland Delphi and also Visual Basic.

I got started in college (in the late 70's) on their DEC PDP 11(?) systems using TTY and dot matrix printing terminals. The TTY terminals even let you output your programs on punched paper tape (what fun!). My first "PC" was an Apple IIe with a 48k mother board. Initialy I saved programs on cassette tapes and then saved up enough for a floppy drive. Since then I've had too many to count....

The year was 1970. I went to an engineering college which required all incoming freshmen to take a programming course in FORTRAN.

We typed source code onto Hollerith cards using an IBM 029 keypunch, one line of source code per card. A console operator loaded the cards into an RCA Spectra 70/46 mainframe computer which compiled and executed our programs in batch mode.

When we were upperclassmen, we were able to use Teletype Corp. KSR33 terminals to interact with the campus DEC10 computer.

I started on a Franklin Ace (an Apple II clone) that was in the school in the very late-1970s; I later purchased a Timex Sinclair 1000 that could be programmed to run simple games and run some rather wasteful applications like clocks & calendars. I then got my hands on a Commodore 64; later on I obtained a 1541 disk drive and a 1702 color monitor for it (I still have the monitor!). I ran a few games on it, learned to program in BASIC, and eventually used QuickCalc to make spreadsheets for the family business.
Sometime in late-1984 or early-1985, I received a Commodore 128 as a gift; this computer could run virtually all C=64 programs, and had a seperate C=128 mode that had an 80-column display and ~124,365 bytes of RAM accessible from the BASIC prompt.

In the late-1980s, I learned assembly language on the 6510 CPU used in the C=64, and wrote a number of demos for the C=64 over the next several years. These demos included graphics, animation, and music. I started a BBS on that computer on the afternoon 07-21-89, and ran it for exactly ten full years; until ~2:00pm PDT 07-21-99.

In 1989, I got a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 3. I don't remember if I had the 8" floppy drive for it or not.

Around 1991, I somehow latched onto a Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100. This was my first laptop; I wrote a few BASIC programs on it - it was lost in 1993 however, when I was not able to come up with a lousy $10 to get it out of a pawn shop.

In 1993 or thereabouts, I ended up with a PC-XT, running an Intel 8088 CPU at 4.77MHz. Not long afterward, I got my hands on a 286 runnung at 12MHz. I purchased a blue LED for $14.00 and installed it in that PC, so that I'd have one of the first - if no0t *THE FIRST* PC with a blue power light.
Sometime during this period, I moved my BBS to the 286. I remember buying an 850MB hard drive for $450.00 just so my BBS would have adequate space for storage and door games.

Sometime later, I ended up with a 386 operating at 40MHz, then an AMD K6 at ~90MHz. This was replaced in mid-2002 with the Dell Dimension 4500 P4, 1.8GHz that I'm using today - thanks to the collective efforts of CPF. :thumbsup:

I also have a Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop PII at ~350MHz that was sent to me not long after having (crash course in) brain surgery in late-2002.