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First Computer

Nice thread. My first computer was an Apple clone called the Franklin Ace 1200. They got sued into oblivion by Apple approximately three minutes after my parents bought that thing so that was fun from a customer support perspective.

TWO FLOPPY DRIVES BABY...

You're jealous...
 
As far as I know, the Ohio Scientific C1P still works. It is (for the time being) irretrievably buried somewhere in my dad's garage**. It had the manuals with it, last I saw it. They are probably buried seperately (and even more irretrievably) by now.

** Remember the closing scene of 'Temple Of Doom'? OK, my dad's garage is a bit like that, only a lot less tidy.
 
Remember the closing scene of 'Temple Of Doom'? OK, my dad's garage is a bit like that, only a lot less tidy.

Errrrrrmm, you DO mean "Raiders of the lost Ark", Right??
 
mummymonkey said:
The Spectrum was like most things from Dundee, cheap, difficult to understand, and rarely worked.


You could do some fun things with demonstration Spectrums in shops, if you were so inclined.

10 FOR n = 1 TO 1000
20 NEXT n
30 RANDOMIZE USR 1331

Turn up the volume on the telly, enter "RUN" and leave.
 
richardm said:


You could do some fun things with demonstration Spectrums in shops, if you were so inclined.

10 FOR n = 1 TO 1000
20 NEXT n
30 RANDOMIZE USR 1331

Turn up the volume on the telly, enter "RUN" and leave.
*boots up emulator*
*types in program*
*blinks*

Well that was interesting...
 
Does this count?



Oh my God, I am getting older and older every day...
;)
 
Nice picture, but it's upside-down.


OOOOOPPSS. :D :D

Actually it's not you see, it is a Chineese seen from over here through the earth.;)

But for you:
 
C64, 1984-1994. Then Amiga, 1992-2001.
Yes, it is strange. I bought the Amiga when Commodore was closing! However I disliked the PC architecture sooo much.
I still have a load of C64's in the house, and from time to time I download some demos and the ocasional game. I love to learn new programming tricks from this little jewel, the C64.
 
Another Commodore user here. I started out with a VIC-20 in 1983; almost immediately upgraded to a stock C-64 with cassette deck; got my first floppy disk drive when my parents gave me an SX-64 luggable (with 5" color screen) for Christmas 1984. In 1988 I bought an Amiga 1000, and in 1991 I "powered up" to an Amiga 3000--which is still my main computer.

I'd prefer to run the Amiga till it drops, but I get a little tired of surfing the web in 16 colors. So I'm planning to grant it honorable retirement later this year. <sniff>
 
ZX-80 with my brother as a kit.
Zx-81 already built + RAM Pack, + Printer (well ozone generating silver toilet paper holder)
Atari 400 + Basic cartridge and best graphics of its time, still my fondest memories, joysticks that left a raw hole in the middle of your palm, a membrane keyboard resulting in fingertips that look like sucker pads.
Atari 600XL - for the keyboard! Plus memory expansion & floppy disc drive! Wow.
Atari 520ST, plus external floppy drive.
Archimedes 3000 - best OS in a PC to date - so much fun
Then to the world of PCs :( 386SX, then a 486DX... never as much fun or excitement as the world of non-IBM PCs. (But Delphi 1 & 2 were fantastic development environments/languages - blew the socks off MS's VB & Visual Cs.)
 
Colloden said:
...snip...

I miss AMOS the most. :D

AMOS! Oh the pain - well I remember having to use it to produce a suite of office apps, word processor, database, spreadsheet, graphing package....

But Francois was an incredibly talented programmer, he couldn’t help being French - I suppose.

(Edited to add)

And AMOS is stil alive, Francios released the source code quite awhile ago. http://www.clickteam.com/English/index.php
 
The first computer I used was a Apple IIe in the 7th grade ... what a nice piece of work that was.

The first computer I owned however was a Coleco Adam. I loved that computer, and for the price it was great, except for one little quirk it had. It came with a tape drive, and if you were programming in BASIC, you couldn't leave the tape in when you shut it off or the tape would be useless. I did it by accident about 3 times before I wised up. the daisy wheel printer was nice too. I still remember the first thing I did with it when I unpacked it ... made a character sheet for D&D (c: I broke it out in '92 and it still worked fine.

The first computer I put together was a Heathkit Motorola microprocessor that I had to program in hex. I did that in high school ... I went to a vocational school and was in electronics. Great memories from that time, one whole week of shop every other week. It wasn't long before we built some Heathkit Hero robots and programmed speech in hex ... we had a little warning system hooked up to an external speaker in the ceiling of the bathroom down the hall to warn us smokers when the dean of students was coming. We had a good vantage point and had light sensors and a camera mounted in the hall (we said it was for open house) ... the dean never did catch any of us, and our teachers (both smokers) were very supportive.

After that it was a ton of Amiga's ... the last one I bought was in '95 or so, a unit from England I believe, with a Toaster 4000 and Anilam editing system. Lots of PC's too, I'm a vender at the M.I.T. flea market and usually come home with more than I brought ... I'm not even sure how many computers I have right now. Hooked up and running I got 4 on my LAN and 2 laptops. Ya gotta love it!
 
My first was a hand-me-down from my older brother that he bought used for $2,500.

A Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. With the expansion module to bring it to 48K, 4 disk drives and a serial port. Came with Visicalc (which I'm sure Lotus bought) and a flight simulator that Microsoft bought. Played a bunch of text Adventure games on it including the original Adventure and a series of games I can't remember the author of but the purple worm was troubling in them.

The flight simulator was tricky to load as I had to load it from tape and could never copy it onto a disk.

My next (also a hand-me-down) was my brothers Heathkit (Zenith) XT Clone. I eventually dropped an Intel 386 daughter card into it.

Now I've got an AMD 2500+ (overclocked to 3200+) clone I put together.
 
Gods Advocate said:
My first was a hand-me-down from my older brother that he bought used for $2,500.

A Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. With the expansion module to bring it to 48K, 4 disk drives and a serial port. Came with Visicalc (which I'm sure Lotus bought) ...

Not sure if you're kidding or not (c: but the guys that made Visicalc never copyrighted it, so they lost millions. They never made anything past the original sales. They don't seem to care tht much either.
 
The first computer I ever used was a Commodore PET about 1979, just played space invaders on it over and over.

Dad bought a Tandy TRS80 model 2 with 16k ram, used to type in pages and pages of Basic text printed in magazines to play "Star Trek" and "Dog Star" adventures, absolutely fantastic machine with the best keyboard I have ever used.

Next up were the usual ZX81/Spectrum about 1982-1984.

Then in 1985 I got a Jupiter ACE which was made by the Spectrum team, totally oddball in that it was hopelessly outclassed by any other machine out there but used FORTH as its programming language. It was good fun making it do things it wasn't supposed to do with Z80 machine code.

The best thing I ever did was display high resolution graphics on it by changing the contents of the video memory faster than the TV raster could display it!

It went in the bin about 1998, I wish I had kept it - damn, I wish I had kept them all!

(Still got the sega mega drive though)
 

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