first computer

A bit nostalgic this morning as was thinking about the first computer I purchased.

Back in 1981 I bought a Radio Shack 32k Color Computer. Began to like it so much I bought a cassette tape drive and a modem too (very expensive back then). Then a printer! The modem was - wait for it - the highest speed available 300 baud (yes kiddies, 300 baud not kilobaud not megabaud, just plain baud).

Of course with the moden I had to find online stuff. I became an early member of Compuserve in the US. And, omfg, I had to figure how to dial-in to the US and avoid long distance costs. The Bell Canada operators were dumbfounded that a person not a business wanted to do this. I finally learned how to use Datapac, Bell's computer access network and get into Compuserve that way.

Then of course Moore's Law kicked in and I had to have the next more powerful model...

My dad had a trash-80 from Radio Shack. My wife just found my first cell phone in the basement. Things change fast.

Wrote my first program on the TRS-80.

Did you know that if you leave your little sister unattended in front of it before you save your work to tape, she'll go for the orange reset button in 30 seconds or less?

WELL SHE WILL!!

Nanobot wrote:

Back in 1981 I bought a Radio Shack 32k Color Computer.

Back in 1981 I was just a gleam in my father's eye. Old farts :p

The first one I remember having was a Sony Viao 486 or something like that.

I had a Commodore 64 in '83.

Scootter82 wrote:

Nanobot wrote:

Back in 1981 I bought a Radio Shack 32k Color Computer.

Back in 1981 I was just a gleam in my father's eye. Old farts :p

The first one I remember having was a Sony Viao 486 or something like that.

1981.. I wasn't even a gleam in my father's eye.

back in 1982 me and my roomates bought a sinclair z80 kit. it was the size of a desktop adding machine, and about as powerful as one. First computer I ever built. Our great goal was have it compute Pi to some long ass decimal place which we never really got around to doing.

Just another old fart computer thing my first programing class in college was Fortran 4 and it was all done on punch cards. Michigan Tech was using a univac 1100/80 mainframe, and most of my programing was done on cards for most of my freshman year.

remember when 64k of RAM and a 200mzh CPU was top of the line shit!

dont recall the brand, but i do recall paying over 3k for such a rig in college..

D&D game Eye of the Beholder never looked so good!

Eye of the beholder, wow that takes me back lol that was a fun game,

This is a photo of a computer I worked on while in the navy. It is just a couple of bays showing as it stretched over 10 feet across the fire control plotting room. During the R&D stages of the Gunnery Improvement Program in the early 80's we switched over to a Sperry Univac Data Processing Set which had 64 K memory.

I had to use a slide rule to trouble shoot the analog beast.

Haha good thing I missed those days, seems an awful lot like work. :p

funny thing shifty you will look back in 10 yrs. and think man how in the hell did I even play a game on that PC.(12 GB of RAM)

Lol, that is probably true. And my grandkids will wonder what the hell a "mouse" is.

Early '80s Commodore 64 for me. I worked the heck out of that thing. Even used it for some word processing in college in the late '80s/early '90s. Fond memories of loading programs using a tape drive. "Press Play on Tape" and then going to have lunch waiting...

Eventually saved up for the floppy drive and a 300 baud modem (anybody remember "prodigy?").

My first computer was an Atari 1040 ST! 1MB of RAM and no hard drive. You had to load and run every program off of a 1.4MB floppy disc (remember those?)