What was your first computer? Here’s my computer history.
Isn’t it strange how the human mind works? I’m sure it’s not just me but I can really spiral in to reminiscing mode just by seeing or reading something. Just yesterday I had one of those moments when I saw this tweet from our friends at BlackBerry:
My first computer was an Atari 600XL. At least that’s what I thought until I started reading about it. The Atari 600XL apparently didn’t have a composite out and I definitely remember just being able to plug it into just about any TV set so it must have been the Atari 800XL. The 800XL did have a composite out, had a whopping 64KB of memory and a CPU that ran at 1.8MHz.
Photo from Wikipedia
I remember that my hometown used to have a Tandy store. I was a regular visitor after school because they had all the coolest stuff including a wide variety of computers. Our local supermarket also had a bunch of computers set up including the ZX Spectrum.
Photo from Wikipedia
I remember playing with that one a lot in the supermarket while my parents were shopping. I remember loving the soft touch buttons. It took a while to persuade my parents to get a computer and I don’t quite remember why I eventually got the Atari. I think a friend at school also had one and thought it was convenient to be able to swap cartridges. I don’t remember all the games I used to play on it but I do remember Decathlon being my one of my favorites. Remember that? Having to move the joystick from left to right as fast as you could?
After the Atari I was bitten by the computer bug and always wanted more. Next in line was the Commodore 64 with Datasette cassette player. The C64 was immensely popular back then. Everyone seemed to have one ;-) It was also on this computer that I started “programming”.
Next in line was the Amiga 500. I loved that machine! 512K memory, floppy disk drive (single sided) and a 7.09MHz processor. The Amiga Workbench OS was a revelation. Man I was spoiled.
Photo from Commodore Museum
I used that Amiga for a long long time until I got in touch with PCs and Macs in school. I studied “Graphic Design Techniques” and also got lessons in Quark Express, Corel Draw and yes… Photoshop. I remember drooling on the Apple devices but they were just too damn expensive. My hometown had an Apple dealer and I remember visiting them a lot ;-) At one time they had a Newton on display and I thought that was just amazing. A Mac was way out of my completely non-existant budget and after quite a long time I finally went for a PC. A 486 running at 66MHz running on Windows.
A bit later I discovered bulletin board systems. Krrrsssss…beeeep…beeeeeep…krrrrssssss… Aah… The beautiful sound of a modem… :D
After the BBSs came the Internet… and the ridiculously high phone bills. I stuck with PCs for a really long time and then at one time (now about 7 years ago, I think) I got sick and tired of having to spend more time keeping my system up and running than actually being creative. I was freelancing back then and did a lot of video work. One of my major problems with Premiere was that I couldn’t do anything with my computer when I was capturing video from a DV tape. I used to have two identical PCs so I could keep working on other stuff while I was capturing video… I didn’t think that was right. One of my friends worked at the local Apple office and I asked him if I could borrow a Power Mac G5 for a while to see if I could improve my workflow. And yes it did! Apple’s Final Cut Pro allowed me to capture video from tape while I was doing email or even while I was working in Photoshop. I also immediately fell in love with Mac OS and ended up buying a Power Mac G5 and even bought the (incredibly overpriced) 23″ Cinema Display. I rapidly became a Mac Head. Bought a PowerBook, iMac and later a Mac Mini as my first Intel based Mac.
Today I am still on a Mac but my addiction has worn off a bit. While I stood in line for iPhone, iPhone 3G and 3Gs I didn’t buy an iPhone 4 and also didn’t stand in line for an iPad. I actually did end up getting an iPad just a few weeks ago to do some research though. I found it important to know what everyone was raving about. I currently use a MacBook Pro on the road and a Mac Pro in my home office.
Aaah man… The memories this post brought up… Am I getting old? :D
I’d love to hear about your computer history! And now that I’m wrapping this up I think I should also do a post on my device history… If I can actually remember all of them ;-)
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I started young with a Spectrum +2. That came with 48k and 128k modes and a built in tape player!
I remember Crash magazine still being the best games mag, and my pride at completing Treasure island Dizzy before my mates.
I remember picking up a book out of the library, that was nothing more than a code listing for an adventure game. From that experience, I learnt GOTOs were evil.
Hacking games written in BASIC to change how it played (One particular cricket (!!) game didn’t give out enough money, so I made sure I was given £999999 after every match).
That was my slippery slope. After that it was all school, BBC micros My first glimpse of a HDD was a Winchester disk (I think), a cupboard sized rack of hardware that had a few megs of space. The occasional Apple (for hypercard mainly), then the heady world of PCs…
I still maintain is was an excellently spent youth!
He he, this really brings up memories.
My first computer was an HC 91 http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_info.html?ICE-Felix_HC-91_40key.html . I used to play some games on it and used it’s drawing API to draw math shapes on the tv screen. It came with a bulky cassette player (to load the games) and a huge AC adapter.
Then came 96 and I got a Pentium R 90 Mhz machine with 16 Mb RAM, 2GB HDD and get this, a color 14” monitor :). It also brought the joy of internet to my life through an incredibly high speed modem connection which reached 20kbit/s in the good days :)
After that it all got modern and fancy, AMD 1Ghz and somewhat recently a 1.8 Ghz dual core desktop and 2 Ghz laptop.
Thanks for sharing this with us Serge!
Ancient computer history….. welll it all started with a ‘Acorn BBC B’ (32Kb) that my dad purchased…. everybody else was playing with Commodore64….
Then on to the PC era… a Tulip XT 8086 with Hercules/CGA card (hardware switch on the back)….
A Brother 80286 and the first computer I purchased myself was a 80486DX, including Dial up/Dial back to the Twente University….
And that’s where the trouble started… hacking linux, playing around with Sun SparcStation SLC, Sun4, Sun Ultra, Huge HP CAD systems.. my dorm room was packed….. Even an old Wang system…
Nowadays running a MacBook Pro, iPad (yes, I am all about Digital Publishing Suite), HTC Desire…..
Electronics have come a long way….
BTW: does anybody want to buy a box of BBC-B tapes with some BASIC games, or boxes of 5 1/4″ floppy disks?
I started at the age of 12 with the forerunner to the Spectrum, the Sinclair ZX81 with 1K of memory (there was a 16K RAM pack available which would lose everything if you nudged it). I still managed to write a game or 2 that involved chasing sprites around a maze. Couldn’t persuade the parent to get a Speccy or Commodore 64. Next up was 6th form college where we started with a Shelton Signet, a star-network machine running CP/M and something called KCL- Kevin’s Command Language, it seemed very advanced, then we upgraded to a PR1ME minicomputer which was the cutting edge at the time but now looks like a dinosaur. On from there it was mostly DEC equipment for a while, including ancient PDP 11/73 and 11/84 mainframes with reel-to-reel tape and teletype terminals. I then got myself an Olivetti M28 286 PC clone with a whopping 712K RAM, 5.25″ fdd and a 10Mb HDD, running on MS-DOS 3.2. Moved on from there to a Mac clone in the mid 90s as real Macs were way too expensive, doing Director, and then Flash development, then to a Pentium III in 1999. Then a wifi Vaio in 2003, and now a quadcore 8Gb / 1Tb own build. I still miss the ZX81 though!
First played around with friend’s ZX81 and Spectrum. My first computer was a Vic20. Used a BBC at school. Later got an Amiga500 and boosted the memory ;) It was all downhill from then onward with various PCs!
A friend of mine had just gotten an ATARI game set for Christmas, don’t remember the model, but after several hours of playing pong I cracked open the manual and found programming examples you could type in.
So after another several hours of chicken peck typing and what seemed like a couple thousand lines of code I typed in the last machine code, hit enter and the most amazing thing happened, a little stick man walked across the screen. It only lasted for a couple of seconds but I was hooked.
It wasn’t until much much later that I could afford a PC, a home built 286 w/16MB Ram, can’t remember how much hard drive space but it was very limited. I learned to program in C on that bad boy.
Now I work mostly on my MacBook Pro!
First programmed: HP2000 mainframe. Only worked in BASIC. I used a loud printer terminal with an acoustic coupler modem.
First owned: Atari 800. Worked all summer painting the house to afford the money. It could display 128 colors on the screen at one time! I hacked it to show 256 colors at once, and had an article published in a magazine about it.
Remember “Creative Computing” magazine? Still have an issue.
My computer history:
- Commodore 64
- Amiga 500 – I really loved this machine. I remember that I spend a lot of my pocket money on a second external 3.5 inch disk drive, because I couldn’t afford a harddrive …
- Pentium PC – My first PC! I used to play around with BeOS around that time.
- Mac. Then, in 2003 I bought my first Mac (G4)! And I never looked back …
Current equipment: iMac, MacBook Pro, iPad and iPhone 3GS.
I learned BASIC with my uncle’s Commodore PET 2001. It had a self-built RAM extension the size of a large shoebox, with plenty of dipswitches and LEDs. We also built an analogue joystick for it, together with “sound” (beep beep krschhhh) output.
My first own computer was a C64. Then A500, A200, a self-built 386, and then a long, long progression of Macs, starting with an SE. Which was dispite the low performance and the b/w display more useful for graphic design than the windows machine.
Thank you for bringing me back to my youth! VIC-20, then Commodore 64. After that was a Leading Edge 486-66Mhz. with 4MB of RAM.