Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Do You Remember Your First?
It was the mid-eighties. I had a degree in Literature from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I was determined to make my living as a freelance writer. And I adored my typewriter—the noises it made, the satisfying push on the keys, the occasional ink on my hands from changing ribbons. I’d heard personal computers were the next big thing, but not for me. No self-respecting writer would give up a beautiful typewriter for that.
Then, at a writer’s conference, I was introduced to this bad boy:
And it seduced me with the convenience of never having to retype a whole page because of a typo or a reconsidered word choice, with the usefulness of having all my work on one slender floppy disk, with the smooth way the keyboard clipped onto the front so you could carry it by the handle in the back like a sewing machine. All my writerly pride went out the window. I had to have it.
Nowadays, I sling around two slim MacBooks like they were nothing, and I can hardly believe I once thought that heavy Kaypro was portable, or that dot-matrix printers were legible. But I’ll never forget you, Kaypro II. You turned my head, you metal-cased rascal you.
What was your first computer?
Published in Technology
Mac at home. Loved it. Did a Mac Plus in College. Switched to PC to play games win OS Warp came out.
Atari 800.
Followed by an Amiga 1000 (which was way ahead of it’s time).
Complicated question in that my first hacking experience was using type printers at school to hack what became the interment.
Later I purchased the below machines to call in and hack mini and mainframes.
Commodore VIC-20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20
Timex Sinclair 1000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000
My dad was an early adopter. We had a Processor Technology Sol-20 in 1977, when I was 12. It was an S100-bus computer for which there wasn’t a lot of software available, so it wasn’t much good for word processing. But I taught myself BASIC programming and had a lot of fun developing my own video games. It was a bit of a challenge, since the thing only had an alphanumeric display, but I managed a lot within those constraints.
Later my dad got an obscure CP/M-based machine, for which some actual commercial software was available. I’m pretty sure WordStar was the word processor we had. I ended up taking that machine to college with me (after Dad had gotten his first PC clone); I was still doing most of my writing on a Sears typewriter, but I do remember writing some papers on the computer and printing them out with a dot-matrix printer. Probably the classic Epson MX-80.
I didn’t get my own PC-compatible computer until 1988, when I bought a cheap generic XT clone. But my first laptop was a Toshiba T1000SE, and I don’t think I would have managed to finish my master’s degree without it. Sometimes I wish I still had it.
It’s funny how clearly I remember each of those early computers. Each one seemed to have its own unique character and helped to define a particular time in my life. In the years since I’ve owned countless computers, all of them vastly more capable than those early ones, and yet I can’t even remember most of them.
Televideo. I don’t remember the model number, if it had one, I think they only made one model. The monitor swiveled and was attached to the side of the computer; which had two floppy disk slots. It came equipped with Chang Labs software whose word processor was superior to the then-version of MS, and a good spreadsheet and a data base program that was vastly superior to the current MS Access. Some things don’t improve with time.
I suspect that MS bought Chang Labs to copy some features of the word processor and data base programs. It is my understanding that that was the method Bill Gates used to make Microsoft the powerhouse it became.
Wrote my highschool term paper on something like this:
But the first computer my wife and I actually bought was this guy:
We took the day off the celebrate and play with Word art!
Mac SE. Still have it.
Me too, Mac SE30, still have it. Booted it up a couple of years ago, nothing wrong. But boy did that font and those graphics ever bring back memories.
I’ll bring up three, only one of which I actually owned (and ignoring the mainframe computers I used in college 1974-78).
The one I owned wasn’t really a computer, but was the stepping stone between the typewriter and the computer for writing – the electronic typewriter that stored a line of type electronically and then printed the line on the paper when the user pushed the “return” key. I don’t remember the brand (might have been sold by Royal as an extension of their typewriter line) or the model, but the ability to review each line of type before committing it to paper was very useful in law school (1978-81), and made for less retyping because of typing mistakes.
When I started working as a lawyer (1981), the law firm had Wang word processors. But lawyers were not permitted to use them. Only secretaries and a staff of dedicated word processing operators were allowed to have terminals. A central daisy wheel printer printed out the final product at the incredible speed of one page per minute. We lawyers could revise documents without requiring the secretary to completely retype the whole document! The law firm had bought the system on the theory that not needing to retype entire documents to change one sentence would cut down on the need for secretaries, thus saving the firm money. But instead the firm found that the ease with which changes could be made caused the lawyers to better refine our documents, creating more drafts, and using just as much secretarial time, but producing higher quality documents. I did not start using a personal computer of any type until about 1995 (an IBM that my employer bought).
My wife is an accountant, and the small accounting firm for which she worked bought in 1983 or 1984 a couple of early Compaq “luggable” computers, each the size of a portable sewing machine. They were I think the first real computers that were portable. They were heavy (probably 10 – 15 pounds), but they could be carried around. The firm bought them mostly to demonstrate to clients how “cutting edge” the firm was, but my wife was immediately thrilled with the new ability to do computerized spreadsheets. She commandeered one as often as she could. No more paper, pencil, and eraser calculations for client financial projections. Changing input assumptions could be incorporated immediately with just a few keystrokes, instead of having to completely recalculate the entire spreadsheet. So she could easily prepare multiple financial scenarios for clients to help the clients make better decisions. And it could all be done in the client’s office. No more need to take all the information back to the accounting firm’s office for calculation there.
I think the first I ever got to mess with was probably an Atari 800, then our school got some Apple IIe’s. However, the first one that we ever had at home was a Packard Bell 286:
Thing couldn’t run Doom, but it would run Castle Wolfenstein. Good times.
My first was one I built in 1977, a single-board monster with a whopping 256 bytes of memory and an RCA 1802 processor. It sported a hex keypad and four digits of bright red hex display. I wrote a “monitor” (a tiny little operating system) for it. I eventually added an additional 1K of RAM on a wire-wrapped board the size of a phonograph album jacket.
I don’t know what ever became of it. I’m guessing my parents probably put it away somewhere after I went off to college. I should look….
Radio Shack TRS80 III. With a daisy wheel printer that sounded like my office was under attack.
The first computer I ever used, was a PDP-8/L, in High School. With 4k of core memory and just a teletype keyboard/printer and paper tape for loading and saving programs at the blazing speed of 10 characters per second.
I don’t believe floppy disks existed yet, not even the early 8″ size. (If they did, DEC hadn’t come up with interfaces for them yet.) The first “mass storage” option available for program storage on the PDP-8 models was DECtape, a formatted random-access media that functioned like a disk but much slower. However, it was much cheaper so even a lot of schools could afford it, but apparently not mine. And since early hard disks were pretty small (early DEC hard disks were 32k or 256k), being able to change tapes allowed for a lot of flexibility.
My school’s system was just a tabletop box, larger PDP-8 rackmount systems and – later – PDP-11 systems could even use DECtape to run a multi-user operating system, RSTS (Resource Sharing/Time Sharing).
Years later, I actually had a PDP-8 rackmount system with a dual-DECtape drive like that, and an RK05 hard disk system that stored 2.5 megabytes on a removable cartridge with a single platter inside. I bought the system from a retired engineer for $100. (He paid $10,000.) But that was lost in storage when my disability began.
After High School and some college I began working on Qantel mini-computer systems, and I had little interest in personal computers at the time that had such little capability in comparison. The first system I worked on was this style:
In back, from left to right, are the hard disk unit, CPU unit, and tape drive. In the front are two user terminals, and a 300cps Teletype model 30 line printer.
I did amazing things with those systems, including writing complete accounting software packages.
The first computer I actually bought was an Atari 800, because I wanted to be able to play some games such as SCRAM, a kind of simulation of a nuclear power plant. But I had no illusion that it would be “useful” like the Qantel systems were. Unfortunately those systems might cost $40,000 even without software.
When the Macintosh first came out, I borrowed one from a Sears Business Center on a deal they had where you could take one home for like a weekend. But the Mac wasn’t very useful compared to what I was used to either.
The first computer I bought to actually write stuff with etc, was a Canon Navigator with builtin phone and 40 meg hard drive. It could also do faxing, using a built-in thermal printer, and work as a phone answering machine when not being used as a computer. The package came with an ink-jet printer on the side for better-quality printing. And I wound up with the automatic paper-feeder for mine too.
At home, in the early ’70s, I might have been found playing with a MITS Altair.
Yes, I was an architectural consultant, and if I had to change a word on the first page of a 50+ page specification, I had to go back and re-type the whole thing. Word processors were like a miracle!
I posted mine (HeathKit H-8) on this old topic:
http://ricochet.com/415405/remembering-heathkit/comment-page-2/#comment-3733117
I started using an IBM AT about 1986 in the USAF. We used it to do “graphics” and a little desktop publishing using some primitive vector graphics software. It had a 20 MB HDD and, I think, a clock speed of 7.5 khz. RAM was 512 k and it had the math co-processor.
The best part of that system was the Matrix PCR II film recorder which produced stunningly beautiful 35 mm slides.
A few years later I bought an Amiga 500 for personal use. I had fun with a few games but that was about all I could do with it.
I have a few unbuilt Heathkits in my collection, mostly electronic “trainer” units. And I have the educational course kits too, including parts.
The first computer I ever used was in high school, right before graduation in 1969. It was actually a Teletype 33 keyboard and printer connected to an early timeshare facility on Long Island. We couldn’t do much with it. It was more of a curiosity, but to a 17 year old, it felt as real as an IBM System 360.
My next one was 14 years later, a Kaypro like the one in the OP. It cost $1795. The unique selling proposition was it came with a library of CP/M software–WordStar, spreadsheet, dBASE II, and a few other odds and ends.
Kaypro is what Arthur C. Clarke used to write drafts of the screenplay of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, and send them overnight to the director, Peter Hyams, at MGM. It was also William F. Buckley’s preferred computer, and he stayed loyal to it even long after MS-DOS machines had become an industry standard.
EDIT: Note that $1795 in 1983 would be roughly $5000 today.
Ditto on the 800 (48k RAM!). Then I got the Atari 130XE . . .
I have to confess . . .
When I first saw the post title, I started to type, “I was 16 with a 19-year-old girl, in my mother’s Vega hatchback.”
And no, I’m not trying to hijack your post thread . . .
My first real, non-game computer was a TI Business Pro my boss let me keep after his consulting business went belly-up. It had an Intel 8088 processor. By the way, I still have it. It’s in my basement in a crawl space storage area under the stairs, behind the cats’ litter boxes . . .
The Kaypro was “portable” in kind of the way the Army makes a tank “portable” by bolting a handle to it. But it had no battery-power option, no surprise considering the CRT display. Although the Otrona Attache could run from some kind of large battery pack, for maybe an hour or something. I have one, with a nice case too.
One of my contract/consulting jobs, after dealing with the Qantel systems, was developing energy-audit software for when a lot of businesses were more or less required – by either federal or state mandates – to get them to qualify for reduced taxes or something. That’s also when I had the chance to try out a Macintosh when they first came out, but my work system was one of the first – maybe THE first -IBM XT systems sold in the Pacific Northwest that had the internal hard drive. Before that, the “XT” was a separate box with just a hard drive and its power supply, that connected to the base IBM PC unit through a thick cable. Everyone else in the office was using standard PCs with two floppy drives. I did most of the original development work, and maintained the master copies of everyone else’s work on the hard drive.
The “field” systems for the audit software were mostly Compaq Portables, also “portable” in the sense that they had a handle on them, but still CRT display and no battery power. They ran DOS, not CP/M. But they could be taken to business offices to do their on-site energy audits. A few of the utilities that bought the software from us and used them with their customers, got Otrona portables because they were smaller and more stylish, but also more expensive. That’s why I got the one I have, it’s way more cool than a Compaq. :-) Basic Otronas used a Z80 CPU and CP/M, but an option was available for some models – including mine – that added an 8086 I think to run DOS. Although for some reason it required a slightly modified version, that never went beyond 2.11 as I recall. I’m thinking some of the higher models had a color CRT display, although I might be wrong about that; at any rate, mine doesn’t.
Loading the audit software from floppy disk took a while, so I added a “background” process (which didn’t slow down the software loading) that played the Kentucky Derby theme using the limited built-in sound capability, and it finished just as the first screen displayed. :-)
That was similar to my Dad’s first machine that I got to mess with. Monochrome monitor, 286 processor, 5″ and 3.5″ floppy drives, a keyboard, and a dot matrix printer.
Apple III. Steve Jobs gave it to me when I helped him write a piece for Readers Digest. Apple III’s were crap because of poor design placement of its processor. Apple shipped the first production run dead, just to fulfill the order backlog — and planned to fix them later. I got one from a later run. It actually worked well. I wore off the letters of the keys writing my first couple books. Had it for four years. Even started a personal syndicated newspaper network on it, with a 300 baud modem — needless to say, transmitting stories was a nightmare.
That’s a great, unique story.
I missed out on my one and only chance to meet Jobs in May 1982 at a computer fair in Boston. I was with Softalk, an early L.A. based magazine, and we had an invitation to meet the Steves and have a few drinks after the show one evening. But my pals all preferred to see Conan the Barbarian on its opening night. No Arnold, no celebrities, just an ordinary multiplex screening.
“Hey, we can always see Jobs and Woz some other time. This is important!”
Both were neighbors and I ended up reporting on them throughout my newspaper and magazine career. Later, I worked closely with Jobs on the notorious 1984 Apple Annual Report. I also covered the famous Mac introduction for the Economist. After I exposed in print some of his bad behavior, Jobs made me persona non grata. On the other hand, I still talk to Woz occasionally. Unusual guy, but very likable. Jobs, on the other hand, was everything, good and bad, you’ve ever read about him.
LOL.
Every. Single. Response. Is from a dude.
Indeed.
The responses also differ somewhat in tone from the original post, which included “adored,” “satisfying,” “beautiful,” “bad boy,” “seduced,” and “you turned my head, you metal-cased rascal you.”
It is a delight to have women among us.
Something like the first computer. It was my mom’s and I was a kid but it was a Tandy with an actual floppy (5 1/2) drive. The elephant ears Compaq is something I remember really wanting growing up and seeing in the computer labs at schools. That’s a throw-back. Really legit.