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.
What Was Your First Computer Experience?
I was talking to one of the kids I work with (I think he’s like 25 or something) and we were talking about the first computers we ever used.
The first time I ever saw a computer in real life was probably in 1985 or 1986. I was in first grade. They brought it in. They explained this would be the computer for the class room. They showed us how to boot it up (with a 5 inch floppy). The program that it ran was what I found our many years later to be some kind of CADD. It had a little triangle called a “turtle” and it could draw lines. If you wanted it to turn one way you typed in a 90. Which I thought at the time was an odd code that I should probably write down.
I didn’t need to worry about it because that was the last time I ever got close to that computer. If it got used again that year, it certainly wasn’t by me and I don’t remember it.
But that was my first computer and my first computer experiance. We have a huge diversity of people here, so I thought we might have an interesting discussion about this. What was your first computer experiance? When was it? What was the computer? (The Wikipedia has great links to computer systems with pictures.) Tell us about it.
Published in General
1978 – TRS-80 Model 1. A friend was an assistant manager at a Radio Shack, and he let me play a game on the computer every day. One day the game crashed, and I thought if I looked at the code, I could figure out what had happened. I couldn’t – but I started reading the “Learning Level 1 Basic” book that was sitting by the keyboard, and eventually bought it. I bought a used Model 1 a few months later, and the rest is history (I manage Unix systems for a number of customers of my employer).
IBM 1130, 1975.
A physical chemistry course that I had in college had the unusual feature that it had a “dry” (i.e., computer) laboratory rather than “wet” lab. The “experiments” required that we learn Fortran IV programming, and then write programs to calculate various physical properties. The 1130 itself was about the size of a large desk, but the various peripherals (card reader, line printer) helped fill up the computer room. Especially memorable were the pizza-box sized interchangeable Winchester drives, which made loud and distinctive sounds as they accessed the hard disks. Many hours were spent in that room, punching cards and trying to figure out just what was the reason a job wouldn’t run.
I loved the Infocom text games too. My first one was Zork II and it remains my favorite. Been a long time since I was eaten by a grue.
Some time in the late 70’s playing with a Trash80 (I guess) in an electronic parts store. I stayed so long my parents had to come and get me. Later we had an Apple //+ and I tried to write an accounting program for my dad in 6502 assembly. When I eventually got to university I enrolled for MIS, but COBOL Programming Laboratory — with the special pads for writing out the programs — ruined it for me. Later in life I became a Smug Lisp Weenie. I see I am in good company.
My dad bought us a pc-jr from IBM some point in the early 80s. Our parochial school had many dads who worked at IBM and they offered a BASIC programming course in the evenings. One had color I think, and to were black and green.
I designed a juggling clown for my final project. The balls movement wasn’t quite right when the class ended. I took a fairly lame-o comp. science intro course at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, using IBM ‘puters, in 1987, as a high school senior.
When I went to college, my dad gave me the pc jr and some kind of horrible printer that used shiney paper and never formatted quite right… usually when you had to get to class with that paper right now… oh joys…
My first real computer experience was a big desktop machine back in high school circa 1970. We filled in computer cards with a number 2 pencil and fed it through a reader. In college we had computer science class…actual punch cards…the only time we could get in the computer building was around 2 AM. I bought an HP 25 programmable calculator and later, a TI 99. Around 1980 or 82 I was asked by the construction company I worked for to test two IBM computers…a system 23 and first generation PC. I learned Basic, then Concentric Information Processor (a language now deader than ancient Sumerian), then FoxPro and finally Access. Before I retired, I had written or helped develop most of the basic computer systems used by the company.
All this while bidding and running major construction projects including one NFL stadium.
I always liked what computers can do and learned to use them as tools.
We had one of those growing up. A very under appreciated video game console.
As far as first computer experience, my dad was a computer technician who spent way too much money on electronics. As such, we had a few PCs, though the one I really remember was the IBM 286 which we got around the early 90s. My dad once found code for a little ghost game written in BASIC in a PC magazine. We wrote the code down, but couldn’t get it to run (kind of a waste of several days).
We had one of those growing up. A very under appreciated video game console.
As far as first computer experience, my dad was a computer technician who spent way too much money on electronics. As such, we had a few PCs, though the one I really remember was the IBM 286 which we got around the early 90s. My dad once found code for a little ghost game written in BASIC in a PC magazine. We wrote the code down, but couldn’t get it to run (kind of a waste of several days).
Am I the only one having issues with editing posts? Was that removed in the conversion to Ricochet 2.0?
Seriously, this is ridiculous!
The first computer I ever used was an Altair 8800 around 1975, which a math teacher at St. Mary’s Hall in Burlington, NJ assembled from a kit, hooked up to a used teletypewriter, and plopped into the corner of his classroom, and formed “Computer Club” which met in the afternoons at school. Eventually, he added a black & white monitor and a cassette to replace the paper tape program reader.
The first computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. Lots of good times there.
Other than crazy online fees, I used to love CompuServe’s sprawling Adventure game, which I first played in the early 1980s. I had all of the Scott Adams Adventures on my TRS-80 as well — the later games in that series were pretty challenging to solve, IIRC.
Other than the crazy online fees, I used to love CompuServe’s sprawling Adventure game, which I first played in the early 1980s. I had all of the Scott Adams Adventures on my TRS-80 as well — the later games in that series were pretty challenging to solve, IIRC.
Ugh. So much for editing posts.
MBF
“. . . playing Oregon Trail on those old Apple computers with black and green monitors. Ford the river!”
Hi MBF! My kids lived several versions of that game. Fording the river made me so nervous I would drop the laundry basket as I walked past. Last summer I asked them what were their fondest memories of Oregon Trail – maybe the trumpet flare as your wagon crested the rise to look down for the first time at the Willamette Valley?
“Nah. Dying of cholera.”
My first was a TRS-80 Color Computer 1 in the late 1970s Not a bad place to start. Its replacement was an IBM PC 1 in the very early 1980s.
The language you were fiddling around with, by the way, was Logo. You can easily find interpreters for whatever platform you’re using today, such as UCBLogo.
Some “dumb terminal” was my first experience, and to this day I have no idea to what machine it was connected, what software we were using, what was the point of the exercise, or whether I followed the little recipe correctly. My faculty had a policy of not conversing with undergraduates. So they do not count. Ya hear that, Cornell? You don’t count!
The Osborne 1 was our first computer in our practice. The Osborne one-after-that was the next one. How lovely they were. Remember the print ad showing Adam Osborne sitting in a rowboat with his portable computer? I was stupid enough to throw away that ad, but both of those computers are still sitting out in one of our barns.
A google image search on “Osborne 1 ad in boat” does not show that ad, but it does turn up another one, which I remember seeing in a magazine. Oh dear, was it InfoWorld?
Z
drop the rope.
<several moves later>
In the distance, you hear a voice saying, “My, I wonder what this fine
rope is doing here?”
I so loved that Zork played these tricks on those of us who’d played Crowther and Woods’ adventure!
I enjoyed the text games, but I loved Gato.
TI 99/4A with the cassette drive. Learned BASIC on that one.
then moved to a C=64 and learned more basic. First, I had the tape drive, then moved to the big time, a 1541 5/25″ floppy drive. (remember the hole punch trick?). My friends had Apple 2 or Timex Sinclair. The C=64 got me into BBSs with the good old Hayes modems of assorted speeds.
I learned on some mainframes in high school. Eventually learned FORTRAN and COBOL.
Then various flavors of PC’s in DOS and Windows. Back when each new processor was a doubling of speed. (ie 386/sx/16 to 486).
I played all those Infocom text adventures too.
“Am I the only one having issues with editing posts? Was that removed in the conversion to Ricochet 2.0?
Seriously, this is ridiculous!”
I have given up! Editing is gone…or it is so convoluted I can’t figure it out. I guess there is a way to reply to someone’s post but I can’t seem to figure it out. Why doesn’t Ricochet just mimic Disqus? That works just fine and doesn’t require secret tricks to make it work!
C’mon, guys! Could it REALLY be that hard?
In the 60’s my dad worked for Ma Bell in the nacent Data Processing department. I went to his new office to see the machines that replaced all those ladies on the comptomitrist machines. It was like a star trek set with raised floors and rows and rows of caed and tape readers and dozens of hard drives the size of a washing machines. He was instrumental in converting their billing to a computerized system. Some of you might remember those old Ma Bell bills that were actually punch cards. At Dartmouth my roommate worked in the computer center and we used to sneak into the back to play an early game of “star wars” on a very expensive screen. Two players controlled a spaceship that had a limited quantity of fuel and torpedos. You had to establish an orbid around the central planet top save fuel and shoot random warships that crossed the screen. The ship that lasted the longest without being shot down or sucombing to gravity was the winner. At Touche Ross we wrote our “parallel” testing programs in COBOL, typed the code on cards, loaded the data on tape and ran the programs at the Harvard Data Center on on an Amdahl IBM Clone. We had a small PC center in the office, dual floppy IBM PC’s, goofy Wang PCs and some Macs. In time, I had my own Compac portable suitcase, all forty pounds of her with a five inch orange screen. PC’s were really pretty useless until reliable networks emerged some five years later.
I was seventeen when my dad, GizmoGuy, brought home the first Hewlett Packard programmable calculator, the HP-35 in 1972. It cost $395 in those days which was a bloody fortune. About the same time he built a Heathkit computer in our basement. I got to read all the 0s and 1s out to him as he programmed the operating system. In college, I used “the smaller Wang”–most likely the Wang 2200–to run my statistical analysis on my psych labs. Only the graduate students got to use the big Wang. Oh yes, just before I graduated, I needed some credits and I ended up as the only female in a beginning FORTRAN class. In those days writing code was all about punch cards in the basement of the library. I felt pretty smug–as the only touch typist in the class, I could get my programs into the queue while everyone else was still laboring over their keyboards.
Mr She, an English professor at a local university, brought an IBM 5100 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100–links still not working for me in Chrome) home for the holiday weekend (the university loaned them out). He then promptly developed something resembling flu, and headed for bed.
His kids were with us that weekend, and seeing as we had a printout of the BASIC instructions for a computer game called “Hunt the Wumpus,” we decided to figure out how to make it go.
And we did. And had great fun ‘reprogramming’ it to do different things and changing the text of the original messages (“Bats! Bats!” “I smell a Wumpus!”). It was the first time I experienced the flush of power that comes with making a machine do what you want it to.
And, almost forty years later, I still believe that’s the way it should be–we tell the machines what to do.
Not the other way round.
I vaguely remember my elementary school setting up computers and letting us play The Oregon Trail on DOS occasionally.
My parents sprung for a family computer sometime in the days of floppy disks. I don’t know what they used it for, but we only played a few games on it (Arkanoid, Descent, King’s Quest). We still had a typewriter.
I was shocked to learn how many people were using the internet a decade or more before I even knew about it.
I went on a high school field trip to Northwestern when I was 15. We were supposed to visit a bunch of different departments, but I spent the entire day in the computer lab. The next year one of the teachers made a twice weekly trip to Lewis College to do runs through their card reader. I could submit my programs too – putting Hollerith codes onto punch cards with a No. 2 pencil.
For me the key punches at the University of Illinois two years later were a big step up, but getting access to one of the LA-120 teletype terminals meant being able to get hard copy without bracing a sysop.
Ricochet is hosted on a Commodore 64. The old version involved an old lady, a rotary phone, and a whistle.
I programmed in college on terminals like that in the early 80s. They had a those green and white striped paper feeds with the punchholes on the side. I remember having to write a compiler and taking the pile of pages (separated by perforations) to the roof of my fraternity house and letting it unfold its way to the ground. Damn thing never did quite work.
Oh, and in answer to the OPs question, an Apple II in tenth grade, in 1980 in computer science class. I think I was in love.
LOL. I remember getting my first 2400 baud modem and thinking I was SMOKIN!
Around 1985, I used a CRT (dumb terminal) to input info for shipping documents at work. Ten years later, in a different position, still used a CRT. It wasn’t until around 1998 or so that I actually received a real computer. It wasn’t until 2000 that I was allowed to use the internet at work. This was at a company with over 8000 people at our headquarters alone. Only a limited number of people had approval and access and I had to write a document explaining why I needed it and how I wouldn’t abuse it. Today, everyone has a laptop or tablet and we use BYOD for cell phones. I declined due to privacy issues.