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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
You guys are old.
First time I ever saw, and used, a computer was in…1993.
Of course, back in Old Country, the first time anyone had seen a computer was around the late 80s, other than antique Soviet and Chinese machinery running on punch cards (although I’m not sure those qualify as computers).
I got a Commodore 64 in grade 5 or 6 (1985 or so?).
However, i’m sure I played with Apple IIE, Tandy, and Kaypro computers before that.
You guys had computer science classes in…middle school and high school…in the 70s and early 80s???
That’s crazy. We barely had windows in middle school, and I don’t mean the operating system.
I never want to hear any of you complain about how bad people have it in America. That’s just embarrassing.
I agree Americans have it pretty good overall. But just because things are generally good, or some things are good, doesn’t mean that everything’s good.
“I don’t want to hear that your appendix hurts. You’re a white, privileged kid born in the best country that ever was. You should be grateful for what you have and not worry about piddling stuff like your appendix.”
Oregon Trail.
Wasn’t quite the same thing as a computer science class today. My high school computer programming class had us programming in BASIC (as I recall), batch mode, using a mainframe computer. The programs were really simple — like calculating the length of the third leg of a triangle if you knew the other two and the angles.
Also, I attended high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan — which is not quite the same as a high school in, say Frankenmuth, Michigan or Cleveland, TX. There was this big university in Ann Arbor, with a really, really long history of computer science, even in the 1960s. (They had one of the cabinets from the first ENIAC machine (the first mainframe computer) on display in one of the engineering building.) They helped design it.
Seawriter
Hoo boy. CoC…..CoC…..CoC…..CoC….
We had a Commodore 64 when I was in middle school. I remember playing the Winter Olympics game on it all the time. It’s amazing the technology advances in my lifetime. I feel like an old woman when I tell my kids, you know when I was your age and I had a school report I had to actually shlep myself to the library with a pocket full of dimes for the copy machine to research paper. I’m 36 and feel like I’m 86 when talking about technology. Geez I didn’t have a cell phone til I was 21.
Sal, Oregon Trail was the best game ever in middle school.
Keypunch, card readers, and wide printouts — I think there was an IBM 360 somewhere behind the scenes. Had to wait for a keypunch, had to wait to feed the card reader, had to wait a long time for the results to print out, find the mistake, repeat. First programming assignment was converting Fahrenheit to Centigrade (it wasn’t usually called Celsius then) or vice versa. I used short variables like “F” and “C” to save keystrokes, and the instructor took off points because he wanted more descriptive names. Now that I program equipment with thousands of variables, I agree with him, but I still think “F” and “C” were good enough for that assignment.
“Computer science” class at my school involved learning how to use Microsoft Works, Excel, and Access. Inserting a basic algebra equation into a cell in Excel was as technical as it got. But at least that class taught me to type with more than two fingers.
I could kick myself for not taking programming classes in college.
Fred,
I marveled at the teletype we had at high school in 1968. It dialed up a main frame at CMU in Pittsburgh. My friend Carl new it inside and out. I wrote one 10 line program in FORTRAN with the paper tape reader. I don’t remember what it did but it worked.
That was it until the early 1980s. I bought a Casio Pocket Computer. This little guy had two 4 bit processors. One ran the numeric and the other ran a version of Basic. It had a 20 character one line display, 1k of eprom memory and its own little paper tape printer. I wrote an anagram solving program and I wrote a cost saving calculator for the solar collector I was selling. I carried it right with me and finished the pitch with on the spot estimates given the customer’s opinion of how much their energy costs would go up in the next ten years. I just loved the little guy.
After that it was a Vic20, then Apple IIe, then a 386 clone, then 586 clone, then AMD single core clone, finally an I7 clone. I also have an HP mini netbook. The mini was exciting as it was sold running Windows 7 home premium. I thought this would be a great way to learn the new operating system at low cost. Instead it was a great way to be tortured to death by a computer to weak to run the over sized operating system that had been stuffed into it However, just to prove how absurdly stubborn I can be, I have finally prevailed over the mini after a 4 year wrestling match. The mini has only a single core atom processor but it has 3Gb of DDR3 ram. One might have thought the ram would have been enough to make it run. It was just enough to delude me into wasting more time on the little engine that couldn’t. Finally, Gd smiled on me and brought the price of SSD drives down. At 55$ for a 128GB SSD I decided it was worth it to try (a testament to my stubborn determination or complete stupidity). Gd relented and the extra performance enhancement of the SSD has brought the mini’s performance up to mediocre. Incredible!
Regards,
Jim
I remember now. In elementary school there were a couple of Apple IIe computers in the library. Oregon Trail was on heavy rotation. No real “training”, just a few educational games.
In junior high there was a computer room with Apple IIc computers. In there we got some experience with LOGO and a spreadsheet program. Probably Visicalc? I cannot remember.
When I got the Commodore 64 in grade 4 or 5, my dad and I took a class in word processing at the local university, but as for BASIC and other functions I taught myself.
In high school I was able to take a “real” programming course, learning Pascal on a Mac Plus. About the same time, I got a Mac Classic, which served me admirably all the way until I graduated from university (at which point my graduation present was a PowerMac 275 with AvidCinema. That was a real powerhouse for the time!).
Oh yeah, I also have a Kaypro 2x, which I pull out of storage from time to time for some nostalgic game playing, every time keeping my fingers crossed that the floppies containing the operating system (CP/M) still work.
We had teletype terminals connected by dialup modem to an IBM mainframe in 1974 at a junior college. That was an advance over the cardpunch machines also available to us. One of the kids put a coil on the phone handset, connected from the teletype to the modem, and tape-recorded the program transmitted to the mainframe. Then, when he played the tape into the device that previously held the handset, the program ran again to the mainframe without having to type it in again. We thought that was genius!
There is pretty much a tie for me between four machines vying as “first computer.” In 1977, upon arriving as a college freshman studying engineering, my pent up demand for computing knew no bounds. Within a few short months I was learning the basics of assembly programming on a DEC PDP-8 mini-computer (love the 11-bit architecture) and its more modern sibling, the PDP-11. I wrote Fortran programs for the university timesharing system, then an IBM System 360 running VMS. But my favorite machine was my very own personal computer–acquired before such things were fashionable–the KIM-1, a 6502-based computer-on-a-board. Through careful coding to avoid overflowing the massive 1KB of onboard memory, I managed to drive an amplifier and speakers soldered to the board’s edge connector and have KIM play simple tunes like Chopsticks and Mary Had a Little Lamb.
You’re wrong Aaron, we use a TRS-80 to host the site. We reserve the mighty Commodore to run the billing system.
The reference to teletype terminals brings back another memory. Earlier in the 70s, in high school, I owned a model 19 teletype (built for the US Army in 1948, according to a tag inside). My favorite use was to tune to a local radio-teletype VHF repeater serving ham radio operators in our area and, with the help of an autostart switch, monitor traffic continuously. Arriving home from school or work I would pull the 20 feet or so of paper with the day’s messages from the floor and “read the mail,” including messages sent specifically to me–an email party line, if you will.
The back of the machine also served as the headboard for my bed and one evening I forgot to turn autostart off before retiring. An incoming signal at about 2AM sent me flying across the room, convinced that the world was coming to an end right then and there. Those things were LOUD. I only made that mistake once.
In the mid 70’s, I was a young Aircraft Radar Warning Repairman stationed at Almaden Air Force Station on Mount Umunhum, just south of San Jose in California. This was a Cold War Radar installation that was part of the DEW line that consisted of Radar installations about 250 miles apart around the perimeter of the USA. This was a 5 story building with an antenna 16 feet high and 40 feet wide. It was easily visible from the San Jose valley.
I had joined the Air Force to see the world and get trained on the latest technology. So from Dalllas (my home town), I went to San Antonio for basic training, then Biloxi Mississippi at Keesler AFB for Radar Training, to Almaden in California. Didn’t quite make it to Germany, or even anywhere outside the USA.
When I got to Almaden AFS, I was disillusioned to discover that there were only 18 transistors in the entire installation. 9 transistors for each channel. One channel per floor. Everything else was vacuum tubes. I had already been experimenting with Digital Integrated Circuits in high school, and this was quite a letdown. Nonetheless, it was a pretty powerful transmitter, and we had to blank the transmissions when the antenna swung around from the Pacific to San Jose, because otherwise, garage doors tended to open and shut or otherwise malfunction across the San Jose valley. (he.. he.. he..)
However, I was able to buy a Yamaha 250 Enduro motorcyle, and I managed to ride it all over the California landscape. My favorite ride was to take Highway 17 from Los Gatos down to Santa Cruz. Man, those were the days…
But I digress. In those days, I was reading the early computer magazines, and discovered the Homebrew Computer Club that held meetings at the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium. So I rode my Yamaha 250 motorcycle on down HWY 280, past Sand Hill road, and started to learn about the new personal computers. They had the Altairs, all kinds of different computer kit companies. Mainly polished aluminum cases with about 8 LED’s and a few toggle switches.
On one of these occasions, there was a presentation by some guy named Steve Wozniak about how the Motorola 6502 microprocessor was implemented in the Apple kit, when from the back of the auditorium, some guy named Steve Jobs rushed to the podium with the first plastic injection molding prototype of the Lisa I or Lisa II. Caused quite a stir in the auditorium. In retrospect, it was just the initial marketing genius of Steve Jobs showing itself. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. So I bought a Digital Group PC instead. It came with 2K Ram standard, but I splurged and got an additional 8K Ram, for a grand total of 10K Ram. That is 10 kilobytes. Not megabytes, not gigabytes. Kilobytes. 10, 000 memory locations. I had to solder every single IC on the thing. No monitor, I had to jury rig a black and white TV and use a cassette tape for programs.
I probably should have stayed in Silicon Valley after my Air Force engagement ended, but I headed back to Dallas instead. I eventually bought one of the IBM clones in the early 80s, with double floppy drives and a very expensive 5 MB hard disk drive. I think I paid about $5000 for it back then.
Anyway, now I find myself with about 8 physical computers in my home office. And another 20 or so virtual machines. So I got sucked in and I’m still stuck in the Matrix…
IBM 360, 1966, College. ALGOL, punch cards and paper tape.
I’m not sure what year I first played with this thing, it was my brother’s. It might have been 1965 or 1966. But it existed in 1963. It was the Digi-Comp 1. My brother always seemed to ask for neater toys than I did at Christmas. I don’t know where he found out about all this stuff. And I’m the one who went to engineering school!
I didn’t know anything about computers at the time, but in reading the instructions (I must have been only 7 or 8 at the time), I found out that it could be programmed by the placement of little white cylinders on posts. Depending on the position of the cylinders, a layer would get moved when you “cycled” the machine. I can’t remember all the things you could program it to do. It wasn’t very much. But it got across some principles of computing. Like I said, it wasn’t mine, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time with it. Nowadays, you guys probably laugh at it, but it was nevertheless programmable. What do you think a computer is anyway? It’s not a smart device until you give it instructions.
I’m not sure what year I first played with this thing, it was my brother’s. It might have been 1965 or 1966. But it existed in 1963. It was the Digi-Comp 1. My brother always seemed to ask for neater toys than I did at Christmas. I don’t know where he found out about all this stuff. And I’m the one who went to engineering school!
I didn’t know anything about computers at the time, but in reading the instructions (I must have been only 7 or 8 at the time), I found out that it could be programmed by the placement of little white cylinders on posts. Depending on the position of the cylinders, a layer would get moved when you “cycled” the machine. I can’t remember all the things you could program it to do. It wasn’t very much. But it got across some principles of computing. Like I said, it wasn’t mine, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time with it. Nowadays, you guys probably laugh at it, but it was nevertheless programmable. What do you think a computer is anyway? It’s not a smart device until you give it instructions.
I also played with Dr. Nim and Think-a-Dot. Dr. Nim was my brother’s. Think-a-Dot I think was my cousin’s, or maybe it was mine. These things fascinated me, but I didn’t understand them. Maybe I understood Think-a-Dot better because I remember playing with it a lot.
I just want to thank everybody. This turned out to be quite a thread! Please keep it going.
By the way, some of you may have noticed the tags. I snuck Oregon Trail in there.
As the holy Wikipedia says:
“The game was popular among North American elementary school students in the mid 1980s to late 1990s. Most students in the United States and Canada had access to the game at school.”
I have to say, I knew a lot of people my age played Oregon Trail. I just never knew how widespread it was.
I don’t think it was just Ann Arbor though. I went high school in a small town 100 miles from the nearest university and I programmed in BASIC in 10th grade in 1980. There was a sense, at the time, that these things were going to be something important, and a desire in a lot of places to get kids exposed to them.
Yup. That was common in 1980. It was not in 1973. In term of computer technology growth, 1980 was to 1973 what in terms of human generations 1889 was to 1976. At least four generations. There were no PCs in 1973. They appeared in 1974 (the Altair as I recalled). By 1980 the TRS-80 was considered mid-chord at best and trailing edge by the real computer junkies. (I wasn’t a real computer junkie. I was the one they were laughing at for still using a Trash-80.)
Growth of connectivity and educational use of computers spread still more explosively. In 1973 110 baud was really hot. By 1980 1200 baud was the standard. (Okay – 300 baud for the retro types.)
You have to be in your late 50s or 60s — and been a teen or in your 20s during the period from 1968 to 1980 — to realize how truly explosive growth in computer hardware was during that period. And how, even with Moore’s Law, it has not had as big an impact. Doubling $1 to $2 is harder than doubling $1 million to $2 million, and that is where we were.
Man, that was a fun time. Scary as get out, but fun.
Seawriter
What’s nice is that this thread can be a little time capsule that people forty years from now can look at and see our perspectives from 2014 about the past.
Speaking of time capsules, there is a great documentary called Triumph of the Nerds, from about 20 years ago. It talks about the very beginning of the computer industry (in the mid 70’s) to the “present” with the launch of…wait for it…Windows 95. There are fabulous first hand stories from Jobs, Gates, Woz, and many others, but also some really funny proclamations. Perhaps the best part are some of the commercials from the 80s for products like Lotus 1,2,3 and the Apple Macintosh. Highly recommend. It’s on YouTube here.
As for my first computer, TRS80, 1981. 32k of processing power baby!
Some early mainframes were actually byte-oriented, although the bytes were called “characters” and were typically 6 rather than 8 bits. The belief at the time was that the optimum architecture for computers doing business data processing (character-oriented) was different from that for computers doing scientific calculations (word-oriented.)