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If we're talking about the first computer ever used, it was an IBM/360 running APL, timesharing the CPU. The terminals were converted IBM Selectric typewriters. I was in college, physics professor had his students taking tests via the computer center. I was like, whoa, I have to know more about how this works. Learned APL and actually got pretty good at it. APL (which stands for A Programming Language) was amazingly powerful, but is now probably extinct.

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At Jacksonville State University, where I did my undergraduate work and took my first programming classes, I learned to program using a bunch of IBM 3270 terminals hooked to the campus IBM 4381 mainframe, which was a 360/370 family machine. The 3270s we had in the main building and math building had "Selectric" type keyboard, while the newer ones in the business building had keys that had the look and feel of IBM PC keys. The 3278 terminals in the math building had the special keyboards for APL programming (with all the extra APL symbols). Thank good old Kenneth Iverson for the devlopment of that language. It was unusual at the time of its development (1962) since it was expressly desinged to be interactive and primitive operations in APL could perform direct processing of entire arrays.

I had to write an APL program for a programming languages class in 1987 (Spring Semester) and we used a PC implemtation that allowed the use of keywords instead of the symbols, which made the programs easier to type in and read, although I felt that it destroyed the spirit of the language. I can't type an APL program here in its natural form, unless we made smiley icons for all the special symbols needed. I will substitute keywords for the symbols to give you an idea of this bizarre language:

)clear
upside-down-triangle res <- primes n; t
res <- 2, t <- 3
-> 0 X iota N < rho res
t <- t + 2
-> 3 X iota v/0 = res | t
res <- res, t
->2
upside-down-triangle

Then, typing

primes 4

causes the following to be printed:

2 3 5 7 11

Twisted, huh?

Another great old language is SNOBOL, and I have the ACM journal from 1964 that has the original article by the guy who developed the language for string processing!

Let's see, what other old computers have I used?

TRS-80 Model 3 (at my high school)
Commodore 64 (several friends had them,
and stores had them on display)
Apple IIe

IBM 4381 mainframe (MUSIC and VSE operating systems,
both running under VM/370) at JSU
IBM 4381, 3084, and 3090 mainframes running MVS at NASA/MSFC
Sperry Univac 1100, 2200 (UAH's old mainframe,
decommissioned in 1996)
DEC PDP-11 models 10, 23, 34 running RT-11 at Psych dept, JSU
DEC Microvax running BSD UNIX, JSU
Perkin Elmer Mainframe (I don't remember the OS) at NASA/MSFC
DEC VAX machines (various models) running VMS (UAH, NASA/MSFC)
Stellar/Ardent/Stardent graphics computers (Stellix, their
Sys 5 UNIX) at NASA/MSFC
Silicon Graphics machines running IRIX (Sys 5 UNIX, many different
models at UAH and NASA/MSFC)
Sun UNIX machines running both the SunOS4 BSD-style UNIX and later
the Solaris System 5ish UNIX) at UAH
Sperry 7000 machine running BSD 4.2 UNIX (UAH CS department's early
UNIX machine from the 1980s)
Cray X-MP, Y-MP (UAH and NASA/MSFC)

Macintoshes (various models through the years)

PCs of all models (8088, 8086, 80286, 80386, i486, Pentiums,
etc, etc, running MS-DOS, OS/2 (1.1 all the way to
3.0, and of course all flavors of Windows, and
various UNIXes and Linux)

I feel as if I've forgotten some. It was neat coming along when I did in computer science, since I got to use a wide variety of machines, each with their own personalities. Nowadays, people that are more than 5 to 10 years younger than I am have not used anything but a PC or a UNIX box, and many have never touched a Unix/Linux machine. It's so sad.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site

Currently I own an x86 laptop, assorted Sparc-based machines, and a VAXstation.

I've never dealt much with mainframe-type hardware...the biggest machine I've had an account (root, actually) on was an 8-processor Sun E6500, which isn't terribly different from a desktop workstation in many ways. I'd be interested in seeing the current generation of IBM S/390 hardware, though, especially if I could run Linux on top of the VM.

I've toyed with VMS and and other less-common operating systems, but I'm mostly familiar with Unix variants [Solaris, AIX, Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, etc.] and Win32 stuff [NT4, Win2k].

First 'real' PC: a 286 machine with 256k RAM and amber monitor in 1992. This AT desktop case was changed out to a 386-40 in 1993, a 486DX-33 in 1995, 486DX4-100 in late 1995, Pentium 166 in 1997 to present (the case and P166 motherboard are in storage.

Present machine is a Celeron 400 midtower system purchased at the liquidation auction for Cinema Film Systems in December 2000.

In storage I have besides the Atari 800 and P166 machine:

Commodore VIC-20/Datasette drive
Commodore 64 and disk drive
Atari 800XL
Atari 65XE and Xf551 floppy drive
Two Macintosh Plus 'doorstops', one with a hard drive in it

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So, I went down to the local computer store. When I got there, there was a new kid on his first day on the job, and I was his very first customer he ever waited on.

I wanted to buy a "Command Interpreter". He immediately saw I was in trouble, and he practically took me by the hand and led me into the computer industry. He and I became very good friends through the years. In fact, he built up a 486 and gave it to me as a birthday present. It was the first real computer I ever had, and I have learned alot from it and him. I still have that computer to this day. He told me some time after that he saw I was a perfect target for a rip-off by some unscrupulous computer shop, and he did not want that to happen.

Well, Mike (that's his name) graduated from High school, and after working for a couple of computer places, he asked me if I could be a reference on a Resume. Sure, why not?

One day I got a call from some firm in San Francisco. It was a prospective employer for him. Frankly, I don't really know who he was interviewing, but at the end of the phone call, the person told me he was going to hire Mike because he liked the answers I gave.

Mike was hired at a salary of $80,000 a year! That made me feel good. Mike and his wife live in a distant city, but I am very thankful I met him, as he kept me from becoming too obsolete.

I deal with computers every day now, I keep them running at the radio station, the theaters, and home. Many friends call me when their computers die. And when they asks me where I learned this stuff, (and they do quite frequently)I proudly say, "I learned it from a 16 year old kid".

I am not a nerd, but I can somehow manage to keep those computers running.

And, now you know why I believe in kids. They are great! Give them a chance. They deserve it.

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AUDIO

After that I did some punch card doing FORTRAN.

Those punch outs are great fun at the football games. People get really mad when it gets in their hair.

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