Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: First Computer Ever

This is topic First Computer Ever in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Paul Konen (Member # 41) on 02-07-2002, 09:42 AM:

The Computer Tech Support prompted this thread:

TRS-80 Model II
16K memory
Green Screen monitor
Cassette Tape Storage

All this for $800

Upgraded later to 48K memory, 5 1/4 in floppy drive, Text to Speech card. The driver of the card had filtering software in it that would not allow it to cuss. IE: F*** you would be "I can't say that word - you" Workaround: Phonetics ph*** you would be "f*** you"

Later went to the Model 3P (Sewing Machine type case)

Paul.

Posted by John Walsh (Member # 168) on 02-07-2002, 09:59 AM:

There were several computers out (even for home/hobbyist use) long before a "Trash80" came out. I fooled with an Altar (sp) 8080 with a KSR33 teletype in 1978 or so. Used paper tape to store and load programs.

I remember actually being excited about getting the spec's for "The Kansas City Standard."

Knew a guy who made his own TRS80 following just the schematics he got from SAMS. Found several mistakes in the schematics!

Posted by Pete Naples (Member # 761) on 02-07-2002, 10:09 AM:

First one I ever got was the grandaddy of 'em all, Commodore PET 2001. Had calculator keyboard, on board tape deck and 8k RAM. Still have it up in the loft, and more frighteningly, it still works! Also in my historical computers collection are Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum. My first PC was a 16MHz 80286 machine, with 1Mb RAM and 40Mb HDD, this was in the days when MS Windoze was even more of a joke than it is now. DOS was king! That machine is still tunning, doing sterling service attached to a satellite tv receiver.

Posted by Greg Anderson (Member # 235) on 02-07-2002, 10:51 AM:

My first was a TRS-80 Color Computer using a normal TV as a monitor. I had 8K of RAM and a tape drive. Can't remember the price but it was probably between $300 and $500 in 1982.

Later, upgraded to 16K of RAM, a floppy drive (5.25-inch), a better keyboard and an $800 daisy-wheel (letter-quality!) printer... all from Radio Shack. The printer still worked when I put it in a box about 10 years ago... and it's still in that box.

So, here's the interesting part. I still have a Model 100 laptop computer from Radio Shack (first introduced in 1983 but I bought it in 1986). It has 32K of RAM, runs on 4 AA batteries and it boots up/shuts down instantly with the flip of a switch. It's the most stable operating system I've ever used and... it still works! And I use it often. I can type 5 pages or so and then, at the end of the day, I plug in into my newest computer, dump the data and, presto! I'm back in business.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-07-2002, 11:38 AM:

IMSAI 8080, built from a kit, 8KB RAM. I quickly moved on to...

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. I chose it over Apple because it could display 64 chars. per line -- the Apple was limited to 40 chars. Subsequently added the Expansion Unit with 32KB additional RAM and floppy drives. Discovering how horribly unreliable the system was, I wrote and sold memory & disk diagnostic software (Z-80 assembly language). Made a nice side income from that for several years and iterations of TRS-80 including the Model III, which was actually not a bad system for its time though at a disadvantage due to being B&W only.

I also bought a Radio Shack Line Printer, $1000. Was actually a Centronics 779. Could only print in upper-case (would be called SHOUTING now). A friend designed a new character-generator chip for it that added lower-case capability, and I sold that upgrade to a lot of users of the printer.

------------------
- dave
Avoid the meadow...

Posted by John Schulien (Member # 215) on 02-07-2002, 01:51 PM:

My first computer was a Bell & Howell black Apple II+ with 48K, two floppy drives (WOW!), and a color monitor (Double WOW!) It was 1981, and I was 14 years old. The first thing I decided was that BASIC sucked, and learned 6502 machine language.

In 1982, having learned basic TTL design from Radio Electronics or Popular Electronics, I forget which, I started studying the schematics that came with the computer. After a fair amount of planning, I went to Radio Shack, purchased a wire-wrap PC board, two 7402 NOR gates, a 7400 series octal latch, a D/A converter, an op-amp chip, and a handful of resistors and capacitors. I used these to build an 8-bit mono sound card. It worked. That was one EASY computer to interface to. Flat-out trivial. I still have the sound card, and it's an ugly mess of solder, missing all of the chips, but it worked!

I never got further then playing sine and square waves, and watching them on the oscilloscope, so I can't really say that I was an early USER of a sound card ...

However, I was certainly one of the earliest OWNERS of a personal computer add-on sound card, and I've always wondered if I was the first. There were a handful of add-on cards available at the time, but I don't remember ever seeing an add-on sound card.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-07-2002, 02:27 PM:

Compaq 486 DX66 running WIN 3.1. NEC multisync 4FGE monitor(great monitor!), HP Laserjet printer which is still used to print checks here at GTS. Some sort of cheapo scanner, single speed external DC rom drive! This stuff was a real

as compared to the stuff out there today.
At home I'm now running a dual P-3 1GHZ machine with Win 2000 and way to much external fun hardware connected to it.
MArk @ GTS

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-07-2002, 04:44 PM:

The first computer I ever used in my home was a Mac IIci running at 60Mhz or so with 32 Megs o' RAM and nearly 40 MB's of disc space! It could play Quicktimes and had stereo audio. This was about 5 years ago, maybe 6.

The first computer I ever used was an Apple II. It was simply awesome. 720k 5.25" floppies kick ass! Who needs rewritable DVDs anyway??

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-07-2002, 05:03 PM:

Am I reading this thread wrong, or is everyone poking fun at older computers? I'll have you know that Film-Tech is running off of a Radio Shack TRS80 model III with the full 16K of RAM and cassette tape drive all hooked into an AOL dialup account thank you!!!

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 02-07-2002, 05:17 PM:

First computer I ever used: 1973--CDC Chronos II via a WU 76 teletype w/punchtape reader/puncher and accoustic coupler modem. Wrote BASIC programs for use in my high school physics class.

First home computer: 1978--Ohio Scientific Challenger II running OS-DOS. 6502 processor with 20k of RAM. Rack mount B&W monitor that I salvaged from an old TAV production truck. 8" floppy drive, no HD, no sound, no modem.

Upgraded to a "luggable" Kaypro 10. Z80 processor with 10MB HD and 64k RAM. 9" green monitor, 8" floppy, no sound. 9-pin dot matrix printer, bi-directional logic seeking with descenders. Later added a 2400 baud modem. My first "real" computer--could use CalcStar for the checkbook, WordStar for the homework, and DBase II for the pilot logbook!

Finished undergrad on a 386SX running Windows 3.11 at 8MHz. Now using an old 200MHz Pentium MMX box. Planning on building an HTPC when I get back to work.

Cheers!

Paul

Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 02-07-2002, 05:42 PM:

I bought my daughter a Texas Instruments 994A computer for $30 at a yard sale, and about a year later at a basement tag sale found two
brand new ones, in unopened boxes for $5 each. Went back for them , thinking they'd make nice birthday gifts for my kid's friends, but they were gone.
Those days kid's magazines had programs children could type in for
the 994A, Commodore, etc., and we used to program them for fun.
The early Commodore had sound, color and programs of popular and classical musical selections long before the biggies offered these at affordable prices.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-07-2002, 05:43 PM:

I can vouch for what Brad posted. I have tampered with the Film-Tech servers while he wasn't looking and almost recorded some Johnny Cash over one of the cassettes!

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 02-07-2002, 06:16 PM:

I'm one of the Radio Shack people from way back. Bought my parents one of the original TRS80 4k machines when they were new, and then bought myself the TRS80 "color computer" complete with two outboard floppy disk drives. Next was a real PC, a Tandy 1000SX (640K! WOW!) to which I added a giant 40meg hard drive. After that it gets blurry...between day job, theatre and home, I think I've gone through about 6 or 7 PCs since. However I still sell tickets at the theatre using software I wrote in BASIC on my Tandy 1000SX...it runs just fine on Win98.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-07-2002, 06:16 PM:

Brad: For the sake of system integrity, I hope you're using the Radio Shack 300 baud acoustic modem.

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.

------------------
- dave
Avoid the meadow...

Posted by Michael Brown (Member # 890) on 02-07-2002, 06:27 PM:

Sinclair ZX Spectrum

much respect

After that i progress to a BBC Micro (I had a double disc drive and everything )

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 02-07-2002, 08:08 PM:

quote:
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.

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.

------------------
Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-07-2002, 08:31 PM:

The first one was an Apple ][+, circa 1981. At the time, it was pretty much a top-of-the-line machine with dual 180k floppy drives and 64k of RAM.

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].

Posted by Ron Lacheur (Member # 1126) on 02-07-2002, 11:40 PM:

First Computer I used?

In elementary school, it was a IBM XT.

Posted by Aaron Sisemore (Member # 145) on 02-08-2002, 01:32 AM:

First computer I owned was an Atari 800 with cassette drive back in 1983. Got a 300baud modem and disk drive for it in 1984, and used it almost constantly (BBS's and games of course) until 1988, and less frequently until 1992(!) (I still have it too)

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

-Aaron

Posted by Mathew Molloy (Member # 666) on 02-08-2002, 02:25 AM:

Mom & Dad bought me and my brother a Coleco Adam. Noisy S.O.B. with that high-speed tape drive and daisy wheel printer. I did spend hours and hours doing simple animations to music with the turtle animation program - wish I had a way to copy those back then. First online chat experiences with the 300 baud modem on Compuserve too. I remember being so jealous of my buddy's 1200 baud modem!

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 02-08-2002, 03:23 AM:

My first was an old XT I got from a second-hand store in 1995, I believe. I paid a whole 10 bucks for it. I took it home and connected it all up, and turned it on. The first thing the screen said was "Bad or Missing Command Interpreter".

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.

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 02-08-2002, 09:51 AM:

My first one was a Franklin Ace, Which was an Apple II knock off. No color or hard drive but it was only $1800 and screamed along at 1mhz. Then I got a real IBM 8088 PC and found a 5 meg hard drive (at an auction)took out one of the 5-1/4" floppy drives and installed it there. I was in heaven. I figured out how to send code to my CNC's controller and could store my parts program on my PC. Before that I used a teletype machine with paper tape at 110 baud. I think they were "chain drive" printers but I might be confusing them with another dinosaur, I mean, printer that I had. After the PC I started assembling my own PCs and have never bought another factory made computer since.

------------------
Greg Mueller
Amateur Astronomer, Machinist, Filmnut
http://www.muellersatomics.com/

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 02-08-2002, 10:13 AM:

Mine was a coleco adam and then at work we had a KPRO
then I got a 286 something then the first big leap was a 386dx40 then a 486dx66 then the nextgen 100 then to a duron 850

Posted by Sean McKinnon (Member # 612) on 02-08-2002, 04:16 PM:

The first I ever used was an Apple ][ E , The E is for ENHANCED! The first i ever owned was a Mac Plus with no hard drive. Then I upgraded to a mac LC III. I always wanted one of those Quadra 950's the big tower case mac, but I never got one

, A Mac TV would have been cool too (all black case abd keyboard). Then I got a Powermac 7100/88AV (The AV Is for Audio/Video). Now I use a Compaq Presario

I hate it and I miss my Mac but I have no choice.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-08-2002, 04:26 PM:

Even Windows fanatics usually hate Compaq!

Posted by Paul Konen (Member # 41) on 02-09-2002, 12:10 PM:

The first computer I worked on was a PDP-11 at the local college using a dialup to a Telex? console. It was a teletype machine with the round keys that you had to mash to go down. It also had a paper tape reader / writer for storing your code.

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.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-09-2002, 09:11 PM:

The old Apple II (pre-Mac era) and Radio Shack TRS-80s were the first ones I used in junior high and high school. The first home computer I used was Compaq's original Deskpro model when I was in high school. My father wrote is first non-fiction novel "Marine Sniper: 93 Confirmed Kills" on it. My Uncle Jim has that machine now, and it still works (he builds kit computers in his spare time and keeps that one around as a kind of "museum piece").