I had an ol' 64 and a nice color tv to go with it but was not really into learning code so just played games on it.
Mac 512e....with a monster 10MB hard drive and a rocking' dot matrix printer. Bought it in June of '84 on a Friday...along with MS Word and Adobe Pagemaker and had a national newsletter ready for the printer Monday morning.
I worked for an company that manufactured electronic scales, the first in the industry, and I was fascinated with computers so I picked up a T99/4A board, pulled a power supply, a couple 8" disk drives, an enclosure out of inventory and built my first computer. I made all my own cables, hooked up a 9" green monitor and I was in business. The program (Wordstar or CalcStar) was on one 8" floppy and the data was on the second, no hard drive. When I was typing in one of the two programs, I would have to pause ever minute or so and let the screen catch up, one letter/numeral at a time. I had base after case of 8" floppies in my office because that wouldn't hold more than a couple letters or worksheets. My first operating system was the original DOS then later, Win 3.1. the biggest upgrade came when I could finally install a hard drive, a giant 10 meg. I didn't see how I could ever fill that up!
I wonder how many young folks are looking at this thread and going what the H..... Never heard of this old crap....
LOL Had a VIC 20 that replaced a Model 28 rattle box W/TU - used it for RTTY and SITOR/AMTOR. Really hot stuff....
What's interesting is that even with those rudimentary tools, we knew more about computers and computing than 99% of today's population. Who today can write a macro without a "record macro" button?
I remember mine well. returning to school in fall of 1977 .. there sat rows of the coolest things ever! Commodore PET 2001 1 Mhz clock speed 4 Mb ram. Here is the best part. You could save your program on a cassette tape and go back the next day, load your program and continue coding. IT.WAS.AWESOME!
Mine was a TI-99 programmable calculator that I programmed charting algorithms for a commodities trader in 1980. After taking some classes in machine language and Assembler, I got a job programming accounting routines in Assembler on a DEC PDP-11. While I worked other jobs on IBM 370, IBM PC/XT, my first personal computer was a Macintosh in 1984. My 3 yr old learned her alphabet on the MAC and I wrote commercial real estate broker database using 4th Dimension. All a good many years ago.
You guys remember having to "park" your hard drive? I wrote a neat little program that parked did a back up, then park it and power it down. Saved me a lot of time at the end of every day since backup was a daily process. We were smarter then
My first Packard Bell had 20 MB hard drive and I was sure it was my last computer. How the hell do you save more than 20 Mb of info????
When I took the Analog Technical Evaluation class at Ft Gordon (ASI C4) they recommended the SR-56 Texas Instruments calculator. Couldn't afford the card reader version, the SR-58, but you could put in a formula like the quadratic equation, and only have to put in the variables. It would calc the rest
Basic , then Basic in letter codes with numbers Basic C to just C . 197X ? with tape & punch cards .. I had hair back then that needed a hair net to go into the control rooms. Now I'm using a white stick on my touch screen
We had to put on anti static/dust shoe covers just to walk into the pooter room at school. You were strictly warned not to dream of touching anything--walk through only and with an escort. Was amazing to this old plowboy to see/hear all the clicking/whirling/and humming. Now the simplest phone has more capabilities than that room full of electrical gear. First pooter had a glitch in the program and it like to have driven me nuts. Finally took it to a nerd, he updated it to a 386--problem solved--or was it just beginning--lol.
Just text and numbers I got from a book called BASIC that came with the computer. Sweet times. Computers are one of those areas I'll never be able to talk about how much easier it used to be back in the day.
Vector 1 with 8K static RAM on board I think it was programed in ESP.... My IP address was 3.... all of my packets were carried by passenger pigeons.... any one else remember "Xerox lines" in 1986I purchased an AMDHAL 5860 main frame for the company I worked for... 32 megs of Ram, with a 40 Gig disk string... and on of the first IBM 3200 series tape cart systems for storage we used COBOL of course....
@wastelander, I think you're talking about machine language. We got the Commodore magazine, took two days to type in and debug a machine language program that gave a small volcano erupting, lol.
