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What was the first personal computer that you really used?
Topic Started: Aug 7 2010, 02:07 PM (524 Views)
George K
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Finally
The "Remember these?" thread got me to thinking.

What was the first "personal" computer that you used on a regular basis. Not the big one at school, or the one at the office. The one that sat on a desk where you could use it in a "personal" way.

In my case, it was a TRS-80 in the anesthesia office at Northwestern (where I trained). It was souped up (eventually) with a disc drive (5 1/4", of course) and a thermal printer.

Posted Image
A guide to GKSR: Click

"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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Copper
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Shortstop

At about the time IBM was announcing the PC I had an Amdahl V7 pretty much to myself. It was similar to this V6:

Posted Image

After Googling for a while trying to find a picture I realized that was pre-history.

The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy
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Ballyhoo
Middle Aged Carp
The Apple ][ Europlus, my favourite ever Apple product. Unlike this one, we only had one disk drive. You had to turn the disks over to use the other side, and if you opened the drive door while the light was on, it really let you know you were doing the wrong thing by making a noise like a machine gun. So many fond memories.

Posted Image
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PhJ
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Senior Carp
Posted Image

1982
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Piano*Dad
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Bull-Carp
My very first personal computer:

Posted Image

Paired with an Okidata nine-pin printer, no less!

This was a $3,000 system in 1985. It helped me publish about six papers and was instrumental in my research. I guess I still have a soft spot for that 'state of the art' 256K machine. It had, get this, two floppy drives! :lol2:
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JoeB
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Senior Carp
My first actual useful computer in the late 1970's was an S-100 CP/M machine consisting of a Jade Big-Z Z-80 computer, a wire wrapped disk controller based on a WD1771 controller, two 8 inch double-sided Remex disk drives, a mish-mash of 8K and 16K memory boards and a wire wrapped serial/parallel board for talking to the H-19 terminal and later an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. With a copy of WordStar and CalcStar the CP/M machine was quite capable of many things. I continued to use this computer as my main computer up till 1985 or so even though I did have one of the very early IBM 5150 PCs back in 1982. The previous computer I had was an 8080 based home made kludge that very limited in capability and, as I remember it, playing Daisy through an AM radio (a very popular program back in the Altair days) was it's high point.
"There are many ingredients in the stew of annoyance." - Bucky Katt
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Piano*Dad
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Bull-Carp
The floppy disks looked sort of like this:

Posted Image
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blondie
Bull-Carp
I had an Okidata 9 pin too. Got my masters proposal done on that plus numerous papers. Chug-chug-chug .. I still remember the sound of it. I published my first article with a Panasonic electric typewriter without correcting tape. I loved the smell of Liquid Paper in the morning ;) . I think my first computer was an XT? followed by an AT? Does that sound right? I shipped a brand new 386 to grad school in '92 and cursed every single one of those students who could so easily haul around those all in one Apple computers. Mine weighed a ton & I had no vehicle to transport it.
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George K
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Finally
Well, the first one I used was the TRS-80 that I mentioned earlier. The first one I owned was an Atari 800.

Posted Image

http://oldcomputers.net/atari800.html

Quote:
 
Designed to look like a friendly typewriter, the Atari 800 is an expandable system with two easily accessable cartridge ports under a front cover, and a removable top with four expansion slots inside.

Posted Image Posted Image

The cartridges are very handy, just plug 'em in and go! Technologically, there's not much to them, just some ROM chips with the program already burned into them.

Up to four Atari 810 floppy drives ($599.95 each) can be hooked-up, allowing fast and reliable data storage.

The floppy drive uses single-sided 5 1/4-inch floppy disks, holding 90K of data on a disk. The data is transfered in serial format at 19200 baud.

The Atari 820 impact dot-matrix printer ($449.95) prints 40 columns of 5x7 characters, at approximately 40 characters per second.

I pimped mine up with an additional 32K of RAM.
A guide to GKSR: Click

"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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Piano*Dad
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Bull-Carp
Well, you're just oooooold, George. :whome:
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George K
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Finally
Piano*Dad
Aug 7 2010, 04:31 PM
Well, you're just oooooold, George. :whome:
You're right.

OTOH, one of the delightful things about being older than 60 (of course, I said that when I was 50) is that, in the operating room, I can pretty much say whatever I want to whichever surgeon is being a turd whomever I want with little fear of repercussion.

"Whaddya gonna do, fire me?" :lol2:
A guide to GKSR: Click

"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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Piano*Dad
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Bull-Carp
Quote:
 
I loved the smell of Liquid Paper in the morning ;) .


:spit:

I can almost hear the strains of Wagner wafting over the rooftops.
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George K
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Finally
Piano*Dad
Aug 7 2010, 04:34 PM
I can almost hear the strains of Wagner wafting over the rooftops.
Tell me again about being old.

Apocalypse Now (1979) :lol2:

Oh, yeah... :spit:
A guide to GKSR: Click

"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... "
- Mik, 6/14/08


Nothing is as effective as homeopathy.

I'd rather listen to an hour of Abba than an hour of The Beatles.
- Klaus, 4/29/18
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Axtremus
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HOLY CARP!!!
Apple ][e and IBM PC XT.
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Dewey
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HOLY CARP!!!
First owned: Commodore 64. First used in the workplace: first-generation Apple Macintosh, used for word processing. First owned by my own company: an IBM 286 XT, with 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy drives and a 40 meg hard drive, and the ubiquitous Okidata 9-pin dot matrix printer. When I needed to print something "letter quality, I'd print it on an Okidata daisy wheel printer in the engineer's office adjacent to mine.
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

"Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous

"Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011

I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14
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Aqua Letifer
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ZOOOOOM!
Posted Image

Ah yes. Rememberance of technology past.



"back in the day, System 7.5,
had HyperCard stacks on my SyQuest drive,
once I got a modem I was never ****in bored,
always dialin up a BBS to play me some LORD,
I stole my school's dial-up to get the internet,
had a copy of Ircle and no regrets,
chillin in #macfilez, leechin on bots,
it took nine years to get a download spot,
hours and hours, makin Marathon maps,
always on the run cause I set it to caps,
eventually I got a brand new Power Mac,
so ****in fast, I almost had a heart attack,
ran a Hotline server on my school's T1,
"Win Ben Stein's Warez" was the name of that one,
Quake 3 Test in the computer lab,
never went to class cause that **** was a drag..."
I cite irreconcilable differences.
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Horace
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HOLY CARP!!!
IBM PC Jr. Learned to program BASIC on it, by typing in little program listings from computer magazines in the day. Had no idea what I was typing but thought it was just so cool that I could give a machine instructions and make it do neat things. The peak of that market for "programs you type in yourself" was probably when little 50-odd page books filled with the code for a certain program were sold. And you didn't even learn anything since the entire listing was in a proprietary encoding which looked like jibberish, in groups of four characters at a time.

What are the chances of something like that being published today? :lol2:

But I liked it and I typed it in.

The game that came out the other end sucked and I stopped playing almost immediately. But I guess it was all about the journey.
As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good?
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
TI-99/4A
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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Piano*Dad
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Bull-Carp
You call that a computer? :lol2:

.
.
.
.
:whome:
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ivorythumper
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
George K
Aug 7 2010, 02:07 PM
The "Remember these?" thread got me to thinking.

What was the first "personal" computer that you used on a regular basis. Not the big one at school, or the one at the office. The one that sat on a desk where you could use it in a "personal" way.

In my case, it was a TRS-80 in the anesthesia office at Northwestern (where I trained). It was souped up (eventually) with a disc drive (5 1/4", of course) and a thermal printer.

Posted Image
+1

My brother had a TRS 80 in the late 70s which we played Tank, Pong and Asteroid on.
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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Klaus
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HOLY CARP!!!
I had a C128

Posted Image

Luckily it was compatible to the C64, so I could play all the pirated games of my friends :lol2:

We also had a datasette at first (still love the concept) before we switched to the 1571 floppy drive.

When I talk about these times with my computer science fellow students, it always gets rather emotional.
Trifonov Fleisher Klaus Sokolov Zimmerman
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musicasacra
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HOLY CARP!!!
I don't remember the make or model, an old hand me down laptop in the mid 90s from my BIL, maybe a Compaq. Probably an early 90s model. I remember the trackball mouse attached to it, no cable. Can't find a photo.
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blondie
Bull-Carp
George K
Aug 7 2010, 04:36 PM
Piano*Dad
Aug 7 2010, 04:34 PM
I can almost hear the strains of Wagner wafting over the rooftops.
Tell me again about being old.

Apocalypse Now (1979) :lol2:

Oh, yeah... :spit:
1979 was a very good year. And we all remember that scene.
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Piano*Dad
Aug 7 2010, 06:58 PM
You call that a computer? :lol2:

.
.
.
.
:whome:
Heck yeah. It plugged into an old TV and I used a cassette recorder to save data.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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John D'Oh
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MAMIL
Posted Image

It was a British (Welsh actually, hence the name) version of the TRS-80. My dad still has it stuck away in a cupboard somewhere.
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
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