Porteus

This is almost revealing your age.

Nice. I remember these. They plugged into your TV. Super cool ... until Dad wanted to watch the football game.

a timex z80 then an atari 500xl atari 128 then i bought ibm i remember i paid 3999.00 for a 386 dx when they first cam out.. lol

1.- Commodore 64,
2.- Commodore 128,
3.- IBM XT,

My first was a Vic20 with tape drive to save and load program.

IBM System/360 Model 30

This thread could be revived for members that came in meanwhile. What was your first computer?

francois wrote: ↑

14 Jan 2019, 15:23

This thread could be revived for members that came in meanwhile. What was your first computer?

Atari ST.

The Atari ST is the first personal computer to come with a bitmapped color GUI, using a version of Digital Research's GEM released in February 1985. The 1040ST, released in 1986, is the first personal computer to ship with a megabyte of RAM in the base configuration and also the first with a cost-per-kilobyte of less than US$1.

Commodore Vic-20 was all I could afford! But I quickly learned I got the wrong machine - or so I thought..

*** warning - kinda long story about romantic idealism follows ***


Unlike my friends - even as young adults, all they were using their computers for was glorified game machines. Ok, that's cool, but I wanted to be in control. Express myself though programming, as ugly as that might be. And of course that means BASIC. But I didn't know where to turn other than the bookstore or library. Had to bootstrap myself.

Problem was, I couldn't find any "VIC" specific books - all others with their own spin for other computers basic flavors would just quickly fail. Or be too far advanced - college level stuff.

Then I *found* it: INSTANT BASIC - Freeze Dried Computer Programming by Jerald Brown. It was generic enough for ms-basic and DEC basic, that finally got me past the blinking cursor!

So the coding was mid-70's era. But it worked - and what little didn't I ignored. BLISS.

But this was '82 or so, and I bought into the whole "People's Computer Company" thing that the authors were involved with for years. Power to the people with BASIC baby! This was an older 70's idea, but now with the 80's, there was no academic teaching and sharing - just proprietary lock down.

People's Computer Company

I scarfed up all the PCC newsletters and other stuff I could find. Ah, the idealism. I bought totally into it - kind of a pre-RMS thing coming from the consumer level of computing, and not the classic PDP-10 era...

So I was really bummed out using computers for about 10 years. Just using software that people wrote because it was their job to lock it down and get it shrink-wrapped. Profit was the ONLY motive - no self expression, no joy etc.

My computing soul sounded like the Moody Blues "Melancholy Man". Alternating with rage of Killing-Joke's "Eighties"

And then in 92/93 or so it happened - I found SLACKWARE.

Faith in humanity restored! Not just because it worked, but I was sharing a *personal effort* of expression that went a bit further than just putting all the bits together. I guess I'm a romantic.

Guess what we're doing right now? Anyone remember "Community Memory" bbs system? The hardware that the "mother of all demos" came from?

Community Memory

I guess I'll stop waxing so nostalgic..

As a kid in school I once had to do with the KC85 or KC87 - one of these, I don´t remember which one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_85
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotron_KC_87

Later in life my "real" first computer was the Commodore 64. Learned to code in Basic and Assembler. Today it would be called "Homebrew"...

...and this breadbox is still in use here!