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Digi-Comp I (Photo memories of 18 first computers)

My 1st was a CARDIAC in grade 8. It was a cardboard computer put out by Bell Telephone. I still have it over 40 years later. My first electronic computer was a Big Board 4MHz Z80 64k RAM with dual 8" floppies cira 1977. Hard to believe as I sit in my living room touch typing on my iPad how far things have come.

my first real computer was a Sinclair ZX81 with the membrane keyboard, and a 16k rampac.
Breathe on the rampac and the whole machine crashed

After that i 'graduated' to a BBC Model B and had that for years (still works now) and i could make that do almost anything

ooh - happy days

I remember when my dad brought home the Timex Sinclair ( we got the 16K expansion later - which was AWESOME at the time ), and he said "These things are the future, boy!".

We later upgraded to a Vic20 and then a commodore 64.

I remember playing a first person adventure game that ran off of a cassette tape - when moving from screen to screen, you had to wait while the cassette rattled and buzzed for about 30 seconds while it loaded up the next 4-5K of graphics...

Good times.

To compensate for the cumbersome membrane keyboard, the BASIC interpreter featured autocomplete. Of course if you were an infrequent user, you forgot which tokens were autocompleted and how many letters each took for recognition.

There was only one token which started with P, and as soon as you entered P it was completed. If you forgot this, you were greeted with a SYNTAX ERROR on PRINT RINT.

The Timex Sinclair 1000 was my first computer. Every keyword and token recognized by the computer was represented by a single letter or number. It was hard to forget which token was autocompleted by each key because the keyword was printed over the key (like an overlay). Tokens requiring you to press Shift first were color-coded in red.

Boy could I have used your help. I had no owners manual, had to fix the ribbon to get the display to work, then was lost! LOL Thanks to everyone for posting their fond memories, and look at us now! 3-6cores 4-8cores, but even though an Apple is a custom mobo, 2k for an OS is just Apple shooting themselves in the foot. Many of us would go with an iOS if they were not so interested in Dick Tracy watches! I do like the new iPhone though.

My brother bought a Atari 400, mostly to play games on, because I was spending to much time programming on mine. The joysticks were basic but are now common icons for the joystick.

The auto complete from Atari Basic (aka. HP Basic) was great. I even bought a better version of DOS that in 1983 was starting to use the GUI interface, and it also offered the autocomplete for commands and files that could be in a 64&3 character format of any Atarti character not just ASCII ones. And the DOS disk volume size could be in Megabytes not Kilobytes. Great for 3.5" floppies and 20meg or bigger Hard disks. But never would have done the 2 Terabyte drives of today.

I even wrote code to change the 40x24 screen into a 80x34 by making text characters become 4x6 matrix boxes insted of the 8x8. But this was only good on Monitors, to much res needed for TV unless it had a Composite video input.

And using the Player Missile graphics from the ANTIC chip I added to the better DOS I used so it had more GUI control. This was modeled after Xerox's GUI interface that Apple copyied(copied for free) from Xerox and Atari used/paid for in its 16/32 bit ST computers.

Oh. Almost forgot the DOS could read and write PC disks.

Good to see the Sinclair timex 1000 getting a run there.
My Zx81 is still sitting in a cupboard in a box that I made to hold all the loose bits.
The BBC Acorn was programmed to act as a keyboard and mass storage for it (Why? Remember when you did things because you could, not because needed to?)

Look at that 16K expansion, who would have used so much memory?
R

I have fond memories of making the chips that were used in the Spectrum. It was made in Dundee. We were in Greenock. We hand-drew the working drawings of the IC's and these went to central digitizing in a big DEC minicomputer. Overnight a huge (10mx10m plot was produced and we checked it using MK1 Eyeball for spacing violations and other dimensional errors.
We used tiny Monochrome Apple Macintoshes for the documentation.
In 1984 or thereabouts we decided that every employee from receptionist to CEO would go to college courses to learn how to use stastistical methods applied to their own productivity. The incentive was a color-screen IBM PC for the department (Costing ?10,000) if we could show a 10% improvement. The impossibly collossal 20MB Hard-Disk unit and tape backup was an extra ?10,000. We also got a plotter and Lotus 123 Spreadsheet. That was the "Killer App" that justified departments procurement of PCs. (There was only one per department.)
We got the programme and did a "Ghoster" one night to learn it inside-out.
Before that in 1980 we were using our National Semiconductor "Starplex" system for database and word processing. This used Wordstar and Datastar. Two Floppy drives. One for the Operating system then working program and the other for data. That and a bookshelf of Documentation you needed to know. Nothing very intuitive.
On the PC's we used, when you pressed both shift keys simultaneously, the screen changed. A hardware switch-board kicked-in and the National Semiconductor Worldwide network opened up in the form of a terminal to the Mainframe IBM system. We could send green-screen emails to any other NS employee worldwide.

I remeber typing a huge amount of code from one of the old listings mags to get sound from the ZX81. As I recall you had to set the tv to just off station and when the program was running pressing keys made a kind of feedback type sounds from the TV. Not exactly music but Very cool at the time.

I typed in the same program. My parents had bought me the ZX81, but Hadn't yet got me a tv to use it on. I typed in the program mentioned above blind - without a screen! - and tuned in my Dad's stereo to hear the wonderful noises!

Oh dear oh dear oh dear...

That's just Hardcore!

Mr knifton with such a short not even a full sentance of communications is of the 'I learned to Communicate on the 140 character phrase limit of Twitter.

People use to communicate in thoughts not words, And I think thoughts created books. Twitter speak is like static noise to true communications.

But the saying goes small minds speak small words. That is not saying Mr knifton is dumb it is just saying communication use to be ideas not just word. And words can be misunderstood, but ideas are rarely thought of in the wrong way.

The same was once said of English, it would have one word and other languages would have 27 versions of that word. Like The -vs- der,die das and dem that would tell you gender and if it was past present or future tense. That was german and from classes 40 years ago.

In the context of the tread, I thought a few words summed my feelings up rather well.
As to a twitter aholic far from it, I?m not sure I even have an account. Maybe my short style if from learning to type on a zx81 membrane keyboard. This may also help explain away so many typos.


I am sorry if my short reply hit a nerve with you; I'm glad it was the short reply the and not the frustration of not finding anything seedy under a heading of Hardcore that prompted your comments. I better end this here, as I have already used up my allowance of words for the month.

Gaz belongs here:

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/

Thanks for the heads up, that is a great site

My Atari 800 as most 8 bit and 16 bit machines did, interfered with the AM radio. On my Atari you had to open the metal shell that held the memory cards to get the best RF effect. That's why the shielding was there and mostly to make the FCC happy.

Never got into it, was more interested in having/authoring software to turn the 40x21 screen into a 80x32 on a TV, but you need a monitor to really read the text clearly.

Hurd some Apple people got good at it then came Sound Blaster and erased this RF music field. But I liked the SAM talking software. Sounds much like Steven Hawking does today. Think it is the same software algorithms.

There was a modification for the ZX81 that involved taking the board out of the case, and putting in a different case with a real keyboard and 64K of RAM. I added a device called a stringy floppy (sort of a small high-speed taped drive) and a 4-inch thermal printer, and I was rolling! I even wrote a program to store, sort, and print the catalog for a local video rental store, and got all the free video rentals I could use.

Dang, we had fun!

Anybody remember 3D Rex.


Rex is comming ........

(Best use of 16k I can think of)

I did do some 6502 assembly language coding, and 8080 and Z-80 coding and Atari ANTIC chip coding. But never got into the 16 bit or 32 and 64 bit CPU coding. Did look at the 68000 coding but that was Apple garbage stuff.

I brought one home in 1981. I already had some BASIC and FORTRAN experience from college. However, the best thing I did was to buy a book on using assembly language to write a checkers game (what was the name of that book?). Anyway, with my cassette drive, membrane keyboard and 13" TV screen, I played a passable game of checkers against the computer. The experience with assembler helped me when I graduated to an Apple IIe with a CPM card.

I was taking 6502 assembly in college, but the Z80 assembly was so much superior, it gave me a big advantage.

I wrote a font editor and created fonts for foreign languages once.

I wrote an 8-color dithered ray tracing program on it's successor, just because my Computer Graphics instructor, (tenured professor with Ph.D.) said a PC would never be powerful enough to do it.

We used to wire-wrap Micro Professor I clones for our personal training in 82. This was a form of early software and hardware piracy. The hardware was pretty straight forward. (You could even say, right out of the Zilog application note...) But they had a so called monitor Eprom that we copied on our Eprom programmer at the company. But the company, that built the originals is now named Acer and they seem to have survived our theft... The originals were not very expensive, but still above my budget at the age of 15. I didn't feel too guilty back then...
I built a stepper motor driver and other stuff. Everything was "hand" assembled and the jumps had to be calculated in HEX.
Later, one of our programmers wrote a monitor and a macro assembler for our company Z-80 boards. I had a old ASCII terminal, "saved" from a fire.(It stank pretty bad, but i got it for free)
Since the company switched to Motorola 68000 processors, those Z80 boards were easily available. We even built a Eprom programmer to fit on the rack bus. This was my first "mass storage" some Eproms and a uv-lamp.
Programming on a real assembler made things much faster and we used it heavily. I think i still have this rack somewhere. I would be interesting to hook it up to a terminal program once...

I remember putting this computer together from a kit I purchased for $100.00.

After putting it together it did not work. Sent it in and Timex sent me back a working model.

Had fun peeking and poking the computer and learning Z80 instruction set all 156 OpCodes.

Still remember the day my dad presented me my first computer... it was a C-64 with a Tape Drive ... used to wait hours (or so it seems now) for Zaxxon to load. learning to 'poke' n 'peek' was really fun with sprites popping up in the background. Thanks for bringing back those really fond memories.

I'll never forget the excitement when I upgraded the 300 baud modem to a 1200 baud, now that was smokin fast. and the pre-internet days on Q-link, which is how I met my wife, nearly 23 years ago.

Zaxxon, don't know where I got a PC copy, but a 486 could not be timed and did that game FLY! LOL My BriefCase C64 was actually a daughter board C128. But now, well for about 5-6 years, I've ran AmigaForever and now AmiKit on my PC's. Only for ImageFX, but AmiKit has over 300 or the AmiNet apps, written with Rexx or Arex. Think you will enjoy the games of the 70's-80's included. Based on WinUAE and you will love the speed of your Amiga-PC. IOW, load,applyFX,save in ImageFX on Amiga was painfull. Now with VM of AmigaOS, 1800 frames is something you would never do on an Amiga in a week. Thanks for the memories

At the time, we didn't know 10 minutes was a long time to load a game like Space Invaders. There was nothing but anticipation as you listened to it whir and click knowing that soon you could be pounding on the space bar trying to knock out monochrome alien invaders.

We also learned our first programming on those machines. Nothing like a loop in a loop on a blank screen that would then beep 10 times and then erase itself. Way too much fun was had rigging up beeping time bombs in classrooms at school. I'm sure they knew who was doing it, but they couldn't prove anything... heh heh

I'm not saying I want to go back to that system, but it still lives fondly in the memorybanks...

This is one of the free games in AmiKit. This VM Amiga, lets you find over 300 apps to run most all hardware in the PC. Including burning apps for CD/DVD, audio SAY, type and let phonems speak in robotic voice, just a blast to see old Amiga programs work at PC speeds. Have fun!

I remember the Commodore C-64 computers coming out in 1982, I had been playing Space Invaders in 1981 and that loaded from a Cassette tape. Then a month later I think 2/81 Atari came out with the Cartridge version. But the Atari 2600 video game came with Space invaders back in 1976.

Still love Star Raiders, it could simulated 3D space and had Tie Fighters, Klingon Battle Cruisers, and Cylon Base Stars. And all this in a 4K cartridge. It sure bet the old TTY Star Trek I played and made versions of in High School.

I use LightWave, and back in 02 at a Sigraph expo, they released maybe 50 startrek objects. So I've like 85% of ships ect.., DeepSpace 9, Voyager and battle crusiers. I also do HD, so if you would like a WScrn desktop pic, let me know. I can call. kilovideo at gmail

I have over 2gig almost 3gig of Star Trek Images I've collected in the last 15 years. And in some cases captured from video. And I use a fractal scalier program I bought back in 1994. Most images tend to be in the 4:3 full screen format so I crop them to 16:10 since I use a 22" LCD monitor. Kind of fits with my HDTV. With the fractal program I like to make my wall paper in the 2560x1600 format since most screens at were my brother works (Lockheed Martian designing the Orion space capsule). Once did a wallpaper collection of the MARS Rovers from there Hi-def animated film Disney did for them. They were and may still be posted on one of the photo sites on the web but I think rescaled to 1920x1200 to save storage space.

till I threw up! I was so enamored with the marching aliens, that I played it 12 hours straight!

Needless to say, that was enough to last me 20 years! Now I'd like to play with it again.

I remember going home with the huge C-64 box some rainy day of 1985. Waiting forever to load Frogger II, Commando or BlueMax.

Pretty soon after, found myself digging into hardware, opening the enclosure a dozen times (away from dad's eye, of course), blowing up a couple of ICs after trying to light LEDs off from the modem port, or scratching assembler with a simple Basic compiler which translated commands to poke values, etc.

Thanks for dusting off fond memories!

I remember the beauty of the screen graphics of Blue Max. I had it on floppy disk. Even at 320x200 in 5 colors it was low res but great for TV's. This was years before the PC and VGA. Now 2560x1600x32bit color is becoming common. And that is approaching movie film resolution.

I cant tell you how many hours I logged on gunship and beachhead 1 & 2 and lets not forget those infocom games.. "you place a towel over your head"

I still have a Vic-20 and one that wasn't pictured here, a working Comodore SX-64. It has a 5" color monitor built in, and a floppy drive. The keyboard mounts to the front for transportation, and the handle becomes a front leg to raise the front up for easy viewing. I had lot's of fun with it back in the day.

After the ZX81 I received a VIC-20 which was the Commodore Computer just before the C-64. I new wanted a C-64.

But, I have plenty of C-128s and things to go with them. Learned the 6502 OpCode and it had a Z80 also. Ran CP/M on it for some time.

Misleading title : Have you forgotten that there was computer life before the home / personal one appeared ??

When I was 16 I wanted to buy a Vic 20, $1000 at the time, not the few hundred in the article. I had half the money so asked my parents for a loan for the other half.

No way. My parents were not going to lend me that kind of money for an electronic toy.

When I complained about this to my Aunt she said I should get a bank loan. Being 15 years old I didn't think they would loan me money, so she co-signed for me.

Now more than 30 years later I make my living programming.

So much for the predictive powers of parents!

Beautiful story, sandy@... Please don't blame your parents any more, just love them. As to your aunt, I don't think any encouragement is needed !

Both my parents had a hard time with the cable box let alone my computer that I saved for a year of work a Pizza Hut to get my Atari 800.

My dad in 1986 bought a PC clone for his traveling salesman biz. I had to teach him how to recall records of old sales that I converted from his file cabinets to DBase 2 system I authored for him to use. 15 seconds sure bet 4 hours of paper shuffling and drawer opening and closing.

Then came Desk Top Publishing, one day of work sure bet the hundreds to thousands he would pay others to do.

I remember spending hours with him writing programmes from scratch or transposing games from magazines into the machine line by line and then more hours spent finding the bad keystrokes. I taught myself calculus so I could write programmes, something my teachers failed to do - it was not a toy - you had to have dedication and perseverance to get anything out of those things.

I still have an old working Apple Mac LCII in the loft my first Mac - 4mb RAM!

I knew the prices weren't right, as when my dad bought me a VIC-20 and cassete drive; the computer was $99 and the drive $69 at closeout prices. My friend bought a C64 his freshman year (1980) of college, which alone set him back $599, not including the drive and TV. I later (1983?) bought a portable SX64 at a amazing price of $499, down from it's normal price of $799.

NOTE Next time you buy new machine.. keep old one as back up and storage.. bailed me out when PS failed on new one..stayed on net and such.

First one, after a TR "Scientific hand held".. was a IBM 8088...with TWO huge floppies. Loaded program in one and output in other. PURE DOS machine, no mouse etc. Then NEW hot machine was local guy bought a 286 with mouse and gold game... WOW. "Net speed" in a small town (finally got limited "net" hooked up) was at 9.9KBS when it worked.. and often dropped off. Wish I had a 8088 as still have the ole floppies of data laying around.
A bit later when working for company in PM dept went down to evaluate IBM "Project Mgmt" SW for our systems applications. On way back saw this shop called "Apple MAC". Had mouse, Icons, no real "schedule/programs SW" but was portable, easy to use.
Nearly got fired for recommending a few as prices was $10K EACH.. and they lowered to $6K day after we got five, nearly strangled the sales guy to get prices down.. and they have dropped ever since.
Looking back, that was quite a time and quite a revolution to date...and in 10 years?

The IBM 8088 was the first platform I worked with for Digitizing Photo/Video in 1984. Techmar Graphic card, our Focus card and our Digitizer. All code was written by a Commodor dealer, who was also an Ampex Engineer. His last product was for Motorola PHX, CrossHair Generator, to allign Probe Cards, after Video Waffer Mapping workstations were replaced. Great daze of the birth of technology. I ran Gem as a desktop on an 8088.

Would love to have one to play with again..but say one on ebay asking %2500.. and not at all sure if I have any programs on the big ole floppies (and yes they "flopped") to run, if remember right it was 520K floppy-"memory"?

You just have worked over an 8088 to get it to run all that stuff.. but remember well sitting there with DOS book learning how to work it.. hit a few keys and wait etc: but you really had to know DOS and such to make the things work, unlike now days.. and that first "high speed improvement of net" to 14.4 or was it 14.9...KBS when it worked.. took hours to download when you could.

every time I turn around. We got one at every garage sale. The city dump was piling them up too. People are just now getting rid of the old junk dusting up the basement.

This in just the last 5 years around here anyway.

I recall the old motto that America use to have. And it was built to last, you buy it once and it lasted your whole life. Then in the 80's or 90's it converted into build something to survive until we make a new one to be better than the last one, and they should have made enough now to afford a replacement.

So we have changed from quality to quantity, we need to get back to quality. For example look at NASA's Space Shuttle. When they converted the Heat tiles to become more Eco-friendly and no longer use Freon gas. It made the Tree huggers happy but made the tiles more damageable.

And now they are almost Eco-terrorist with the Gulf of Mexico oil problem. My solution wrap all the Eco-terrorist in Charmin TP and toss them into the Oil slicks. Note they are bio-degradable, oil is also but at a much slower and more damaging rate.