How Long Have You Been Using Computers

[Bagwan]

I started in 1965 on the ICT 1500, a second generation mainframe. Graduated to a IBM 1401 thence to the ICT 1900, 2900 series and then the Univac 1100/84 series. Now I can hardly catch my breath and feel like an old medical man who can remember using leeches.

[Onyxia]

Vic 20, with the tape drive. Great joys of having those booklets of dos games you could type in to make like the snake game or something. From there i went to commodore 64, then the amiga. Still remember my first modem, 300 baud modem. Good times.

[mdechgan]

Commodore baby yeah! I remember connecting it to my television screen via RF adapter.

I don't really consider it to be real computer though more like a gaming system.

My other "real" computer witha disk drive though was the apple II.

[2008bangkok]

For those curious > Every digital computer type ever made

As for myself, started in 1965 (not counting the analog computer I built in high school) with Honeywell, Burrough's and Univac big iron while in the military. Afterwards a z80 computer kit with 8" floppy and tape recorder for programming. Did a lot of assembly language on it modifying the DOS and bios of the system and running CP/M. Then to PDP09 PDP11 PDP15 LSI-11 series DEC computers then DEC VAX minis and probably every generation of PC processor types since. Speaking of the 4004, designed a control/display system with one at the university I worked at.

Also the Plato system at the University of Illinois. Plasma based vectored touch screen terminals that played games pretty well. IBM 360/370's including assembly language programming during my computer science studies.

No SInclair zx80 or zx81 on that list they were a classic

[JetsetBkk]

... It replaced an old electromechanical Friden calculator which was lubricated by sewing machine oil, but you could divide with it. But if you divided a very large number by a very small number, the machine filled the room with the smell of oil and could take 15 minutes...

Now you're talking! Fridens??? My very first company had four of those babies :D

Noisy, vibrating, smelly, regularly jamming (not enough sewing machine oil) electromechanical monsters... bl00dy marvellous! They belonged in a museum when I used them, and now - hopefully - that's where they are:

[lungbing]

1968 with a ICT 1903. 32k of memory but after you loaded executive from paper tape only 28k useable.

Programmed in PLAN (assembly level) COBOL, FORTRAN and ALGOL.

Remember the card punch? I could still punch one now. 11 4 8 in one column was asterisk and most programmes had four asterisks to end input.

An 8 meg disk drive was added the year after. The interchangeable disks were about a foot tall and about 18 inches across with 7 or 8 platters on a spindle. Took two hands to carry it and put it into the drive.

My own first computer was the Radio Shack TRS80. Those were the days.

(edited for spelling)

Edited October 2, 2008 by lungbing

[xbusman]

If you ever need someone to program your IBM systems 24 with punched cards in EITHER Cobol or RPG3, I am yo man. Got on the USENET in may 1979, how do I remember that foray into cyberspace? Had to call into another university and log in then send a request to my university to remove my rather prodigious parking violations allowing me graduate a week later. Used a rotary phone and set it on a "modem" that was about the size of a Prius, from whence it raged through data at about 64 bits per second. Speeds like that left a lasting impression.

[PeaceBlondie]

Speaking of slow speeds, I used to sign off the cybercafe on the plaza in Granada, Nicaragua, when the internet slowed to less than 100 bytes per second...in 1999.

[Niloc]

My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer(1983), the Yanks could not spell then either! I imported a proper keyboard and installed extra memory to take it to 100K.

Two books came with it, 'Getting Started with your Color Computer' and 'Going ahead with your Color Computer'. I learnt BASIC from these two books, updated to a single board computer attached to a terminal from a junk yard and taught myself Pascal which is still my favourite language, now Delphi which is really Pascal. My last program is the 90 day calculator for Thai Visa which is written in Delphi 7.

Colin

[gk10002000]

college freshman in 1975. used some sort of punch card computer in high school in 1974 but can't recall the details. University had an IBM 360 with punch cards and batch processing. Used CRT and real time compiling and running in about 1978.

Bought an Apple II+ in 1983. Never used it. Had no memory, no software, a real clunker. Been using computers since then in industry and university. Went from mainframes to Sparc stations, then to PCs and now with the centralization of the PC software and IT department control, almost back to the mainframe idea again.

Note: Really did use a slide rule in 1975 in engineering freshman class. In 1976 my fluids processor that used to spend a lot of time on site at shipyards brought in this massive round cylnder thing. Some sort of giant slide rule used on site. Big so it gave enough accuracy. Or, the wife could beat you with it as it was about three times the size of your basic pastry roller.

[george]

My first computer was in 1980, ABC80.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC80

The ABC 80 (Advanced BASIC Computer 80) was a home computer engineered by the Swedish corporation Dataindustrier AB (DIAB) and manufactured by Luxor in Motala, Sweden in the late 1970s (first model August 1978) and early 1980s. It was based on the Zilog Z80 running at 3 MHz and had 16 KB RAM, expandable to 32 K, and 16 KB ROM containing a fast semi-compiling BASIC interpreter.

ABC 80 normally used a dedicated (included) tape recorder for program and data storage, but could also be expanded to handle disk drives (and many other peripherals). Some sound effects could be produced by a Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip which was connected to an 8-bit output port, but there was no way to control the chip's features in any detail, so sound was limited to 96 fixed sounds. The monitor was a black and white TV set modified for the purpose (an obvious choice since Luxor also made TVs).

[Crossy]

The first real computer I brushed with was a DEC PDP-8 running OS-8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/8 in the mid '70s.

Previous to that I'd had a lot of dealings with an electro-mechanical analogue computer (don't remember the type designation) that controlled the big 3-barrel anti-submarine mortar found hanging on the back of the Bristol class (Type 42) destroyers. Huge thing used boxes of synchro-resolvers and differentials to do incredibly complex real-time sums to drop the mortar somewhere in the same ocean as the submarine. Used a weird 115V 1100Hz 3-phase supply that HURT if you got hold of it (as I did on numerous occasions).

Ahh, them was the days

[CHdiver]

First Computer was a IBM PS/1 1992 or 93 First thing I did was install a game (or tried it). Somehow managed to format the disk I had to install the game from and had to ask for repacement (witch I got for free). My knowledge did improve a little over the next years thought.

[JetsetBkk]

The first real computer I brushed with was a DEC PDP-8 running OS-8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/8 in the mid '70s....

I used PDP/11 23's in the mid '70s - running RSX11M. Used to raise the priority of my editor (EDT) session so I got more CPU time than the other guys. Had to stop that when a much more knowledgeable guy started getting his own back on me!

[Tywais]

I used PDP/11 23's in the mid '70s - running RSX11M. Used to raise the priority of my editor (EDT) session so I got more CPU time than the other guys. Had to stop that when a much more knowledgeable guy started getting his own back on me!

Ah, deja-vu. Our primary control computer for a linear accelerator at the nuclear physics lab I worked at was a PDP-11/34, also running RSX11M. However, access was restricted to us developers and the accelerator operators for safety/security reasons. Wrote the drivers & interrupt handlers for the custom control electronics in MACRO-11 and the primary control software in FORTRAN. Our DEC VAX systems ran VMS and our original networking used DECNET protocols.

[geriatrickid]

1975: anybody remember those IBM punchcards? The chads made great confetti.

I can remember writing exams where we had to colour in the a,b,c,d,e answer for part of our answers and that was the 80's. I look at the mac I cart around now (did you know it is the most popular "brand" for those in the health sciences?) and compare it to my first portable Toshiba that weighed a ton and used a floppy disc.

I am so greatful to have missed having to learn Cobol and Fortran.

[JetsetBkk]

I used PDP/11 23's in the mid '70s - running RSX11M. Used to raise the priority of my editor (EDT) session so I got more CPU time than the other guys. Had to stop that when a much more knowledgeable guy started getting his own back on me!

...Wrote the drivers & interrupt handlers for the custom control electronics in MACRO-11 ...

Ahh, MACRO-11 assembler. Did it for about 12 years from 11M v3 (I think) to 11M-Plus v4.4 (the last version I think)! We were still using PDPs when Mentec took over the PDP range. We bought a load of Mentec M100's too!

Memories, memories...

173000g

[tartempion]

1968 Univac 9200

1968 Ruf Praetor

1970 Kienzle 6000

1972 Philips P350

1974 IBM 370

[GungaDin]

This looks like a roll call of the oldest buggers on tv.

[kiakaha]

back in bletchly park on the 40's, i busted the enigma cipher Me and Colossus were like Steve Jobs and Lisa.

thats what i tell the girls anyway, they just dont seem too impressed

[pampal]

Started in 1980 programming on punch cards which were taken once a week to the mainframe at LAUSD headquarters. Next it was on to the Commodore PET and then onto a Atari 800. The rest is history.

[unomi]

I had one of the first Spectrum Computers. That would have been 1980?

Well do I remember the days of Manic Miner and the hours of fun spent playing that.

From the computer magazines we spent hour after hour typing in the games program listings only to fine they - or we - had made an error with the data so the program did not work!!

Fun days.

Yeah My first was an zx80 aswell, best thing ever. 

Played Scuba Diver or whatever it was called for hours on end, then the typing in of programs and getting those cool programming books with cartoon characters, can still remember the image of the 'stack'.

the zx80 was so popular there would be radio shows about them where they between interviews etc, they would play programs thru the radio that you could record on a tape player!! 

So I guess I grew up in the age of am-fi. I still think that is quite cool.

Later I got my hands on what I would still say is the best computer ever made, the Amiga, superb mix of hardware innovation and unix'y OS. There is an entire alternate history where the Amiga won out and the world is a better place. 

Never really saw the point of DOS or win3.1 (which was the first I saw). I do remember going insane while learning OpenBSD, those were fun times. ASCII Daemon screensaver coming on while stumped on something seemingly intractable, evil wizards.

Also, I still have my hp42s  

[Freddie_fly]

I started on Texas Instruments 980 computers with paper punch and 9inch tape as program loaders. remember getting the first TI PPC at work and trying to figure it out.

The first machine I personally owned was an Amstrad 6128 around 1985, followed by a 286 from an old UK company called Viglen (believe they may be still around now).

In 1980 we also had the TI 770 terminal onboard our ship. all TI offices worldwide had them and we had a system called IMS (internal messaging service) which used the Transit satellite, with it we could send messages to any TI facility worldwide (email before it hit the mainstream). I bet TI wish they had patented that.

Freddie

[simonphuket]

Wow, I thought I had been around for a while, but am a newbie compared to some of you guys. Respect . My first program on punchcards must have been around 1974 or so? Just fun on my parents IBM terminal. My first job as a programmer was in 1986, IBM mainframes. Worked for Big Blue for several years, cool stuff at the time. Lots of assembler programming, extensions to the OS... Then, as the career progressed, work became more and more boring, and finally ended up here.

Anyone knows if the wonderfull Big Irons from IBM are much used in LOS? Back home the real mainframe specialist are sought after, not many around anymore.

[JetsetBkk]

...Lots of assembler programming... as the career progressed, work became more and more boring, and finally ended up here...

[G54]

Doh!!! Posted already.

I need a break

Edited January 13, 2009 by G54

[G54]

I had one of the first Spectrum Computers. That would have been 1980?

Well do I remember the days of Manic Miner and the hours of fun spent playing that.

From the computer magazines we spent hour after hour typing in the games program listings only to fine they - or we - had made an error with the data so the program did not work!!

Fun days.

Yeah My first was an zx80 aswell, best thing ever.

Played Scuba Diver or whatever it was called for hours on end, then the typing in of programs and getting those cool programming books with cartoon characters, can still remember the image of the 'stack'.

the zx80 was so popular there would be radio shows about them where they between interviews etc, they would play programs thru the radio that you could record on a tape player!!

So I guess I grew up in the age of am-fi. I still think that is quite cool.

Later I got my hands on what I would still say is the best computer ever made, the Amiga, superb mix of hardware innovation and unix'y OS. There is an entire alternate history where the Amiga won out and the world is a better place.

Never really saw the point of DOS or win3.1 (which was the first I saw). I do remember going insane while learning OpenBSD, those were fun times. ASCII Daemon screensaver coming on while stumped on something seemingly intractable, evil wizards.

Also, I still have my hp42s

Did you play 'Jaguar' on the Amiga? Two people at the same time racing each other around those circuits. I remember my son and his friends all coming round as we all had great fun with that game.

When UT came out on the PC, the house was full again. Days of dial up, high ping rates and then we got broadband with NTL and kicked a lot of ass against those poor suckers still on dial-up.

Great days.

[bdenner]

Haven't read all the posts here but my 1st exposure to computers was in the RAAF in the 60s's where they may not have been electronic but pneumatic ---------

Does that qualify???

[tominchaam]

I started with an Apple back in 1984. Added 10MB to the original 1 MB and felt I would never run out of capacity. The money I spent on service might have been more than what I paid for the PC. But I loved it and stayed with the same brand for quite some years.

Interesting to see the majority here have used computers for more than 20 years. Would be interesting as well to see a simular poll regarding the age of the members on this forum - my guess is most are over 50, maybe even over 60.

Edited January 13, 2009 by tominchaam

[sniffdog]

1980 ... Tandy TRS-80 ....then Commodore 64, Atari ST and PC ....

The TRS-80 came standard with 4KB of memory .... I expanded to 16KB. The price .... probably the same as a whole PC nowadays.

Edited January 13, 2009 by sniffdog