Registered: May 2000
Location: Cleveland, Ohio 44067
Posts: 242

Speaking of the really slow modems, remember the bbs boards we used to jump on? I used to play dungeons and dragons on one site.

__________________
What does it look like I am doing...I am kickin' my @ss!!!

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Oak Grove, Kentucky
Posts: 211

quote:

---

Originally posted by usonian2001

Anyone remember GEOS? My dad bought a copy when the C64 was on its way out (and software was getting super-cheap), but I never spent enough time with it to figure out what it was good for. IIRC, GEOS stood for 'Graphic Environment Operating System' - it was an attempt at giving the C64 a GUI, but because the core applications (word processor, etc) were spread across four floppies it was just too big of a pain in the butt to use. At the time I didn't quite understand the relationship between hardware and operating system (with the C64 you just turned it on and got the READY prompt with blinking cursor... OS? What's an OS?) So I never got into it. In retrospect, GEOS was a pretty impressive effort!

-Andy

---

__________________
<A HREF=http://www.xecu.net/bcollins/index.htm><IMG SRC=http://www.xecu.net/bcollins/BEBOOKEM.GIF>

Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Midwest
Posts: 25

After using my Apple IIe for 11 years, I went to a CompUSA store and bought a reconditioned 386 laptop with 2mb RAM and a 70mb hard drive for around $1000. It had a paper-white display and a floppy, too. Converted alot of AppleSoft Basic programs to QBasic, added a C compiler from MIX (which is still available, BTW), and just days before win95 was released, installed win3.1 (to run Turbo Pascal for Windows).

Had to add more 8mb RAM (for an oddball total of 10mb) to get TP to run properly -- 'cept the screen kept flickerin' every time the hard drive got accessed. Never really knew why it did that.

Doesn't work anymore, as the CMOS battery can't be replaced. Back then, if that battery died, you were expected to buy another computer. When it did, I grabbed one of the last PowerMac 6100/66 DOS Compatible systems on the shelf -- and that was a dream system, being a Mac and a PC in one box.

__________________
Get someContent.

Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Austin, TX
Posts: 49

My high school was the second in Melbourne, Australia, to get its own computer. It was 1971 or 72, and the machine was a Digital PDP-8/L. Eight kilobytes of real live ferrite core memory, one ASR-33 teletype terminal, and no external storage except for a paper tape reader and punch. You had to toggle in the first dozen instructions (RIM) through the front panel, which told it how to read the binary loader tape (BIN) which told it how to load the Formula Calculator (FOCAL) language tape. Somewhere around here I still have an ASR-33 Teletype fan-fold tape that produces a 1974 calendar with a nude girly picture done in multi-overstrike ASCII graphics.

Many were the hours lost on playing Lunar Lander, Towers of Hanoi and Hammurabi after school. I guess that's where my computer addiction started.

At college, we had a Control Data Cyber 76 (I think), and all our computing assignments had to be submitted on 80-column punch cards, or on optical-recognition cards if you didn't want to stand in line for one of the three card punch machines. Your results came back around half a day later on 15x11 fan-fold paper.

I left college and got a job as a computer operator on an IBM 370/158 mainframe. Can't remember the stats of the machine itself, but I will forever remember the IBM 3330 removable disk drives. Those disk packs weighed around 20 pounds each, and held a whopping 200 KILObytes of data. We had around 200 packs and 16 drives, and on an average shift you could expect to handle over 100 disk mounts. My right arm will forever be stronger than my left!

We had a hazing ritual for newbie operators - we'd tell them it was time for the monthly chad audit, sit them down with the chad bin from the card punch, and tell them to sort the chads into piles according to the punched out numbers thereon. Kept 'em quiet for a whole shift.

The first PC (they were called "microcomputers" then) that I laid hands on was one that a friend had built from a kit, running CP/M. Don't recall much detail of that one.

The first PC I really got to use in any serious way was one of the first IBM PC XT's to hit the office, and the first machine I bought for myself was an Ollivetti M24, which was a souped-up PC-AT clone with a 16MHz 8086, 640KB RAM, a 20MB hard disk and Olivetti's version of DOS 3.2.

Thanks for the memories!

Registered: May 2001
Location:
Posts: 3

first computer

Wow reading those really takes me back!

I got my first computer as an 8th grade graduation present in 1983. It was TI 99/4a. I didn't have the fancy expansion box for it or anything, I just read and saved with cassette tape. I actually got my parents to pop $100 that christmas for the extended basic cartridge. I did quite a bit of programming on that thing.

My second was a c64 which I ran a BBS on for a couple of years. Started out with 300 baud (I think I paid $300 for it too!) and progressed to 1200, 2400 and then (gasp) 9600 baud! I had a couple of 1541's and a 1571 drive. I used an old b&w tv for a monitor, mostly. I had an old commodore printer too. I remember I actually had this program called "1541 sings" that would make the drive play music by banging the r/w head of the drive around!! Argh! Anyone remember Fast Back'em? You could start up this program and then actually disconnect the 1541 drives from the c64 and use the two daisy chained drives to copy disks without the computer connected.

Then around sophomore-junior year of HS I got an Atari 520ST, a nicer dot matrix printer, a real monitor, a SS/SD floppy, and a DS/DD 3rd party floppy that had an LED readout of what track number it was on. I think just for the ST, one floppy, monitor, and 1200 baud modem, it was like $1200.00.

After that, even though I became a PC tech (1989, working with 286's) then a LAN admin, I never bought a PC for home until about 3 years ago!

Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Hacienda Heights, Ca
Posts: 302

Our first system at home (parents) was the Odessey Pong.

In college - some IBM mini, TRS-80's, and an Altair (played Star Trek on it).

First system at work was the Burroughs B7700 (back when mainframes would fill a large computer room).

The first computer I owned was a IBM XT with 640K RAM, 20 mb (half height drive...way ahead of everyone else at work ).

Handheld - Sharp Wizard

---------------------------------------------------------------

Current PC systems - Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop, 3 Gateway2000's, Dell Optiplex.

Work - Unisys NX6820-PL4, (2) NX5602, A14-1121, (2) NX4600, (3) LX5100, NX4200, (2) LX100. A bunch of Nt's/Win2K's servers.

Handhelds - (2) Prism's (me/wife), Deluxe (daughter), Solo (son).

__________________
Bret Snyder<BR>If you don't know where you're going,<BR>You'll probably end up somewhere else.

Registered: May 2000
Location: Cleveland, Ohio 44067
Posts: 242

Odyssey 2 was way better than Atari 2600 and then of course Mattel Intellivision kicked some serious butt. Baseball, Football, Utopia, and slew of other cartridges. Remember the joysticks had a keypad with an overlay for each gameand the joystick was really a flat disc.

__________________
What does it look like I am doing...I am kickin' my @ss!!!

Registered: Oct 2000
Location:
Posts: 61

quote:

---

Originally posted by ByronC


Hi Andy & All,
Yes, GEOS is still around. It has expanded into a full Desktop GUI Operating System known as New Deal Office. I'm using New Deal Office 98 "daily" with Windows 95.

This is NewDeal Inc. web site:
http://www.newdealinc.com/

I'm also NewDeal E-List Maintainer.

Byron

---

Registered: Mar 2001
Location: Nebraska- the Good life
Posts: 695

Geoworks/New Deal is an amazing program. I love(d) how well it could integrate graphics and text - far better than Word, and much easier than Publisher or other text/graphics programs from microsoft.

The GUI interface was so logical and friendly that my techophobic wife rarely had any problems using it, while she is constantly asking about how to do similar things in Windows- even several years later!

You used to be able to run the entire thing on a mere pittance of hard drive and RAM memory- I think it only needed 256K or something RAM, and a couple megs of memory.

It could run on old DOS machines, 286's- almost anything! The incredible thing to me was the price- $76 a few years ago for the entire package- GeoWrite, GeoDraw...

And here we are nowadays throwing away otherwise perfectly good 386's because they won't handle Windows 95 or other new mega-programs! And this is a 'good' thing?

Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Glen Burnie, Maryland
Posts: 205

Digging back in the thread...

quote:

---

Originally posted by bradhaak
Commodore 64 - My favorite game was Empire. I still play Empire Deluxe (look at my avatar), and soon on my Palm.

---

__________________
Sven

If at first you do succeed, try not to look astonished.

Registered: May 2000
Location: Cleveland, Ohio 44067
Posts: 242

Risk is awesome, I have the two latest versions and much prefer the first one! "Blind Risk", what a great concept!!!

__________________
What does it look like I am doing...I am kickin' my @ss!!!

Registered: Aug 2000
Location: New york
Posts: 1

1st video game was Telstar(kinda like pong on loads of "D" batteries)

As far as computers goes, atart 400(love those pressure keys),Atari 800xl with dual floppy drive and a 1200 bps modem(i think it was 1200. then I grabbed a comodore 64, mastered oracle(first dongle I ever use, and never actually worked) They lasted through college, where I fell in love with macs, learned pc's cuz they were cheap. then got a packard bell 486 33, dell p2 266 ,then p4 1.4....phew...too much cash blown there.

Registered: Oct 2000
Location:
Posts: 34

Kaypro 10!!!!!!!!!!! Woo hooooo, those were the days. Still have it actually, but it has been about 4 years since I plugged it in. It was advertised as being portable, but I imagine it was a little like carrying a "suitcase nuke." Or maybe a lot like carrying my wife's suitcase.

Ahh, that tiny little 4 inch screen, the CP/M language.... Kaypro grew so fast in its initial months that they were actually assembling them in a circus tent in their parking lot!

Speaking of CP/M -- anyone use the CP/M disk that came with their Commodore 128?
So many great memories in this thread.

Registered: Oct 2001
Location: CT
Posts: 3

Re: Re: What was your first computer?

quote:

---

Originally posted by K. Cannon

YES!! Man, I'm jealous--we got the Atari 400, with flat, plastic keyboard and only 16k (Which my dad and I later souped up with replacement keyboard at a whoppin' 48k).
Also, (you dog, you) we had the TAPE RECORDER to enter data instead of the floppy. On the States and Capitals game, one one side, some dude would talk about the game while it loaded.

Did you get some game called "Preppie" (I think) It was like Frogger except you had some guy in pink shirt and khakis trying to cross a golf course.
The worst was, the games took FOREVER! on tape and after a while, they would mess up at the very end of the loading process. It was quite frustrating.
Of course, all of this wonder was taking place on our television set, which to computer plugged into. Then we got an Apple iiC with screen and floppy

Who remembers the Sinclair?

---

Registered: Aug 2000
Location: South Carolina
Posts: 1062

How much did that thing actually weigh, anyway?

Registered: Dec 2000
Location: Philadelphia
Posts: 19

The first computer I ever used was a Vic20 which I started typing on as soon as I was old enough to read (which was earlier than most I'm told). My dad had a mortgage calculator and a typing tutor program on tape (that tape deck for the unit was so cool! One of my favorite things to do was stick the data tapes in a regular tape deck and listen to the squeals) I copied all the programs out of the book that came with it about programming in Basic, but knew nothing about how the programming worked (except GOTO of course). We also had a cartridge with Space Invaders on it that you stuck in the back.

The first and only console system I ever owned was an Atai 2600. My favorite games were Donkey Kong and the Space Shuttle simulator. I wish I still had either one of those systems. My dear mother decided they were trash and I never saw them again Oh well. I bet I could find them if I really looked

__________________
DLPanther
<a href= "http://www.dlpanther.com">DLPanther's Nonsense Page</a>
"When All Else Fails, Improvise!"

Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Misplaced Canuck in Charleston SC
Posts: 257

My first computer back in 1985 was an Apple IIe with 64K ram, and an extra 64K on the 80 column video expansion card. Started with one floppy, eventually inherited a second one from a friend who traded his II+ for a IIc. Money I earned delivering newspapers went into a joystick, grapple printer card and epson dot matrix printer as well as numerous infocom games.

One of my favourite programs was one I ported over from GWBasic to do simulations of galaxy collisions. I could set up various parameters for each galaxy and watch the IIe crunch away and show what happened to the galaxies as they moved through each other. It was one of those things that I usually left running overnight

I learned to touch type by typing in programs from Nibble magazine. Good old applesoft basic Learned to read assembly too typing all that hex code in.

I was even using it up until my second year university 5 years later for some of my essays and lab reports.

It's still in the basement of my parents' house. I've been thinking about bringing it back with me on my next trip home.

Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Glendora, CA
Posts: 96

The Colecovision Adam Computer...the model I owned was the one you had to plug into the front of the Colecovision game console. I don't have the computer anymore, but I do still have the coleco.

That thing was a beast...equiped with a tape drive for the brains, and a daisy wheel printer...and the word processor could be switched between process and "live" modes. Meaning you could type and edit and then print...or use the whole thing as a typewriter, and the printer would print as you typed on the keyboard.

My first game I remember on it was Zaxxon. Oh man...!

And if you accidentally left your tape near the computer (anywhere near being 3 feet), it would instantly erase anything you had on it when you flipped the power switch...! I swear that thing would cause a neighborhood brown-out when turned on...those were the good ol' days!

Sam

ps-thanks to whoever here made me realize how old I am getting!

__________________
<CENTER>
<strong>
<span style="color: blue;">Where's the "Make Coffee" button again?</span>
</strong>