I remember being trained (at ITT Tech) on an 8086; Intel 8086 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I also remember using Logic probes; Logic probe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and knowing Boolean Algebra; Boolean algebra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It’d be interesting to see how many others remember this stuff and what else you may remember. I didn’t do a complete list, but if you’re interested just ask.
This was the very first computer I had myself access to and learned a
little bit how to program
http://oldcomputers.net/pet4032.html
(that was around 1981, a math teacher at my school taught us the very
beginnings of BASIC programming).
Two years later I bought myself a C64 and learned the 6502 assembler. I
was not using any “real” PC before I went to university where for the
first time I saw what DOS is (and FORTRAN 77 programming), that was on
IBM XT’s.
Later came all the rest. One machine I was impressed by was the SGI Indy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy
with IRIX which I could use as a graduate student (it was much more
impressive than the SUN and HP UNIX workstations I used before.
–
PC: oS 12.3 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.10.2 | GTX 650 Ti
ThinkPad E320: oS 12.3 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.10.3 | HD 3000
HannsBook: oS 12.3 x86_64 | SU4100@1.3GHz | 2GB | KDE 4.10.2 | GMA4500
I remember seeing those as a kid (12 or so and yes in the 80’s). I also remember the Apple IIe. My friend had a C64 and this was late 80’s. All thhis was prior to the 8086 that I was trained on at ITT Tech.
Well of course, making these statements just confirms that you are old as dirt you know. My first PC was a TRS-80 using a Z-80 CPU, a clone of an 8080 as I recall:
I had the Keyboard/PC, Expansion interface and monitor. I later added two 35 track, single density, single sided floppy drives that had 70K of storage each. Which was greater than the 48K of RAM memory it came with. It also had a cassette tape interface and I purchased a tape version of a machine language disassembler. I used the disassemble to disassemble its self and used the result to create a floppy based disassembler version. I then used that to figure out all sorts of things included how to copy Atari 400 game floppy disks.
I ultimately traded the TRS-80 PC to someone that worked at a Steak and Ale restaurant in Houston for 100 chicken breasts, 50 steaks, all vacuum packed and the recipe for their marinate sauce. I did not ask many question about the food source then. My next PC was an Osborne 1 Computer I purchased from a fellow employee after it got water damaged (it was slight) when the roof got torn off part of the office in a storm where I was working at the time. Insurance paid it off and I purchase it for $50 as I remember, but it might have been a $100 as it was long ago. I ran CP/M software on it and ultimately wrote several machine language programs we used in the business I worked at.
In 1983, the company I worked for made us an offer to buy a PC, interest free, for use at our home, which I paid off over two years. Clocking in at $2600, a lot of money back then, for this:
http://paste.opensuse.org/view/download/11432145
I might be regressing, but it is is faster than the old PC.
Thank You,
James, all those bring back memories to. They look like their from the 70’s and early 80’s. My first images were watching my dad at work using computers like those.
As to being old as dirt, I guess I had that coming since one year on my mom’s b-day I told her she taught history to the dinosaurs. Yeah, made her feel all kinds of warm and fuzzy.
My first one was an ATARI 600XL with memory 64K extensionrotfl! in 1984. I typewrote BASIC listings from magazine as we all did.
ATARI users suffered somewhat from lack of community. However, it did already contain a grapic processor and thus beat the C64 in term of speed although it had the same CPU.
Later, when I was in University we bought a 486DX. What did I have to learn? Not (Turbo)PASCAL, not FORTRAN no - MODULA!
That was just one semester (within mechanical engineering). Never heard of it, again.
Is that huge cauldron in the middle a double fan over the cpu ?
you bunch of kids!
my first computer experience was in '75 via a audio coupled modem
next to the terminal/printer to an IBM mainframe in another building
owned by my rich uncle…that system allowed only unclassified work…
next was in '79 from a glass terminal hardwired to the mainframe in
the basement…could only go up to secret level
then in (about 81) a different mainframe system/network went to top
secret and beyond…
first PC experience came in about '87 with an un-networked Zenith 150
cleared to use up to secret, with a “Winchester Drive” we could take
out at night and lock up in the safe.
i was never ‘trained’ as either a user or technician…that was
always the job of the secretaries, clerks and the electro-wizards…
first box i owned was a 486/33 with 110 MB hard drive and 4 MB RAM
bought in '92 (upgraded in about '94 to 16 MB RAM and a 66 MHz chip,
both of which were pretty expensive!)
–
dd
On 2013-05-26 10:03, dd wrote:
> you bunch of kids!
As a kid, I got a TI-57 as a present from my cousin from abroad. It was
impossible to find those things in Spain, or they were very expensive,
and only in the capital city.
I programmed a sort of moon landing simulator there. Later, I got (via
my cousin again) a TI-58C - I think I was on high school:
Here, the simulator was improved to consider air resistance, gravity
change, centripetal force, fuel weight…
Later, I could use a ZX-81 at a friend’s place.
The student residence I was at got 3 of these:
They used B/W, big TVs as display, got second hand. If I recall, I did
part of the setting up and purchasing. The cable was on the other side
of the room - people did sometimes tread on them pulling the plug…
after half an hour of loading a flight simulator game from tapes.
Finally, I got my own first computer: an Amstrad PC, with a whopping 512
KB of RAM and TWO floppies!
But B/W, not as the photos. I still keep it. I /think/ it still works.
I used it to learn programming. The university lab had one VAX
computer shared by hundreds of students. I think we got 3 hours per
week, to learn Pascal. When too many people were compiling, and others
were editing, you had to blind type and wait perhaps 20" for the display
to respond.
I tried renting computer time at a place, but it was expensive… and
they used something called ms-dos 3 and turbo pascal 2, so different
from the vax… so finally I had to buy my own machine to learn myself.
Well, to be honest, I did not buy it: my father did.
The assignment we had to do was to find a solution to the four color map
(it can be demonstrated that any map can be coloured with just 4
colours; our job was to find combinations of such). My PC found the
first 3 solutions in seconds, but the 4th took half a minute or more.
I thought that the VAX would be slower, but it was not: it found that
4th solution in a mere second or two. That VAX was good, the problem was
getting a CPU time slot.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
My very first experience with computers was in the sixties, when a schoolfriend’s father taught us how to punch holes in punch cards to make the IBM computer in the cardboard packaging factory stamp our names on a piece of cardboard. The IBM was used to control machines that cut the cardboard rolls into identical folded boxes. Unaware of what I had achieved my mother used the box with my name on it when they moved house, and wasted it afterwards.
In the eighties friends had the C64, Atari’s, but personally I missed that completely. Mostly because it was all games they seemed to care about. My first owned computer was a 8MHz 8086, 2 floppy drives, no HDD, 512KB. Soon after I became a sysadmin working with NCR Towers, which ran UNIX on Motorola processors. A huge 4MB RAM for 35 users on dumb terminals.
On 2013-05-26 14:26, Knurpht wrote:
>
> My very first experience with computers was in the sixties, when a
> schoolfriend’s father taught us how to punch holes in punch cards to
> make the IBM computer in the cardboard packaging factory stamp our names
> on a piece of cardboard. The IBM was used to control machines that cut
> the cardboard rolls into identical folded boxes. Unaware of what I had
> achieved my mother used the box with my name on it when they moved
> house, and wasted it afterwards.
What a pity!
> In the eighties friends had the C64, Atari’s, but personally I missed
> that completely. Mostly because it was all games they seemed to care
> about.
Same here.
But when I had one, I played O:-)
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
I went on a FORTRAN II course in about 1964. Our IBM cards went off site to an IBM 7030 somewhere - a turn-around of 2-3 days, very frustrating. Later I did some Algol 68 work too in the 70s on an ICL machine, but my first personal computer was an Amstrad in the 80s (forget which one). You had to load the software from a tape. Things have moved on a bit!
Am 26.05.2013 15:06, schrieb petermcph:
> I went on a FORTRAN II course in about 1964.
There are still some pdf copies around
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/fortranarchive/?s=&t=&type=&page=3
it is nice to see a reference manual with 65 pages for a language
–
PC: oS 12.3 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.10.2 | GTX 650 Ti
ThinkPad E320: oS 12.3 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.10.3 | HD 3000
HannsBook: oS 12.3 x86_64 | SU4100@1.3GHz | 2GB | KDE 4.10.2 | GMA4500
On 05/26/2013 01:28 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> got a TI-57
oh, i had forgotten all about those!!
a guy who worked for me had a TI 51 (or maybe SR-5x, this was about
'76) it had a little magnetic strip onto which you could save
programs…i made a program to calculate the amount of fuel used and
remaining on multi-hour missions…my first programming attempt was
terrible, i ran out of storage locations and number of steps
available…the guy who owned the machine looked at my program about
(no kidding) thirty seconds and showed me how to use the same little
routine over and over, and how to free memory slots when no longer
needed–with his help i freed about half the memory and steps (well,
he was a MIT grad and had done a lot of programming before i met him…)
–
dd
I did a picture history on facebook of my computer experience. It all started in 1969 on a Moog Hydra-point end mill, where I learned to read paper ASCI tapes and program a five axis machine. My background started with mini’s VAX, AS/400’s and some mainframe then later became more focused on PC’s. There’s a couple things that got left out but for the most part it’s all there. Laugh and enjoy!
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.294113727343808.71411.293680404053807&type=1
My favourite
https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc1/301728_294113927343788_979370446_n.jpg
I liked 2000 it was stable, and I don’t ever remember having servers abort … much, I ran it with a Citrix terminal farm and had a hard time justifying a reason to upgrade to 2003. But to this day my favorite OS is still VMS, and Dave Cutler designed both VMS and the NT family.
I have a softspot for win 98 SE too. After 2000 ,win started to focuss more than glitz(effects,glass phew etc…) rather than functionality 
Agreed, I have to add though openSUSE 12.3 is winning me over big time. A fine OS, no doubt. 
That’s an interesting thread and some of mentioned hardware I saw in a computer museum but as I’m begun studying CS I have to learn a lot of old stuff do understand today’s hardware which do not have such an awesome design like this one: SGI O2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . For some time I try to get a working one but either they do not work anymore or they are too expensive so that I can effort one.
