Your first computer

[Crimpsal]

In 1984, I was married with 2 kids.

It was when the kids got to about 10 years old , we bought our 1st machine.

[Easilyconfused]

Well my first computer was a ZX81 and I ended up buying the inevitable RAM pack. From there I upgraded to an Atari 400 and dual disk drives. A friend of mine was an electronics wizard and he built a speech synthesiser that ran out of the joystick ports. You could program it to say all sorts of things with a very metallic accent. Eventually a string of PCs followed from MS DOS 6.2 up to XP Professional. A quick inventory shows 1 working desktop and 3 more desktops in various state of cannibalisation. Another desktop arriving tomorrow and 2 laptops in residence as well.

At school we had BBC micros and a small fleet of Tandy TRS80 machines.

When I joined the laboratory at Rolls-Royce in 1987 I went "backwards" to Commodore Pets. Sturdy little machines they were and we had some real smart programmers who could get the BASIC programs to modify themselves whilst the program was actually running. Only computer I ever saw continuing to operate despite being dripped on by hot hydraulic liquid - the PCs that replaced them had a huge failure rate.

When the lab transitioned to HP Vectra PCs we bought a real nifty little card from a company called Brainboxes on the Wavertree Industrial Estate (included on the NWE 2 CD !!!) that allowed us to connect Commodore diskdrives to PCs and port the data across as ASCII data and the programs went from Commodore BASIS to MS BASIC. Brainboxes are still in business years later selling all manner of interesting gizmos.

John

[ajax103]

when you say "Acorn" is that an electron or the Atom

Darren

Home of the LCDR

No but it looked liked the archimedes but with a 4 letter code.

It Did'nt look like this did it



Darren

Home of the LCDR & Dodgy 8 Bit Dinosaurs

No, it was unique in that the everything was built into the keyboard, it didn't have a cd drive but back then a floppy drive was more then enough.

you just had to connect a mouse and a monitor and you were good to go. [/img]

[darren10000]

ajax103

Was it this one



It's the Acorn A3000 it came out in 1989

"The Acorn Archimedes A3000 was based on the Archimedes A410 but in an 1040ST/Amiga A500-style wedge unit. Designed for the home market, it was intended as a replacement for the BBC Micro and like the earlier Archimedes models it was only really used in British schools up until very recently.

Acorn started to phase out the Archimedes name and the machine was now simply badged Acorn A3000. Rumours have it that some of the Acorn A410 models had serious reliability problems and had to be recalled, so the Archimedes name was dropped to boost the machine's reputation.

Like the Atari and Amiga computers it had a built-in keyboard and disk drive located on the right-hand side, but unusually it also had two stereo speakers on either side of the unit. This form factor is ideal for a school environment as it doesn’t take up too much space and was often used with a metal plinth allowing a monitor to stand on top, usually an Acorn-badged Phillips 8853 (AKF12) or 8833 MK11 (AKF17).

The A3000 had two expansion ports. The internal one was a cut down 8-bit version of the type found on the earlier Archimedes machines. The second one, on the rear of the case, was a 16-bit version fully compatible with both earlier and later machines.

The operating system could read PC 720K disks and provided improved facilities for hard disk and networking, as well as some apps included in ROM which would appear on the task bar, such as Paint, Edit, and other useful programs. "

Darren

Home of the LCDR

[ajax103]

That's the one

[darren10000]

Getting a little bit more on Topic as this is a rail forum...There is an excellent BBC Emulator out there which works 100% realistically. Also there are loads of BBC Games out there and as they've all become Abondware they're Legal. I've tracked down Southern Belle & Evening Star, which were the first Train Sims. Anybody Interested PM me and I'll give you the URL's &c.

Darren

Home of the LCDR

P.S. Go and Vote on My Kebab Poll.

[allypally]

Had a SNES and stuff, used a very old, very clunky thing at school from 1993 onwards. Was bought my first home computer in about 1996 - a Tiny Computers machine sporting windows 95. It still lives on at my mates house as a 'vanilla' machine for testing things on.

[peterholton]

1978. Tandy TRS-80. B/W screen, very low resolution. Paid approximately £750 with the 16K memory expansion, but only Level 1 Basic. ISTR upgrading to L2 Basic later, but can't remember how much for.

Learnt a lot about assembly language on it. Great stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

Peter

[g0fthick]

My first PC was a Time computer, it was a Christmas gift from the parents in the Winter of 1998.

Of course i'm alot younger than most of you, however i have been using and building computers ever since.

What a horrible computer that Time thing was, eugh.

[rlmathers]

We were very poor when I was a lad, I could only afford an Abacus.
You had to slide your balls across the wires to make it work.

Ray

[ianm42]

It would have been about 1974, when Marconi donated an Elliot 920G to my grammer school in Farnborough. most of it sat underneath a table, with a big switch console on top. You fed it paper tape, created on a Flexowriter, and the output paper tape was printed back out on the Flexowriter. It was programmed using Algol. We had managed to get it converting centigrade to fahrenheit before it broke down, never to go again.

My university project used an Intel 8085 development kit, with 1k RAM, and hex keypad program entry. It had no way of saving the program, so had to be left switched on. A year later, the ZX80 came out, and would have revolutionised my project.

At work, I used Plessey Miprocs, and Ferranti Argus machines, before a long period using DEC machines (PDP-11 and Vax). At the time, it would have been unbelievable that DEC would so quickly become history, after being purchased by a 'toy' computer company, Compaq.

My first personal purchase was a ZX81, followed some time later by an Atari STFM, which was so far in advance of the BBC or other similar priced options. I also tinkered with an Acorn 6502 development kit, also programmed using a hex keypad.

My first PC purchase was around 1994, a Gateway 90MHz Pentium.

I currently have 4 PCs and a laptop,

P.S. a university mate of mine did some of the development work for the Dragon, which was a product of South Wales.

[CaldRail]

My fathers first PC was a Sinclair Spectrum. It was sent to him by accident so he dutifully phoned and told the supplier, who promptly sent him another. A truly awful computer by any standard!

[tripman]

Hi way back in the 70s, I was building a desktop calculator in monthly parts with the magazine "practical Electronics. It was costing an arm and a leg but I discontinued it when Sinclair brought out a build it yourself pocket calculator. Big pockets in them days. This I completed and still have. It was very basic, ate batteries and was made obsolete in no time by the calculator chip.
My first real computer was the Sinclair Spectrum, with the squishy keys.
Don't knock it because when it first came out there wasn't anything better.
I learned Basic with it and wrote yards and yards of code just to put a stick man on the screen.
Eventually I made a data base of 180 pubs, on my round, and all their leisure Mcs with service visits. But that was after the new keyboard and 64K RAM came along.
Then it was onto Amiga, Tiny, Time, the whispering giant Acer Aspire and now my amazing media-center Mesh.
CU Eric

[darren10000]

I thought I'd bump this one

Darren
73E

[slipperman12]

Hi Gentlemen,
My first computer was a Compukit UK101. I was into electronics at the time, building all sorts of circuits and this seemed to be THE thing for me to make - it came in a kit of parts, which all had to be soldered to a large printed circuit board. You certainly knew how to solder after building it! It had BASIC built into its ROM and, in its 'as built' state, output to a mono TV (I think it was channel 43, but I could be wrong!). Storage was on cassette tapes. Several hardware add-ons were made available for it, including floppy disk drives - at that time, they were the 5 1/4 inch disks - but I could never get it to work reliably On the other hand, they were a HUGE improvement on the tapes!

I ran it for, I think, about 2 years, until 1982/3 when the new kid on the block, the BBC Model B took my fancy! My UK101 has gone the way of all defunct equipment, but I understand there are still some people with working models. There are quite a few sites on the 'net which refer to the UK101, here's one : http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=802

Cheers,
Ged