Wednesday's Question of the Day: first computer?

swampwitch

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What kind of computer did you learn on? Do you remember it fondly... or not?

I learned on a VAX terminal for a UNIX system. I used Scribe and VI to type in scientific papers handwritten by the scientists. The equations were complicated, and the commands to enter in the equations were even worse! When they came out, I LOVED my Macintosh 512K; I could see the equations immediately, saved a lot of trees since before we had to print to see them.
 
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carolina

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Goodness! it's been a while!
TK-82 :lol3:
The TK-82, of Microdigital Eletrônica Ltda, was one of the first Brazilian home computer anyone could afford. It was a fairly close copy of the Sinclair ZX-80 albeit looking very similar to a Timex TS-1000, the US version of the ZX-81 which was also sold in Brazil.

It was the second computer made by Microdigital, after the TK-80, first attempt to produce a ZX-80 copy. The company will later produce clones of a variety of other popular computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Apple II and even Tandy TRS-80 Model III. Actually, Microdigital never produced computers of its own design.

However, the TK-82 wasn't a mere copy of the ZX-80 but featured several enhancements: two KB of RAM instead of one, a joystick interface, a tone generator and a dual tape transfer speed which could be either 300 or 4800 baud.

Three models were successively launched. The TK-82 with 4 KB of BASIC ROM, then the TK-82S with 8 KB of ROM, then the TK-83 which RAM memory could be expanded up to 64 KB. First models used standard logic chips. They were later replaced by one custom chip, probably copied from the Sinclair ULA.

images can be seen here:http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=912&st=1
Data was recorded in an audio cassete :doh3:
 

Winchester

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One of my GFs gave me my first computer a very long time ago as a Christmas present, an Acer. I remember it had two 5-1/4 inch floppy drives and a 40 mg (yes, mg) hard drive. Word Perfect 5 or 6, I think. The printer was a dot-matrix. The monitor was about 14 inches with an amber-colored font.

We've come a long way since that first computer.
 

aqualoon

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Commodore 128 that my Grandfather had.  Because I was on his PC so much as a kid (which was really uncommon at this time) he bought me a Commodore 64 that went in my room.  I thought I was so cool slinging out command prompts to load games - totally hacker.
 

cheshirecat

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In 1976 I took a programming class at college.  The computer consisted of a keyboard and a big roll of paper.  You wrote your program in basic then hit run to see the results printed on the paper.   

I dropped out of the class because I couldn't get any lab time.  They only had 2 terminals and both were always in use.  Just about any time I went to the lab both were surrounded by boys playing Star Trek. 

My next opportunity was in 1985 when I had the good fortune to work for a very intelligent man. He talked the department head into buying an  IBM Personal Computer model 5150.  It not only had a monitor it had a 10 meg hard drive (built in) and 64kb of ram.  He asked me if I was interested in working with it to find ways to make our jobs more efficient.
 

One day I was exploring the directory on the drive and found Star Trek.  I can only imagine how it must have been playing it on paper.   

It wasn't until 1993 that I actually bought my own home computer.  It was a generic 386DX-33 with 128kb of ram and I paid extra for a 210 meg hard drive.

I am a dinosaur.
 
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Draco

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I don't remember.. HP Hewlett, but don't remember much more about it. I used to play Kings Quest on it all the time!

but I do remember my first website I tried to sign on to.

I remember watching Beast Master, and on the ending screen, they had the website. I went to my computer, and went to DOS Mode and tried to get to that website, lol. We didn't have internet then. Then I remember when we finally did get AOL, my sister taught me about the chat rooms and there I learned how to Role Play on AOL and been addicted to that for years o_O
 

andrya

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Commodore 64.

The first "real" and usable computer l had was in 1988, a Best Systems 286 with 10m hd, and the big old external modem.  At the time we thought we'd NEVER fill the disk space, lol.
 

Draco

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actually, thinking about it, in elementry school before having a home computer, we had an old Apple computer.. Apple II I think. It had a floppy drive, and I remember playing a game where we had to set pullies and wedges to get a ball from one side of the screen to another. I don't remember much else except I loved that little computer
 
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