I originally posted this post on my blog.
An owl blinking in a large forest made us all jump in surprise.
It was back in 4th grade. We all wer...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
OK, I feel very old right now.
The first computer I used was an IBM 1130. It was about the size of a refrigerator, had 8k core memory, 16mb disk cartridges, a "high speed" card reader, a selectric-like console, and a 60 line per minute printer (yes math whizzes, that's 1 line per second; you could listen to it setting up each line before the big clunk that printed it).
This computer ran report cards and schedules at my high school. I'm forever grateful for the guy who administered it who decided that high school students could learn about it too. I learned Fortran first, but later assembly language, RPG, and even BASIC using a version from Portugal that had all of the messages in Spanish.
I got into advanced things like loading registers directly using switches on the console; at first to give myself more "lives" in whatever game I was playing, but later to interact with assembly programs. I got good at partitioning programs into chunks that could be dynamically loaded to make stuff fit in that 8k.
I was fascinated with all this and it led me to a career that I love. The technologies keep changing, but a lot of the fundamentals stay the same.
I have a core plane from an 1130 in my office. It's amazing to think of each bit as a small magnetic donut with a couple of wires running through it.
If you've read this far, here's an amusing trick that we used to play on the guy who taught the Fortran and RPG courses. The console had these labeled plastic blocks with lights behind them for indicators. There was a green "running" one, a yellow "out of paper" one, a few others, and one bright red "parity check" one. I don't think we or that teacher knew what parity was, but we all knew it was bad when it happened. So, while his class was in there keypunching and running their programs, we would swap the "out of paper" and "parity" blocks and then punch a small hole in the console paper. When the paper printing out the job control stuff got to that point, everything stopped and the red light came on. The teacher would panic, but one of us wizards said we could fix it (by flipping some switches, looking very smart, and then advancing the paper a bit). That never got old.
Thanks for reading.
John
Have you ever had the chance of letting him know you went into computers because of that?
For me it was more like a happy accident :)
Loved this take.
Hey that sounds like a funny game...or prank :)
Thanks for your comment
We had to solder the chips on the board for my first computer. And then had to flip switches on the front panel to load the binary to program it.
Got fancy after that and had a TTY33 and only had to use the panel to load the load program, then read the program off the paper tape.
Also did some programming on a Tektronix 4051. They had a feature where you could make a program 'encrypted' on the DC300 tape drive. Turns out that the encryption was an exclusive OR operation and if you loaded the tape with the program as a data tape, you could read the header. I wrote a program that used an ASCII representation of bytes and decoded the program. For some reason they declined to use it as a submission for their user group.
I worked at AT&T when Bjorn stopped by to give a talk on 'C with classes'.
Once, another gentleman of similar age and I were talking about times like these and one of the younger folks spoke up saying "I learned about that in my computer history class." sigh
I once used a FORTRAN where you could pass in the address of a constant and change it's value. 1 + 1 could equal 4.
And next month I turn 70 and will finally retire, the vast majority of my life as a programmer (aside from a miserable couple of years as a Product Owner.)
I used a couple of Tektronix "graphics" terminals (4010 and 4030, IIRC) at my first job. they were glorified Etch-A-Sketches. You had to erase the whole screen to draw something new.
Yeah, FORTRAN call by value was just the same as call by name, so if you assigned a value to a constant argument in a subroutine, that memory location got altered and 1 could equal anything you wanted it to. LOL That was challenging to debug.
The 4051 was, I believe, either a 4010 or 4030 with a DC300 tape drive and BASIC built in to it.
OMG! Such a privilege.
Me too :P
Always feeling old reading such articles :-)
So, my first computer I saw and learned to code on it was a Sinclair ZX 81 (1 KB RAM), from my uncle. My first own computer was a ZX Spectrum, then a short period with a Commodore C64, then Atari ST, TT, and after that had to switch to x86.
Pretty similar for me, though I went zx81 -> TRS80 coco -> Spectrum +2 -> Amstrad PC512 -> self-cobbled-together cyrix 6x86, which took me into the i386 era.
I tried using a Trash 80 a few times. Trying to save programs onto a cassette deck was brutal.
:O Still impressed me how things run with such resources...or our current software is too bloated.
There was no Wallpaper to hold in memory :-)
OMG! 😱
Way younger than me, then. My first computer was a Sinclair Spectrum 128k - the Spanish flavor. It came out just in time for christmas of 1985.
Later, I studied computer science. During the first three years Windows 3.11 was all the rage, but we all were mainly using MS-DOS 5.
When I finished college in 1997, Computer graphics (you know, the "real" ones), were a thing of UNIX Workstations, PC's were starting to catch up with CPU's like i386 and i486. Cyrix and AMD were then manufacturing alternatives, though that stopped with Pentiums.
And suddenly the PC was powerful enough, eating the whole market. Windows 95 was the new way to operate computers (though many of us were still rebels behind the MS-DOS prompt).
In the end, all of us jumped into Windows. Windows 98 SE was a thing for me, and also Windows XP, but then I changed to Linux and have never looked back.
I jumped into the computing wagon with Win95-98. Anything before that is prehistory for me :P
I'm thinking our second family computer was around the 95-98 version. Before that, it was whatever was on special at the local radio shack. I was too young then to really be allowed to touch it without supervision and I know it was a Tandy with a dot printer that sounded like it was preparing for takeoff any time you tried to use it (and spent the next 20 min meticulously tearing the edges in perfect lines).
The internet came several years after the cow boxes, if I remember right. The excitement from just hearing the dial up for the first time is forever ingrained, but unless you got to experience that for yourself it's hard to explain. Kinda like the excitement of Y2K, when you either hoarded supplies like a doomsday prepper or threw a party to honor the end of computers (cause the lifespan of every computer worldwide was only guaranteed until midnight).
Nostalgia for sure! Thanks!
My sister and I liked to pick up the phone while my dad was connecting to the internet just to hear the buzz :D
That dial-up screech and having to restart every time really takes me back. My first computer had that flying Windows 98 logo as a screensaver, and I remember feeling like it was magic. Which old wallpaper always stuck with you?
For me it's the green windows xp wallpaper, that's the first one that came to mind :)
The astronaut flying in outer space. OMG! I just waited for the computer to show it.
It was in the 80s, early 80s, maybe.
At that time amateur electronic magazines published projects of small computers (yes! You could build your own computer starting from components and PCBs. They were small stuff, nothing comparable with the first MS-DOS/Windows PC). Many magazines also published courses about BASIC and (sometimes) other languages.
One day I was at a computer exposition. The most "powerful" ones where MS-DOS computers with, I think, 8086 CPU. No graphic, just command line and BASIC.
On an unattended PC I wrote my very first program. It was something like
then, trembling, (yes! trembling for the emotion!) I gave
RUNand the computer printed on screen the first ten products by two. I felt... so charged, so proud, so... I do not know. I still remember (more than 40 years and thousands of lines of code later...) the emotion.Then my school started and extra-curricular course of FORTRAN. Coding was done with a line editor (like Unix
ed) ...and be grateful it was not punched cards.BASIC was the first programming language I was taught in high-school
I think it is a good language to introduce people to coding. Simple syntax, interactive, you can "fool around" with it and it allows you to teach the basic principles of coding: variables, conditionals, loop, subroutines, functions, ...
Sure, it is not a language (at least the basic BASIC...) I would use for production and you are going to miss some important/advanced concepts like pointers and OOP, but if you have a bunch of rookies who do not know what a loop is, it is not a bad choice
I first saw a computer at my father's workplace. He worked in a communist lab trying to reverse-engineer PL/1 and port it to a huge Soviet machine. It was about 1985. A few years later, he changed job and worked in an acoustics lab. They had a French Intertechnique computer with a screen and an oscilloscope. The machine featured a simple Basic dialect that my father showed me and let me play with. And a year or two later, he bought me a Commodore 116/16, the first computer we had at home.
hey it sounds like your father had a lot of interesting jobs.
Hmmm ... 🤔🙄🤔
hey such an interesting journey...Assembler?!! I only found it once while in college...
Yes, but not really productive, more as a hobby and of pure interest how these machines were working.
End of this yourney was, when Micfrosoft choose the intel cpus for the PCs - not the in my opinion more logical 68000 with his linear memory.
The "secrets" of intel with their not so logical paging then stopped my assembler-jouney. 🤔
First time i saw a computer close up it was a windows 98, that was my first year of uni. In my 3rd year of uni i had to do workplace attachment and there I worked in an Iron & Steel factory; There they had a variety of computers from mainframes running COBOL, Informix and Progress 4GL based systems to windows 95 desktops for secretaries and managers. I once ahd an ecounter with a windows 3.1 computer that provided the interface to manage some equipment used in the factories there, such fun!
Same around here. The wallpaper with the astronaut was my favorite
My first experience with a computer was a DEC PDP-8 as a freshman in the College of Engineering at the University of South Carolina. We learned FOCAL, a Dartmouth BASIC derivative during the fall semester. We learned assembler during the spring semester.
With RISC being popular, one could say that the PDP-8 had a reduced instruction set. I don't remember how many opcodes it had, but I remember that to load a value in the accumulator, one had to clear it then add a value from mermory (CLR. TAD).
I don't know if I would have pass a course on assembler :O
I remember my family's computer from when I was young (first one I remember). It was a chunky Dell with a CRT tube and Windows XP. I remember we had to wait half an hour after turning it on to be able to do anything. And that grassy hill background is forever burned into my brain 😄
OMG! Same here.
DRAGON32 around 1982. Still got it & it still works.
I had the coco2 which was the same machine with a couple of part swaps and a different badge. I used to play D32 games on it!
It was an RCA Spectra 70-40 mainframe at school and I was going to try (unsuccessfully at the time) to learn FORTRAN IV on it, but I did write a hangman program in BASIC using an ASR 33 teletype terminal and that was enough to get me hooked.
this hit home so hard, the dial-up buzz and those dusty screens took me right back to my own first setup
makes me wonder, how much do those early little tech moments end up shaping how we see computers now
I guess most of us ended up choosing programming because the mystery/magic of seeing computers for the first time. These days, they're so omnipresent that we just don't care anymore.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K in my 4th grade, no internet, no hard disc, no floppies, just tapes :) Basic & MCoder ;)
oh i'd forgotten about the floppies
I remember some classmates taking floppies to our Computer class to install the GameBody emulator to play in class...
windows xp to linux mint, a journey through many versions and a switch.
road rash, jass jack rabbit and mario filled our days!The last game I played was broforce!
I remember playing Doom? or another first-person shooter game those days...
What about Quake?! 😱
(... these endless nervous grey skies!)
PS: @cesar Aguirre
Thank You very much for rising this topic! 😎😎😎
You're welcome! Didn't know it would resonate with a lot of people...
The first computer I saw was around 1979 - DEC PDP 11/45, closely followed by an 11/70. We got a Commodore PET as an office machine which I spent hours on, then our office graduated to a VAX 11/780. The first computer I owned was an Atari 400 - playing Defender or watching it slowly plot colour graphics on our home TV was the best.
1965 - CDC 3100 (16K, cards & tape), University of Montreal.
FORTRAN
I was hooked for life.
OMG! I only found FORTRAN once in my coding career
Commodore 128. Twice as much memory as my friend's Commodore 64!
I guess it was advertised like the biggest achievement, "twice as much memory as its predecessor"
Not sure if it counts as the first 'computer'. But it was a Philips Videopac G7000 console. I mean, I learned coding on that thing.
My first I owned myself was a Commodore VC-20.
hey if you learn coding with it, it counts :D