xotGD
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I wasn't aware of that!Or record them from a special radio station.
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Your first experiences of computers
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birchesgreen
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Ah yes the days of cassette loading, i remember my friend's dad got a double tape system which allowed fast copying of tapes. My friend became the most popular kid in class...
Journeyman
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Various TV and radio shows broadcast computer programs you could record onto tape yourself.
telstarbox
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Great thread!
I started primary school in 1993, so I guess the post-BBC Micro generation as all our kit was from RM (Research Machines). The first PC in our classroom was DOS-based and included RM's "Caxton" word processor and a Spot the Dog game. It might have been a Nimbus PC-186?
Then we received a new PC with an optical drive which was known to everyone as "the CD-ROM". Software highlights included Encarta and Richard Scarry. The login and password were on a nicely printed laminated notice, information security not being a major concern then
In 1999 the school got online with a very noisy dial-up connection. We used Internet Explorer 4 to view the Blue Peter website.
At secondary school we had a managed desktop system which I think used Windows 98, upgraded to Windows XP in 2003.
I remember using Yahoo! as the default search engine and being amazed when Google came in, as it gave you so many more results. Then Wikipedia editing became a huge craze and my school developed a very detailed article. USB memory sticks arrived around 2004, which were a huge step up from neon floppy discs.
Now at work I have a small, fast and quiet Windows 10 PC with 'always on' broadband and Google Chrome. I still find it amazing how much it can do, and how it's transformed working with information.
I started primary school in 1993, so I guess the post-BBC Micro generation as all our kit was from RM (Research Machines). The first PC in our classroom was DOS-based and included RM's "Caxton" word processor and a Spot the Dog game. It might have been a Nimbus PC-186?
Then we received a new PC with an optical drive which was known to everyone as "the CD-ROM". Software highlights included Encarta and Richard Scarry. The login and password were on a nicely printed laminated notice, information security not being a major concern then
In 1999 the school got online with a very noisy dial-up connection. We used Internet Explorer 4 to view the Blue Peter website.
At secondary school we had a managed desktop system which I think used Windows 98, upgraded to Windows XP in 2003.
I remember using Yahoo! as the default search engine and being amazed when Google came in, as it gave you so many more results. Then Wikipedia editing became a huge craze and my school developed a very detailed article. USB memory sticks arrived around 2004, which were a huge step up from neon floppy discs.
Now at work I have a small, fast and quiet Windows 10 PC with 'always on' broadband and Google Chrome. I still find it amazing how much it can do, and how it's transformed working with information.
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My first experience would have been Acorns, probably at junior school. The Acorns were just been phased out of my High School the year I started.
My first experience of a desktop as we may know it today would be an i386 processor with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I recall being nervous with it and not knowing what to do when the screensaver appeared. These days my livelihood is made from working in IT!
I think your experiences are very similar to mine, though I never worked on anything RM (I recall our Network Manager at high school was averse to the RM "buy in" - I believe their software sat on top of the usual Windows OS)
The memory sticks mention is an interesting one - I first used one at school in 2004/5 (a 64MB one which was quite large for its time - we still have it I think as a family member was still using it until a few months ago) and I had to have the drivers installed on the Windows 98 machine I used in IT class. It was a refreshing change from having to faff about with floppy disks to transfer stuff to work on at home (some of which had to be "broken down" to fit within the 1.44MB limitation!)
My first experience of a desktop as we may know it today would be an i386 processor with Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. I recall being nervous with it and not knowing what to do when the screensaver appeared. These days my livelihood is made from working in IT!
Great thread!
I started primary school in 1993 and all the IT was from RM (Research Machines). The first PC in our classroom was DOS-based and included RM's "Caxton" word processor and a Spot the Dog game. It might have been a Nimbus PC-186?
Then we received a new PC with an optical drive which was known to everyone as "the CD-ROM". Software highlights included Encarta and Richard Scarry. The login and password were on a nicely printed laminated notice, information security not being a major concern then
In 1999 the school got online with a very noisy dial-up connection. We used Internet Explorer 4 to view the Blue Peter website.
At secondary school we had a managed desktop system which I think used Windows 98, upgraded to Windows XP in 2003.
I remember using Yahoo! as the default search engine and being amazed when Google came in, as it gave you so many more results. Then Wikipedia editing became a huge craze and my school developed a very detailed article. USB memory sticks arrived around 2004, which were a huge step up from neon floppy discs.
Now at work I have a small, fast and quiet Windows 10 PC with 'always on' broadband and Google Chrome. I still find it amazing how much it can do, and how it's transformed working with information.
I think your experiences are very similar to mine, though I never worked on anything RM (I recall our Network Manager at high school was averse to the RM "buy in" - I believe their software sat on top of the usual Windows OS)
The memory sticks mention is an interesting one - I first used one at school in 2004/5 (a 64MB one which was quite large for its time - we still have it I think as a family member was still using it until a few months ago) and I had to have the drivers installed on the Windows 98 machine I used in IT class. It was a refreshing change from having to faff about with floppy disks to transfer stuff to work on at home (some of which had to be "broken down" to fit within the 1.44MB limitation!)
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nlogax
Established Member
All the geeking out on this thread is awesome.
Here.. probably my dad's 48k Spectrum (amazing..hello Horace Goes Skiing), then a brief fling with a Dragon 32 (not so amazing), then back to the Speccy before settling down with second gen C64 and all the fun of copying friends' games on the twin tape deck.
Got my first PC in the early 1990s and never looked back, apart from the raft of 8 bit emulators on my Mac..
Here.. probably my dad's 48k Spectrum (amazing..hello Horace Goes Skiing), then a brief fling with a Dragon 32 (not so amazing), then back to the Speccy before settling down with second gen C64 and all the fun of copying friends' games on the twin tape deck.
Got my first PC in the early 1990s and never looked back, apart from the raft of 8 bit emulators on my Mac..
Journeyman
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I found that after I got rid of my Spectrum in about 1990, I lost interest in computers for a while and went several years without owning one, although I did have a portable word processor for a while (a bit like an electric typewriter, but with a built in LCD display and disk drive). I got my first PC in 1996, just before I went to uni, and it was a 486 running Win 3.11. I bought it from Escom, who went bust very soon afterwards, but thankfully I was never affected by that, as it served me reliably for several years.
I wasn't personally that adventurous when I was younger; my experiences came through school which bought a PDP-11 system running a Systime (a company in Leeds) operating multi-user system on which I learned Basic. There's now a Systime emulator which I've looked at briefly. Then an ICL 1900 which was bought from Perkins of Urmston for £1.08, 8% being the VAT rate at the time, so these will have been 1977-1979 or so. The 1900 was good experience with paper tape and punched cards and with routine maintenance of the hardware, plus its ferrite core memory usually retained the operating system when powered down overnight. My 1980s experience were mainly IBM mainframes, 3033, 308x, 3090, 4331, 4341, 4381. I only bought my own computer when it seemed to have "some" of the capabilities of the larger systems, so this really required a 386 processor, running OS/2 which promised more than it delivered, that would have been in 1990 or so - 386SX at 16MHz which is a bit laughable now but at the time was OK. I even bought more memory for it which I had to plug into sockets on a card which connected to the ISA bus, amusing in that it was possible then with slow processor clock speeds which weren't too troubled by memory attached to an IO bus.
I had a great summer job in 1984 when I was an "operator" of IBM mainframes in Philips, West Croydon. Essentially load tapes and paper into line printers for overnight processing of invoices and so on. Great job because someone took over from you at the end of your shift and inherited and hopefully solved any problems you'd been dealing with.
I had a great summer job in 1984 when I was an "operator" of IBM mainframes in Philips, West Croydon. Essentially load tapes and paper into line printers for overnight processing of invoices and so on. Great job because someone took over from you at the end of your shift and inherited and hopefully solved any problems you'd been dealing with.
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My first computer was the Camputers Lynx 64 back in 1982/3. The first PC I used would have been a NEC (I think) 8086-based PC, the first one I owned was a Gateway 2000 386SX-16, the first mini-computer I used was a DEC VAX (not sure of the model though).
Journeyman
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I had to look that one up - I'd never heard of it. It's amazing how diverse the home computer market was early on, before it crashed and settled down on a few of the more popular models. Everyone wanted a piece of the action, and it led to some decidedly awful products appearing. I pity the poor kid who woke up on Christmas morning to find a Mattel Aquarius under the tree...
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
I remember too about 1998? upgrading my computer to 4 x32 = 128 Mb EDO RAM - I thought wow I am the king. It was good at the time. Crazy now of course. A PC could not work of that small amount of RAM.
First computer experience would have been an Acorn A3020? at infant school in ~93, they also had a BBC micro which was used to do the weekly spell tests, despite it not having the voice synthesizer and as such having to show you the word required to be spelt!
My first PC experience would have been the sole windows 95? machine at junior school, which turned into ~15 machines in 98, these being RM windows 95 machines with their add on UI. All other computers at that school were Acorn Risc OS computer in the keyboard machines.
Even at secondary school in 2000 only the two IT rooms had windows 98 machines (the win98 machines being relegated to mainly being used for the electronic registers when I left) and everywhere else was 99% acorn, with most RISC OS models present (including Archimedes desktops, keyboard computer, A7000 and a couple of RISC PC's that had been or were used as the Econet server).
Even when I left there were still Econet sockets around the place, I believe the reliance on Acorn was due to Acorn giving them a special deal/grant to buy the machines (the A7000's at least) and, of course, we one of the original partners in the computers for schools Tesco promotion.
The Acorns were excellent machines but windows was the standard, still remember the rapid boot times due to the whole OS being in ROM (4mb? on the later versions, even a phone OS won't fit in that!).
My first PC experience would have been the sole windows 95? machine at junior school, which turned into ~15 machines in 98, these being RM windows 95 machines with their add on UI. All other computers at that school were Acorn Risc OS computer in the keyboard machines.
Even at secondary school in 2000 only the two IT rooms had windows 98 machines (the win98 machines being relegated to mainly being used for the electronic registers when I left) and everywhere else was 99% acorn, with most RISC OS models present (including Archimedes desktops, keyboard computer, A7000 and a couple of RISC PC's that had been or were used as the Econet server).
Even when I left there were still Econet sockets around the place, I believe the reliance on Acorn was due to Acorn giving them a special deal/grant to buy the machines (the A7000's at least) and, of course, we one of the original partners in the computers for schools Tesco promotion.
The Acorns were excellent machines but windows was the standard, still remember the rapid boot times due to the whole OS being in ROM (4mb? on the later versions, even a phone OS won't fit in that!).
nlogax
Established Member
Fun to see all the references to Acorn and Research Machines here, in my past I've run college networks and worked with education teams and part time OFSTED inspectors in local government, and that old RM Nimbus kit cropped up everywhere. Even managed to wangle myself an ancient RM 380Z from a disposal pile, not that I ever managed to make any more use from it than a bookshelf - it was gigantic.
Geezertronic
Established Member
I miss the days when it took 10 minutes to load a simple game off tape
I too had a ZX81 with the 16k expansion pack - if my memory serves me well, this was the first program I wrote with good old Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code:
10 PRINT "Please enter your name"
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "Hello "; A$
40 GOTO 30
Then it was the XZ Spectrum Plus 2 (only the lucky few had the +3).
Friend had a BBC Master which was great as school had BBC Micros so we used to play Chuckie Egg at school too
Cousin had an Amiga where the graphics were superb at the time.
I too had a ZX81 with the 16k expansion pack - if my memory serves me well, this was the first program I wrote with good old Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
:10 PRINT "Please enter your name"
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT "Hello "; A$
40 GOTO 30
Then it was the XZ Spectrum Plus 2 (only the lucky few had the +3).
Friend had a BBC Master which was great as school had BBC Micros so we used to play Chuckie Egg at school too
Cousin had an Amiga where the graphics were superb at the time.
That seems a bit early for going to as much as 128MB of RAM - I'm guessing that prices would've still been hovering around $2-5/MB so that would have been a significant investment. Prices dropped considerably in 1999 into 2000 though, could it have been a little later?
How things change though, I got my first PC in 1992 and it included the $80USD upgrade from 2MB to 4MB.
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
Oh trust me it cost a pretty penny. I had 64 and went to 128 and seem to recall it cost me just over 200 quid
I remember quite a few milestones in my computing life, quite possibly because despite doing a computer science degree and working in the industry for many years it was a long time before I bothered buying a "proper" computer of my own.
In the last year or two at primary school we had the obligatory BBC Micro on a trolley. In the last year we were excited to get the cassettes to take part in the Domesday Project.
Secondary school was a bit of a computing wasteland. There was a room with a dozen or so BBC Micros, which towards the end of my time there had been replaced by Archimedes machines. There was a solitary IBM PC (a 286, I think) in the school library.
While at secondary school my first experience of networked computers was at a Saturday school at Bangor University, I don't know what the computer was but the room was full of text terminals connected to something running VMS. It felt oh so modern and futuristic.
I did A Level Computing at a centre shared with all local schools which offered the "high tech" courses the schools couldn't do individually. It had 386 PCs, and my project was a masterpiece of thousands of lines of completely pointless but pretty Turbo Pascal.
During A Level I had to take an extended period off, and was loaned a PC laptop, an incredibly heavy but surprisingly small greyscale thing in a suitably beige case.
At university is when it all changed, not least because of being connected to the Internet! First generation Sun SPARCstations with what we're for the time enormous monitors. Less impressive was my first exposure to NFS over a coax network. The room of disk less ones (network swap, fun) was always the easiest place to find a free machine. Also gave me my first experience of Internet porn, via gopher.
In the last year or two at primary school we had the obligatory BBC Micro on a trolley. In the last year we were excited to get the cassettes to take part in the Domesday Project.
Secondary school was a bit of a computing wasteland. There was a room with a dozen or so BBC Micros, which towards the end of my time there had been replaced by Archimedes machines. There was a solitary IBM PC (a 286, I think) in the school library.
While at secondary school my first experience of networked computers was at a Saturday school at Bangor University, I don't know what the computer was but the room was full of text terminals connected to something running VMS. It felt oh so modern and futuristic.
I did A Level Computing at a centre shared with all local schools which offered the "high tech" courses the schools couldn't do individually. It had 386 PCs, and my project was a masterpiece of thousands of lines of completely pointless but pretty Turbo Pascal.
During A Level I had to take an extended period off, and was loaned a PC laptop, an incredibly heavy but surprisingly small greyscale thing in a suitably beige case.
At university is when it all changed, not least because of being connected to the Internet! First generation Sun SPARCstations with what we're for the time enormous monitors. Less impressive was my first exposure to NFS over a coax network. The room of disk less ones (network swap, fun) was always the easiest place to find a free machine. Also gave me my first experience of Internet porn, via gopher.
Either a BBC micro brought home from school by my father during a school holiday or the world famous Commodore 16!
At junior school, we had the obligatory BBC micros followed by an Amstrad PC1512.
Moving to secondary school, it was the usual Nimbus 186 machines, upgraded at some point, but then at home an Ambra 386 (yet another world famous model!)
At junior school, we had the obligatory BBC micros followed by an Amstrad PC1512.
Moving to secondary school, it was the usual Nimbus 186 machines, upgraded at some point, but then at home an Ambra 386 (yet another world famous model!)
My first home PC was a Commodore 64 - if memory served me correctly it weighed a ton! When I started work the main "PC" type machine was a "twin floppy" which meant putting flippy discs in and out all the time! For a while I used a mainframe computer using "FORTRAN" as the language and something called "Job Control Language".
I was feeling old reading this thread until I reached eMEs 's post.
In 1971 I was looking for a change in career and my manager suggested I applied for a position in the banks computer department. A couple of weeks later I started work on IBM 360's with punched card programs and ferrite core memory. Thus started a career which brought me into contact with BR's TOPS system while it was under development. Time with various other employers took me through computer developments until early retirement in 2010. Like others my first home computer was the zx81.
In 1971 I was looking for a change in career and my manager suggested I applied for a position in the banks computer department. A couple of weeks later I started work on IBM 360's with punched card programs and ferrite core memory. Thus started a career which brought me into contact with BR's TOPS system while it was under development. Time with various other employers took me through computer developments until early retirement in 2010. Like others my first home computer was the zx81.
telstarbox
Established Member
I'm sure we'd be interested to hear more about the TOPS development if you want to share
eoff
Member
I remember borrowing a friend's ZX80 and being very unimpressed that it could not compute and show the display at the same time.
At school I was able to go to a local technical college for one afternoon a week to learn programming on the Commodore PET.
The next (final) year I just played around with a Cromenco but I took a sixth-year maths course that taught Fortran programming done by sending coding sheets to Moray House in Edinburgh with results returned on fanfold printout a week later.
Around the same time the school got an Apple II which I got to try and I liked. I'm not sure if I came across the BBC Micro that year or later but I remember being unimpressed with the IBM PC graphics in comparison.
Since then I have used more and more powerful computers, the kind that still fill a big room.
I still have a ZX81 that was a leaving gift and it has a clacky external keyboard connected via ribbon cable.
[ Edit - had to drop next post because the forum merged it to this one which I did not expect ]
At school I was able to go to a local technical college for one afternoon a week to learn programming on the Commodore PET.
The next (final) year I just played around with a Cromenco but I took a sixth-year maths course that taught Fortran programming done by sending coding sheets to Moray House in Edinburgh with results returned on fanfold printout a week later.
Around the same time the school got an Apple II which I got to try and I liked. I'm not sure if I came across the BBC Micro that year or later but I remember being unimpressed with the IBM PC graphics in comparison.
Since then I have used more and more powerful computers, the kind that still fill a big room.
I still have a ZX81 that was a leaving gift and it has a clacky external keyboard connected via ribbon cable.
[ Edit - had to drop next post because the forum merged it to this one which I did not expect ]
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Fortran. Eurgh.
GRALISTAIR
Established Member
FORTRAN Formula Translation
BASIC Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
COBOL COmmercial and Business Oriented Language
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Never used either in anger, but I'm not sure which I hated learning more - Fortran or Cobol.
birchesgreen
Established Member
I did COBOL when i was doing my computing HND at Poly, always enjoyed it's verbose ways. I didn't do any COBOL when i started working though, all my work programming has been perl and javascript...
As a child my dad was able to borrow from work an 8086 PC (OS on one floppy disk and whatever you were doing and files on the second).
Shortly after he was allowed to acquire one, which then ment leasing how to use DOS if I wanted to do anything (which is a useful experience for understanding file structures).
Latest on we got a 486 with Windows 3.1 which was used a lot during my year 10 study leave, year 11 mocks study leave and final GCSE study leave. Although I'm not sure how useful playing SimCity was to my final grades!
When I was then at college one of the staff "uninstalled" the games which came on the computers, they were a bit miffed when I found them and were playing them as all they had done was delete the icons from the desktop. Unfortunately they worked out how to actually uninstall then after that.
I know use computers to design roads, so know my way around AutoCAD fairly well (although it's such a vast programme in aware in only using a fraction of what it can do).
Shortly after he was allowed to acquire one, which then ment leasing how to use DOS if I wanted to do anything (which is a useful experience for understanding file structures).
Latest on we got a 486 with Windows 3.1 which was used a lot during my year 10 study leave, year 11 mocks study leave and final GCSE study leave. Although I'm not sure how useful playing SimCity was to my final grades!
When I was then at college one of the staff "uninstalled" the games which came on the computers, they were a bit miffed when I found them and were playing them as all they had done was delete the icons from the desktop. Unfortunately they worked out how to actually uninstall then after that.
I know use computers to design roads, so know my way around AutoCAD fairly well (although it's such a vast programme in aware in only using a fraction of what it can do).
Just remembered my nursery (where I was 1990-91) had a computer. I seem to remember a cream body with a black keyboard, and the number pad had a Zero shown as Ø. Had a few basic games/puzzles on it, but have no idea what model.
All I remember was kids keeping hitting the 'Esc' key out of the game, and trying to restore it involved the teacher pressing Pause/Break repeatedly (in my very hazy distant memory).
All I remember was kids keeping hitting the 'Esc' key out of the game, and trying to restore it involved the teacher pressing Pause/Break repeatedly (in my very hazy distant memory).
eoff
Member
This thread reminds me of how great the BBC Micro was, it supported networking (Econet) and you could load from remote disk over the network.
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