Your first experiences of computers

[LOL The Irony]

A Tiny (remember those guys) running on Windows 98 and I still have it!

 

[Journeyman]

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.

It was an incredibly powerful machine. The only real problem with it was that most of them only had 32K of memory, and in some modes screen memory took up 20K of that.

 

[Bletchleyite]

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).

Hmm...sounds like a BBC Micro - red function keys? I seem to recall the 0 looking like that was quite obvious on those. They were pretty universally in use in educational settings until the mid 90s at least.

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.

Well ahead of their time. The Archimedes was a great machine for its time as well - and the UI we now know as Windows 10 owes a lot to Acorn's design, whether intentionally or not - other than the start button (on Acorn machines this would be a link to each physical drive) the Windows 10 taskbar works identically to the RISC OS icon bar - open applications on the left with a context menu, system stuff on the right (though I think it was all right aligned other than the drives unlike Windows). Also pioneered the widespread use of vector graphics, and had a really quite slick multitasking system (though it was co-operative multitasking, relying on applications returning control to the OS once that bit of processing was complete, so one application crashing could still take the whole thing out).

Best of all you could develop anything with a window template editor and a text editor, all running on a quite advanced version of BBC BASIC. Plenty of commercial stuff was developed in BASIC, which made everything effectively open source because you could just nose inside the files!

Also no mess installing applications, an application was a folder with ! as its first character, and everything was neatly stored inside. I believe this is nicked from the Mac.

It was an incredibly powerful machine. The only real problem with it was that most of them only had 32K of memory, and in some modes screen memory took up 20K of that.

The BBC Master 128 solved that, until the coming of the Archimedes which became the mainstay of schools until about 2000 or so when Wintel PCs started replacing them in force.

 

[Journeyman]

A mate of mine at school with very well off parents got given an Archimedes for his birthday almost as soon as they first came out. We were completely blown away by what it could do.

 

[birchesgreen]

Well ahead of their time. The Archimedes was a great machine for its time as well - and the UI we now know as Windows 10 owes a lot to Acorn's design, whether intentionally or not - other than the start button (on Acorn machines this would be a link to each physical drive) the Windows 10 taskbar works identically to the RISC OS icon bar - open applications on the left with a context menu, system stuff on the right (though I think it was all right aligned other than the drives unlike Windows). Also pioneered the widespread use of vector graphics, and had a really quite slick multitasking system (though it was co-operative multitasking, relying on applications returning control to the OS once that bit of processing was complete, so one application crashing could still take the whole thing out).

I believe there was some sort of deal between Acorn and Microsoft, when they were designing Windows 95, to use some aspects of RISC OS such as the taskbar.

The most important thing about the Acorn RISC computers of course was the ARM architecture...

 

[nlogax]

A mate of mine at school with very well off parents got given an Archimedes for his birthday almost as soon as they first came out. We were completely blown away by what it could do.

We had one in our school computer room - most of the time we used it to play Zarch.

 

[Journeyman]

We had one in our school computer room - most of the time we used it to play Zarch.

View attachment 83403

That was a really impressive game! A somewhat more limited version of it - Virus - was later ported to the Spectrum. Wasn't quite the same.

 

[dgl]

Supposedly the Archimedes was easier to write games for than the Amiga because it could all be done in software when to get the best performance you had to do extra coding for the custom chips on the amiga and that could only give you a little mmore power than what the Archimedes could do in software.
Admittedly the internal bus on the Risc PC was quite a limiting factor but still found much use in TV studios world wide with Risc PC's put in customised housings and sold by TV equipment suppliers.

 

[Bevan Price]

My first use of computers was at Uni, circa 1972. It was installed in its own temperature controlled building, and to access it, we had to input programs and data as holes in long strips (rolls) of paper ("punch-tape"), with Algol 68 as the programming language, and then walk to the computer building. A day or two later, the staff handed you a printout of the results of your calculations; if you had made a mistake on the punch-tape, you were liable to get a printout consisting of lots of blank pages. If you spotted an error on the tape before you submitted it, you had to copy the "correct" section of the tape, then retype the corrected parts of the program or data.

After a year or two, there was an upgrade to using punch-cards, where you could reuse the "program" cards, and just produce new cards for each set of data.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

Wow Algol - I never learned that one. FORTRAN BASIC and COBOL for me.

 

[najaB]

Wow Algol - I never learned that one. FORTRAN BASIC and COBOL for me.

Yeah, Algol was before my time too. The languages that I learned in or by University were Cobol, Fortran, Prolog, Lisp, Pascal, Java, C, C++ and 8086 assembly. I only taught Pascal, C and C++ though.

 

[DavidGrain]

Punch cards predated computers and I think when I was a kid, my dad took me into his office and showed me a punch card sorting machine which would sort the cards into any order that your wanted.

With actual computers, I think it was when I was studying at college, my student society organised a company visit to one of the first companies in the area to use a computer. They showed us the computer printing out invoices. This was before line printers which could stop at each print line so the continuous paper was always moving which meant that the print was slightly blurred but readable.

One of my first jobs was at a large oil company and one day a group from our office went to the company's computer centre. It was a large office block built on a bend in the road so that standing in the computer room you could not see the far end of the office round the bend. In that room they had 4 massive computers doing work which today could probably be done on half a dozen networked desktops.

The first computer I actually installed was the size of a door four-square. It had 32 KB of RAM and 1.8 MB of bulk storage on 2 hard disks. On that computer I ran 6 terminals (including one over a phone line to our London office) and one printer. Nowadays the Fitbit watch on my wrist on which I receive text messages is many thousands of times more powerful than that.

Some years ago I was looking back through the records of a society I had joined and found a note that in 1951, they had gone in a party to London to visit J Lyons & Co to see The Computer, the first commercial computer in the country.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

The first computer we bought for my twin sons was a VIC-20 (with a 16K ram pack), then upgraded the following year to a Commodore-64.

 

[DavidGrain]

Years ago I was in Tandy. Remember them? A man was there with his daughter, aged about 10-12 who asked her dad to buy her a computer magazine. He refused telling her that she had to learn to use what she had got first. No she probably needed the magazine to help her learn to use what she had. I hope she went on to be a computer expert just to teach him. Tandy was the UK chain of the American company Radio Shack who sold all sorts of electronic equipment for you to build your own computers before the prices of computer came down from the high price range that small computers used to be.
By the way I still have a laptop which I bought from Currys in 2001 for £1,000 which I still use for one particular job.

 

[mikeg]

My first experience of computers? In 1992, I went to primary school in reception, I saw a computer in use (A BBC Micro, even then), and was fascinated by it. For my 5th Birthday my Uncle gave me his Amstrad CPC, which although second hand I have to say is to date one of the best Birthday presents I've ever had. When I was eight and a bit, my parents sourced some 3" discs on which to save tapes, my Uncle was able to perform this using a piece of software called 'Bonzo's Hack Pack'. I wanted to learn that myself, so I got that manual and learned how to use CPM, how to program in BASIC, it quickly became a fascination, even picked up a bit of Z80 assembler but could never master it beyond printing a few lines, so used BASIC. All pop this, push that, far too tedious.

In 1996, just after I'd turned 9 my parents bought a PC, a Compaq Presario 7230, with 8MB RAM and a 120Mhz Pentium processor and running Windows 95 it seemed incredible, but one thing I missed is beyond the limited features of QuickBasic there was no means of programming it out of the box, something I sorely missed. It should be mentioned it took some figuring out, especially with it running Windows 95. Much of the software we'd bought for it still only had instructions for Windows 3.1, so the method of using it being completely different posed a lot of figuring things out.

I began collecting computers in 1997, first purchase being a ZX Spectrum +2 from a car boot sale for £5 of my pocket money. Shortly thereafter I'd visit car boot sales religiously, coming back every couple of weeks with a new purchase. I got an Amiga 500 with plenty of games for a fiver not long after. Then an Oric Atmos 48k, for £15, a C64 (later model), a NES, a SNES, a VIC 20, an Acorn Electron, Atari 2600, a CD-i player, two Sharp MZ-800s which I fried trying to fix one with the other about a year later... D'oh, an Amiga 600, later upgrade to an Amiga 1200 of eBay, thought I paid a fortune for it with lots of games in 2000 at £75 but later sold of pretty much all of what I bought, in the case of the A1200, made nearly a grand and still have some games left over, sold the ones worth £30, £40, £50 nowadays. Also to add in there, I rescued a BBC B from the bin at my former primary school, where I'd help out my former teacher and ICT coordinator every Friday after secondary school. Ditto for an Acorn 4000, and a RiscStation of some sort. I wish I had all that kit now, but sold it the first time I attempted living independently, probably for about two grand in total mind. Oh, and the BBC B, I've heard of the caps going pop being quite common but mine caught fire a couple of years ago after being in the loft a couple of years. Sob.

Also built my first computer in December 2000, found the parts, got them all for Christmas. I made some interesting design choices it has to be said, they were selling off AT cases and motherboards cheap, so for more bang for buck I went with that. I bought a second hand copy of Windows NT4 for about £12 off eBay, as I don't play many games it was a good choice. I've also been using GNU/Linux since the Summer of '99 , with Red Hat 5.2 (no not RHEL, the original Red Hat) and 6.0 felt like pain relief with GNOME and KDE.

 

[AM9]

Punch cards predated computers and I think when I was a kid, my dad took me into his office and showed me a punch card sorting machine which would sort the cards into any order that your wanted. ...

Punched cards were my introduction to programming. I remember at college in about 1970, we created a program by manuallly punching a number of 80 track cards, - they were the same size as card airline tickets (and later the large BR rail tickets). We then went next door to feed then into the local authority's old computer. It took about 0.5 of a second for the cards to be read from the feed hopper, through the reader and back with another puched card with the answer on. I also used analogue computers, a totally different experience. The experiments were to calculate the trajectory of falling, bouncing and blown objects through free space.
My next experience was at work using computers as controllers of measurement instruments (HP called them desktop calculators but for the day they were well suited to the task).
My first home computer was a ZX81, built from a kit, - unfortunately, I was supplied the infamous dodgy ROM which had the OS and Sinclair BASIC on it. The problem was that it insisted that 0.5 squared was 1.35! They replaced them pretty quickly of course. That was followed by a BBC Model B, ostensibly as part of the children's education, - Chuckie Egg, Elite etc.. Eventually I acquired an external floppy drive to escape the frustration of cassette program storage/loading.
The final stage was my purchasing of a PC in 1991, it had a 386SX, 2MB ram, a 51MB HDD and fed a 12 inch monitor. The whole thing cost about £1100! A year later a 120MB HDD cost £229. Since then, most of my computing effort has been in building workstations to do video editing on. A 1TB HDD cost about £35, even a 1TB SSD is well under £100.

 

[Harpers Tate]

There were three (IIRC) computer terminals in the bank branch I started work in, in 1973. At that time only about a third of the branches were "online". The thing was the size of a large desk and contained many mechanical parts and little in the way of electronics. But it could access the system at the data centre and perform simple enquiries (as at yesterday) and apply updates (for tomorrow) using a bespoke language that was not at all intuitive.

My first use of an actual desktop computer was in about 1990 when I changed jobs. There is your desk, and there is your computer. It was a standalone - no connectivity except to the shared office printer. And when you turned it on, after much onscreen goobledegook, it looked pretty much like this:



IIRC 386 processor, 2k RAM, 20mb HDD. And no Windows; just DOS, like that ^.

It had two "apps" loaded: IBM DisplayWrite (word processor) and Lotus 123 (Speadsheet). And you had to know the DOS commans to launch whichever one (yes, just one at a time) you wanted to use.

 

[najaB]

IIRC 386 processor, 2k RAM, 20mb HDD. And no Windows; just DOS, like that ^.

Would've been 2MB rather than KB, but that was typical for the time. It wasn't until MS-DOS 6 that it got a decent graphical shell (of course, Windows was available separately).

 

[Harpers Tate]

Quite possibly 2mb. I think the most the mobo would take was 14mb or something with all slots taken. I seem to recall a few years later putting an expansion card in it and adding another strip to make it 16mb. Which was the most the architecture would support.

At some point "they" decided I needed a DeskTop publisher app to produce some more "fancy" documents. It was Aldus Pagemaker. It needed a Windows shell to run in. So I also got Windows 3.0, and running PageMaker was the only purpose to which Windows was put.

 

[david1212]

School in 1980 or 1981 has a couple of ZX80 and one by Research Machines ?

Polytechnic from October 1982 had a mainframe with a room of terminals and several rooms with different stand-alone systems. One was Compucolor. These were not so popular hence easier to get time on.

First personal computer either late 1983 or 1984 was a Spectrum with Ferguson cassette recorder and the ' silver paper ' printer. The latter was replaced then refunded / exchanged for a white paper thermal printer. Later the Spectrum was put into the case with proper keys and with a parallel port adapter a Taxan Kaga 24-pin dot matrix printer. The latter I recall was £220 in 1985.

I still have the Spectrum but not switched on at least 30 years. I doubt the cassette recorder would work even if cassettes still OK.

 

[SteveP29]

Tandy was the UK chain of the American company Radio Shack

Maplin seemed to me to take over that job when Tandy disappeared, I always went to them first before PC World, unless their price was way different to PC World.

My own computer history:
81 or 82: received an Acorn Electron for my birthday (I see nobody else has mentioned one of those in this thread)
Parents bought me a game to go with it, Arcadians, the Acornsoft version of Space Invaders.
When it came to time to add a joystick for playing games, I remember having a long diasgreement with them when they wanted to get a Plus1 so that peripherals could be added at a later date (Printer etc), whereas I wanted the First Byte adapter, which was just a joystick connector, I have no idea why this was such a big point of contention.
I added games to it over the years over the next 7 or 8 years (favourite being Howzat, which was a stick cricket game that came on a compliation tape of 3 games, and you could edit the players)
No computers in school until I moved town and school in 1986 and the Computer Studies classroom (which we only started doing as a lesson in the 3rd year) had a networked bank of 12 BBC B's
I was able to do loads of impressive stuff on them because of knowing BASIC through my Electron, not that that impressed any girls!!
Favourite game on that was called Barrage, a random line was drawn that represented a mountain valley and mountain and a base put on each side, the object of the game was to type in the angle from which the gun in your base fired on the base on the other side
After leaving school in 1989 I didn't use a computer in education again until 1993 when I did my HND, this involved learning to use PC's (which were all RM desktops) and this was where I came across spreadhseets for the first time (Lotus 123), now my life doesn't go a day without me doing something on Excel, whether that's for work or leisure.
Starting my first full time job in 1997 was the beginning of spernding every day behind a desk at a computer, Windows 3.1. NT, XP and 10

At home, I got a Sega Master System in 1992, Amiga A1200 in 1994, inhertited a PC and upgraded it in 1998 and have had a few desktops and laptops since.
Games consoles, I've had all of the Playstations 1-4

 

[peters]

My primary school had a few of the BBC Micros and an Acorn computer for the top class which had a colour printer. The colour printer took 15 minutes to print the equivalent of one page of A4! In my final year the school got some computers running Windows 3.1 and during wet lunches we were allowed to play solitaire and mineswepper on them.