I just came across this article.
https://www.howtogeek.com/what-came-before-microsoft-windows/
It reminded me of my former boss. We think we are old. His computer learning was using punch cards. He described pushing them in one section removing that result and pushing them in another section to continue the program.
My my how far computing has come in 50 years.
Commodore Pet from Dadâs workplace, own ZX81 then Acorn Electron. Used friendsâ Atari 800, ZX Spectrum, VIC 20, BBC Micro, Commodore 64. Something with a green screen and 8in floppies at school. School also had a Research Machines 380Z (from an Oxford startup).
All these and more are described in The Computers That Made Britain.
None of the above did gaming as well as the machine-coded arcade games from the late 70âs to the mid eighties, I would add.
Sent an original game program âZX Hangmanâ in to Michael Orwin Software, a company that put out compilations, but it failed to load for them off my tape.
I love topics like this.
Our first family computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer, in 1979. The silver one with the chicklet keys. Next was an IBM PC (Dad worked for IBM), then an IBM PC XT. My first computer that was my own was a PCjr, in 1984. In 1989 when I went to University, I got an IBM PS/2 Model 25. While at university, I was introduced to Unix (SunOS) and I fell in love with the NeXT. I still own the NeXT Computer Prototype (yes, my Cube is a prototype) that I bought in the early 1990s from a NeXT employee named Blaine. In 2001 I went to a conference, where I saw Mac OS X for the first time; this was around the time of 10.0.4, and the NeXT heritage was obvious. I called my wife and told her that we were buying a PowerMac G4 Cube to sit next to my NeXT Cube. I sold that a while back, but have been a Mac user since 2001.
Currently as a family we have a fleet of five MacBook Air M1 (2020) units, and I have a M2 Pro MacBook Pro from my employer.
I have a Lenovo M900 on which I run VMware ESXi (v6 I think, not sure⊠I never need to manage it anymore), on which I run about a half-dozen VMs. This is nowhere near as capable as the Dell R610 it replaced, but it is much quieter, generates much less heat, and consumes much less electricity, so it was a huge win in those respects. (The R610 had 192GB RAM and 32 vCPUs; the M900 has 32GB RAM and 8 vCPUs.)
As an employee of IBM, my father would never consider getting a Mac, so all I could do was play with those at a friendâs house. I wanted an Atari 800 too, but that was also a no-go. I now own an Atari 800, 600XL, 800XL, and XEGS. (Not directly related, but not far off: I also wanted an Atari 2600 but my parents never bought me a game system. I now own multiple Atari 2600s and multiple 2600 emulators; similarly I have a real Atari 5200, with trackball, and this is my favorite game system of all time.)
Thatâs nice to read you dad worked for IBM, does the most passion about computers and IT in general derived about your dad? Or you discovered something else by yourself?
I definitely wanted to do something technology-related because of my fatherâs career: He worked as a contractor for NASA in IBMâs now-defunct Federal Systems Division. We lived in Huntsville, Alabama, from 1971 to 1976, and then in the Cape Canaveral, Florida, area from 1976 to 1984. Rockets and space were a daily thing for me groing up, and that made an impression.
I used MANY computers before I purchased my OWN first computer. The very first computer I used was a minicomputer I never personally SAW because it was in a county-wide school district location. I got into it in high school from an AT&T Teletype which happened to have an âacoustic couplerâ [pre modem stuff]; this was BACK in 1972. Despite the clumsy, slow access, it did capture my interest and led me to a career decision in Computer Science.
The first computer I actually purchased and owned was a Micron P100; the â100â was apparently significant because it was a 100 Mhz processor running the system. The unit came with Microsoft âWindows for Workgroups 3.11â, but around the time I got the system in 1995, Microsoft had just introduced Windows 95, so I DUAL BOOTED that with Linux - which was my actual intent. Slackware was my choice for the first introduction to Linux software, and I picked up a book containing a slightly dated version; it worked, but gave me low resolution (640x480) and only 8 colors, so one of the first investigative things I did with Slackware was to learn how to improve that; I found a newer graphics driver and brought things up to whatâs commonly called VESA (1024x768) graphics today, with 800x600 as backup; MUCH better.
A few years later I got a Toshiba laptop and did more. Iâm not sure I even remember all of the systems Iâve used over the years, but professionally Iâve used scores of different operating systems, applications, tools and programming languages. Iâm NOT a great programmer; Iâve been more of a systems integrator with a good general knowledge of software-hardware capabilities and capabilities. Iâm using a Lenovo IdeaPad now; I think their âThinkpadâ line, which they acquired long ago from IBM is far superior to the IdeaPad, but âthe price is rightâ with what Iâm using, since Iâm now retired.
The first computer I programmed was an IMSAI 8080 that was sitting in the metal shop I worked at (we were fabricating prototype/early production sheet metal parts). I have vague memories of flipping the switches (no keyboard) and saving programs to cassette tape. I also have memories of 80 x 20 terminal ouput while learning MASM (macro assembler), but that may have been on a Cromemco system that was also around and was the heart of a commercial video arcade game being developed. Those systems were so simple: line up machine code and press the go button.
Brian, I remember the Atari 830 acoustic coupler, and always wanted one of those. And an 810 disk drive. And lots of other Atari peripherals⊠lolâŠ
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and then a BBC Micro -early to mid 1980âs
I had to search that on Google. Haha. Before my time.
1982 - Texas Instruments TI-99/4A
1986 - Commodore 128
1994 - white box Intel Plato motherboard with Pentium 75
After that, I have never stopped upgrading and building.
I didnât realize TI had computers. I do remember their calculators, and they were some serious machines, with programming capabilities. We use to program the quadratic equation in them. Good fun they were.
I looked it up; TI sold that computer line until 1988. They were well regarded, but they lacked that IBM/PC compatibility that some of the others enjoyed.
The TI-99/4A was interesting hardware. The PEB (Peripheral Expansion Box) was the only way to add a floppy drive, and Texas Instruments wanted a small fortune for it. I used a Radio Shack cassette recorder to save/load my data connected to the TI-99/4A. The tones saved to the cassette were not dissimilar to those of a dial-up modem. The cassette technique was slow, but it worked reliably. It was here that I taught myself Extended BASIC, and back then computers shipped with detailed printed manuals.
I recall wanting a Spectrum, but couldnât afford it. By the time I could afford to buy a computer, it was a DX66, with an AWE32 SoundBlaster + Yamaha XG.
The first working computer that I bought was a radio shack color computer. I played around with microsoft basic, and learned to do peeks and pokes in memory to paint the screen.
That was a really long time ago.
Are ANY of you old enough to remember Heathkit? They had a lot of electronic projects, some of which you could build, others theyâd assemble.
While I was at Michigan Tech in the 1970s we had some Heathkit models in the Electrical Engineering computer hardware labs. I briefly experimented with a few of them.
Later, a few years after I was employed, General Motors had a few on-site âlifetime learningâ classes. I attended one sponsored from the Wayne State University College of Lifetime learning and we put together board level experiments and literally wrote simple programs using groups of zeros and ones, the lowest possible programming level. That was also a Heathkit, either an H8 or H11; canât remember which any more. I also took a real time course and I remember building a project for a âspring mass damper systemâ (essentially a real time simulation of an automobile suspension - a simple example).
My day to day experience has nothing to do with any of these things but I looked into numerous different areas to determine which ones I wanted to focus on. When I found UNIX, and later Linux, that gave me the path I chose to pursue.
I remember using a Tandy (monochrome). It was my first experience with a word processor and was a fun computer to play around with.
Neither Heathkit nor Tandy were my FIRST computer experience. Our school district cooperated with other schools in our county to form what was called an âIntermediate School Districtâ, which provided a variety of services that many schools could share. What they offered in the early 1970s was acoustic coupler telephone dial in service to a district minicomputer. We used ASR-33 teletype devices with paper tape reader/writer capabilities, so we could save our simple programs on spools of yellow paper tape, held in a circular band with rubber bands. The computer had a copy of an early implementation of Dartmouth BASIC, which has been vastly improved since those early days, (and probably either replaced or mothballed by now). It was enough to get me interested, but of course I wanted a vastly nicer interface. When I found video monitors and keyboards, and was better; direct minicomputer, personal computer and mainframe computer access was much better, depending on the task.