Well, do you remember what year you got your first computer and what the specs are?
I know, it was a ATARI130XE with 1.79MHz and 128kB RAM. running with a Datasette/tape cassette player to save and load programs. The OS was the Atari OS. You can find the details here: Atari 130XE
But this is not what I want to tell you. I just browsed Google Books and found this: Popular Science 10/1990
Reading that reminded me how fast time is running.
Here is a screenshot of page 41 (in case you don't want to go there (click the image to enlarge).
See the price for that bricks imagine today. Take that money and buy components…what you could get…
My first computer was an Amstrad/Schneider CPC664 in 1986. It comes with a Z80 CPU running @ 4MHz, 64kB RAM, a 3’’ floppy disk drive (really great) and a green screen. I remember that I wrote my thesis on it using CP/M and Wordstar, but most time we play Bomb Jack :).
I believe it was about 1980-81. It plugged into a color TV and booted to BASIC. I still have the computer, tape drive, and I think some game cartridges - I even had a printer but I don’t know what became of it. I haven’t fired it up in years, but the manuals are on my bookshelf. In addition to a friendly no-fail intro to BASIC programming, they include the schematics and a reference for 6502 Assembler mnemonics.
I used to write my own BASIC programs. I was already into chatbots and AI by then. The computer magazines of the day would publish BASIC programs line-by-line. My younger brother would painstakingly type them in. One that I remember him entering was a pretty decent Centipede knock-off.
In the mid 70’s, my father shipped equipment from the US to holland and built a home computer. It was a model from “the Digital Group” but I dont know which one. On that machine a took my first steps at basic programming although that didn’t amount to much. I was about 7 at the time.
A few years later we got the TRS-80 model I on which I started to actually learn to make programs…
I remember we had a subscription to BYTE magazine with advertisements that prized 16K RAM at only $1200,-
Thank you al for your stories. Reading them gives me a slight idea how old you all are
I also still remember entering BASIC code from a magazine…it was a pain in the b***…forgot one cmma and was wondering why the code did not run Troubleshooting in 400 lines printout with a 9-needle printer with a almost blank ink ribbon on low quality paper and find a missed comma was quite challenging at this time.
My first computer was in 1979 and was an Ohio Superboard II - An excellent machine with it’s 4KB of program RAM and 1KB video ram (both of which I doubled). Good BASIC and I learned 6502 assembler programming with it and did a really good ‘space invaders’ implementation.
I moved on to a BBC model B and learned so much with it due to it’s multifarious interfaces. I ended up using them at work and wrote a version of the ‘animal’ program to allow minimally skilled technicians to diagnose printer and VDU faults on the production line. At home I built a SPO256-AL2 chip based speech synthesizer interfaced to the parallel port. A talking computer - WOW!
At some point I bought a Sinclair Spectrum, primarily to learn Z80 coding and absolutely hated the ‘dead flesh’ keyboard, but after the 6502 machines, 16 bit registers were an absolute luxury.
Couldn’t agree more on the keyboard of the Spectrum - the first upgrade I did was the full size keyboard - the board of the spectrum fitted inside the keyboard case.
imagine today. Take that money and buy components…what you could get…