n800 ancestor

[ioan]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/05/03/forgotten_tech_epson_hx20/

-ioan

[Karel Jansens]

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/05/03/forgotten_tech_epson_hx20/

-ioan

I agree that the Epson was earlier, but the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 had a lot more impact.

http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.html

[brendan]

ahh the trash 80. i learnt basic on that.

[Texrat]

ahh the trash 80. i learnt basic on that.

Same! We thought we were sooo powerful on that thing... :D

[debernardis]

My first "pda" was the Sharp PC1500. (http://www.pc1500.com/) I still have it. Wonderful. It was in 1982, I was 16 years old. Overclocked to 4 MHz, got the semi-secret assembly code manual, hacked the thing to make a two-players tron-like game on the bw low-res 7x156 dots lcd. Sigh...

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Sharp_PC1500_System_1.jpg

[proterra]

Could this be close to the truth
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/05/25/intels_newspad_from_acorn/

[fpp]

In 1984 I wrote my first "business apps" (in Basic :-) on a Canon X-07 :
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=258

A fantastic machine for its day !

[Sadavyk]

I don't know about you guy's, But I am so happy I wasn't apart of that time, There was not internet can you imagine a world with out INTERNETTABLETTALK or GOOGLE I would cry..

[brendan]

the first computer i ever used, in second grade, was this boat anchor...

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=102&st=1

how far we have come...

[Texrat]

My first real computer (Timex Sinclair 1000):

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/ts1000.JPG

http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html

Man, Sadavyk, you have no idea! It was like being on a frontier then. You'd play around with something like the above, and then the oh-so-sweet Commodore 64 comes out and it's a whole new ball game. *sigh...*

[YoDude]

Back then Sinclair rocked my world @ 3.25 MHz. :D

[Sadavyk]

Your right TEXRAT, I never looked at it like that but I came into the tech world kind of late, I tip my hat to you..

[ioan]

oh man, everybody is soo young! my first computer was :

http://www.shacktech.co.uk/images/abacus.jpg

[Sadavyk]

LOL your right

[jpj]

I cut my programming teeth in the late 1970s with the HP-67 card programmable calculator, moving on to port civil engineering FORTRAN programs to the HP-41C. You can see, I always had a thing for handhelds.

Unfortunately, magnetic card storage was kind of limiting, so I reluctantly moved up to "big iron" - the HP-85 desktop with its data cassette storage and a whopping 16KB of RAM (expandable to 32KB). Whee! Then came the IBM PC. None of the available FORTRAN compilers included date or time library functions, so I taught myself Assembler and wrote my own. There was something exhilirating about getting that close to the innards. Since then, life hasn't been the same. A geek was born...

[m_sparks]

internet!?! :eek: how about the days of dial-up BBS boards - jezz i racked up my parents phone bills with my atari 1200xl and the 1030 modem...good times, good times!:rolleyes:

http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/XL/XL-Pages/xl-range-main.htm


http://www.atarimuseum.com/computers/8BITS/1200xl/1200xl-main.jpg

you know-it just hit me as i was posting this - does anyone know if you can run linux on the old ataris? that might be fun....

-matt

[mredeker]

the first computer i ever used, in second grade, was this boat anchor...

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=102&st=1

how far we have come...

That is the one I started with, too :D

[iball]

I started out with a Timex-Sinclair 1000 as well.
But then I got an "upgrade" in the form of a Commodore Vic-20 and my grandmother made the mistake of buying me the 300 -baud modem cart for it...ah, Compuserve and big phone bills!

[anidel]

None of you guys started on this one?
A Laser 500 from VTech
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/vtech_laser500.jpg

It wasn't even mine. (my very first PC was the C= 64)

[Texrat]

Yeah, I remmeber getting kicked off of Compuserve for going beyond my alloted minutes on a 300 baud modem... lol.

Oh, and I didn't mean to be dismissive of ya Sadavyk. Heck, the tablets are the next frontier, so at least you were here for that, right? ;)

[frethop]

Now I'm feeling old. My first machine was a TRS-80 (loved that cassette tape storage) with BASIC programming, but my first program (the one that got me hooked) was in BASIC on a SIGMA-6 mainframe. This bad-boy was my interface of choice:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/tty33.jpg
Paper tape storage, 300 baud comm rate, typewriter speed output. Now THAT's computing!

-F

[Karel Jansens]

You are all wimps! Try debugging this baby:
http://www.science-explorer.de/bilder/stonehenge008.JPG

:cool:

[Texrat]

Feh. Totaly unfair. The original coders are all dead and left no documentation!

But at least the media is more stable than what we use now...

[ioan]

and this is how a computer will look like in the future - the future of that time (i wonder what do they thought the wheel will be for, playing need4speed?). just read the text:

http://www.toyarchive.com/Computer1950Future.jpg

[Karel Jansens]

Feh. Totaly unfair. The original coders are all dead and left no documentation!

But at least the media is more stable than what we use now...

Documentation? Documentation!!??

Sheesh...
:cool:

[anidel]

Documentation? Documentation!!??

Sheesh...
:cool:

"Use the source, Luke"

[geneven]

The t/s 1000 was my first computer as well; I got it at Kmart, paying extra for the 16k extension--more memory! I thought it was cool that I didn't have to type in goto but could just hit one key. But loading programs with a cassette player was a drag--sometimes you had to try over and over to get the program to load. It worked better on the Timex 2068, a COLOR computer I got later.

It wasn't bad with no Internet--there was a thriving BBS community. When the Internet rose, those pillars of the community,BBS sysops, faded back into obscurity.

[wodin]

Here was mine http://oldcomputers.net/atari400.html . This page says max memory was 48 K, but actually that is in error. the only way to expand this from the original 8K was to piggy back RAM chips on top of the built in ones with the address line bent up and wire wrapped to the original address chip. You could get a whopping 32 K that way.

I learned basic on this, and managed to produce a passable slot machine app.