Comments on: Ahh, My First Computer…

By: MawWarropyWep

MawWarropyWep — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:18:28 +0000

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By: Leo D.

Leo D. — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:02:44 +0000

My first computer was a Commodore 64. I learned to program and understand operating systems on it. Eventually a program called GEOS was written for it which used a GUI and ran on a collection of floppy discs. GEOS was eventually ported over to pc’s. I would love to be able to run GEOS again on a modern pc. It would be amazingly fast. As computers get faster, Windows seems to get bigger and slower. My first pc was a 360sx running dos upgraded to DRDOS and GEOS. My favorite pc was the Commodore Amiga 500 that I upgraded to 8 Meg of memory. a friend with a pc asked what I would do with all that RAM!!! The driving force for buying a pc over a Commodore or Apple or Mac was that you knew that you would always be able to buy programs for your computer. Yeah – try buying anything for a four year old pc. Another note – my first hard drive was a 20 Megabite drive (0.2 GB) that sold for $200. At least hardware has gotten better and cheaper.

By: Rose

Rose — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:18:32 +0000

My first computer I bought out of Radio Shack. It was fine for writing a paper on it for school. But beyond that I couldn’t do anything with it. The only other person I knew that could make it do things other then print out my papers for school was Steve.

By: Genie

Genie — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:28:12 +0000

I started off with an Apple IIe, so not quite so old. But I’ll never forget my computer sci teacher in college going on about the fact that if you properly managed your hard drive space (deleting old versions of programs when you installed the new, etc.), you’d never need more than a 80 MB hard drive. LOL!

By: Pete Larkin

Pete Larkin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:18:09 +0000

My first was a timex Sinclair 1000…talk about primitive. Mine was loaded however, I have the optional 16K rampack. I still have it in its original box complete with its directions book. I learned a lot with it, a small screen B & W television, and a portable tape recorder for saving and loading programs via cassette tape. I learned both basic and machine language with it. Later I moved on to “more powerful?” Radio Shack trash 80s.

By: Sue Aimes

Sue Aimes — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:14:31 +0000

My first computer was also a Commodore and I loved that little machine. I am now 80 yrs old and really didn’t come into being computer savvy until my grandson, Wes, grew up to be my techie. When I get into trouble, he shows up and solves all my problems. Thanks Wes for being my genie!!

By: John Cooper

John Cooper — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:54:21 +0000

My first computer was a Coleco Adam. It was based on the Coleco game system and came with a daisy wheel printer. But the text on the TV was a maximum of 40 characters wide. Bonus, I think it came with a Donkey Kong cartridge! It also used a digital tape drive system with no pinch roller. The cassette looked like a standard audio cassette, with an extra hole or two in it. The directory was in the middle of the tape. So when you wanted to save anything, it would start at the directory, then zip out to the place to store it, then back to the directory, then back to store it, then back to the directory… you get the picture. Had it for a little over a year, and got a suitcase style IBM XT.

By: Susanne

Susanne — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:29:21 +0000

One of my girl friends down the street had one of these computers and we thought she was one of the luckiest people in the world. We were absolutely fascinated with her computer. Sometimes you think you actually just dreamed that the computer that hooked up to a TV of all things existed. My kids look at me like I sprouted antlers or something when I tell them these stories of how things were when I was a kid. Thanks for confirming that it really did exist and I have not completely lost my sanity.

My first computer was purchased in the late 90′s a Gateway and this was after working on computers since 1989. Compared to how streamlined and advanced computers are now it seems like my Gateway was a big clunky dinosaur. I love how far technology has come and I love how much I can do on my computer on a daily basis.

By: Joe Williams

Joe Williams — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:41:07 +0000

After experimenting with a Sinclair I moved up to a TRS 80 that managed to wear out a coupld of dot matrix printers and then I won a Harvard Graphics software package as a door pize. The graphics were great but my case was too small for then ecessary graphics board.
I wrote a grant proposal for a device that could record graphics onto 35mm slides. Alas my TRS 80 was no match for this new windfall so I convinced my dean of the value of beautiful graphs projected on the screen. He agreed and in no time I was producing over 3,000 beautiful graphs each year on agricultural production statistics in Kentucky. I used a lot of 35mm film and production time but it was great fun when I could produce multimedia programs using six Carosel projectors on three large screens. The addition of stereo sound was a crowd winner!
You can talk all you want to about PowerPoint but these slide show graphics combined with “live” images had far better results. No wonder I enjoyed my university job for over 42 years!

By: Wesley

Wesley — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:17:21 +0000

Here in OZ all the schools still use Apple computers up to High school – user friendly, don’t crash and you don’t have to load “patches” every couple of weeks and the Operating system is so reliable that it remains constant for years. It seems that XP is the best of a bad lot and everyone is going back to [t.