help!

[mpiotro]

My mom bought for me a "game" for my Atari 2600 - Basic Programming.
I chucked it aside after about 3 minutes and went back to Asteroids..

-Mike

 

[Mickey]

IBM PCjr. Had a plugin module to do Basic Programming,cool.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=186

 

[Tom Jenkins]

I still keep my slide rule handy, just in case! Of course, I don't remember how to add on the darned thing ........

 

[Sliver]

Commodore Vic20, cassette tape drive,4k Ram, 16K expansion RAM cost $160 Can.
Had a ball with it.
Brian.

 

[Rod]

First computer

1978 Apple }{ 1.17Mhz 6502 with 16k ram and a RatShack tape drive. Paid $450 for 32k Ram so I could hookup a floppy drive - Still have it
Got an Apple}{e (upper/lowercase)
1984 classic Mac (screamer!)
1988-9? MacII (first color Mac) $9 grand!!!
MacIIx
G3 - using at this moment
G4 Titanium
newest G4 laptop for Christmas
oh yeh - some kind of Windoze box to test my software on

Mike - do you still have that Apple 1?? hens tooth

question for ya'll:
Why did IBM name it's early fixed drive a Winchester. Answer will be coming from Dandrade.

 

[bernie_carlton]

Fist computer - Radio Shack Model I - learned a lot from that thing. BASIC, Assembly and Pascal programming, computer circuit modification.

And yes I do know the Winchester thing - but I'll wait on others.

 

[BobB]

(Of course, nobody called them 'hard' drives, they were Winchesters, weren't they?)

I can remember a computer dealer in Sydney had an old "Winchester" in his shop window on display recently. Apparently it still worked. They used to grunt and grind as if the bearings were falling apart.

This particular hard drive was an enormous 20 meg. One would have been lucky to fit it in the back of a large American GM pick up truck. He apparently purchased it from IBM when they were about to throw it away.

Bernie, I had one of those also. And a few more that are past history.

Never had Apple. Could not afford them.

 

[Rod]

Bob,

The Kearney & Trecker horizontal mill used those old beasts. 6 Meg and used 220 3phase for the spindle. 'course the used a PDP 1175 for the controller. I'm an expert on those junkers - Gaggh!

Rod (The CNC dude)

 

[Bitmore]

My first was an OSI, Ohio Scientific for you kids! Dual 5.25" single sided floppies, 6502 Rockwell microprocessor, 32K bytes memory and a 20 meg drive that had 4 24 inch "platters"! The drive weighed over 70 pounds! It was kinda neet though because it had a removable glass cover to swap the "platters" if you had another "platter" pack.
Certainly was not a laptop!

 

[harryting]

I think it was 1983-4? It was a Tandy Rat Shack Color Computer. My poor parent got talked into buying a "Floppy Drive Controller" as well. Don't remember the price but it was like $1500 or something like that. Of course, we didn't have that kind of money either.... dumb dumb... They got this idea that learning computer might lead to a good job or something.. sigh..

Current system:

AMD64 3400+
ATI 9500 hacked to full 8 pipeline
1GB PC3200 Ram

 

[Terry Woods]

Gee, coxy...

It appears that no one knows how to help you through your crisis.

Too bad...

---

I'm with sliver! Commodore-64! Floppy? Whazat? Cassette Player? Now yer talkin'!

This was when I was working as a Tech Support for Tech Support at a place called Floating Point Systems. We made state-of-the-art high-speed massive array processor systems. We were really high-end with the big boys! And I'm playing with a Commodore-64! This was before the PC-explosion.

When I finally moved into a "real" PC, I never even considered going to Apple... their system was closed. That is what hurt them so much in their early years.

I still believe that a Commodore-64 can handle a really huge amount of the typical low-end PLC applications out there. What was great was the easy access to the I/O through the parallel port. Instead of being limited to the number of pins available on the parallel port, it was easy to create a protocol that would communicate to a bunch of I/O boxes by "addressing" (selecting an I/O box) and then passing/reading status data to/from the selected box.

And boy could those things take abuse! Cooling fan for the CPU? Whazat?

Need access? Access was built in! You only needed to know BASIC!

Monitor? HMI? Any kind of TV was fine!

Damn... I had fun with those...

 

[Doug-P]

My 'firstborn', as Mrs. -P called it was a Heathkit microprocessor trainer. I upgraded it by hand to an astounding 512 bytes RAM. Added the 6809 (that's one cool chip: 8/16-bit accumulator; two index regs.; two stack pointers + addressing modes out the wazoo) daughterboard enhancement.

Built a Microace

. Got a box 'o parts and a schematic with no instructions. Had a ZX-80 too.

Moved to the big time with a Color Computer (CoCo) 2. Bought a CoCo3 and drive controller so I could store progams/data on 256k floppies. Yahoo!

 

[Rod]

The CoCo

I was working for the Fort Worth Museum of Science & History when the Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) came out. We/I had to chose between the AppleIIe and the CoCo.
John Roach (pres of Tandy sat on our board). We needed 6 color display computers and the CoCo didn't have floppy drives that would auto-boot. I told Mr. Roach we would go with Apple. He quit the board.

The first computer I used was a 4004 - toggle switches for address and instruction. flip switches and hit the load button. THEN you could use the card/tape reader and the teletype printer. At that time a CRT was considered to be a storage device.
No mistakes could get you up to printing "Hello" within 45 minutes.

Tom Jenkins: you had me going for a moment! My K&E circular slide rule doesn't add either - but it does do log-log.

I have the feeling that the 'old hands' here were among the first to buy personal computers, take them and the software apart and learn assembly - THAT'S why RLL is a walk in the park!! The FUN days!!

I just downloaded the driver for my laser printer - 39.5MEGS!!!!!!

Ah well,

Rod (The CNC dude)

The answer to the Winchester question - tommorrow - unless Dandrade pre-posts

 

[Bitmore]

Ok old guys...
What is the margin of error for a slide rule?

answer later.....

 

[Doug-P]

Ok old guys...
What is the margin of error for a slide rule?

I dunno. However, to illustrate how far we've come, there's a card in the Trivial Pursuit game which asks, "How many logarithmic scales are there on a slide rule?" There was a time when this would have been much more common knowledge.