The Shop > Electronics & IC Programing
Adventures in old 80s computers.
DavidA:
I would be interested to know which computer members first used. And which one they did their first programming on.
My first experience with computers was in 1980 when someone left an (I think) Olivetti machine with me and invited me to 'have a play' with it.
But it was a TRS-80 Model 1 that I learned to program on. Ik of ram, tape for storing my master pieces and only two string functions. A$ and B$.
And, naturally, upper case only.
This lead, years later when I was at Huddersfield Poly', to me getting a reputation for writing very 'user hostile' programs.
Dave.
awemawson:
My first programming experience was weekly sessions in 1968 sitting in front of a Teletype which was on line to a time sharing bureaux. I was writing short routines in Fortran processing measured values for the spectral response of military infra red detectors. It was a slow, long winded business all at 110 baud.
My first owned computer was one I designed and made in 1973 using the Texas 74181 'bit slice' ALU chip set, and was micro-programmed using a diode matrix to form the actual instructions from sequences of logical operations. I think I had 1k of actual RAM. All wire wrapped on home etched boards! Amazingly it worked.
My first non home brew was in about 1975 - an S100 bus machine using initially an 8080 CPU board, and later a Z80 one from 'Tinker Toys' and it was this one that I used to get to grips with assembler coding.
All this well before 'PC's' arrived on the scene.
Bluechip:
BBC B+ with a 5" Floppy [ disk that is .... :lol: ], at least I did until it got run over. Also had a Nascom 'B' [ I think ] but never got into that thing really. Eventually gave it to a bloke I used to work with at IBM - he was collecting ancient pre-PC stuff. Commodore, Dragons etc. etc.
Then did nowt really until about 1997-ish when PE started faffing with the 16F84 and TK2 .
Dave
DavidA:
How did you manage to run over your computer ?
Dave.
S. Heslop:
Being born at the start of the 90s, Windows 95 was in full force by the time I got old enough to really use computers.
I said it before but it must've been great to live in a time when computing magazines were actually about computers. By the time I was looking at PC magazines they were more aimed towards people with little knowledge about computers, and never got more technical than installing antivirus software.
I guess the 'real computing' stuff all migrated to the internet, and I didn't get an internet connection till 2005. My parents got caught up in the news hysteria about it and really believed the internet was nothing but chatrooms and pedophiles.
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