Tweet of the Day

[RandySF]

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[soothsayer]

1. I built a Sinclair

[yonder]

7. That was our first also. Timex-Sinclair.

Programs were loaded by cassette tape. We thought we were riding the tiger of technology back then.

Several years after that I read of university weather researchers using those for high altitude observations. Apparently they had advantages other computers didn't. I don't remember, maybe it was size.

[soothsayer]

9. Ah yes, the simple cassette. Think I bought mine from Omni magazine

$99

[yonder]

13. Ha, ha 99 bucks. What's that in today's dollars, like $400?

We got ours at a Payless Drug Store for about the same, want to say 79 or 89 bucks. Don't remember.

I think that was part of the marketing....cheap.

[MontanaMama]

2. My first computer was a

Commodore 64. Not super old...but I thought it was a big deal a the time.

[rickford66]

3. Learned FORTRAN IV

On punch cards.

[GoCubsGo]

11. I learned some FORTRAN, but no punch cards.

Although, I did use a stats that someone else programmed on punch cards when I was in grad school. I did most of my thesis on an original Macintosh, no hard drive. You had to put the program disk in the drive, and then remove it if you wanted to save to another disk. Fortunately, it wasn't long before you could buy a secondary external drive. Pain in the ass, but still better than the punch cards and main frames.

[rickford66]

14. Actually the first computer I used was a room full of vacuum tubes.

It could do square roots !!

[GoCubsGo]

15. Thinking back on how far we've come in such a short time blows my mind.

My crummy, little Fire tablet has more computing ability that room full of tubes, and from what I understand, more than the one in the lunar modules that put men on the moon!

[Gaugamela]

4. My first computer had a 40 MB hard drive and I thought I was set for life.

[rsdsharp]

8. My first "real" computer was an IBM PC Jr.

128K of RAM. No clock, no hard drive, 5 1/2 inch floppy drive. And I do mean floppy. If you wanted to use a printer, you literally had to bolt an attachment to the CPU to plug a printer into. That was an option that cost extra, over and above the cost of the printer itself.

[yonder]

12. Our second was an IBM PS/2 model 25

8086 CPU running at 8 MHz with 512 KB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive. The monochrome monitor and computer were one unit, kind of like a Mac.

Man, were we smokin or what?

[I_UndergroundPanther]

5. Made ASCII art

That were printed out with a dot matrix printer.

Learned how to make ASCII art on an apple that had green letters on a black background on the screen ,saved it to a floppy disc.

[USALiberal]

6. This was mine! Sophomore in high school. Nt

[aeromanKC]

10. I was hooked on the Pac Man game on the new Apple II E

I had the arrow keys down!!

[Silent3]

16. This was my first experience...

After using that for a year or so, this was my second:

[madamesilverspurs]

17. Trained to run a machine

that sorted punch cards. Our instructor was the only one authorized to use the large keyboard machine that sent instructions to the sorter; that data was stored on a thing that always comes to mind when watching a curling match, rather looked like one of those stones.


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