February 28, 2007 3:51
What Was Your First Computer?
A lovely book landed on my desk today: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by John Alderman, Dag Spicer, and Mark Richards. It starts with a reconstructed version of the Z3 Adder, a WWII-era machine that used "hole-punched movie film" to store data, and goes up through Google's first production server, which is not very vintage but somehow appropriate anyway. The photos are gorgeous -- the windy blue-white guts of a Cray-3, the humble plywood case of an Apple I, a purple-and-white portable suitcase-style Osborne...
But I was disappointed not to see either of my first two computers in there. Somewhere around 2nd or 3rd grade students in my elementary school were taken out of class, in small groups, and ushered in hushed silence into the awesome presence of a Commodore PET, which lived underground, like the Minotaur in its maze, in the school's fallout shelter (this is such a perfect period piece). Under close supervision, we were permitted to play Hunt the Wumpus for about half an hour. Thus educamated, we were returned back to our surface lives.
Later my family actually took possession of a Sinclair ZX81, a tiny little guy with a touchpad keyboard that hooked up to your TV. IIRC, it had a mighty 1K of RAM (can that possibly be right?) For storage it hooked up to my dad's boombox -- my siblings and I would play the data tapes out loud, at high volume, to annoy him. What I remember most about our beloved ZX81 was that you could program in BASIC, and it would bug-check as you typed -- if what you were saying made no sense, it wouldn't let you add the line. That kind of thing would probably annoy me now -- I always disable grammar-checkers -- but for an 11-year-old it was handy.
If I got a PC now, of course, I would never consider programming it. I would just surf the Web endlessly. But back then, trapped as we were on our little computational islands, we made our own fun.
About Nerd World
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman blogs about anything and everything that could be plausibly labeled geeky--science fiction, fantasy, video games, comic books, tech stuff, and so on. If it could get you beaten up in junior high, it's fair game. About the Author
Matt Selman
Matt Selman has worked on eleven seasons and over two hundred episodes of The Simpsons. He currently serves as an Executive Producer. About the Author
RSS Feed
 |
Reader Comments (9)
My father bought an Epson QX10 when I was in junior high. It would thoughtfully cluck like a chicken when it was about to lose your document, so you knew to dive for the "save" button (sort of like a cat gagging before it hurls on your carpet). And you could play "Zork" on it. Who could ask for more?
The real wonder is that my dad was still using the QX10 when I was in grad school. Ten out of ten for being an early adopter, but minus several million for using Valdocs in the 1990's.
Posted by K | February 28, 2007 6:06 PM
An Apple IIe, with I think 64K of RAM. Though I suppose you could count my Atari 2600 with keypads and BASIC Programming cartridge.
Posted by Eric J | March 1, 2007 12:29 PM
My first computer: IBM 360 programming WATFIV FortanIV on Pencil Card. Later an IBM 370/158 OS/370 MVT. You penciled in "bubble" that corresponded to the same holes put in using EBCDIC 029 Keypunch machines. I think it was an IBM 360 / 155. We submitted the cards, and got results in a day or two. I got to test and IBM 5100. That was cool with the APL option, but it had cruddy basic. My first "PC" was an Atari 800. I had a tape drive and a disk drive. Between 32 and 48 KB of RAM depending if I was using a cartridge or not. It cost hundreds of dollars for 16KB of memory. BASIC, PILOT, and LOGO. LOGO was cool. Very much fun for graphics! Later in life I used the ATARI to write code (in PL/I and COBOL) that supported one of the radars in a current (that is still flying) Navy fighter. I don't think I should say which! The old main frame days were much much more fun then the current PC's.
Posted by dulcimoo | March 1, 2007 11:08 PM
My first love was a TRS (80?) Color from Radio Shack. It boasted a whopping 2 K of memory and programs were added via cartridge or a cassette tape drive.
Posted by KlingonChick | March 2, 2007 9:12 AM
Your posting made me misty eyed with nostalgia for my old 1988 Compaq "portable" that ran Wordperfect on DOS with a tiny screen, little glowing green letters and the keyboard that snapped on to the front. If you are pining for more visuals, here's a nice site from the heart of the Santa Cruz mountains where, apparently, old PCs are put out to pasture: -http://www.digibarn.com/
Posted by Leslie | March 2, 2007 1:19 PM
I had a Timex Sinclair 1000 (rebranded ZX81) with the 16K expansion pack. (Actually, I still have it.) In high school, we used Trash-80's in the Comp-Sci class, and I longed for a CoCo. My parents got me an IBM PCjr (Peanut) instead.
Eventually, I got an aging Mac Plus (with a giant 40MB HD) and I haven't looked back.
Posted by Church | March 3, 2007 10:56 AM
The first computer I considered "mine", that I could lay my hands on anytime and play with to my heart's content, was an IBM 1620 with 20KB magnetic core (ferrite doughnuts!) memory, a 10cps console typewriter, and a card reader/punch. The comp. sci. lab at RIT (in the early '70s at the new campus) had all these wonderful old working machines that we students could explore and use. I learned machine language, Assembler, and Fortran on that wonderful, monstrous, cranky box. We had access to all the newest tech., but those days of exploration on such historical and wonderful technology I will never forget.
Posted by Chuck Partridge | March 5, 2007 9:24 AM
An Apple IIe with 48K of memory. I got Visicalc with it, did a budget and it told me (without question) that I couldn't afford the computer.
Posted by Michael Brown | March 5, 2007 11:25 AM
A IBM 386, actually i think it's still in my parents garage or shed somewhere....
Posted by sheds | June 17, 2007 6:51 AM