Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Computers from Yesteryear

Got to thinking about this when discussing new computers on another thread. My first computer was a Zenith Z150 (second generation after the Z100). It had the amazing 600kb of storage that I bumped to 712kb (not mega or giga, but kilobytes). That wasn't enough to store the operating system (DOS) and run any programs, so I had to have the OS on a separate 5 1/4 floppy that was loaded up to start. Man have we come a long way!

p.s. - I still have that old system and it works perfectly (Z150 CPU, 14" green monitor, and Star NX10 dotmatrix printer and 5 1/4" floppys). I wonder if it's worth anything?

had a Vic 20, a Commodore 64 and 128 my next computer was an old 386 after that. Les

At home we had a Radio Shack TRS-80.

Now you're making me feel old.

I once managed the Heathkit computer business unit, which, at the time, was just kit-ized Zenith computers. First Heathkit computer I built was the H-158, same as the Z-158, with 8088 processor and spunky co-processor, IIRC.

Before that, I worked at Tektronix, which allowed employees to buy parts at cost + 15%, which allowed many of us to build Tek 4051 graphic computers, with non-RAM storage--it was built into the face of the CRT. 32K of RAM, operating system in another 32K of ROM.

Forgot to mention the games ... pong and "pong-like" golf. Other than that it was a $2500 word processor. Man was I living large.

Mom had a Kaypro Word processor and one of those old zip feed printer's.

My first home computer was an IBM PS/2 Model 30. 640K RAM (Max) and a 40 Meg hard drive. It had Windows 1.0:

You'd be surprised what a collector would pay for that.
I have a friend who sold an early Macintosh computer for way more than he paid for it! Think thousands...

Tandy (Radio Shack) Color Computer, the first model, with a TV for a monitor. And I sprung for the high memory option, 16k. Mass storage was a cassette recorder. Of course it was hacked to death, both hardware and software. The cool thing was that with only 32k for what correlates to an operating system today and stock parts, one person could actually completely understand the computer, hardware and software. Today even the monitor/TV is obsolete and basic 8 bit micro controllers (one chip computers) are more powerful. Gotta love the 6809 instruction set though. Still have it, in the basement of course.

My first computer was an Apple IIe I bought in 1981. The IBM PC did not exist yet at the time.

I used it first with a Z80 card/processor and a pair of 5 1/4 floppy disk drives and a CPM operating system. My printer was a Centronics needle printer. I was living in London and the whole thing cost me about � 2100 !... The first hard disk which appeared one or two years later was only 1 Meg and cost � 1200.

My favorite programs were Word Star a great word processing program and Visicalc, the first spreadsheet, to be replaced later by Multiplan.

Although I had bought the computer with the maximum 64 K of memory (the basic model came with only 16 K...), when I was doing a "cut and paste", I could only handle a few words at a time. Therefore I bought an extra 64 K of memory and everything became fine, I could cut and paste complete sets of paragraphs.

Sadly enough, despite all the progress made by Intel, MS Word of today with a state of the art Toshiba portable of the professional line (the latest Tecra) IS NOT FASTER than my old little machine was with Word Star !!! Of course today's systems offer a lot more facilities, but technical progress has been somewhat buried under a lot of useless complications and speed has not progressed.

Even my laser printer is hardly faster than the Centronics needle printer.

At the time, the sheet by sheet feeder - an option I did not buy, preferring the more reliable continuous feed of folded sheets - cost � 600 !!!

It is only with the spreadsheet that you can really see a major progress in ease and speed.

Times have changed a lot, the hardware has progressed immensely, there are many more applications, large pictures can be stored and handled, Internet came etc.. but I feel that Microsoft has "stolen" some of the potential through unnecessary complexities.

Okay, I'll show my age too. After writing assembly code in school using development boards based on the Intel 8080A and Motorola 6502 processors, a bunch of us ordered up kits in a group buy and built the �Ferguson Big Board�. This was a single board computer with keyboard controller and video built in. We still needed to obtain a keyboard, video monitor, a multi-voltage power supply and some sort of storage media. One Z80 8 bit processor @ 2 Megahertz system clock frequency, 64 kilobytes of dynamic RAM (all the processor could address with it's 16 bit address bus). CPM 2.2 for an OS. Programs included Wordstar, Microsoft BASIC, Adventure (a text based cave game), etc. The board was the same dimension as an 8 inch floppy drive which is what I had for storage. Each eight inch floppy would store a whopping 256 kilobytes of data! I leaned a lot and had a lot of fun building it and using it. I still have the main board.

Yes, we have come a long way. I was about 5 generations into PC's before I had one that could even handle today's desktop image. Remeber DOS and autoexec files? At least then I could trouble shoot software problems. Started with the Zenith Z150, WordPerfect, Lotus, and Harvard Graphics.

My dad won an Apple IIPlus from Design News for a patent/invention he had submitted for a contest they were running. We never opened it, but traded it to a friend for a wood stove.

My first computer was a TI-994A with the solid-state cartridges and then a tape-recorder for data storage.

Then, I graduated to a Commodore 64 with DUAL FLOPPY DRIVES! Ran that system long and hard for a number of years.

Started college and bought a Mac PowerBook 145b (I beleive that was it). A few years later, I got a PowerMac.

Bought my first PC (and current desktop model) 8 years ago with a Dell Dimension 8100. Scrounged and resurrected a few laptops from work.

Looking to build a new desktop the end of this year.

Aqualung

First exposure to a computer was the BAEDP time sharing service in 1972 - teletype and paper tape. Then went on to work with a 8080 dev board, as a neighbor's dad was a BSD in Sales for Intel. First actual personal computer was an Atari 800. Star Raiders and Visicalc - oh my!

I think the crudest interface I ever had to work on though, was many years later, when I was entering code via the front panel on a very finicky PDP-8. This thing had a tendency to overheat and lose everything in RAM (probably all of a couple K) just before you were able to show the instructor that your code was complete and functional.

Punch cards and Fortran taught me the value of recycling code, and typing slowly but accurately.

Good times (not)

Just thinking...... Remeber all the IBM ads with the Charlie Chaplin guy? LOL

I remember taking computers in 8th grade on a Radio Shack something or nother. The class was using DOS and programming on BASIC.

My first computer at home was a Macintosh. I think my dad payed over $4k for it, because it had the upgraded external 10MB harddrive. That hard drive was the size of a Websters Dictionary. Now a days you get 4 gig jumpdrives for $30 bucks and they are the size of pens.

Hemi

I remember the TRS-80 , with the tape deck, and the move "up" to 5" floppies.....

In the mid eighties I was saddled with trying to learn programming with a language called Ada in the POS Arcturus environment.

That crap soured me for life on programming computers. Twenty five years later I still flinch when I find out I have to learn something new to do with computing.

IBM 80/88, thought I died and went to heaven when I got a new 286 machine!

Yep, an H-158 was my first one too. Building it was a bit of a stretch from the crystal radios I had built before.

First "real" one was a Mac SE/30 in 89. 128 Mb of RAM and a 40 Mb hard drive. I was sure I'd never need more.

My first Computer was a Burroughs B-3500 and B-2500 Sharing the same Tape Drives and Disk Memory. The 3500 was used Batch Mode the 2500 was used on line mode hard wired to CRT and Data entry terminals.