I worked for WANG computers 1988

The mini computer was the size of a over sized desktop with separate CPU, memory and IO cards

Back when you had to FIX printers not throw them away and buy new. Chain and Band printers were the BEST to work on!

300Mg Hard drives were the size of a dish washer, had removable platter pack with 16 discs and 32 heads when a head crashed it would wipe out the entire drive and you had to replace all 32 heads and align them using an Oscilloscope.

was certified to repair the HP 1 the first laser printer.

Walked to school in 5 feet of snow barefoot up hill both ways..... blah blah blah...

Mine circa '75 or '76 was the Altair's only direct competitor, the IMSAI 8080, and I still have it. Soldered the whole thing together from scratch, had only one IC that I had to replace but otherwise was perfect. Though I have not booted it in years, I suspect it still works.

I still do occasionally bring-up to people that the 768K RAM card (yes K) cost $750.

I also have a dual-floppy disc drive which is much bigger and heavier than the computer!

My first pc was a 286 with 5" floppy drives.  The first computer I used was in about 1973/74 - a dumb terminal connecting to a mainframe over one of those modems that  you stuck the phone handset into.  I had a printer instead of a monitor.  Good times.

I'm a newb then.  Cos back in 75 I was busy learning addition and subtraction and how to use flatware.

What's kinda sad is that some of the computer skills I do have are quickly becoming "old school" - and I didn't start working on them until 2005. (excluding self-taught HTML and some basic dos commands).

The first computer I worked with(~1965) was similar to this:



Yeah, those are vacuum tubes along the top. The beast was analog and was programmed by inserting small modules containing capacitors, resistors, and inductors into the patch panel in the middle. Knobs and switches were patched in and adjusted to input variables, and the output was read on the meter or an oscilloscope, or printed out on a large x-y plotter.

There was quite a bit of math involved to derive the electrical analog of a mechanical system.

This thread is bringing back memories....

My Dad was in the computing field since the late '50s so as a child growing up I have all sorts of rich memories that are computer related. He was a mathematician by trade and actually worked on the trajectory for the Mercury program for Linde as they had the LOX component of the rocket and were also responsible for fuel burn calculations I believe. He described that effort as a room full of WW2 german scientists working slide rules....the whole room, hundreds of folks, spoke German!  Computers were also used (UNIVACs?) but everything was still backed up by slide rules.

I can also vividly remember standing in the driveway speaking with my Dad about a cuff link he was wearing I guess around 1967. It was I suppose a rudimentary IC chip and had around 100 transistors on it. Not black like you see today but rather ceramic with gold pathways visible. I remember him telling me that one day computers would be the size of washing machines...! This was unfathomable to my young mind as I had toured the Linde computer center earlier that summer  and the main frame room was about the size of a football field.

I also remember helping move a UNIVAC machine sometime in the late 60's. He was working for Union Carbide at that time and they were just giving the thing away. My father was helping a friend move it and he kept some of the replacement parts....diodes. He actually sat me down and illustrated on an extra board how these resistors formed a transistor and the logic of the signal. Lot's of info for my young 8 yo mind.

As I mentioned previously from 78-81 I worked for Mohawk Data Science and my forte was the 6401 Data recorder. It was really a wondrous device...all sorts of transistors, mechanical relays, even diodes on some boards. You could actually diagnose a problem and run it through the boards with a scope. I was also sent to school for the MDS 2400 system but is was Z80 based IIRC and I just never took to it like the 6400 series as a tech. It was all board swaps and no Oscilloscope work.

On a sad note...when working for Mohawk I worked out of the 50 Broadway office in Manhattan. My accounts were generally in the exchange area and with the bigger banks; Morgan Stanley, ADP, etc...I also had numerous accounts in World Trade one and two.  One was Cantor Fitzgerald...the company the was wiped out on 9/11.  I dated one of the front office gals for a while and have wondered if she was killed in the attack.

Yet we are old timers for having used 5.25" and 3 1/2" floppy drives and at one time drooled over the lighting speed of a 33.6k modem.

Me too, I hated losing one, or getting them out of order, or getting one crunched up.  

For me, it was Space Wars on a PDP 11/30 in 79, followed by a Timex Sinclair 1000.





My first PC with storage was a TRS-80 Model 4D.









m





 

Yes, but if you started prior to 1975, you're going to die soon.

The first computer I ever used:

True true
Funny thing is... back in the late 90s I had some equipment that still used the 5.25" floppies.  I was told that there was a new system out that used 3.5" but that it was so glitchy they didn't bother keeping it.

Back in the 80's I had some equipment that used 8" floppy disks.

ETA:  In GD, one-ups-manship is tradition.  

I started with Fortran and punch cards in 1973.

I started personal computing before there were any personal computers.

Monitors? What the fuck was a monitor?
We had a line printer. I think it was a DEC, but I don't remember. I wrote my first program in 1973. It added two numbers and printed the sum. Those were the days, pencils on punchcards.

whatevar, you're just OLD

I started in HS with a Apple ][e (green CRT's)
at home with the Ti99/4a and a cassette deck


eta: I used computer punch cards for programming the unit that tested various aircraft black boxes...but that was in the USAF and mid 90's

FIFY

 

Does having a Magnovox Oddysee count?

First one I actually owned - Epson QX-10

We have all been alive and participated in what could be arguably the most significant technological advance in human history.

If all you did was buy a computer, you contributed to the revolution. I am 49, and looking back, we have come a long long way.

Guess what?

A major airline still uses FORTRAN (granted it's FORTRAN 77).

 

I can recall the IMSAI machines and a buddy of mine had an SWTC. I can remember programming a TRS-80 prototype to play music on the radio (EMI from the unit would play on the radio if you put it close enough). The prototype that I wrote code for didn't even have the blinking asterisks for the cassette interface so you really didn't know whether you'd loaded your stuff in right until you finished and there was garbage in the program lines. It had a whopping 4k of program space and the ever-so-helpful debugger consisted of three messages: What?, How?, and Sorry. Not even a line number, just those 3 words. After that I got to play with an IBM 5120 which was much, much more sophisticated (and about 10 times the cost). The first computer I ever used my own money to buy was an Apple II+. That carried me thru undergraduate school. I've owned Ti-99/4as, Sinclairs, and a Zenith PC that I used for years.

I can remember in college playing Star Trek on an APL terminal (300 baud Decwriter) connected to a DEC-10 (or DEC-20, can't remember now). I did a LOT of programming back in the late 70s on machines like Microdata, Prime, Honeywell, and PDP-11 under the Pick operating system. My first actual FORTRAN class was using punch cards (still) on an IBM-360. I eventually convinced one of my profs to give me an account on the WYLBUR system so that I could type my programs in on a terminal rather than the punch card machine. (After which I wrote my own Star Trek game in Wylbur Exec language ).

I've done stuff on some of the oddest of the oddball one-off type machines. Like an Olympia - not the typewriter like the printer I had, but an actual PC. I did some programming on an Epson like the one in the picture above. Also did some work on an Altos, and many of the Xerox machines of the day like the Star, and the Xerox 820 PC. I even wrote some code on a Sigma 7 to act as a data base server for the Xerox 820 as a "smart" terminal.

It is truly amazing the technological progress we've made in the computing world. We have several orders of magnitude more computing power available in ordinary people's hands/basements than was available on the whole planet back in the 50s and 60s. The interesting thing, though, is that while computing speed, storage capacity, communications speed, and virtually every metric imaginable is thru the roof compared to the 70s, we seem to have created a scenario where the more possibilities we see, the more we want to take advantage of, with the attendant bogging down of the people and equipment to do those tasks. In short, our productivity hasn't skyrocketed by the orders of magnitude in computing speed because we keep adding to the to-do list.

What was the BBS name?



 

I've had to explain some pretty strange things to my kids...   My daughter asked me how we clicked on things if the computer didn't have a mouse.

VIC-20, then graduated to a C-64. Did college papers on a primitive word processing program I hand-typed as peek and poke commands from pages of numbers in back of a Compute magazine. This was early to mid-80's, and I was behind the curve because of my time spent in the Corps. And I too remember being able to get impressive programs into that tiny bit of 64k memory.

I believe this pic is from the mid-50's, loading a computer into a plane.

My dad taught computer science (programming) from 1969 - 2005.

Tony

I sold "computers" at Radio Shack in 1979.

The quote was actually "640K ought to be enough for anybody".

pfft. I had a vic 20 before you were born.