[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Your 1st Computer/Internet exp.? (Page 1 of 2)
Posted: 1/14/2011 10:32:52 AM EDT
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It's amazing the way things progress.....My 1st exposure to a computer was back in '85 with a neighborhood nerd. I thought it was the coolest thing at the age of 15.
Fast forward to the mid 90's, my father gave me his 486 DX 66 with Win 3.1....I was using old telnet, calling local BBS's on a 2400 baud modem...lol WHen I upgraded to a 14.4 I thought I was the shit! Then this service called America Online and Prodigy came into life. Charging by the hour. I though there is NO WAY this crap is going to last, NOBODY was going to pay for that... 
Few yrs pass...I get a Packard Bell P 200 with what I think was 40 megs of ram...lol Ran WIN 95 on it. Here I am now, laptop with 4 gig's mem. dual boot Win 7 and Linux, Trying to learn Linux again, it reminds me of the old DOS language. Funny how being a "nerd" has become the "norm" BTW..that old nerd back in the 80's that I befriended since everyone picked on him is making Major bank as a programmer for the FBI...actually wrote most the code for Carnivore back in the late 90's. Has a beautiful Czech wife {I think from mail order} lol |
| My first computer was a Commodore 64. I ended up with two of them. Mostly ended u playing games on it though. Bought a few accessories like an external floppy drive. Finally began using computers at work for scheduling. My first one was a used 486/DX25 followed by a Compuserve acct. My first modem was a 14.4 external unit. Local BBSs like you. It was much after that that I finally figured out and used the email thing however. |
| Vic 20 with a cassette drive followed by Commodore 64 with a 5.25 floppy followed by Apple IIs and then original PCs at school, then Unix mainframes and pre-www internet in university. I thought I was on a cutting edge was when I shelled out big bucks for a whopping 1MB of RAM and a 9600 baud modem for my 286. |
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1981, age 6. My parents borrowed a friend's VIC-20, just to see what it was all about. As my mother didn't want it hooked up to the TV in the living room, they hooked it up to the TV in my room (they had given me the old color TV after they bought a new one). They played with it for a bit but couldn't really figure out how to do much with it, even though their friend had included a couple of BASIC programming books. They left it in my room and went to bed.
I woke up about 5AM the next morning, curious about this "computer" thing. Like any kid of 6, I wanted to play a game, so I looked through the books to see if I could find one. Finding an interesting Space Invaders game program, I set about typing it in. By the time my parents came in to check on me around 8, I had entered the program (it was not short - this was BASIC here), debugged it, and was playing it. They bought me a C64 soon after. |
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Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell .......................
1968 as a Computer Science major - actually Mathematical Computer Science - lots and lots of math - every advanced course in the place was required (applied and theoretical) - fewer true computer science courses were available at first. IBM 1130 - 8K of memory (yes that's K - not MEG). No connectivity between machines at all - read in punched cards - do calculations - print out reports - punch out cards - make disk files. TP (Tele-Processing) was getting a foot-hold at bigger sites - private coax-based networks or teletype over PBX (telephones). The next year, we got an IBM 360/30 - baby version of what was being used for the Moon shots - 64K - some dial-up stuff and coax ............ WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. One of the first 6 to graduate in this new major at this school. I've seen a lot of changes in my 40 years in "the business". It was new - it was challenging - and I'm so glad I was there to experience it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  
If you would have told me then that within my lifetime you would have a machine sitting on your desk that is 1,000 times more "powerful", 100 times smaller, cost 10,000 times less, and there would be this thing called the Internet - I would have called the guys from the funny farm to come and get you. Now when I hear "ridiculous" things like that, I'm not at all skeptical ..... 
You have much more (multiples of 10x in CPU/RAM/disk) than this sitting on your desk/lap right now .......... couple of 1970's-era IBM 370 mainframes below ................ models 145/158 .............. I loved working on these big boys ............ Box on left side of lower photo was one of the first laser-printers - IBM 8100 ......... Devices to right of it are IBM 3505 card reader and 3525 card punch .............. seems like yesterday .............. hell, I can still ID the various devices .............
I also see 3330/3340 disk drives and 4503 printer .................. everything else is CPU/processors/controllers/consoles ................. Hot, noisy, neat stuff .................. man vs machine!!!!!!!!
It was you verses a room full of equipment in those days instead of you verses the world (Internet and all of the cyber-crooks and other various ass-holes) - network administration/security stuff I got into later!!!!!!! I felt good after a day battling the mainframes - sort of dirty after a day of battling cyber bull-shit (little of what a LE probably feels like - used to take the hate home with me - I truly hated these types of people and there was never nor will there ever be closure) ............    
Was more than happy when retirement time came ............................ 
Would I do it over again? Yep .................................. 
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1979, TRS-80 Model III at school - prior to that we did one semester with punch cards that got taken to the local university to be run. 1981? Commodore 64 at home, connected to TV 1984? Apple ][c with small green screen monitor 1985 Mac Plus - the first PC with 1MB RAM - and a 20MB Hard Drive plus an ImageWriter II color printer. w00t! Got away from home PCs for a while - used them all day at work and was uninterested in them at home. Moved to AK in '92, '95 or so or bought a $200 old IBM XT with Lotus 123, used it to calculate board-feet for a cabin I was building. Visiting parents in fall of '96, got online for the first time ever. Mind = blown. Moved back to the real world in 97, soon after bought a Pentium 133 for home use & internet. |
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Quoted:
My first computer: TRS-80 Model 4, Zilog Z-80 running @ 4MHz. First "internet" experience: 1989, same computer, 300 baud modem connected to the RS232 port, dialing in to work. +1 I remember when my dad came home with the memory expansion module for it; 16K of RAM and was about half the size of a paperback book. I also think it was fairly expensive too. The laptop I bought this past Tuesday has 6 Gigabytes of RAM! After that was the "usual" progression. Commodores (VIC-20/C-64), typing in BASIC programs from the back of Byte magazine, followed by various PCs. ETA: Now that I actually read your post,  I have to -1 myself. First computer was the Sinclair ZX-80 (with the 16K memory expansion), although my best friend did have the Trash-80.
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86~87 Tandy 1000 First "online" was around 91 when I got a 286 laptop with a 2400bps modem and was local BBS Interwebs was 1992 I had a 30day trial from a local provider that lasted about 2 years. Basically just did email and news groups. Linx would show text on early "web pages" Finally got my first PPP internet connection in 95. Netscrape 2.0 ftw win95 still pretty much sucked at the time, the ppp dialer for 3.11 was quite buggy as well. I ended up using NT3.51 for a couple years until NT4 came out. |
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1985-ish.
Nought a Tandy 1000 with an orange monochrome screen and something like a screaming 12k modem and maybe double that in RAM with a smoking hardrive capacity of around 10mB or some such. I basically bought the most powerful computer available from Tandy at the time when I was stationed at Ft Campbell. My granddaughter now has a watch she got out of cereal box that has a more powerful processor then my original computer. |
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First computer Commodore 64.
First internet? Back when IRC was text only (I know it is still text, but yous get it), and at the time internet was only available to me at one of the schools in the entire district. My mind was blown when I saw that I could talk to another person via text in another state, let alone another country. Been hooked ever since. So in short, Minds = Blown. |
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Quoted: Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell ....................... 1968 as a Computer Science major - actually Mathematical Computer Science - lots and lots of math - every advanced course in the place was required (applied and theoretical) - fewer true computer science courses were available at first. IBM 1130 - 8K of memory (yes that's K - not MEG). No connectivity between machines at all - read in punched cards - do calculations - print out reports - punch out cards - make disk files. The next year, we got an IBM 360/30 - baby version of what was being used for the Moon shots - 64K - WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. One of the first 6 to graduate in this new major at this school. I've seen a lot of changes in my 40 years in "the business". If you would have told me then that within my lifetime you would have a machine sitting on your desk that is 1,000 times more "powerful", 100 times smaller, cost 10,000 times less, and there would be this thing called the Internet - I would have called the guys from the funny farm to come and get you. Now when I hear "ridiculous" things like that, I'm not at all skeptical ..... I worked for a company that had a System/34, and I remember it as being bigger and heavier than this:  I opened up the doors and expected ..........awesomeness.............. but instead found mostly empty space and a gigantic hard drive that looked like a washing machine drive. I looked at the data plates inside and found out it had a 6502 CPU (.....!!!!....) and had been modded all the way up to 96K of ram. They had to have some kind of bank switching thing going on to make use of that extra 32K. When they retired it they had to call in the heavy duty cartage company that originally installed it, to get back out of the upstairs office and down the stairs without losing it and killing everyone in its path as it went through the side of the building. ETA This was replaced with an IBM AS/400 minicomputer that cost .............. $500,000 ............ It looked like a somewhat oversized PC box. One day I peeked over the shoulder of an IBM tech that came in to blow the dirt out of it and about fell over. It had a typical PC motherboard with a PowerPC CPU and I could tell that because it didn't need or have a heatsink and cooling fan on it. For half a million dollars ...............  |
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Quoted: I looked at the data plates inside and found out it had a 6502 CPU (.....!!!!....) and had been modded all the way up to 96K of ram. They had to have some kind of bank switching thing going on to make use of that extra 32K. When they retired it they had to call in the heavy duty cartage company that originally installed it, to get back out of the upstairs office and down the stairs without losing it and killing everyone in its path as it went through the side of the building. Funny you should mention that - I doubled the RAM in my TRS80 to 128K, but of course it can only access 64K since due to its 16 bit architecture much like the 6502. You could turn the extra RAM into a fast RAM disk drive though - just hope you don't lose power. |
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1st computer: Vic 20.
1st interweb experience: Using a terminal with a Hayes 300 baud modem to access a University's online library systemvia an 800 number. Hacking down to root and using telnet to play MUDs in Germany. Best guess says this was 88 or so. I was in middle school. |
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Quoted: Quoted: I looked at the data plates inside and found out it had a 6502 CPU (.....!!!!....) and had been modded all the way up to 96K of ram. They had to have some kind of bank switching thing going on to make use of that extra 32K. When they retired it they had to call in the heavy duty cartage company that originally installed it, to get back out of the upstairs office and down the stairs without losing it and killing everyone in its path as it went through the side of the building. Funny you should mention that - I doubled the RAM in my TRS80 to 128K, but of course it can only access 64K since due to its 16 bit architecture much like the 6502. You could turn the extra RAM into a fast RAM disk drive though - just hope you don't lose power. I still have a motley collection of Atari computers with bank switching memory mods all the way up to 320K of ram in some of them, and an ICD hard drive interface on one of them. Yes, ramdisks are MUCH faster. I made a memory expansion card for a Commodore 64 that used a static ram chip instead of the usual dynamic ram. I could load a Basic program into the card and then turn the computer off for a whole day or more. When I powered back up the program was still there and ready to run. I made another expansion port card that had a row of 16 LEDs on it. I programmed it to scan back and forth like the electronic eye on a Cylon.  |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell ....................... 1968 as a Computer Science major - actually Mathematical Computer Science - lots and lots of math - every advanced course in the place was required (applied and theoretical) - fewer true computer science courses were available at first. IBM 1130 - 8K of memory (yes that's K - not MEG). No connectivity between machines at all - read in punched cards - do calculations - print out reports - punch out cards - make disk files. The next year, we got an IBM 360/30 - baby version of what was being used for the Moon shots - 64K - WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. One of the first 6 to graduate in this new major at this school. I've seen a lot of changes in my 40 years in "the business". If you would have told me then that within my lifetime you would have a machine sitting on your desk that is 1,000 times more "powerful", 100 times smaller, cost 10,000 times less, and there would be this thing called the Internet - I would have called the guys from the funny farm to come and get you. Now when I hear "ridiculous" things like that, I'm not at all skeptical .....
I worked for a company that had a System/34, and I remember it as being bigger and heavier than this: http://www.kiwigeek.com/hjp/comps/IBM_s34/PickUp/P1010052.jpg I opened up the doors and expected ..........awesomeness.............. but instead found mostly empty space and a gigantic hard drive that looked like a washing machine drive. I looked at the data plates inside and found out it had a 6502 CPU (.....!!!!....) and had been modded all the way up to 96K of ram. They had to have some kind of bank switching thing going on to make use of that extra 32K. When they retired it they had to call in the heavy duty cartage company that originally installed it, to get back out of the upstairs office and down the stairs without losing it and killing everyone in its path as it went through the side of the building.
ETA This was replaced with an IBM AS/400 minicomputer that cost .............. $500,000 ............ It looked like a somewhat oversized PC box. One day I peeked over the shoulder of an IBM tech that came in to blow the dirt out of it and about fell over. It had a typical PC motherboard with a PowerPC CPU and I could tell that because it didn't need or have a heatsink and cooling fan on it. For half a million dollars ...............
The System 34/36/38 and later the AS/400 were part of the IBM "General Systems Division" - small business oriented computers. The 360/370/4000/............. were part of the IBM "General Purpose Computing Division" - mainframes - bigger ones were water cooled.. I remember in 1973 we got some of IBM's new "Winchester" disk drives - new high-capacity technology - 70MEG
Yea, they were VERY expensive in those days - you never bought one - you either rented or leased it until something new came out and IBM would let you "break" your multi-year lease - no strings attached to get the new machine. They were days to be an IBM sales rep - big bucks!!!!!!! Remember the old IBM motto - www.etypewriters.com/think.htm They were the only act in town for many.many/many years ................ In the early days, even as a relatively small customer, we had a sales rep, systems engineer, program support rep, customer engineer (repair man) assigned to us and they would call or show up every week - sales rep was there at lease once a week - when I left 35 years later, our closest support (besides repair) was in Atlanta, GA ................. with the Internet all software support/problem solving was done online ............... even interrogation before a hardware call so that the repair man would spend minimal time on-site ............... in the beginning, IBM made you feel like you were important to them, no matter your size - at the end, it was more like - "Meh!!!!" .......... but that's what you have to do to compete today - a true sign of the times
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Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: I looked at the data plates inside and found out it had a 6502 CPU (.....!!!!....) and had been modded all the way up to 96K of ram. They had to have some kind of bank switching thing going on to make use of that extra 32K. When they retired it they had to call in the heavy duty cartage company that originally installed it, to get back out of the upstairs office and down the stairs without losing it and killing everyone in its path as it went through the side of the building. Funny you should mention that - I doubled the RAM in my TRS80 to 128K, but of course it can only access 64K since due to its 16 bit architecture much like the 6502. You could turn the extra RAM into a fast RAM disk drive though - just hope you don't lose power. I still have a motley collection of Atari computers with bank switching memory mods all the way up to 320K of ram in some of them, and an ICD hard drive interface on one of them. Yes, ramdisks are MUCH faster. I made a memory expansion card for a Commodore 64 that used a static ram chip instead of the usual dynamic ram. I could load a Basic program into the card and then turn the computer off for a whole day or more. When I powered back up the program was still there and ready to run. I made another expansion port card that had a row of 16 LEDs on it. I programmed it to scan back and forth like the electronic eye on a Cylon. http://www.nicholaspackwood.com/CylonFlea.gif Awesome! I assume you - like me - didn't have much of social life in high school? |
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Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: I looked at the data plates inside and found out it had a 6502 CPU (.....!!!!....) and had been modded all the way up to 96K of ram. They had to have some kind of bank switching thing going on to make use of that extra 32K. When they retired it they had to call in the heavy duty cartage company that originally installed it, to get back out of the upstairs office and down the stairs without losing it and killing everyone in its path as it went through the side of the building. Funny you should mention that - I doubled the RAM in my TRS80 to 128K, but of course it can only access 64K since due to its 16 bit architecture much like the 6502. You could turn the extra RAM into a fast RAM disk drive though - just hope you don't lose power. I still have a motley collection of Atari computers with bank switching memory mods all the way up to 320K of ram in some of them, and an ICD hard drive interface on one of them. Yes, ramdisks are MUCH faster. I made a memory expansion card for a Commodore 64 that used a static ram chip instead of the usual dynamic ram. I could load a Basic program into the card and then turn the computer off for a whole day or more. When I powered back up the program was still there and ready to run. I made another expansion port card that had a row of 16 LEDs on it. I programmed it to scan back and forth like the electronic eye on a Cylon. http://www.nicholaspackwood.com/CylonFlea.gif Awesome! I assume you - like me - didn't have much of social life in high school? Or in my 30's and 40's when this went down ..............................  |
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My first computer was the Apple II+ - I was in my teens and I worked all summer to come up with well under half the money and my parents paid the rest. It was A LOT of money back then! My first internet experience was in 1989/1990 as I was working at Penn State in a research lab and we had access to the internet and could access some data through the web. It was a very different web then we have today! All text based and finding anything was always a trick. Things evolved very quickly however from 1990 to say 1992/1993 and by 1993 the internet was looking more like what we are familiar with now ––- anybody remember the original Netscape! |
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486 DX2 66 with 8MB RAM, Win 3.11.
DEC full-length ISA thin-net NIC. Got on September '94. Started with telnet, talk, email, USENET. Little bit of MUDing. By January '95 was running beta builds of Chicago and upgrading Mosaic and Netscape weekly. Never did the GOPHER thing. |
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My first exposure was on an original IBM PC that my mothers friends had. Whenever we went to visit, it wasn't long before I'd given up on their deployed sons old toys and was playing around with the computer. Dialing into bulliten boards, etc. The BBS door games got hooked on PCs initially.
After that, I was hooked, but I also grew up poor. Parents got a VIC-20 from someone, somehow, with the tape drive and I played around a lot with that. Sargon II chess cartridge FTW. Then in '90 or '91 ma' finally had enough money and we bought an older model PC AT (286) clone at a mall outlet. I started learning C and Pascal, and spent a lot of time swearing at this screen: 
Started dialing into the internet via Delphi w/ WFW 3.11 and winsock. I remember at a young age, being an avid Phrack and 2600 reader, the first time I made my way onto IRC and into #hack on efnet. Taran King and Knight Lightning were in the channel, and some other people, having an average discussion. I didn't know any better, and started in with "hey guys, enough, lets talk shop" and instantly got kb'd. Thus started an IRC addiction that lasted many years. |
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Win3.1 and trying to get that fucking winsock program working correctly. Proabably about 1994ish. Trumpet Winsock was easy. Getting the Beame & Whiteside TCP/IP stack running in DOS so you could play Quake was a challenge. I still feel a little bit dirty just thinking about networked DOS. |
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I just remembered something so horrible my brain blocked it out for many years. I traded a brand new blue Mini-14 and six Ruger 30 round mags for a used 20 meg hard drive to put in my first-generation IBM PC. The Ruger stuff cost me a lot less than a new 20 meg drive back then, and what the heck, that Ruger stuff would always be around and dirt cheap ................... ETA The computers I use regularly tap into a total of 13 500 gigabyte hard drives plus several others of smaller size, and there's a couple of spare 500 gig drives still in the package, just in case I might need one some day. ETA I remember going through a pile of bad Seagate ST-251 40 meg MFM drives, swapping circuit boards and chassis until I had two good ones - 80 MEGABYTES !!! Of course, I had to partition each of them into two 20 meg drives - the max number of DOS partitions and size of DOS partitions - and ended up with C: through F:. I still have them somewhere and a bunch of ST-125 20 meg MFM drives.  |
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First computer was a 386DX, I think it was an old IBM that my mother was able to bring home from work. We had fooled with the Commodore 64 in the 1980s but the first real home computer was that 386 that was running DOS. We used that thing until maybe 1995. Windows 95 came out and my parents bought a new Pentium which was the shiznit. We also got on the Internet at the time (36.6 kbs?). The ISP was something like Homenet or something with Home in it. 8 mb of video memory which was awesome for the time. 4 GB HDD, 16 mb of RAM. Yeah, she was smokin! My first computer was a a refurbished CompUSA brand computer and I can't remember the specs but I remember having a 40 GB HDD and thinking it was huge! |