Since Matt wrote about classic computers yesterday, we received a lot of stories through our Comments mechanism (which everybody is always free to use). Apparently, we all remember our first computer and computing experiences. Mine was in front of two Commodore computers - a Vic20 and a C64. What about you?

Gress LeMaistre: “Well, jeez, the first one I played with - as a computing professional (mainframes, of course) - was an IMSAI kit that a couple of us had kicked in to buy and build. Once completed, we could enter the paper tape command sequences on the front panel in hexadecimal and then load the IPL (initial program load or a quasi-OS). Once there, we could load a pong-type game from tape that we had taken several days to punch and have a rip-roaring game going in 2K! But the first commercial system I bought was a Commodore PET with a whopping 4K and a cassette drive! I had a real keyboard, too, if you had hands the size of an 8 year old. But I could program music, games, BASIC programs and PEEK and POKE assembler into memory for advanced work. Those were fun days and we all were debating the merits of Intel versus Motorola architecture for CPUs. Intel was easy to program in assembler but you could do amazing things with the Motorola chip. And the result is still debated: IBM vs. Apple.”

Robert King: “Ti994/A was my first one. Loved that one. Did some basic programming on that. Loaded programs with a cassette tape. Went through three Commodore 64s. Had the nasty habit of taking them apart but not being able to put them back together. That was a fun machine. Loved those Infocom games. Tried to learn machine language programming. I remember when I got a 300 baud modem. Loved those bulletin boards. Then at some point when I was older I bought a Hyundai 386 computer. Almost $4k for that. Probably had 4 megs of ram and a 30 MB hard drive which went to 60 megs with Stacker!”

Arthur Taylor: “Atari 800XL with an added 64K module, daisy chained floppy drives[3], plotter printer, dot matrix printer, drawing tablet, and a 300 baud modem. Cost over $1000 not including the games and software. I used up until 2000 Xmas when at a staff party I won 14 packages of MS software so I bought an HP to run it on. Still miss the wonder I felt doing some of the tasks on the old one.”

Randy Allen: “My first computer was an Atari 800 with the tape loader. It took forever to load a program on that. I remember waiting 20 minutes or more to load Baja Buggy so I could race my little buggy across the desert. I would get game magazines and try to type in all the commands for a game and usually make some mistake and never get it to run. Those days I can live without. I could amaze my family and friends by typing in a quick program that would write their name on the screen until I made it stop. Now how useful was that! My first game console was an Odyssey, which actually had a keyboard built into it, so I guess it could have been classified as my first computer. I don’t think I ever actually programmed anything on it. It actually had better games on it than the 2600 until Activision got into the business and taught the others how to get more out of the cartridge system. My roommate had the 2600. I think we spent half our pay on rent and utilities and the other half on games and beer.”

Pardon me while I go download some emulators…

Tags: pc, atari, computer, personal computing, computing, commodore, infocom, emulators, c64, vic20