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ICL 1901 in 1970, getting ready for decimalisation
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PDP-11 at the high school.
First home system was an Amstrad 1512. Replaced the DR-DOS (or whatever) and its GEM interface  with MS-DOS 4. Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo C++.
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386dx-33, in 92/93. It even had a Tseng Labs 24-bit svga adapter.
Still got the book for DR-DOS 6.0 somewhere.
Tried Turbo Pascal 6.0 for a few months before giving up in disgust and moving onto TASM. A slowish machine (as compared to machines available in 93), low memory-4mb, 64kb segmented memory and no floating point unit all helped one to hone a comprehensive understanding of the architecture. Though I never did get around to bank-switching the vga card to make use of any video modes needing more than 64k of memory.
Directly programming the OPL registers in the sound-card was some fun too - none of this protected memory stuff. Just raw, naked access to the hardware. Yeah baby! Extremely limited vectors for catching virii tend to make one happy to have access to all memory at once.
Video Mode 0x13h - oh how I remember thee!
char *screenPtr = 0xA0000;
screenPtr[x + y*320] = color;
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin
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I started puttering around with drawing shapes in ascii using tandy basic on Trash-80 color 2 with 4k of ram in the late 80's. Depending on if you counted the schools computer or my parents, my first real programming was turbo pascal on a 386 with 1(?)mb ram (theirs) on a 486-25 with 4mb in '96.
I first got paid to develop on a D600 with a PM-1600 and either 2 or 4 GB of ram in 2005.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Amstrad CPC 6128+[^] with floppy disk !
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Do not feed the troll ! - Common proverb
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One of these: Commodore 64[^].
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
me, in pictures
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Ditto
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. ~ George Washington
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Mike Mullikin wrote: Ditto
I've never heard of a 'Ditto'. Was that a special model? 
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
Those who seek perfection will only find imperfection
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
me, in pictures
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Yep, came with a cassette drive. Slow and buggy as hell! 
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. ~ George Washington
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+1 for me on the Commodore 64. Soon after I bought myself a Trash-80 and I thought I was really living large until I built myself an Apple II clone. It was so much fun back then.
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Ditto that on the C64 (though it wasn't my first, a TI). Also had a special add-on cartridge - one of those ones that you buy from the massive computer supply stores with the big catalogs (remember the days of pre-internet catalogs?). I never quite took the time to understand how the cartridge worked, but boy did it make a difference in load times! Load just about anything in under 10 seconds. It was so much faster you would think it would just be destroying the disks in the process, but I never had any problems with the disks (ah, remember DS DD?).
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IBM-PC AT (80286, 6MHz), 512K RAM, 20 MB hard disk, 2x floppy drives (5.25" 260K, 5.25" 1.2M), Hercules CGA video card, Princeton Graphics System color monitor, Okidata 192 Microline dot matrix printer, Rockwell 300 baud modem, MS-DOS 3.0, Lattice-C compiler. Also 1985.
/ravi
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Somehow Ravi, your post has reminded me of a particular scene from the Futurama series.
The one where Bender is getting all hot and bothered at seeing the circuit diagrams of old robots.
"Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation, so that belief can be preserved." - Tim Minchin
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I had to Wikipedia Futurama and Bender.
/ravi
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That was a neat machine that time, I had one of those
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In high school, Commodore PET with 16K of memory.
Learned Commodore BASIC in class; self taught on Assembler.
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Depending upon how you define development, it's either
- FORTRAN on an IBM 1800
- FORTRAN and Assembler on a VAX/VMS Cluster
- FORTRAN/C/Assembler on IBM PC/AT 12 MHz/1 wait state/40MB HDD w/PC DOS 3.1
For those who know: FEED -> REGISTER -> RELEASE
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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At Caltech (Fall 1974) it was a DECsystem KA-10 (all discrete logic, no integrated circuits, core memory, 1usec cycle-time) timesharing system. Programming in Basic, FORTRAN and assembly!
First employment: summer 1976, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Univac 1108, FORTRAN. Analyzing fuel consumption of the attitude control system of the Viking Mars Orbiter.
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PDP 11/23 running RT-11 K&R C Compiler
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Mine was a ZX Spectrum 48k which I received as a pre-Christmas present back in 1983.
I spent most of that night up playing Flight Simulator[^].
My only real piece of coding on it was a database engine, I wrote, that could save 12 records.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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GuyThiebaut wrote: that could save 12 records.
I hope you mean, "all of 12 records". 
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Our school had a PDP-11 I started on in the mid 70s.
First one I had was a Franklin Ace 1000 a couple years later.
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That looks like a luggable that my boss made me tote to Mexico when I was working down there. It was a Compaq[^] and weighted a freakin ton, 2 tons if you where in a hurry to catch a place at the other side of the airp0ort and had to be there in 5 mins..
Semper Fi
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I got selected to learn programming in 4th grade on an Apple II+ by my elementary school teacher. (1982-83) Our district got enough machines to put a half dozen in each school but there was no formal curriculum at the time so it was all pretty unofficial and ad-hoc. When I got to high school in 87, our computer teacher was awarded one of IBM's first Teacher of the year awards for his program "reach out and byte someone" (1988) which taught students how to use dial-up resources like CompuServe to help with research projects. Big Blue donated an entire lab full of PS2's networked to a server all running Netware. It was amazing at the time and really put some fire to the districts' computer cirriculum. I started learning Pascal on that network in '89. Gave me a big leg-up when I got to college.
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