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OriginalGriff wrote: access speed measured in furlongs per fortnight
I still have that problem. The controllers basically were glorified parallel ports. You were lucky when the CPU did not have to access that port several times to bit bang the signals on the bus. That part probably was already done by about 20 pounds of TTL logic on that board. Still, fetching one 16 bit word after another over the ISA bus (or its XT predecessor) is a slow affair. Or did they really invest another 20 pounds of TTL logic in some DMA feature?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I have an almost identical story Paul
We can’t stop here, this is bat country - Hunter S Thompson RIP
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I think back now, and it had a seek time of what? 45ms? And I thought it was quick!
And it was, compared to floppies.
Ah ... "Kings Quest" in glowing EGA! Start generating a fractal, and go down the pub to let it finish. Play a game with no "save" and stick the KB in a drawer to keep the cat off it while I was at work! Them was the days!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Mine was a ZX Spectrum[^] 48K.
Although it nearly wasn't - when we got it home, the box was empty. They'd given us the display box instead of getting one of the real boxes from the back of the store. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard Deeming wrote: when we got it home, ... from the back of the store.
Now, that's dating you!
(And me, of course!)
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Ah, good old Sinclair. I was expecting to get the one with 16 Kb RAM, but instead got the 48K version. It was hard to believe a computer could have that much memory - it used all the 8-bit address space (16 Kb ROM + 48 Kb RAM).
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That's why I liked the HD64180 - it was binary compatible with the Z80, but included a bunch of peripherals, including an MMU which let you page in sections from a 1MB address space (PLCC pack only, the DIP was 512KB).
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Bought my first computer when I went to college back in 2010. It was a Dell Vostro 3400 with an i3 350M. Now, I have moved on to a desktop PC I put together with an i5 8400, Nvidia GTX 1060 Dual 6GB OC edition. I love my new machine.
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The company I worked for gave me and DEC LSI-11/23 running some flavor of unix, with the cc compiler and a vt100 to take home as it was destined for scrap. This was the day of the C64, Amiga and others.
This was entertaining until I got one of those new fangled 8088 XT PC clones from Taiwan - the ones with the flip top metal case that were seemingly everywhere and ran DOS 3.31.
In between the family bought a TI994a that had BASIC and went composite to the TV but frankly, that didn't count for much of anything. We made basic loops that send expletives to the TV. Ah-ha, see what we made the computer say. Today fortunately for everyone, our Echo Dot is hip to our tendencies and won't play ball.
modified 1-Aug-19 8:41am.
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At first there was the PET, 25 lines by 40 columns with character graphics and all the green screen fun you might want. I spent a fortune to increase the memory from 8k to 16k. Then I spent another fortune on twin floppy-disk drives. The equivalent of $2,000 for 1.02Mb Commodore format 5 1/4" floppies. Then I got a second-hand "business class" PET fairly cheap with 25 lines and 80 columns and a very pale green (they claimed white) screen. Amazing - except the lines didn't join vertically as there was a couple of pixels gap between lines, presumably to improve readability on lines of business stuff - but no good for games.
I then started a home PC rental company and supplied ZX-81s, Dragons, BBC-Bs, TRS-80s and the brand new ZX-Spectrum! We set up the option to rent before you buy and most people ended up buying, thank goodness. It didn't last long as a couple of friends of mine I partnered with wanted to concentrate on ZX-81s and I wanted to just do the BBC-B. They were married and outvoted me 2 to 1 so we got a bunch of ZX-81s (and Spectrums) which luckily sold quickly bringing almost no income or profit. At the same time we got dozens of requests for the BBC micro but we ran out after we sold both we had in stock and my partners didn't want to admit they were wrong so we didn't buy more - and closed down the business after the last PC we had, the one and only Dragon, sold.
Then, PCs, and the rest is history.
Note: We also had a VIC 20 but never had a C64.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
modified 1-Aug-19 11:10am.
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I was 16 during the 'price wars' of the early '80s. My parents got us (my brothers and I) a TI-994/a for Christmas of '82. (maybe '83?) I was the only one that took an interest in it aside from the few games that came with it and was soon using it to solve high school math homework. I still have it in the original box.
I took several CS classes at uni in the late '80s but got barred from the computer lab when I refused to give up a terminal to a grad student. I would not own another computer until my Dad brought home a couple of PowerMac 6100s (around '97) that were being scrapped at his work. (one of the baby bells) I got back into school and bought my first Windows system in late '98. What a wondrous thing it was to discover that the computer lab was a thing of the past! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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This is going to be slightly embarrasing, but my first computer was a Bally Astrocade[^].
I got the BASIC cartridge for it. It had a mind boggling 1.8K of RAM. That's right, 1,760 BYTES to store your code! But, the cart didn't have any RAM at all, so where does your code get stored? It was very cleverly interleaved into the video RAM.
...and that's what kicked off my career in code, 1978.
Yes, you can write code on a calculator keypad. There was a keypad overlay, and the bottom row of keys were 4 different "shift" keys. Every other key on the keypad had up to 5 different meanings, like a letter, number, symbol, or BASIC keyword, depending on which "shift" key was used before it, or none of them.
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The first one that was in the house was an Amstrad 1512 (?) -- with the hardcard already installed.
I wiped the drive of its DR-DOS (?) and GEM GUI (yuck) and installed MS-DOS 3, Turbo Pascal 5.5, and PFS: First Choice (I still have the book and 5.25" floppies).
But the first one which was mine -- college graduation present -- was a CompuAdd 486SX with MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3 .
modified 1-Aug-19 11:39am.
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My first computer was the Sinclair ZX81 which had 1K of RAM. I was ecstatic when the 16 expansion module came out, because I could do my inventory with it. My next was the C64, an incredible bargain considering what it could do. I learned both C and assembly with that PC. My next PC was the Amiga 1000, and after that, I had learned enough to change careers and program professionally. I still have all three computers.
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I did have a "hand-me-down" ZX-81 that I got from someone -- the original owner had bought it as a kit and assembled it. The ZX-81 was definitely an interesting little micro -- particularly interesting was the level of minimalism.
The first microcomputer I'd used was the TRS-80 model I back in high school -- had enrolled in the computer programming course the year the school acquired 3 TRS-80s to replace the teletype and dial-up access to a local mainframe (they got the TRS-80s since they could get three of them for the same amount of money that was spent on access to mainframe w/ one teletype terminal. Initially the TRS-80s didn't have diskette, so we had to use audio cassette for storage. Each one was eventually upgraded to diskette configuration in the following years).
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I never had a C64 but I have an amusing story about them.
At my first job out of school we did a lot of rather interesting projects. We also did some weird ones. One of them was for a large manufacturer of batteries. They made a system in-house that monitored the growth of the cells in a deposition furnace. The system used a very early CCD array (essentially a DRAM chip with the cover removed) as a digital camera and a program written in BASIC to examine the image from the camera and decide when the cell was had grown enough. Our part of the system was procurement and assembly of some things. The amusing part of all of this is the system ran on a Commodore 64. Our purchasing agent looked "all over" for a source and finally went down to the local K-Mart and bought 98 Commodore 64s. I think it took three trips to get them all to the shop. I thought the whole thing was hilarious, especially the part about getting them at K-mart. That was the one and only I remember ever buying anything at K-mart for a project in my entire career.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Nostalgia can be a tricky thing.
My first computer was a C64, which my dad got me on Christmas of 83, I believe, which would've made me 11. That, and the tape drive. All I could do during that first year was type in my own programs (or from magazines) and save them to cassette, or play cartridge-based games. The next Christmas, I got the floppy drive - so despite it being notoriously slow, given I had gotten used to a tape drive for a year, I thought that was a huge improvement. The following Christmas, I got a printer. In hindsight, given what each device sold for, even back then, I really have to appreciate this amounted to a lot of money my dad set aside to get me these one Christmas after another.
I then bought myself the C64C, so my folks gave the original one (just the computer) to a couple of friends of theirs, for their kid. Later I got myself the C128. I genuinely have no idea what happened to those computers...sometimes I wish I still had them. I remember doing a lot of high school work with GEOS. The Amiga was always out of my reach, price-wise, but Commodore advertised it rather heavily in the magazines I read, so I did have a bit of envy. It's probably just as well I didn't know anyone who had one.
Having a bit of a hard time with English technical manuals during my teen years, while I did learn a lot of Basic, I never learned assembly, so PEEKs and POKEs meant nothing for me except for a few items I had come to learn by heart.
About 2 years ago, thanks to Amazon shipping internationally, I bought the C64 Mini (look it up) when it was still only available in Europe...had I waited a few more months, when it finally showed up in the US and Canada, I could've paid a lot less for it. But, I don't really regret it. While it's okay for some games, the moment you need to use the keyboard, you're at a real disadvantage - you either have to use an onscreen keyboard that you can only control through the USB joystick, or hook up a USB keyboard (and my hub somehow doesn't work with it). The company that makes it will be releasing a full-size version at the end of the year (with a functional keyboard, this time around), and I have to admit I'm rather intrigued... Emulators on a PC don't do it for me.
Archive.org has a ton of old magazines, and I actually remember some covers from a few of them. While they're interesting enough for a quick read here and there, just for nostalgia's sake, I can't imagine myself sitting down and start typing in some of the sample listings.
So what was so great? Well, this is where I learned programming (admittedly to a somewhat limited extent), but it's all I had needed to convince myself at a very young age I was going to make a career out of this hobby, so by the time I got to formally study computer science, I found I had an advantage over most of the students I had classes with. For one thing, I never questioned whether this was the career path for me. Clearly, some had never even asked themselves until they were already of college age.
Damn. There went another wall of text...
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Mine was a spectrum 128k with some games coming in cassette (I remember "Panic in the orient express")
I suppose I am one of the "youngsters" over here
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Mine was a "Junior" computer. A 1979 or so clone of the KIM1, available as a self assembly kit from an DIY electronics magazine called "Elektuur" ( "Elektor Labs" these days ).
1K of RAM, 1K of ROM, a HEX keyboard 6 digit 7 segment display and no storage. No compiler, no assembler: simply type in the actual hex codes for the 6502 assembly instructions one by one and start the program.
Mind you: in the end you do get to know how a processor works. The main reason why I ended up in embedded control systems.
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I was in the Sinclair camp owning a ZX Spectrum 48k in 1983.
I wrote my first useful application on the Spectrum - a database.
Okay so it could only save 12 records... but it had CRUD functionality!
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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My C64 is the C128. Although I must admit that I spent about 90% of the time in C64 mode, mostly not for programming or making music or demos but for playing games. I knew a little C64 Basic already when I got the machine and appreciated the extended syntax of C128 Basic very much. Unfortunately, extended syntax at the same CPU speed means slower execution, so I finally turned back to C64 Basic and also learned a little assembler for the time-critical stuff like copying a whole screen full of characters from an offscreen buffer to the display.
The two things I liked most about the C64 were its sound capabilities (SID chip forever!!  ) and the way you could glean much more potential from the machine than its obvious capabilities. You could do real magic if you knew all the not-so-well-documented tricks like certain memory addresses, interrupt, raster interrupt or the 4th audio voice, which could be used for playing sampled stuff like digital drums. It was a world with very narrow boundaries that could be vastly extended, that's what was so cool about it for me. Unfortunately, I was born a few years to late, bc once I had become really good on the C64, everybody else had switched to Amiga already.
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My "C64", that is the first computer I had, was some Windows 95 machine built by a local electronics store. I learned programming later, staring with some HTML (which is programming in a rather loose sense of that word), then PHP, then Delphi and later low-level stuff like C and ASM. Both I learned after learning C# in the meanwhile.
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