Remember When

[wodin]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

The first computer I used with an Atari 400. At first, we didn't have a floppy drive, that was a luxury. We used cassette tapes.

Yes, that was my first computer too, and it also had a cassette drive. I had a friend who was a hardware wizard and he doubled the memory (to 8 kilobytes) by soldering memory chips on top of the installed ones and wiring in the address lines to the memory controller with wire wrap wires.

I remember my very first computer program was a slot machine game, coded in BASIC on it. It took about five minutes to load from cassette.

[SeaKing]

Originally Posted by Apache

For some reason, I still have my MSDOS floppies. I was cleaning out my office yesterday and found them.
Apache

Offer them for sale on Ebay and see what happens.

[jersysman]

Are we forgetting the TRS-80? Yes, most of the programs were on cassette tape when I first started with computers. Actually, I built my first computer from instructions in Popular Mechanics magazine.

Those were the days!

[crich70]

Originally Posted by jersysman

Are we forgetting the TRS-80? Yes, most of the programs were on cassette tape when I first started with computers. Actually, I built my first computer from instructions in Popular Mechanics magazine.

Those were the days!

I had one of them. The one with color. A whole 16kb of memory. I even learned how to write programs in basic back then. Basic Alphanumeric Symbolic Instruction Code.

[covingtoncat73]

I didn't pay much attention to them and was a bit of a late adopter, I guess. Due to money as much as anything else. I got a Kobo WiFi when the Borders on St. Charles in NOLA was going out of business in 2011. I had a gift certificate for my birthday to spend and the price was right. I got my first smartphone a month later. The Kobo still works perfectly and I am still satisfied with it, though I got a tablet (Acer Iconiatab) last year and a real smartphone (a Galaxy S3 just a couple of weeks ago).

I do a lot of reading on my new phone and even read on the old but the Kobo's better battery life and more "book-like" feel make it nice to read on and the same, of course, could probably be said of any eInk ereader. When the weather is nice, I like to read outside and you need eInk for that. The tablet is big and heavy and I only like to read comics and graphic novels on it. I do read in bed with my phone before I go to sleep, so I don't need a light.

[exscentric]

We used commodore64s for several years. We typed in code and saved if for a database/word processor/spreadsheet program out of a computer magazine. It worked quite well and we did a lot of work with it. Our first computer thought was a timex sinclair with a plug in 16 k pack. If you would move the computer often the pack would loose contact and dump all your work.

First readers were the Franklin Ebookman. Did a fairly good job.

[applesauce]

Originally Posted by morriss003

I still miss DOS

Nooooooooooooo I remember my excitment at the first GUI, It was heaven.
first computer was an amstrad 512. It was a powerful beast hehehehe

applesauce

[SusanM]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

We got an Apple II at our high school in 1981. We had a couple coveted blank floppies that we would hide from the business teacher. She was afraid that we would damage the computer by writing programs. For her, a typewriter was a high-tech gadget. So we taped the paper sleeve to the back of the desk and stored our floppy there. None of the teacher could teach us anything about the computer, we had to teach ourselves. The business teacher was no help, obviously, but the English teacher was enthusiastic, if just as ignorant about computers.

A couple of us were the go-to sources of information, it was sort of like being an oracle. Big fish in a little pond and all that. Really, all we did was read the manual.

LOL...I love these recalls. Keep 'em coming!

[crich70]

Originally Posted by QuantumIguana

We got an Apple II at our high school in 1981. We had a couple coveted blank floppies that we would hide from the business teacher. She was afraid that we would damage the computer by writing programs. For her, a typewriter was a high-tech gadget. So we taped the paper sleeve to the back of the desk and stored our floppy there. None of the teacher could teach us anything about the computer, we had to teach ourselves. The business teacher was no help, obviously, but the English teacher was enthusiastic, if just as ignorant about computers.

A couple of us were the go-to sources of information, it was sort of like being an oracle. Big fish in a little pond and all that. Really, all we did was read the manual.

I remember teaching myself BASIC from the book that came with my TRS-80. Sometime later one of my teachers was trying to create a image of the characters from The wizard of Oz on the computer and wanted a character to have a blinking eye. She was amazed that I was able to help her work out that part of the programming. All I had done was to read the book as well.