First Computer?

[WiffingWaffles]

A Dell Optiplex running windows XP.
It had a Pentium 4 if i remember correctly.
Love the old days of playing Halo CE on PC (The demo)

 

[tlc]

Got my first computer in fall 1997. A Tandy 386SX/33. 2 MB RAM, 100 MB hard drive, DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1, 16 color Cirrus card. I bought a 33.6 hardware modem for it. And a HP color printer, I would actually print pages to see what the colors were supposed to look like.

Those were the days. I found DOS 6.22, and tried WFW 3.11. Spent ridiculous amount of time digging through Filepile and OAK Archives for Dos/Windows utilities, and tweaking Autoexec.bat and Config.sys and ini files for just a sliver of improved performance. I accumulated a huge drawer of floppy disks which I still have. I upgraded it to 10 MB RAM which made quite a difference. I bought a Cirrus video card at a resale, and while it wouldn't go, I swapped the chips into mine and one of them gave me 256 colors, I was the king now! I ran that thing until fall 1999, but wow it felt like a lot longer than 2 years. I met a ton of people in the area from the local chatroom run by the main ISP in the area. And email pals from all over the world on Lycos chat and mIRC. Fall 1999 I was given something or other with a Cyrix 150 CPU, which was very unstable, and sometimes I would go back to the 386 which was stable as a rock, it never crashed no matter what. It also fired right up some time after Y2K with no problems.

I have a picture, but I have to get it on here first. Tomorrow.

 

[AuAL]

My “first computer” wasn’t actually mine, but the first one I got to program. It was a PDP 11/45 in the engineering department of the local university. I was still in high school and was taught how to use it by a friend of my father’s (he was a member of staff.) I remember inputting the bootstrap loader on the front panel toggle switches, then loading the OS from magtape spools.

While still in high school, I enrolled in night classes at the uni to learn Fortran 4. I think this was on an ICL 1900 running George 3. We never got near it - punched up our programs on cards, left them in the pigeonhole and got teletype printout, wrapped around the deck, the next day. If you didn’t put 1X at the start of the output format when printing out a column of numbers, the duty operator got really annoyed with you…

 

[Ghostinthemachine]

Family pc was a vic 20,terrible thing my first personal PC was a zx spectrum 128k with light gun,I adored it

 

[Simon68]

Commodore Vic20 bought for twenty quid from an advert in a Newsagents window in 1988

 

[UFO]

Should I be worried that I know almost all the computers mentioned in this thread?

By name, of course, not that I have ever seen all of them. Only ones I didn't recognize were PC-2 (thought this was stupid one - I should have known it), Research Machines 380Z and PDP 11/45.

Atari 520STFM almost caught me with that FM, but then I realized that it still was "Atari ST"-series and immediately I got an association with 68000 and Dungeonmaster-game

Acorn is also familiar name, thought Acorn Electron variant I had to think a little bit. But Acorn Archimedes was considered to be a real power mill back then. It sure beat Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500.

Atari 800: M.U.L.E.!!!

My first one was Spectravideo 328. I got it when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I got initially interested about computers because of their games (I had seen Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k at my cousin and fell in love with the game "Fred") but half of the games that came with the Spectravideo (which was bought as an used) were made with BASIC-language (probably written from some computer magazines that used to have plenty of program listings back then) so I found more interesting figuring out how the games were done rather than playing them.

After that I got my cousin's Spectrum (and I think its games still had the best atmosphere ever, because of the machine's video chip's limitations), then came Commodore Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, 486 PC...

I never had a C-64 or a 386 PC which is really, really strange.

I was about to throw a raunchy joke about how I feel about these things right now, but decided not to do it

I was able to get my zx81 to do speech recognition and efficient word processing - stuff that machine was widely considered incapable of

I have seen what Polish hackers could do with C64 demos in 90s. I can believe everything

Speech recognition as like audio voice analyzing? If so, how much time the processing took? Did you need to build any extra memory electronics (paged memory and such) or was the commercial 64 kB memory extensions enough?

 

[Jumpinbare]

The 64k extension was enough. You had to train the system to the specific words you used. I couldn't give you an accurate processing time, but there was a definite lag of a second or two for it to match up the voice to the stored word.

 

[Shevek]

Back when computers had their own rooms, I won a kit for a speech synthesizer. It was a fairly simple breadboard assembly, with clips to swap in three different capacitors, in order to make ten different vowel sounds, one per setup. To work out which ones to use, there was a complicated looking circular slide rule. I decided to just try some at random. I wasn't even careful about using the clips, just holding some things by hand, so they had accidental intermittent contact. Its first sound was "ma," easily repeated for "mama."

 

[Jumpinbare]

My high school had one of those kits, but it was incomplete and with no instructions.

 

[AuAL]

My high school had a (one) programmable, desktop calculator. It had nixie tube display, and was programmable using mini-punchcards. They came pre-perforated and you pushed the chads out with the tip of a pencil. You had to look up the hex code to find which holes to punch for which assembly code instructions. We wrote “moon-landing programs”, iterative loop F=ma, etc. After running a program several times, the card was prone to chads falling out. I got to the point I could “read” malfunctioning cards and tell friends where to fix the hole, by sticky-taping a chad back in place. It would be more than 10 years before programming was a major focus in my employment.

 

[UFO]

The 64k extension was enough. You had to train the system to the specific words you used

Based on my amateurish experience, that was a recommendable achievement.

When DVD and digital TV came (late-90s, early 2000s?), I really hated that I had to burn subtitles to a picture when creating... um... copies for my personal and completely educational use. Text file based subtitles did exist, but DVD and DVB-broadcasts used bitmap pictures.

So I tried to create a software that recognizes letters from subtitle streams and outputs them to a text file instead. Single letter's reference model (is that a correct term? I have never learned the terminology) didn't take much space (I don't remember, kilobyte perhaps?), but using too low resolution created ridiculous false positivies (some texts ended up being alien language), and using higher resolution required multiple variations of same letter (to catch shape changes). It was pain and I think speech recognition might be more problematic with more variations in tone (different voice when having flu, dry throat etc.)

I never finished the project as there was very quickly other and better solutions available. That is my life story with programming: As soon as I get a proof of concept, I lose my interest and don't finish the work. Except when I'm paid for it, of course.

 

[UFO]

a recommendable achievement.

Arg... Mixed up words. "remarkable achievement". You know what I mean...