Susan's Place Transgender Resources

Probably one for the oldies like me.

What were the first computers you had/used before the modern PC?

My first computer was the Commodore Vic-20 (though I used a BBC Micro and Acorn computer at school). After my Vic-20 came my Sinclair Spectrum 48k+, then the Commodore C64 and Commodore Amiga 500. My friend had an Amstrad machine. It was a good while before I got my first pentium computer with windows 3.1 on it.

Takes me back some. I think I was basically there from the dawn of home computing.

I have an abacus.  Not expensive.

Quote from: ChrissyRyan on April 01, 2026, 04:02:39 PMI have an abacus.  Not expensive.

Fingers are cheaper!

My first was a PC but an old 386 machine. It'd play Doom, Prince of Persia and such. Also used for mynschool work and graphics.

I built "computers" using various IC chips, including the 8088 processor. My first mass-production computer was an Atari 800 with a whopping 48k of RAM. No hard drive, no modem. It had a tape drive that stored programs on cassette tape. Eventually, I upgraded and got a modem (300 baud) and a floppy disk drive (5.25-inch).

I thought I was state-of-the-art when I upgraded my modem to 14,400 baud!

I started programming in Atari Basic, then learned DOS 3. After DOS 5, I took courses in FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal, and BASIC. By then, Windows had changed everything for home computers. I hated using a mouse. I realized I could not keep up with all the new languages coming out, like Java and C. So I switched my major from Computer Science to Electronics Technology and began focusing on hardware instead of software.

From computer hardware, I got into Systems Analysis & Design, which was fun. Then expanded into Robotics and Industrial Controls. While in the service in Germany, I turned down two job offers from IBM. They were great offers, but not good for an active duty soldier who was married with kids.

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 01, 2026, 04:20:08 PMI built "computers" using various IC chips, including the 8088 processor. My first mass-production computer was an Atari 800 with a whopping 48k of RAM. No hard drive, no modem. It had a tape drive that stored programs on cassette tape. Eventually, I upgraded and got a modem (300 baud) and a floppy disk drive (5.25-inch).

I thought I was state-of-the-art when I upgraded my modem to 14,400 baud!

I started programming in Atari Basic, then learned DOS 3. After DOS 5, I took courses in FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal, and BASIC. By then, Windows had changed everything for home computers. I hated using a mouse. I realized I could not keep up with all the new languages coming out, like Java and C. So I switched my major from Computer Science to Electronics Technology and began focusing on hardware instead of software.

From computer hardware, I got into Systems Analysis & Design, which was fun. Then expanded into Robotics and Industrial Controls. While in the service in Germany, I turned down two job offers from IBM. They were great offers, but not good for an active duty soldier who was married with kids.

Wow! Quite the tech pioneer Lori! My Spectrum had 48k and a tape drive. Programming was possible in BASIC. I started a course at uni in C++ but I quickly realised it wasn't for me. I think we had a 10 week module and at the end we had a program that did Ohms Law! Seemed like an awful lot of effort for little reward to me! When I was in school I had a calculator that had 32k! Amazing what could be done with so little back then.

I thought 48k was a lot.
My profile pic is 340k.

Times have changed.

TRS-80, Commodore Pet, Commodore Vic-20, Commodore C64 and Commodore Amiga 2000.  Then started into 286 as first MS-DOS Windows 3.1  💚

Oooh, never heard of a Commodore Pet. Will have to take a look at that.

TRS-80

Now that I think about, the 286 was bought/mail ordered while I was stationed at RAF Lakenheath.

The first computers I ever used were the Apple IIe computers my elementary school had. The first computer my family owned was in the early 2000s. I don't remember the specs, but I think it was Packard Bell and was like a Pentium 90 or something. It was a used computer my dad bought from some guy he knew. I had just finished college. I remember wishing we'd had one sooner, because I could have really used it in high school and college. I had to rely on friends or the school computer labs to access computers for school work.

Well, I started out, around 1971, stealing computer time on some of the lab computers at the university after school.  The best one was a PDP-8 (mini).  When I went on to university, I did my degree in computer science, and used the PDP-8 legally, as well as a CDC-6400 mainframe.

My first personal computer was a PDP-11 from Heathkit that I built myself, in 1978.  I moved on the the run-of-the-mill 286s, 386s, 486s, etc.

Quote from: KathyLauren on April 01, 2026, 06:18:14 PMCDC-6400 mainframe

Was that a punch card or magnetic tape?

In high school, we had to use punch cards, but the seniors got a plastic card like a credit card.

My first computer was a ti90. No real memory and you had to use your tv. Not popular with my parents. My school had apple 2. That was the last apple product I liked

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 01, 2026, 06:37:43 PMWas that a punch card or magnetic tape?

In high school, we had to use punch cards, but the seniors got a plastic card like a credit card.

I rebuilt a control system that,used punch cards to mix animal feed. The cabinet was 5' tall, 8' wide and 3' deep. It was full of wires that looked like a pasta factory exploded. I put a GE plc terminal blocks and still had over half the cabinet left. Program took .e 2 weeks to write.
I did the entire,engineering,design and build. That was,a fun job

@Jessica_Rose posted a photo of an IBM 360 memory core over in Photography.

https://www.susans.org/index.php?topic=246894.msg2328940#msg2328940

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 01, 2026, 06:37:43 PMWas that a punch card or magnetic tape?

Punch cards.  Most of us computer science majors learned to keep a rubber band around our assignment programs in case we dropped them.  Except we'd keep our account/password cards in our shirt pockets so they wouldn't get stolen.  When running the program, we'd slip the account/password card into the deck, submit it and then retrieve the card when we got the deck back.

Hi Everyone

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model I, a home computer from Tandy Corporation with a Zilog Z80 processor running at about 1.77 MHz and typically 4 KB to 16 KB of RAM, expandable to 48 KB. It used a monochrome green screen with a 64 column text display and loaded programs from a cassette recorder using BASIC commands like CLOAD. I used it to run simple games, including a space shuttle landing game that updated frame by frame using basic text or line graphics.

I then had a 486 machine with a VESA graphics card, a dot matrix printer and a large 17 inch multisync CRT monitor, which gave me flexibility with different display modes and resolutions.  It had about 4 MB of memory and a 256 MB hard drive, along with a tape drive for backing up system files.  I also had both a 5.25 inch floppy drive and a CD-ROM drive, which at the time felt like a big step forward.

I used this system for work, mainly doing CAD drawings and for university studies.  With the dot matrix printer, I was able to print A3 drawings, which was very useful for technical work.  The main software I used included WordPerfect, which was an excellent word processing program and AutoCAD.  Like many people at the time, I also used other software that I downloaded and licensed using key generators.

To get the most out of the system, I configured my own AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to maximise available memory, which was essential for running larger programs under DOS 5 and DOS 6, as well as Windows 3.1.  This setup allowed me to switch between environments efficiently and run a wide range of software.

I also spent time programming in several languages including assembly, C, Fortran, Java, Lisp and BASIC, using the system both for development and learning.

For games, I played classics like Doom, Commander Keen and Prince of Persia, which all ran well on that setup.  I had a 14,000 baud modem and connected to the internet through dial up and bulletin board systems, which was how most online access worked back then.

As for Linux distributions, Slackware, released in 1993, was one of the earliest I used. It packaged the Linux kernel with tools and utilities that followed traditional Unix design. Getting device drivers working, especially for cards like Creative Sound Blaster and similar hardware, was often a real pain.

Looking back, it was a very capable machine for its time and handled both work and entertainment surprisingly well.

So yes, definitely a big step.

Best Wishes Always
Sarah B
Global Moderator
PS  I worked on the IBM 360 it was a class assignment and we had to write programs on punch card, oh boy that was fun.  In addition while at a community college (think trade school) I used the famous PDP 11.

Quote from: Lori Dee on April 01, 2026, 04:20:08 PMMy first mass-production computer was an Atari 800 with a whopping 48k of RAM.
I realized I could not keep up with all the new languages coming out, like Java and C.

I hate to tell you this Lori but, C was around a good 7 years before the Atari 800 came out.  Compared to COBOL and Fortran it's a relatively new language.  It was around long before JAVA, perhaps you're thinking of C#, which came out shortly after JAVA.

My first experience with a computer was in Basic on a Vic 20 we had at home, when I was a kid.  Multiple computers and languages since then.  The last 30 years were primarily C with a little C# thrown in.

That all ended yesterday.  I'll probably never write another line of code. 

Funny this subject came up today.  I retired Yesterday, the 31st of March.  Seven days after turning 69.  At a little after 8 pm, I was the last one out of the building, left my badge on my manager's desk. 

Well this thread is making me feel young! I have never heard of a lot of these. Were some of them steam powered lol?!

Seriously though, I'm glad to see there are a lot of fellow Vic-20 users out there. We are a rare breed in the UK.

I was too young to have any of those computers at the time! We used BBC micros at primary school and then Acorn Archimedes at high school. It was Acorn computers that then created ARM which is behind basically every RISC mobile phone processor and modern microcontroller. So at least something big from the UK that still exists.

Charlotte 😻

XP21 with an Xpander memory card/unit. Still have it somewhere in the ex's loft. I got it to learn a bit about how they worked and wrote a simple game called guess the depth of oil, if you got it right the oil rig gushed and filled the screen. Commodore C64 Terminator game set with floppy disc ,cassette reader and some how to books. Then got a tower in which I fitted a gaming card, we spent hours playing Worms!!!

Quote from: Charlotte Kitty on April 02, 2026, 02:27:15 AMI was too young to have any of those computers at the time! We used BBC micros at primary school and then Acorn Archimedes at high school. It was Acorn computers that then created ARM which is behind basically every RISC mobile phone processor and modern microcontroller. So at least something big from the UK that still exists.

Charlotte 😻

Acorn Archimedes! That was the one I couldn't remeber! Thanks Charlotte. I knew I had used an Acorn but couldn't remember the model.

Quote from: davina61 on April 02, 2026, 03:33:04 AMXP21 with an Xpander memory card/unit. Still have it somewhere in the ex's loft. I got it to learn a bit about how they worked and wrote a simple game called guess the depth of oil, if you got it right the oil rig gushed and filled the screen. Commodore C64 Terminator game set with floppy disc ,cassette reader and some how to books. Then got a tower in which I fitted a gaming card, we spent hours playing Worms!!!

Worms and Lemmings were class games!

The first computer I ever used belonged to a neighbor. It was late 1978, and a Heathkit H8 with a cassette and 48k of memory had me hooked. I think the first computer game I ever played was 'Adventure', and then 'Star Trek'. There were no graphics back then, the games were text-only. I spent many hours at his house.

Love always -- Jessica Rose

Quote from: Jessica_Rose on April 02, 2026, 07:04:29 AMHeathkit H8

Yay!  Another Heathkit user, from the age of dinosaurs.

Quote from: Jessica_Rose on April 02, 2026, 07:04:29 AMthe first computer game I ever played was 'Adventure',

I didn't know that they ported Adventure to the H8.  It was a staple in the PDP-11 world, and I had it on my H11.  I even remember the opening: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." 

For all you younguns, Adventure was the very first role-playing game ever.  No graphics, just text.

Quote from: Paulie on April 02, 2026, 01:25:52 AMIt was around long before JAVA

I knew the guy who invented Java, James Gosling.  He went to my high school and was a year behind me at university.

Quote from: Charlotte Kitty on April 02, 2026, 02:27:15 AMIt was Acorn computers that then created ARM which is behind basically every RISC mobile phone processor and modern microcontroller.

It was designed by Sophie Wilson, a transgender woman, and one of my heroes. I have had the pleasure of meeting her 3 times.

Sophie Wilson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson)

Quote from: PhilippaRees on April 02, 2026, 12:25:07 PMIt was designed by Sophie Wilson, a transgender woman, and one of my heroes. I have had the pleasure of meeting her 3 times.

Sophie Wilson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson)

That's definitely nice to hear she was instrumental in all the tech we are using today.

As a kid, around 1970, I was allowed to play on some Bull (a french computer manufacturer) tabulating equipment, mostly card punch machines. I loved to watch punch card sorters and the card readers. Occasionally the operators opened the door of the reader and you could see how the cards ran between rails through the reader. It was fascinating to watch for 6-year-old me.

My first small steps into programming were on a TI-57 and later TI-59 calculator.

My first real computer was an Atari 520 ST+ which had an 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor and for the time gigantic 1MB RAM. Next I had a Macintosh Classic followed by a Mac IIsi and a Powerbook 180 (which I still have sitting around here). And then quite a number of G3, G4 and G5 Macs followed by a wide variety of Intel Macs.

And that 14,400 baud modem was top of the line when I got onto the internet for the first time in the mid 90's.

I never owned a PC.

Quote from: KathyLauren on April 01, 2026, 07:35:45 PMPunch cards.  Most of us computer science majors learned to keep a rubber band around our assignment programs in case we dropped them.  Except we'd keep our account/password cards in our shirt pockets so they wouldn't get stolen.  When running the program, we'd slip the account/password card into the deck, submit it and then retrieve the card when we got the deck back.

And you would draw a diagonal line on the top edge of your card stack just in case if the stack got dropped or the rubber band broke and you had to reassemble your program...

This is probably only going to mean anything to the brits on here but did anyone watch the brilliant BBC minidrama "Micromen" about the British computer manufacturer wars in the 80's (Sinclair vs Acorn vs Amstrad). It had Martin Freeman and Alexander armstrong in it. A good watch if you can find it.

And there was that fictional series "halt and catch fire" about the US industry too. That was good while it lasted.

My introduction to computers was the schools commodore PET, the ancestor of the VIC-20 that came after it and then the commodore 64. Thats why the little graphics characters they all have are known as petscii characters.
When I studied computing at school we sent our programs off to the local collage to run on an ICL mainframe. They were written on coding sheets and we got a printout back a week later along with some paper tape with our program on it. Only occasionally were we allowed to touch the PET.

Later the school got an Apple IIe and a research machines 380Z.

My own first computer was a 1K Sinclair ZX81 that I built from a kit.
I later got a BBC model B where I properly learned to program and I still have it.
Later I moved on to an Atari ST520FM Which I also still have.

I did electronics at university but I mostly write embedded applications in C these days

Quote from: Stottie Girl on April 02, 2026, 12:59:18 PMThis is probably only going to mean anything to the brits on here but did anyone watch the brilliant BBC minidrama "Micromen" about the British computer manufacturer wars in the 80's (Sinclair vs Acorn vs Amstrad). It had Martin Freeman and Alexander armstrong in it. A good watch if you can find it.

I did and I was amazed to learn that I used to drink in the pub where the fight scene actually happened. It was actually filmed in a pub a bit further down the road.

And I also just found out that ARM designer Sophie Wilson was in that scene so now I have to watch it again.

Quote from: Iztaccihuatl on April 02, 2026, 12:45:27 PMAnd you would draw a diagonal line on the top edge of your card stack just in case if the stack got dropped or the rubber band broke and you had to reassemble your program...

Ha-ha!  Yes, totally!

I remember play Oregon Trail. You learned to type POW and BANG. A lot of text

Using fingers and toes, I can do addition and subtraction easily.  But I have limits.

The limit depends on how many people are around with their shoes and socks off.

Quote from: Stottie Girl on April 01, 2026, 03:59:50 PMProbably one for the oldies like me.

What were the first computers you had/used before the modern PC?

My first computer was the Commodore Vic-20 (though I used a BBC Micro and Acorn computer at school). After my Vic-20 came my Sinclair Spectrum 48k+, then the Commodore C64 and Commodore Amiga 500. My friend had an Amstrad machine. It was a good while before I got my first pentium computer with windows 3.1 on it.

Takes me back some. I think I was basically there from the dawn of home computing.

You are only a little bit older than me, Sarah. Although you wouldn't think it. I never had the Vic-20. We did have the BBC Micro and Acorn computers at school, though. We are eerily similar in world view, haha. I think my first was the 128k Spectrum. Because one of my mates at school had one and I used to go round his house. The built in tape drive was witchcraft. I did have an OG Spectrum, with the rubber keys, but it never worked.

Shout out to Dizzy. The egg that spawned a million copies.

I did have a Commodore 64, though. And went on to Amiga 600, then a 1200... where a 2 megabyte hard drive was cutting edge. I mean it kind of was when all the games were on floppy disks that were around 700kb.

Amstrad was kind of the Apple of its day. 10% of people owned them, and made sure you knew it.

Quote from: Sephirah on April 02, 2026, 03:39:02 PMYou are only a little bit older than me, Sarah. Although you wouldn't think it. I never had the Vic-20. We did have the BBC Micro and Acorn computers at school, though. We are eerily similar in world view, haha. I think my first was the 128k Spectrum. Because one of my mates at school had one and I used to go round his house. The built in tape drive was witchcraft. I did have an OG Spectrum, with the rubber keys, but it never worked.

Shout out to Dizzy. The egg that spawned a million copies.

I did have a Commodore 64, though. And went on to Amiga 600, then a 1200... where a 2 megabyte hard drive was cutting edge. I mean it kind of was when all the games were on floppy disks that were around 700kb.

Amstrad was kind of the Apple of its day. 10% of people owned them, and made sure you knew it.

Show off! Spectrum 128k where I had the 48K, Amiga 600 when I had the 500 lol! Spoilt cow ha ha!

Yeah I remember Dizzy. One thing we Brits have always been good at is writing video games.

This whole thread has spawned off what we were talking about by the way! There have been some amazing computers mentioned on here, it's worth taking a butchers at some of the history.

Quote from: Sephirah on April 02, 2026, 03:39:02 PMThe built in tape drive was witchcraft
...
where a 2 megabyte hard drive was cutting edge.

What I would have given for 2 megs of disk!  Or even *any* disk.  When I first got my H11, it had 8 K of memory and *no* disk, not even a floppy.  It used punched paper tape for storage.  You wouldn't believe how that affects your program development cycle!  You made sure your programs worked right the first time, second max.

I did eventually max it out at 56 K of memory, added a 64 K 5.25" floppy, a dual 8" (2x 256K) floppy, and eventually, a 14" disk platter that held 10 megs.

Quote from: Stottie Girl on April 02, 2026, 03:56:43 PMShow off! Spectrum 128k where I had the 48K, Amiga 600 when I had the 500 lol! Spoilt cow ha ha!

Haha, I got my 600 off a car boot sale, for like 20 quid. ;D The 500 had the full keyboard. The 600 was like an Amiga laptop.

I pre-date PC's. The first computer I used was my high school's main frame. The Terminal was a telex machine. We typed in our program into the telex machine and produced a tape. We then dialed up the main frame and ran the tape to load the program and the data. Kept our fingers crossed that there were no typos.

FYI, this class helped me get my first full time job with Maersk Line. Where the terminals weighed about 60 pounds.

Ellen

Do you keep your older computers, if so, do you use them?

Are they considered obsolete?

Most of the computers I have that are or were old didn't boot up

If the hard drives are not corrupted, I reuse them for extra storage.

I repurpose the power supplies and fans. The rest gets torn down and scrapped after I dismantle the motherboards, memory, video, and other cards. Those get stripped separately to recover the gold. There is very little in them, but I would rather keep it than give it away.

I have on old PC. It is a Paquet PC. It is just a little larger than todays cell phones when closed up. Runs on four AA batteries with Dos 3.0 in RAM. It uses early versions of SD cards for memory and addtional programs.

Ellen

Quote from: EllenW on April 06, 2026, 10:08:23 AMI have on old PC. It is a Paquet PC. It is just a little larger than todays cell phones when closed up. Runs on four AA batteries with Dos 3.0 in RAM. It uses early versions of SD cards for memory and addtional programs.

Ellen

And it still operates? Most electronics have a definite life cycle

Someone said his dad still keeps an old PC to play floppy disk based games.  It cannot connect to the Internet as there is no home telephone to connect an old modem to.  He keeps the PC as is just to play old games.  No software or hardware updates.  Wired mouse and keyboard.  It has a big tube monitor.  It has a sprocket paper printer but it is not used.  No USB no SATA no wireless no Bluetooth no card readers.

Quote from: ChrissyRyan on April 06, 2026, 10:51:15 AMSomeone said his dad still keeps an old PC to play floppy disk based games.  It cannot connect to the Internet as there is no home telephone to connect an old modem to.  He keeps the PC as is just to play old games.  No software or hardware updates.  Wired mouse and keyboard.  It has a big tube monitor.  It has a sprocket paper printer but it is not used.  No USB no SATA no wireless no Bluetooth.

Being isolated like that also means no need for anti-virus or any of the non-essential crap that bogs down modern PC performance. I had a lot of software that functioned perfectly as it was. Then some yahoo decided that it needed more, and more, and more.

I miss DOS 5.0.

😁