First computers or pre PC computer history

[Stottie Girl]

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.

[Charlotte Kitty ✅]

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 😻

[davina61]

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!!!

[Stottie Girl]

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 😻

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.

[Stottie Girl]

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!!!

Worms and Lemmings were class games!

[Jessica_Rose ✅]

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

[KathyLauren]

Heathkit H8

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

the 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.

[KathyLauren]

It 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.

[PhilippaRees]

It 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 🔗 [Link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_​Wilson/]

[Charlotte Kitty ✅]

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 🔗 [Link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_​Wilson/]

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

[Iztaccihuatl]

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.

[Iztaccihuatl]

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.

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...

[Stottie Girl]

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.

[PhilippaRees]

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

[PhilippaRees]

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.

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.

[KathyLauren]

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...

Ha-ha!  Yes, totally!

[Dawn Kellie]

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

[ChrissyRyan]

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.

[Sephirah]

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.

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.

[Stottie Girl]

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.

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.