patrick.net

My Texas Instruments computer circa 1979. I got it as a gift along with an IBM Selectric II typewriter. I did my undergrad at one of the Claremont Colleges. Life was cool!

Here is the first computer I ever had. It was an Apple IIe with an Imagewriter printer that was entirely dot matrix.

Actually we had it as a family. Dad got it in about 1984. I was able to keep it once he got a Macintosh with an Imagewriter II and he purchased an Apple IIc for the family.

Apple IIc

Macintosh

I took that Apple IIe to college with me in 1987 with the Imagewriter. It got me through my bachelors degree in 1991. I used it in grad school until 1993. Then Dad got me a Macintosh Classic. I still have the Macintosh Classic somewhere.

I used to write lots of programs in Applesoft Basic. I remember the transition from DOS 3.3 to ProDOS. Appleworks was the bomb when it came to word processing. All of my college papers were done on Appleworks.

All of those computers were ridiculously expensive in their day. Now, even the cheap desktops that are around $300 make all of these look like stone tablets.

And how about that market today? It looks like we're in a sell off after some gains this week. I think we're still in for a fall.

And my very first experience programming in Basic was on the Commodor Vic 20 with a cassette tape drive:

I was so thrilled when I made a program that could print "hello" on the screen. That was my first program. It took 20 minutes to save it on the cassette and 20 minutes to call it up to run it from the cassette tape. I was babysitting for a guy who had this computer and he would let me use it once the kids went to bed.

Maybe they'll allow me to have my prune juice at the home now... :)

Kids today don't appreciate what it was like reading and writing programs in from a cassette recorder. I vaguely remember on my Atari you could hear the data squeals as you read it in.

There was something wonderfully DIRECT about the process. I ran a BBS in North Georgia that was famous in it's time, and it was on an Atari, with program read in from tape and run from RAM for as long as I could keep the thing running. Uploading & downloading software by xmodem, later zmodem. I ran into one of my BBS users a few years ago, well he recognized me first by my name and said "hey didn't you run that BBS back in...." and off we went.

The BBS ran first on Atari 800XL, awesome piece of equipment in it's day:

Final iteration had this:

Upgraded the RAM with a soldering iron, used the excess for a RAMdisk to speed everything up. I forget when I finally got off cassette and had my first 1050 floppy drive. Woohoo SpartaDOS and using a clipper to cut a notch on the floppy so you could flip it and use the back side. Good times!

Yep, time for my prune juice.

Ca early 1982 I discovered a rather disused 4K Model I in the back room of the advanced Math classroom. This was the only computer on campus. Teacher showed me how to cload and I was off to the races. The next summer we finally got a room full of Apple IIes for the business dep't, and one of the business teachers was nice enough to buy just about every Apple II game ever made up to that time (I think with her own money, dunno).

My senior year I hadn't failed any classes so I took first period off, had "independent study" for 3rd period, and my 7th period history teacher let us cut class since the material was so boring for us. With lunch (5th), that meant I spent every odd period in the computer lab my senior year, LOL. I even had my own system that nobody else used, one of two that had a color monitor along with a monochrome CRT for reading 80 col text, CP/M card, IIRC Mockingboard sound card, mouse card, printer.

I thought computers still kinda sucked in the 80s, until the Mac II came out. That was the first machine I desired with every fibre of my being. Worked two jobs in 1987-89 and was able to get a Mac IIcx soon after they came out. Great machine that I hand-carried onto the plane three years later when I went to Japan. With a mail-order LaserJet 4MP I got in 1993, I was rockin'.

My first computing experience involved COBOL and punched cards. The second was learning why you never drop the card deck.

Vicente says

Upgraded the RAM with a soldering iron, used the excess for a RAMdisk to speed everything up. I forget when I finally got off cassette and had my first 1050 floppy drive. Woohoo SpartaDOS and using a clipper to cut a notch on the floppy so you could flip it and use the back side. Good times!
Yep, time for my prune juice.

Wow, you are really bringing back memories with this comment. I remember using a clipper to notch floppies so I could use front and back. Wow, I almost forgot that detail.

Oh and I remember how expansion meant way more than plugging in cards into ports. LOL!