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Well I think it was downhill after Fortran - mind you those computers would have lived in the house while you stayed in a shed.

 

Thanks for that explanation Sarraceniac - surprisingly I did understand most of it :D

My first computer was my son's hand-me-down Windows 98 on which I doodled a bit, liked it,
so bought myself a new XP.
Over three years now, most of it self-taught and with the help of sister(Daisees) and GC
I think I have achieved quite a lot for somebody of such advanced years! :rolleyes:


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Darn it Terrier, you outrank me. My Pet had all of 4k of RAM, cost I think, about �£600 around 30 years ago and, unlike the atom, (that great forerunner to the BBC computer) you didn't build it yourself. But it did have a nice 9" monochrome screen with chunky graphics, built in BASIC, a 5.25" floppy drive (no hard disk) and of course, no mouse.

Nice cartoon jjordie. :D :D

 

Sorry, now to top you all.The first computer I ever used was Liverpool Uni's ANALOGUE computer where one had to enter info on punch cards. The language I think was CECIL (it was 40 years ago. Then we went on to ZX80 and ZX81, then Tandy machines

 

Sorry Palustris. Got the t-shirt. I was talking about owning. I too used a punch card job (do you remember the size of the sorting machine?) when at Uni. And the languages supported were CECIL and Fortran. The TRS-80 was before Mr Sinclair appeared on the scene the Tandy was at the same time as the Pet. Eeeee. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

 

We were very lucky, Tand (aka Radio Shack) ran a whole series of courses for teachers on using the TRS 80 when they were trying to get the Govt. to adopt it for schools. Our first machine was a Tandy 4 colour one (copied less successfully by the Dragon, which we also had).
Most of the time we wrote in Machine code and used a compiler to get it into the machine. It is amazing just how much you could squeeze into the memory though.

 

There was another machine going at the same time as the TRS80 and the Pet. It had the most horrible keyboard because all the keys were in rows vertically as well as horizontally. Does anybody remember what it was? (See what you started jjordie?) :D

 

Yeh! Interesting isn't it :D

 

My first "computer" was the ZX90! Hours of fun - you plugged it into the tv then spent all day typing in screeds of BASIC code (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code [1])) to (maybe) get a game of PONG! Only thing was you had just one character wrong or missed or added a space, it wouldn't work! HA!



My next was an Olivetti with NO hard drive. You had to load in the DOS every time from a floppy disk. And then you loaded in the system disk but you had to save all your stuff to other floppy disks.

And there was sometime when you had to save your documents in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but I can't for the life of me remember why .....

Hey ho. Happy days!

 

Hi all, yes the acorn atom was the first machine we bought for my son, was never really bothered about them at the time,son just kept progressing to bigger and better he's the expert my fall back when i'm stuck,I started to use them at work then eventually bought one for myself find it invaluable persuing my hobbies not into playing games though not got the time, have a safe day everyone.