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Sherman Set the Way-Back machine to 1981

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What was your first computer or experience with programming..?

Well for me at the strapping young age of 7, my father brought home a Timex/Sinclair 1000. With a wopping 16k RAM and a 3.25mhz processor I was set on a path that lead me to where I am today. This thing sported a cassettee storage system and monochrome display capable of 64x44 resolution in graphics mode.

Every day when I got home from school I would just love cracking open the accompaning book of ROM BASIC and Z-80 assembly programs and typing them in, then see what would happen if I change this line of code... or that line of code.

10 FOR I=1 TO 50
20 PRINT “HELLO WORLD“;
30 NEXT I

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    I still have them and fully boxed and working btw :D
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    Reminds me of the post I wrote last night (name is link). I'm pretty sure my first program was something for poking random chars into the video buffer on a VIC-20 (done in Assmebler) or an AD&D character generator written in ProDOS Basic.
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    Commodore PET.

    Writing BASIC programs to make ASCII rocket ships fly up the screen really impressed my mother when I got permission to bring the computer home over a school holiday.

    Then my best friend and I would spend hours "hacking" game programs to make them say rude things. Those were good times, even if it did take several minutes to load a tiny program from a cassette tape.
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    First was in the US AirForce when maintence forms started beeing entered into computers.

    I was new and just did my training on aircraft general maint. saw the errors when older guys were puting down the wrong set of codes for parts Vs. Job Codes Vs. Ordered Parts.

    due to my seeming like a "wiz" at filling out the forms I was taken to the "Most Holy" room at Job Control HQ where the new computers were and the tape drives etc...
    thats what led to....

    On leaving the USAF and going back to the old home town I purchased a Commodore VIC-20
    C= what a company, had a chance but got bled dry by Mr. Jack T. the founder.... nother story that is...

    So I had 3.5 K of ram and 8 color graphics Whooo Hooo

    then I started adding cartreges
    and found I wanted 2 of them at the same time...
    Open cases and study circut borads....
    I already knew how to solder from HS days....
    I built an AM-FM poket radio kit from Radio Shack as a teen, Mom was amazed that it worked!

    Got the "Debug tools" cart and the "Graphics Super Expander" onto one cart!! Man was i l33t
    then, I had 6 k of ram and graphics commands and trace and step commands ..... it was like having .... VISUAL BASIC for the first time....

    after that went in fast pace about 3 more computers and classes at the local Comunity Collage....
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
    ZX81 is not the ZX80 as alot of people seem to proclaim, there is a difference.
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2004
    I mainly used a C64 (plus a Vic20, a PET, an Apple IIe, and a TRS-80 III), but I remember this one because it was the cheapest. The thing I remember most is that it scrolled from the bottom up.

    For a while, they were giving these away for free with grocery purchases in Toronto.

  • Anonymous
    February 22, 2004
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  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2004
    Wow, I had totaly forgotten about that machine. My GrandDad and I built one and carved up a plastic shoebox lid so that we could put the full-sized keyboard (he never said where it came from) in it and wire in into the device. :) It was wonderful. I spent hours with a bar magnifier going through huge magazines full of binary code and checking the CRC number at the end. And saving the program to a cassette tape.
  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2004
    This is a blast from the past. J I saw this on a new blog site and couldn’t resist sharing it with everyone. What was your first computer or experience with programming..? Well for me at the strapping young age...
  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2004
    Oh boy :)
    That's what I started with too LOL!