What Was Your First Computer??

[ferlew]

Prompted by AbEd's thread, it reminded me of ours.
It was an Acorn Electron 32K, what was yours?

[Graham-W]

Spectrum with 16kb of memory. Who would ever need more than 16kb of memory? I think the operating system used up about 7kb but that still left loads. I later got a kit to upgrade the memory to 48kb. Awesome.

[Zacs-Master]

We had some sticks in junior school. I seem to remember green ones were 1 point going up to long orange ones which were 10. Does that count?

[boxtops]

As I said on the other thread - Commodore 64, at home.

At work, we had manual typewriters, then they sent us on a course (this was about 1985) and when we returned, our desks had luge monitors and electronic typewriters-cum-keyboards. You could choose whether you wanted the keyboard in typewriter or monitor mode.

Our boss worked out (like he had nothing else to do) that because we now had electronic templates for routine letters, it would save us three weeks' typing a year..... :-(

[Prudie]

A BBC B, played games on a cassette recorder. It did teach me to program in Basic though, it was pretty good for its day.

[boxtops]

^ huge monitors (I wish we could edit posts!)

[weecalf]

Toes and fingers stuck after 19

[bert_h]

Ferranti Pegasus, September 1962.

[jno]

they did that to us, boxy, but not till 1990ish. No ergonomic research at all, with the result that half the staff got RSI. Hiring the temps to cover for them (and pensioning off the worst affected) blew the company's budget out of the water for years.

[lilacben]

Snap ferlew...so did we lol.! Do you remember playing Ping Pong on it .? And trying to put a programme onto it.. took hours and then if you had one thing wrong it wouldnt work..! Nightmare.

[bibblebub]

The first one I used was in 1970 and it had a room all to itself, occupying 3 or 4 cabinets each the size of a large wardrobe, and the programs I wrote were on paper tape generated by a teletype; typos meant that that you had to read the ASCII values represented by the holes punched in the tape and that was the best way to learn binary.

[Graham-W]

If it was the Pegasus II there were only 12 made. There's one in the Science Museum. They're still waiting for it to warm up.

[ferlew]

Lilacben, yes.
We got a magazine too, which taught you to programme, I recall writing a prob to produce lights on a xmas tree, winking ones at that!
Also, out local college ran an Acorn Electron Adventure Group. All the games were script.

[bhg481]

Pegasus was earlier than 1970, Graham. I used one in 1963 - input AND output on paper tape and through a teleprinter (like the old BBC Grandstand football results) for printed output.

[bert_h]

No, Graham, it was the Pegasus I, delivered to Durham University in October 1957 but actually installed at their King's College in Newcastle-on-Tyne.

[kevanswerbank]

A ZX Spectrum from Woolworths. There was a fault with it - the images were in black and white but you could play Scrabble with it quite well.

[ferlew]

Dear oh dear, my typing, I was so excited.
"we wrote a programme"
"our local college"

[marval]

Mine was a commodore, not sure which one though.

[cupid04]

An abacus...

[woofgang]

BBC B.