After 18 years of service

[corydoras]

I've been in this game too long. I remember my first Tandon 386/33 running 3.1 with a massive 10MB HD and a whole 2MB of RAM.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7707016.stm

[chesters1]

i remember my first pc a IBM x86? not even 640k 0f memory ,my first AT286 went in its box and eventually a huge full size board with 3mb on it (single chips and lots of them) even then running anything over 640k was dodgy at least

my boss bought it for the price of a car in 86? and couldnt fathom it out so gave it to me ,its green screen was eventually replaced with an 8? colour one.

the biggest windows leap was windows 3.11 for work groups IMHO

its (not sure which of the two) 8mhz crystal was replaced by a 16mhz one about all you could do then to speed things up.

my first computer was a timex zx80 then on up the sinclairs until sugar ruined them but i did have a plus3 in the end and a modem

the "web" then just seemed to be links to uni's and text pages at a very slow line by line download screen

Edited November 5, 2008 by chesters1

[corydoras]

i remember my first pc a IBM x86? not even 640k 0f memory ,my first AT286 went in its box and eventually a huge full size board with 3mb on it (single chips and lots of them) even then running anything over 640k was dodgy at least

my boss bought it for the price of a car in 86? and couldnt fathom it out so gave it to me ,its green screen was eventually replaced with an 8? colour one.

the biggest windows leap was windows 3.11 for work groups IMHO

its (not sure which of the two) 8mhz crystal was replaced by a 16mhz one about all you could do then to speed things up.

my first computer was a timex zx80 then on up the sinclairs until sugar ruined them but i did have a plus3 in the end and a modem

the "web" then just seemed to be links to uni's and text pages at a very slow line by line download screen

My first home computer was a C64. I had the 5.25" floppy disk and the silly little plotter.

 

My first PC was an Apricot. It didn't do graphics or have a HD, but it did have TWO 3.25 floppies and a cordless keyboard. The keyboard was infra red and it worked well. I used to use it to write COBOL (Microfocus COBOL) programs. Wordstar and the COBOL compiler would fit on one 720k floppy and the code on the B drive. Apricot were way ahead of their time.

 

My first work computer was a Rockwell AIM. It had a 20 character alphanumeric LED display, and an integrated 20 character thermal printer. There is a picture of on in Wikipedia, but that is a more modern version. Mine only had a hex keypad, not a full qwerty. There was no software for it as such. It had a disasembler in the ROM, but we had no assembler. I believe there was on available but since it was not symbolic it wasn't really worth it. All the coding was done on in pure machine code, with a pencil and paper, then you would type it into the AIM, disassemble the code to the bus ticket printer and hopefully what you got out was what you had on paper. It had an RS232 port so you could save work to a tape, but this was dodgy as hell so we always blew work in progress onto an EEPROM too. Most of the time we had to fit all of our code into 1K, but it takes a long time to input 1K of data on a hex pad.

 

Most of the time we did not know what our programs or modules actually did. Some of it was for a Scandinavian company who made huge industrial washing machines. The wash programs were on big plastic punch cards. Some of us wrote code to read the cards. My bit controlled all the valves and pumps.

 

Some other code was for Plessey. It could have been for anything from traffic lights to a linear accelerator for all we knew.

[chesters1]

i remember the washing machine (or one similar) a keymatic ,to use it mum used to push the square key into a slot with the desired program inwards

blimey found one strange how the brain keeps stuff hidden until something triggers it ,i just wish i had another brain full of triggers alongside it

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/images/I011/10240836.aspx

Edited November 6, 2008 by chesters1

[corydoras]

i remember the washing machine (or one similar) a keymatic ,to use it mum used to push the square key into a slot with the desired program inwards

blimey found one strange how the brain keeps stuff hidden until something triggers it ,i just wish i had another brain full of triggers alongside it

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/images/I011/10240836.aspx

A Hoover Keymatic something like this:

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/images/I011/10240836.aspx

Our code was not for them (I was only 3 when they came out) I can't remember who the company was, but they were Scandinavian, might have been Finnish. I think they had some kind of hammer in their logo? We never saw the washing machine itself, just the card reader and some memory mapped LEDs to represent valve actuators, heating elements and so on. Primitive stuff. Our AIMs did not have any case, just a motherboard that was mounted on a sheet of heavy plywood and the 'ports' were just a row of memory mapped jumpers on the back of the mobo. They did not even have an operating system.

[chesters1]

just logic circuits i expect ,if x does y do this if x does z then do this etc

probably a 8080 or its kin hidden on the board to keep everything ticking over ,might even have been PAL's long time since i played with them most tellies had some in somewhere and the students programmed them at the uni (bloody old fashioned tech was still taught when i worked there ) kept them quiet

Edited November 6, 2008 by chesters1

[corydoras]

just logic circuits i expect ,if x does y do this if x does z then do this etc

probably a 8080 or its kin hidden on the board to keep everything ticking over ,might even have been PAL's long time since i played with them most tellies had some in somewhere and the students programmed them at the uni (bloody old fashioned tech was still taught when i worked there ) kept them quiet

6502 chesters. All the registers for the i/o ports were on page 1. Page 0, the first 256 bytes were reserved for the "operating system".

 

I could never get my head round 8088 or Zilog instruction sets, but I could assemble and dissasemble 6502 code in my head, very sad huh. I don't know if I could still do it now. It's 22 years ago. Bill Gates has Aspergers syndrome. One of the first projects he worked on was a BASIC interpreter for IBM PC (remember they would boot into BASIC if there was no floppy or HD?) The BASIC rom had about 10,000 lines of code. Bill claims that he can still remember it off by heart.

[MrWiggly]

Sinclare Spectrum was my first. MSDOS I far as I remember. And a seperate tape recorder storage !

 

My kids use to play the old "Ping Pong" game on it !

Edited November 6, 2008 by MrWiggly

[chesters1]

you can get excellent pc emulators for old speckies etc and all the roms to use on them.

i like the sega emulator GENS identical in every way to the machine

 

our first delve into games machines was a philips creation the videopac ,most of the games were crap but terrahawks very addictive in a simplistic way.

blimey 1k of memory and even emulators for it

http://www.henchmansion.com/retro/videopac.htm

Edited November 6, 2008 by chesters1

[Steve Walker]

My first computer was a Commodore VIC 20 when I was 11-12, so '84-ish. The games were pretty rubbish, so I learnt BASIC and spent a lot of time programming it. Then I got a C64. Even on the 64, the BASIC implementation was interpreted and the performance was too slow to do anything exciting. It came with an excellent user manual which included all of the opcodes for 6502 assembly language, a memory map for the inbuilt routines and an explanation of the available addressing modes, though. So I taught myself assembly language and because I couldn't afford the cartridge based assembler/disassembler software, I wrote my own in BASIC. I suppose I was 13 or 14 then.

 

The C64 ended up in the loft, and then I didn't really touch computers again until I was at university. I didn't really do any serious programming again until I was working for my PhD and needed to do some number crunching that exceeded what Excel/Access could do natively. Image analysis data, and lots of it. Then I got a temp job doing Excel/Access development in BT's statistics office, then one as a junior software developer, writing apps in VBA and VB6 and SQL Server. Then ASP and distributed VB6 MTS/COM+ apps. Then C#/.NET work. That's what I'm still doing today.