Les
Orchard: I see that Mark Pilgrim has posted a picture of
himself as a kid, working at an Apple //e. Based on what I wrote
this past Summer about being Newly Digital in 1983, I would guess
that around the same time I was working on a Commodore 64, and I
would have teased him in a relentlessly geeky way about his clearly
inferior machine.
Bah. In 1983, I was working on a
3033. (16 MB RAM, 4.7
MIPs).
As a young'un (I was 2 years old in 1983) I have an awed fascination with the big iron of yesteryear. Any chance of some more details - what kind of things were you developing on that monster? What languages were involved?
I first learned C-64 basic in 1985 at the age of 9 and then quickly moved onto becoming a 6510 asm hacker ;-)
Ahhhh, the days before M$ unleashed clippy and the like on the world... ;-)
By '83 I was programming the 6502s in Apples, Ataris, and Commodores. The computer that took my first program, though, was a DEC PDP 11. I think it was an 11/34, I entered the program in machine code on a TTY. Later, I picked up an 11/10 with 8KB core and toggled the program in on the console. As far as I know, it should still be there, but I'm waiting for the right enclosure to make it a "live" end table.
Hmm.. somewhere around that time my folks bought a TRS-80 with 4k of on board memory and the cute little cassette player for having all sorts of fun. I was 7 years old in 1983.
'83? That's when i was 8 years old :P Had an Atari 400 with a Basic Language Cartridge and a Basic Manual. Typed in all the source codes that was in the manual which in turn (of course) disappeared when turned off. I thought someone had deleted them :P
I see that we have a recent theme of folks posting stories and pictures of how they lost their programming virginity. While Matthew hasn't quite mastered "Hello, World" yet, he's doing pretty good at surfing the web at 4 weeks :) The computer...
In 1983, I didn't have a computer of my own yet, since I was still thinking of myself as a musician, and had not yet given in to my inner geek. But at work I had a DEC Rainbow on my desk, (dual-boot/dual-processor, ran CP/M on a Z80 or MS-DOS on an 8086), and administered a VAX 11/730 running VAX/VMS.
By 1983 that whole method of typing 'LOAD' and then hitting 'Play' on the cassette deck was ancient history, as we had actual 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. Heck, the whole disk was floppy, not just the inside! I'm sure you knew that you could use both sides of the disk by cutting an extra notch on the side that didn't have one. I can't rememeber if it was 1983 or 1984 that we attached a mouse to the Apple ][+ and started using MousePaint, but better graphics the world did never see... at the time anyway...
Pete, yes yes, I know, that TRS-80 with the cassette player was old school by '83, but hey, we were the only family on the block with a computer. Our neighbors called us "snooty"... even if we did have to press Play :-)
Surprised no one has mentioned the TI99's. In `83 I had no home computer yet (CoCo's came to me later, second hand.) and these school machines (along with a few Apple II's) provided my intro to programming.
I had played around with the C64, but my dad bought a TRS-80 Model 4p (their "business class" portable machine). Dual floppies, 48k. Monochrome screen. Ran TRS-DOS and CP/M.
Adium 2.0 beta available for download (OS X AIM client) Nokia N-Gage cracked "Application of all combat power that is available to us" Bush wants to prevent protests in UK Deaths spur review of road TRAMP: Makes RDF look like Python data...
In 83 I was using my first computer, a BBC Model 'B', with a whopping 32K memory, a TV-out, and a casssette recorder. In the UK this was the behemoth, as the other machines of the day were 16k in size.
The BBC ran BASIC on the command line, allowed you to drop into assembly and had 7 colour modes, ranging from high-res monochrome to low-res 8-colour, though you could also flash colours in this mode. Along with the machine we had a pair of joysticks that were really analogue-precision-pointing devices that I've not seen the like of since.
The sheer quality of games like Elite and Revs has yet to be matched.
The first programming environment I ever had in the home was, honestly, the "Computer Intro" cartridge for the Odyssey 2 videogame system. You had 100 bytes worth of space for code and data to play with, and you couldn't save your programs, which you entered in hex, which, in retrospect, is pretty impressively hardcore. ( [link] )
My first actual computer was a Coleco Adam, which of course 0wnz all your little Commodores and Apple II's... :)
I had a Radio Shack Model 100 in 1983; started with 8 KB of memory in April and upgraded it to 16K near the end of the year. Mom had a TI; my brother had a Timex Sinclair. Mom was never tempted to buy another....
Must be some lesson there.
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Prior to that, I'd done serious programming on a PDP-10, and taken some classes which used a VAX. But the Tandy machine was a lot more fun.
In 1983, I had a 16K Commodore Pet and I wanted an Apple II and Atari. My next computer was a C64 and then much later (went through this "unnatural" :-) 4 5 or 6 year period where I didn't have a machine at home!) Power Mac 7500.
I'm too old! I first met computers in 1968. By 1971 I was working on an ICL System 4 - boy that had 12 x disk drives (removable) with I think 60 Mbytes each - around 720 Mbytes total. Each rack (2 units) was about the size of a tall freezer unit. I don't know how much memory it had - probably not too much.
Then I switched to ICL 1900s a year or two later - at least it had a powerful operating system.
By the mid 70's I was working with PDP 11s, and they didn't have much memory and the total backing storage (removable) was 5 Mbytes.
There were other machines - Prime and Multics - some were very powerful for their day, and they did support large numbers of users.
Nowadays most laptops are much faster than these monsters.
However, some of the software features from the 1970s were much more powerful than we have today.
It's not fashionable to talk about batch processing, but for repetitive tasks it's one heck of a lot simpler than having to sit and type in commands all day.
OK - I realise this is an old post - but it was fun reading this anyway!