your first computer

[Dmoeny]

Avocet 20. Or, more in the spirit, an 8088 clone I built up.

[SteveP]

Actual image of SteveP conducting a transaction at his bike shop with his first computer.

saab,
do you still have the receipt?
looking at the computer i realize i undercharged you.

[lumpy]

Here is the story on the wang building.
Cross Point (Lowell, Massachusetts) - Wikipedia

Ouch.
Sold again in 2014 for 100,000,000.

I followed that story - it was very much touch and go for a while. They somehow got Verizon (iirc) in there as a tenant before their money ran out.

[davids]

Here is the story on the wang building.
Cross Point (Lowell, Massachusetts) - Wikipedia

Ouch.
Sold again in 2014 for 100,000,000.

"Third-tallest buildings in Lowell"... And ugly as a Wang terminal.

[choke]

We had some kind of small computer at home...a TRS-80 maybe...but I don't recall much about it.

The first computer I really used was a Wang. Interestingly enough, this was at a US Embassy....the State Dept used them in the late 80s/early 90s.

Actual image of SteveP conducting a transaction at his bike shop with his first computer.

In 1988 in Moscow, USSR, the stores that were strictly for tourists (Beriozkas) had modern cash registers. But once you got away from those and into the 'normal' Soviet shops the clerks almost always used an abacus. It was quite an eye-opener.

[lumpy]

I used a Wang computer when I was an intern at the Attorney General's office. Summer of 1994. They had a whole room full of them for word processing. Had to learn the Wang word processing prompts and formatting and stuff, which was pretty arcane. I wonder how long those computers lasted there?

[xjoex]

Mine was a used Victor 9000 with 8088. 8 bit proc at 4mhz, single 5" floppy and... 10 Mb hard drive. Oh it had a 4 color cga monitor. It was 5 years old when we got it. I am sure I got in to a lifetime of CS because it broke so much and I had to fix it.

Joe

[xjoex]

I administered a Unix LAN with about 400 workstations and 2 big servers for a while. That is a OS you can be fond of.
...what a geek.

I worked in the computer lab (big surprise) , everything was unix. I still use Linux everyday, but now in a vm in my Mac. In the dot com days I worked at a company where we bought a dozen big Solaris servers (around $500k each) for our Toronto office. When we lost funding and closed the office we left them there because we couldn't afford the taxes to bring them to Colorado.

I just ordered a new laptop with a 2tb ssd and 16gb of ram, nuts!

Joe

[xjoex]

Found some pics of the downfall of that dot com...
Before


Hey lets decommission some machines to save money.


I got a new job a week later. I figured with this cart went my future at the company.


Joe

[Tristan]

I had a Tandy 1000 as a kid but my first experience with programming was on one of these Texas Instruments Ti-85 calculators. I wrote a few scripts to help with my highschool math homework then when I did my pilots license in 1996 wrote some scripts to help with point-to-point navigation in the pre-GPS Cessnas. Every time the batteries died I'd loose all my programs and would have to re-write them....

[jerk]

my first computer was an IBM PC jr. it took floppys AND cartridges and had a a sweet wireless keyboard. IBM never supported the fucking thing and it only kinda worked with some IBM compatible software. still it was pretty sweet.

[sk_tle]

Found some pics of the downfall of that dot com...
Before


Hey lets decommission some machines to save money.


I got a new job a week later. I figured with this cart went my future at the company.


Joe

I used to manage the same sunfire v120 / v240 / v420 /v480 / v8x0 . They weren't 500k each though.

[xjoex]

I used to manage the same sunfire v120 / v240 / v420 /v480 / v8x0 . They weren't 500k each though.

Wow I forgot they were SunFires! This was a different data center. We left the E6500's in the Toronto office so I have no pics of them. They were amazing hardware that had 16 motherboards that allowed hot swapping of failed CPUs. Granted your iPhone is faster, but still it was cool.


-Joe

[sk_tle]

I managed some 6800 that were similar but a newer gen. It is a bit moot nowadays with virtualisation but it was cool to physically partition the hardware, add or remove a cpu boards or drives and assign them to domains.

I quite enjoyed my time with sun hardware and solaris as well as ibm power. With the exception of those shitty small cpu fans on the v120/v240 the sun sparc and ibm power were/are much more durable than those cheap intel powered we are all running nowadays. I've been playing recently with smartos which is a KVM hypervisor running an illumos (opensolaris) kernel with features such as ZFS, dtrace and zones.