Forum Discussion
First computer you bought?
What was the first computer you ever bought? Though my former in-laws got my ex and I a computer for Christmas 1997, which was a Pentium 166MHz clone computer sold by a small computer store in ...
Someone I worked with had a Hesmon cartridge. I was able to duplicate it on an EEPROM and mount it to a card that I slipped into the back. I still have the 6502 and 6510 books for learning machine code and how to interface with the C64 interrupt schemes.
First thing I wrote was something to interface to an AFSK decoder I built specifically for one of the SCA subchannels on a local FM station. The service was something called PocketQuote, a stock ticker broadcast service. The service itself used a hand-held SCA receiver built into what looked like a TI-58 calculator with an optical card reader for the user's access code. The program I wrote emulated that thing, plus was able to track up to 20 stocks, plus detect any access codes that were plainly unencrypted within the data stream. That's a whole story in itself.
Fun times.
I started with a VIC-20 and actually used it as a computer rather than just for Omega Race... Modified and upgraded it enough to keep using it early into the Internet era, accessing indirectly while CompuServe still had command-line interface, also through other boards.
Maybe remembering 300bps modems helps me cope with the shortcomings of Hughesnet better than some folks seem to do...
Finally lept out of the stone age with a Macintosh 68030, then an iMac 333, then an eMachines tower (along with a Dell Inspirion laptop for the wife), then the current HP slimline tower (along with assorted Android devices).. I was just thinking that my current desktop has 7,400x the processor, 3.3 million x the RAM of my first one... But I still don't have a robot butler or flying car!!!!
