Novocastrian

Inspired by Steve's Apple IIGS woes.

First work 'puter an Elliot 903, first at home a VIC 20.

AlexInBC

I'm obviously not as old as you

First home computer (mine, not one belonging to my older brothers) was an Amstrad 6128. First work computer would have been a bog-standard intel 80386 of some description.

Novocastrian

Oi. I'm not as old as Steve.

snowshoveller

first home computer was an atari ST

first work was some kind of windoze box running 3.1 i think

Novocastrian

The Elliot 903 was the size of a room, took paper tape or punch card input and had the computational might of a pocket calculator.

Fortran, you've gotta luv it.

Oink

First home was a Mac Quadra. The first work one I had was a powerbook 15".

Atlantic Xpat

First computer at home was a ZX81. Remember 'ram pack wobble' anyone?

First work computer were Wang minicomputers I think...all I recall was that the email programme was called 'Wang Office' Cue much amusement with 'Send me a Wang, Wang me, etc etc.'

Novocastrian

Either insightful or very young.

Novocastrian

Wanger.

JonboyE

First home computer was a Sinclair Spectrum.

I think this was my first work computer as well. I was with a travel operator I had the task of writing a program that would record the numbers of airline tickets sold.

Next I went to work for a bank in the city that had a mainframe the size of a European principality, then finally to a company that had PCs. The accounting department of 25 people had 2 PCs between them. I can't remember the brand name (although Victor rings a bell). They had two 5.25" floppy drives. You put the disk with the program in the left had side and the disk with the data on the right hand side. One day we bought a 1MB external hard drive. We fought each other tooth and nail to use that vast expanse of storage.

Novocastrian

That's the sort of stuff I'd hoped for. Living in a baked bean can computer tales.

After the VIC-20 I earned a living for a year or two writing machine code for a 6502 based Commodore PET. Then I bought one of the first IBM 8088 based PCs and wrote code for that too.

Them was the dayz.

Piff Poff

Our 1st home computer was a ZX Spectrum too - Hungry Horace rocks!

I remember getting a book full of games that you could programme into the computer so after a week of programming you select 'go' and the whole thing crashes

As for work computers - I dunno!

Novocastrian

Cassette tape storage? Luxury.

Steve_P

Vic 20 here with Cassette storage.

Followed by an Apple II+ Clone

dbd33

Alas, I don't keep close track of this geekier than thou shit but:

- I recall my, now ex, wife playing Adventure all night with friends from neighbouring apartments in about 1983, Adventure was a mainframe text based game "You are in a cave, it is pitch black" she was attached to the mainframe via a Scanset, a screen of about 40x40 characters which used an acoustic coupler and a phone line at 300 baud. Later she used an Osbourne which I could barely lift but which went at 1200 baud.

- My first machine at work was an ICL System 4 with a magnetic drum. At least that's the first machine of which I remember the name. The first machine from which I made serious money was a PDP 11 with a German language Assembler translator; the IBM LA (load address) instruction was rendered as LIK (Load Index Konstant). It used magnetic cards as storage and had no other form of memory.

I moved to Canada in 1981 and then, as now, it was a backwater. I learned 1401 Autocoder, obviously one does not look back after mastering Autocoder.