# How far back do your computer memories go



## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

I'm ancient so I remember the caveman days when only the govt and huge corporations had computers. Big hulking things that took up massive space with spinning reel-to-reel tapes, hard copy printouts, lots of cool flashy lights and noises in very chilly rooms. Knowing how to use these things meant you were seriously intelligent. Or at least seriously geeked out.  Or both. 

Then early in my career we had "word processors." No, not MS Word or anything so advanced. They were "computers" of a sort, but all they were and could do was word processing. Mind you, they did it very well; it was many years before things like MS Word achieved and finally surpassed them. The early days of PCs were rough, but we didn't know it at the time; we thought they were so cool. Green text on a black background only, really primitive apps like Lotus 1-2-3 (a spreadsheet) and Wordstar (a horrific and totally illogical word processing app). Oh and...games! Battle Chess and Jeopardy with their CGA graphics, wow so cool. From there it just exploded. 3.5" Floppy discs that were not only twice the storage size of the old bigger ones but you didn't have to be careful about touching any part of and messing it up...then CDs, wow quantum leap! My first PC was a 386/33, at the time a mid-range machine, but co-workers grumbled because they paid as much or more for a weaker system just a year or two before. Of course I was in the same boat eventually.

It seems funny now but I'm glad I was part of that golden age of computers...the upgrades and tech jumps were huge. Normal people become serious tech geeks because it was all so novel and exciting, like a shiny object to a crow. Like going from CGA to EGA graphics, massive upgrade..then EGA to VGA and SVGA. Now it's all a yawn in comparison really, even though the lamest of systems today is light years more advanced than the cutting edge stuff then. Hell you can probably get "computers" today in a box of cereal that blow away the best corporate computer systems back when.


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## Double Helix (Jul 14, 2021)

Wordstar was what I learned on. Using a Franklin: no mouse for me; just DOS commands


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## robcs (Jul 14, 2021)

My earliest computer memory is helping my brother build a UK101 (a clone of the Ohio Scientific Superboard 2). It had 1 *KB* of RAM(!), a 1MHz processor, and a 16-row display (a whole 128x384 pixels!)

at school we had a computer room with a terminal in the corner that took stacks of punched cards. A favourite prank was that if you were walking past the staff room and saw someone’s stack (their homework!) waiting to be picked up, you’d give it a quick shuffle 

Later it was replaced with BBC Micros, and later still Acorn RiscPCs.

my mate across the road had a Commodore Pet and then a ZX81.

the first computer I owned was a 48K Spectrum, then later I saved up for a RiscPC of my own. I added a PC add-on board and it was my main computer well into the 2000’s when I finally went over to the dark side and built a PC.


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## Double Helix (Jul 14, 2021)

bill5 said:


> . . . Hell you can probably get "computers" today in a box of cereal that blow away the best corporate computer systems back when.


Remember Dick Tracy's watch? How "future shock" was that?


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## cuttime (Jul 14, 2021)

The 16K memory pack always shifted off the back at the worst possible times, usually while POKEing a 5 or 6 page game from SYNC Magazine.


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## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

Double Helix said:


> Remember Dick Tracy's watch? How "future shock" was that?


Nobody took it seriously of course. Like those flat-screen huge monitors in Total Recall. Fantasy.


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## jmauz (Jul 14, 2021)

Commodore 64.

It was a piece of shit. 

We had that fucker plugged into a shitty 12" color TV. Also had the tape drive...

LOAD "GAME" ,8 ,1
PLEASE PRESS PLAY ON TAPE

Then you'd wait 30 minutes.


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## Traz (Jul 14, 2021)

My earliest computer memories go back to the early-mid 90's when the school I was going to at the time had us take a computer class where we were learning how to use computers and floppy disks and all that good stuff. I'm pretty sure the computers we were learning on were the original Macintosh's, at least that's what I remember them looking like.


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## JT (Jul 14, 2021)

Early 80's, I had an Epson QX-10. $3K new. It ran on CPM if I remember correctly. No mouse back then, two floppy drives, one for the program and one for data. The only music app I remember was something called QX Composer. I was able to type instructions to place a music note on a page and have my dot matrix printer provide a jotty piece of sheet music. It was a good starting point as I look back on it.


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## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

Good ol dot matrix printers. They weren't as good as the daisy wheels, but omg the daisy wheels were horrifically loud.


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## NoamL (Jul 14, 2021)

Windows 3.1 and later 95.... that very particular shade of teal.

I remember Claris Works, MS Paint, Oregon Trail (and Yukon Trail and Amazon Trail!), and the way the windows OS back then tried to make everything feel like a real life button. Even the clock was trying its best to look like a real life boring clock in an office cubicle.

and yep floppy disks. I remember Sim City 2000 came in a cardboard box with something like 15 floppy disks you had to insert one by one to install the program.

First computer game I had that came on a CD-ROM was Civ III. Or maybe it was the DOOM clone that came in a box of Chex cereal.

The Internet was a completely different thing back then too. I think Wikipedia might be the only surviving remnant of what the Internet felt like back in 1995-2000. Very non commercialized and de-centralized.

Internet search was very primitive and people would use web rings or portals to navigate. Every website would have a visitor counter and it was a big deal if your site had 10k+ visitors.

"Portable" computing wasn't around yet, everything was bulky tower computers that would hard crash if you tripped over a power cable, even Tamagotchis and GameBoy Colors felt like magic.


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## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

NoamL said:


> Windows 3.1 and later 95.... that very particular shade of teal.
> 
> I remember Claris Works, MS Paint,


"Remember?" I still use MS Paint.  

And while I'm not into gaming any more, I would rather play DOOM than most of the games out there today. I hate that they never came out with a legit DOOM 3 (what they called DOOM 3 was a joke, nothing at all like the orig).


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## Anthony Roberts (Jul 14, 2021)

My dad worked at a nuclear research reactor...in the early 70s my Dad took me to work for the day...they had the first computer I ever saw and the scientist were playing a star trek game on it


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## Geoff Grace (Jul 14, 2021)

bill5 said:


> I remember the caveman days when only the govt and huge corporations had computers. Big hulking things that took up massive space with spinning reel-to-reel tapes, hard copy printouts, lots of cool flashy lights and noises in very chilly rooms.


Ditto.

_(I thought I'd further date myself by using the word, "ditto.")_

Best,

Geoff


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## dflood (Jul 14, 2021)

Too far.


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## Polkasound (Jul 14, 2021)

My introduction to computers was around 1983, in junior high school. I remember the Apple IIe and Commodore 64. My first computer game experience, in all its monochromatic green glory, was Oregon Trail.

My dad was working as a school administrator at the time, and they lent him a computer so that he could learn how to use it. Back then, I had no need or desire to use a computer (and neither did he) so it just sat in our house and gathered dust. I did not touch a computer all the way through high school and most of college as there was no world wide web then.

Around 1992, I bought a Canon StarWriter70 word processor for writing college papers. I absolutely loved that thing and used it all the time:







In 1994, my parents bought a family PC (a 486). That PC changed everything. I used it mainly for desktop publishing, MIDI recording, and accessing the internet -- three activities that shaped my future.

I bought my own PC in 1997 and expanded beyond MIDI recording to two-track audio recording, another activity that shaped my future. I sold the Canon word processor to a friend... who, sadly, used it to pull an all-nighter writing a paper for school. She finished it, but never saved her progress to the disk. She got up to start getting ready for school and snagged the power cord with her foot. POOF.


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## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

Anthony Roberts said:


> My dad worked at a nuclear research reactor...in the early 70s my Dad took me to work for the day...they had the first computer I ever saw and the scientist were playing a star trek game on it


I remember that game. You typed in coordinates of where you wanted to go and it showed you place on the map by typing it out on a small grid, I think enemies were asterisks, etc.

Also football. You typed in what play you wanted to run (I think you had a whopping 8 to 10 choices) and it typed the result. So cool then. 

Another big moment for me was in school when a guy had an Amiga PC. I think EGA graphics. Looked basically like a "modern" computer, I had only seen CGA before that and the diff was huge. Really left an impression. And he had this game called Starflight...I was hooked. dBase II and III were also huge at the time. You could build not just a database but the entire executable, totally standalone database, no program required to run it. 

Then the Satanic cult known as Microsoft took over...sigh


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## dcoscina (Jul 14, 2021)

For non music- Pet Computers in the early 80s. Then the Wang computer for making basic computer programs (with punch cards). Moved to C64 and Amiga for art and my first music computer was an Atari 520ST with Steinberg 12. Seems like another lifetime ago


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## Kent (Jul 14, 2021)

bill5 said:


> Wordstar (a horrific and totally illogical word processing app)


Came here to say that WordStar is easily my favorite word processor! Haha, different strokes I guess.

This essay outlines many of the elements I like about it:








Robert J. Sawyer: Hugo and Nebula Award-Winning Science Fiction Writer


Author of 24 bestselling novels including The Oppenheimer Alternative and FlashForward



sfwriter.com


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## CATDAD (Jul 14, 2021)

Playing Frogger on a Commodore 64 at home, and Oregon Trail on Windows 3.1 computers at school because they had decent money! I remember being amazed at how small (and not floppy) the "floppy disks" where for the school computers. Technology moved so fast in the 90s, still hard to believe games went from Lode Runner to Half Life in that time! The struggles of moving documents between Microsoft Works and Microsoft Word...


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## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

kmaster said:


> Came here to say that WordStar is easily my favorite word processor!


You're sick.  So to save a document meant Control+K+S+Alt Z (or whatever the hell) made sense to you? OK.....

WordPerfect was also a POS. As much as I rip on Microsoft, there wasn't a word processor worth a flip until Word.


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## dflood (Jul 14, 2021)

Apart from a bit of mainframe stuff in college, I started with a Wang Word Processor for work in about 1981. Word processing was cool but it had Multiplan, Microsoft’s first spreadsheet program. I was compiling data for agricultural research trials at the time and it was a wonder. Then along came DbaseII and other marvels. By the later 80’s I was using an IBM PC clone as the terminal for computerized greenhouse control systems systems. In the mid 90’s I bought our first ‘home’ PC, justifying to my wife ‘how great it would be for the kids’, the deciding factor for all purchases in those days.
The first computer music software I messed with was probably Voyetra, followed soon after by Cakewalk, and Band in a Box. I eventually transitioned to Pro Tools for audio, but didn’t really get into midi until I switched to Intel Macs and Logic. The only career advice I gave to my kids was to try to find something where you are not chained to a computer for life. That’s getting harder to do all the time.


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## Ray Cole (Jul 14, 2021)

dcoscina said:


> For non music- Pet Computers in the early 80s. Then the Wang computer for making basic computer programs (with punch cards). Moved to C64 and Amiga for art and my first music computer was an Atari 520ST with Steinberg 12. Seems like another lifetime ago


A good friend of mine had a Commodore Pet computer. He was the first of us to have a computer at home. That was probably around 1978 or so. It would be a few years before I got my first computer, a 16K Atari 800. Then a couple years more until I got my first PC clone. I started writing music on that computer using a DOS version of Cakewalk. It couldn't do audio, but it worked fine for what I was writing at the time, which was mostly music for piano. Here's one of the last pieces I wrote on that old version of Cakewalk: Ray Cole - Fantasy for Computer-Driven Piano.


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## puremusic (Jul 14, 2021)

Let's see I started out with of course the ATARI 2600. . Then my friends who were computer collectors inspired the next steps up.. they had the Intellevision, Colecovision, ATARI 800, ATARI 1040ST, C64.. so I wound up with the ATARI 400, C128D, and eventually things moved on to the IBM clone days and the 286-386-486 etc.

I remember programming a snowflake program with my father on that ATARI 400, I saved it to a cassette tape. I playing Ultima III and Forbidden Forest, listening to tracker music on the C64, and marvelling at my friend's Game & Watch. Man I still want one of those things. I grew up in a mixed Italian and Korean neighborhood so the weird electronic gadgets and robot toys angle was well covered.

A friend of the family worked in computers and showed me the Internet when it was a complete unknown, I spent most of my time accessing a random quotes/cookies program. Later I went to a college famous for its computer program, so it had Internet access still before the Internet was a thing. MUSHes and MUDs were a thing back then, I got involved with that and wrote some nice locations and scenes.

Internet etiquette was different back then. I still have those habits.

Frankly, a part of me liked the Internet better before everyone else found out about it. Ahem. Cough. Cough.   A lot of things were different.


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## rnb_2 (Jul 14, 2021)

My first computer, IIRC purchased with paper route money (and a lot of it), was an Apple II+ with disk drive somewhere around 1982/83 (with a small color TV as a monitor) - I think my dad knew someone who was able to get us a (comparatively) good deal. Unfortunately, I really didn't know what to do with it beyond playing games. I was amazed by a 3D animation program a coworker of my dad's gave me, but it was too primitive and hard to use for me to wrap my brain around at the time. I sold the computer after about a year.

The next few computers I owned were DOS PCs, followed by a few years with Amigas in the 90s, then about a decade of home-built PCs after Commodore went under, then to the Mac in 2006, where I remain to this day.


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## InLight-Tone (Jul 14, 2021)

I remember making the choice between the Commodore Amiga 500 or the Mac with the tiny screen at a local mall. I took the Amiga because of the graphics possibilities with all the cards and external gear you could buy. I immersed myself into the Bars and Pipes sequencer.

Subsequently, I signed up with Compuserve and downloaded breast pics which took at least 10 minutes for a low resolution photo...


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## khollister (Jul 14, 2021)

1973 - IBM System 360, FORTRAN, card punch and large format greenbar paper. Built a 8080 computer from plans and PCB's designed by some fellow engineers at my first job (Harris Corp.). First commercial computer I purchased was an Apple II. I have owned just about every personal computer made (Apple, Atari, Amiga, PC's) and worked on IBM and CDC mainframes, PDP/VAX, HP mini-computers, Sun, SGI and Apollo workstations, etc.


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## Symfoniq (Jul 14, 2021)

Commodore 64 and Apple II. First computer I fell in love with though was a Mac IIci.


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## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

Oh man the days before the internet...CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL were the big 3. I was into Prodigy. It had message board forums not unlike this one, email, various entertainment aspects, and...fantasy baseball. lol...I wasn't really even into baseball, but the concept as a person who loved sports and stats was interesting to me. I remember AOL charged by the hour and so that was out. 

And I see there are other old farts here  Remember bulletin boards?


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## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

khollister said:


> 1973 - IBM System 360


First computer course I ever took used those things. Punch cards. SO don't miss them.


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## puremusic (Jul 14, 2021)

Yeah I loved those BBS games and trying to choose the best transfer protocol.. There was that spaceship game.. And then Ripterm came out that was really something. I though it'd be bigger than it turned out to be though.


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## bill5 (Jul 14, 2021)

I just liked visiting diff BBSs, they had a wide variety of formats and for me the appeal was the file downloads to see what cool stuff I could get for free.  This was more or less how most looked as I recall

Like


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## rnb_2 (Jul 14, 2021)

bill5 said:


> Oh man the days before the internet...CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL were the big 3. I was into Prodigy. It had message board forums not unlike this one, email, various entertainment aspects, and...fantasy baseball. lol...I wasn't really even into baseball, but the concept as a person who loved sports and stats was interesting to me. I remember AOL charged by the hour and so that was out.
> 
> And I see there are other old farts here  Remember bulletin boards?


I never really got into the BBS scene - I didn't buy a modem until somewhere around 1992 to get on GEnie, mainly because that was where people who were into the Traveller science fiction tabletop RPG were. I ended up also spending a lot of time in Neil Gaiman's topic there, where he, a few writer friends, and many fans hung out together - my first taste of what a free-wheeling community of wildly different people could be like. I still remember Neil posting a photo of his third child right after she was born in 1994, and a very moving response I got from him to a message I sent when I was going through a difficult time in late 1993.

I've been an early adopter of a few things over the years, most amusingly broadband internet in the late 90s in western Massachusetts. There was a point when the non-profit I was working for was using multiple phone lines routed into a special box to provide internet to an entire building, and we needed to download a (for the time) fairly large file for a network project we were working on. It was actually faster for me to drive 20 minutes to my apartment, download the file there via my cable internet, and drive back, than to download the file over the phone line at the office.


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## José Herring (Jul 14, 2021)

Commodore Vic 20 with 5k ram I believe. I learned how to program using Basic a sine wave sweep from 60hz to 22khz. My first foray into computer generated sounds.


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## Loïc D (Jul 14, 2021)

ZX81.
I still own a working one.


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## wahey73 (Jul 14, 2021)

jmauz said:


> Commodore 64.
> 
> LOAD "GAME" ,8 ,1
> PLEASE PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
> ...


Same here, but with the Floppy, so it was only 20 minutes 
Then the Amiga 500 and after that my beloved Atari ST1040 on which I learned Creator (which then became Notator SL, Notator Logic......Logic Pro)


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## Saxer (Jul 14, 2021)

Commodore64 here too. It was the first computer I had and the first computer I ever saw except the big blinking boxes in science fiction movies. At that time when actors in bad SciFi movies ran into a hopeless situation they decided as the last way out: "Let's ask the computer!"
That was all I knew about computers but a music teacher had a Commodore64 too and recommended it to me as I was making tracks on my Fostex 4-track cassette recorder all day long. So I followed his advice and started with "Supertrack", the Grandpa of Logic. 64 KB RAM: it could hold about 3800 MIDI events before it crashed. There was a note counter on the screen. Each note took two events: NOTE ON and NOTE OFF. Some tracks I had to divide into two songs and after recording the first half to cassette tape I had to punch in the second half while starting the computer at the same time. But I wrote my first string arrangement on that thing. After the update to "Scoretrack" it even displayed the notes of a single track on the screen. But from screen I had to write it down to paper myself.


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## pixel (Jul 14, 2021)

I'm not that old but "thanks" to communists, my country was way behind rest of the world until 1989 (and then it needed years to catch up after that). So my first contact with computer was my cousin's C64. I got one when I was about 10 years old. I don't remember first games I played. We were getting mostly pirated tapes then. Original games were luxury then (price wise). "Creatures" on C64 is still one of my favourite game of all times.

Then almighty 386 PCs in school. I hated Norton Commander which we had to learn at that time. Learning abstract commands which were doing abstract things (my brain couldn't process what "format c" means  ) and we had no explanation from teachers either. Just classic "do what teachers tell you to do and shut up"  
We had some games then to. Something like shooting bombs from castle to another.
My friend had 386 to and I remember how I felt scared coming back home at night after playing Doom :D
At that time my cousin moved to Amiga 500 and then 1200. He infected me with Trackers and music making. He couldn't teach me programming thought, it was too abstract for me until recent years when I finally learned a bit of C# and C++
In 1999 I build my first PC: Pentium II.IIt was a real beast. I could watch DivX but in a tiny window because full screen video was killing that PC completely :D
I got demo of Fruity loops and rest is a history


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## Saxer (Jul 14, 2021)

pixel said:


> We had some games then to. Something like shooting bombs from castle to another.


I remember that... "Ballerburg"?


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## el-bo (Jul 14, 2021)

Loïc D said:


> ZX81.
> I still own a working one.


Blimey!

My first computer experience was with friends' ZX81, but my first computer was the ZX Spectrum. From there, the Atari 800XL then Atari ST (First for games, then for Cubase). After that, I had a dalliance with a built-to-spec (I didn't do the building) PC, after which (from 2007) I have been using Macbooks.


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## pixel (Jul 14, 2021)

Saxer said:


> I remember that... "Ballerburg"?


No it was actually a game called... "Castle" :D I just googled it https://dosgames.com/game/the-castle/


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## PaulieDC (Jul 15, 2021)

I guess this is more the history of what I experienced (writing this sentence last, lol):

Around 1970 when I was 8, my aunt took me to work once on a Saturday, she was the accountant for the Wise Potato Chip factory, and she had to run some process and I saw the punch cards flying through this long machine, like on the opening of Adam 12. In '73 my dad got a calculator for his business, big thing with orange LEDs, and I was blown away that I could enter an equation and it would give me the answer. Had to have one so for Christmas a National Semiconductor NS600 was under the tree, I was SO stoked. Wasn't until '83 until I touched an actual computer, our mainframe geek at work bought himself an IBM PC Jr and it had MS Flight Sim on it, FOUR colors. I was blown away again. I distinctly remember asking him what the difference was between hardware and software, lol. In January '84 I went to NAMM in Anaheim (worked for Kramer Guitars then) to set up and man the booth, and I strolled around and saw someone playing a MIDI keyboard and on a green screen PC, Notes were appearing! Albeit slowly... I don't remember which company it was. In '85 got a Commodore 128, 1571 floppy disc and hooked it to my TV. I ran an astronomy app and was tracking Haley's Comet. Amazing. I think that was 16 color graphics. Got bored and sold it to buy a Yamaha SPX-90, lol. Got n 8-track 1/4" Tascam to record my band totally analog (that will become relevant in a min). Went on the road with band in '89 and the Brit sound guy rented a Mac SE to run spreadsheets and draw stage plans. I instantly became a fanboy sheeple, and in May 1990 I opened an Apple Credit account and spent $4200 on the Mac Portable plus the extra $200 internal modem and $200 for the extra MB of ram. Oh, and $799 for a tractor feed printer (DeskWriters were still well over a grand). I walked out of that store asking myself, what on earh did I just do? Will this investment actually get me anywhere? What do I know about computers? Remember, cars still had 8-track and cassette players! But I dabbled with MasterTracks Pro on it... I wanted SO bad to learn orchestration but the 4MB of sounds on my EMU Proteus MPS+ didn't sound great and I didn't understand MIDI really. Then got out of music and got married in the 90s and turned to desktop publishing in the Mac. Man, what a ride. Total Mac snob until I got into programming in '98 and had to flip to all Windows, and that's why I use all Windows PCs but only iOS devices... call it my respite! I did get back into live sound in 2005 for our church but no real PC interaction going on. Yet.

I'm up late and should go to bed but the question made me look back on the journey. It was cool, but... no turning back now!

Side note: In my online Berklee class for Live Sound we had to give history of our experience (got my first PA in '79 and the recording thing in '87) and one of the younger fellas asked me what it's like to have gone through all of the analog sound and recording development through all these years, and my answer was this: what we have now with these sound libraries doing every sonic layer and articulation in software that has unlimited track with emulations of every hardware unit out there for effects, etc, running on an insane 14-core PC I built for less than the MacPortable I bought in 1990... I could care LESS about the journey, I came back to everything we didn't have 30 years ago and all of this is so incredible it's still almost mind-blowing. Now we have Internet and YouTube, I can watch instruction on ALL of this and interact with people who write bloody music for Star Wars and they answer questions, this is absolutely off the chart and I'd never want to go back. When I see arguments on "which DAW" blah blah blah, I laugh because we are so spoiled now. And it's mind-blowing every time I hit a note and hear the cellists from the BBCSO's instrument in my DSP controlled Neumann monitoring system (we are so spoiled in 2021, my goodness), it's indescribable. That's why I say I'm new at this, I took the past of what we had and hacked it to let it float away... MIDI composing today is a whole new world. It HAS been cool to re-enter the MIDI world 30 years later to see what developed, I grant you that.

Oh... Cubase is the best DAW, hands down.


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## easyrider (Jul 15, 2021)

el-bo said:


> Blimey!
> 
> My first computer experience was with friends' ZX81, but my first computer was the ZX Spectrum. From there, the Atari 800XL then Atari ST (First for games, then for Cubase). After that, I had a dalliance with a built-to-spec (I didn't do the building) PC, after which (from 2007) I have been using Macbooks.


ZX spectrum was my first computer too….Manic Miner and Jet set Willy….😂


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## NekujaK (Jul 15, 2021)

Learning to program in Basic and LISP on a PDP-1170 way back in college.


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## Alchemedia (Jul 15, 2021)

DOS were the days my friends!


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## wahey73 (Jul 15, 2021)

PaulieDC said:


> ...but the 4MB of sounds on my EMU Proteus MPS+ didn't sound great...


Still have mine and it is still working. Strings, Piano and funny enough the Trumpets haven't been too bad back in these days


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## Vik (Jul 15, 2021)

Macintosh Plus. Fantastic machine, since it had a full megabyte of memory. Switched soon to Atari 1040ST, also with 1 mb RAM. Bought C-lab Notator after having used Hybrid Arts SMPTE Track Pro for a while.


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## Nico5 (Jul 15, 2021)

IBM 360 JCL


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## el-bo (Jul 15, 2021)

easyrider said:


> ZX spectrum was my first computer too….Manic Miner and Jet set Willy….😂


Along with 'Chuckie Egg' and 'Horace Goes Skiing'


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## pmountford (Jul 15, 2021)

Vic 20 was my first interest in computing. Then Sinclair QL before moving onto Atari 1040st and then Atari Falcon iirc. At the time I was told by the distributor in London I was one of the first to buy Dr Ts KCS sequencer. Did anyone else use it or was I actually the ONLY one? 😉


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## Wedge (Jul 15, 2021)

My brother and I got an Atari 2600 for christmas. We played the crap out of it, especially Pitfall. The joysticks didn't seem to last too long. But that's a console and not really a computer. We got an Atari 800 after that which I learned BASIC, played Ultima III and Aternate Reality the Dungeon. I loved to type in the games at the back of computer magazines (I can't remember the name of any of them.) Then I found BBSes and loved downloading stuff just to download stuff. It was a game of being rushed to see what you could get.


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## TomislavEP (Jul 15, 2021)

I got my first computer at the age of seven in the late '80s. It was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum + model. I was mainly into games but I did also experiment with BASIC now and then. Somewhere in 1992. I've encountered Commodore 64 for the first time and was completely blown away! Since then, I have had several Commodore-based configurations. PCs still weren't mainstream for most people in my parts, so I've learned my first PC moves in high school, which was equipped with several computers running Windows 95.

I got my first PC in 1997. and this represented my first steps into DAW work. However, I was quite disappointed with the limitations of virtual instruments back then, so I've kept going back to the analog gear I had at the time. I've completely switched to working in DAW only in 2008. when I've got my first Pro Tools system, based on Mbox 2 Mini. The rest is history.


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## chrisr (Jul 15, 2021)

My dad worked in maintenance for ICL and Ferranti in the 60s/70s, when we went round the "computing" exhibition at the museum of science in London, he'd worked on several of the machines and could tell us more about them (well - the quirks of each machine) than the museum info available.

My home town, Manchester, has a brief but glorious history of computing firsts, a couple of decades before the Americans really crashed the party.

For me personally it was the standard c64/BBC Micro/ 286 of the 80s. Not much else to say there, but...

I've also been lucky enough to meet a couple of computing legends in person - I worked with David Braben for a week or so when I recorded audio for a game for Frontier. If I'm honest it was somewhat underwhelming for reasons that are too tedious to go into.... and ... much more excitingly I met and recorded Eli Harari, the inventor of flash memory, in the run up to his receiving the "Medal of Technology and Innovation" from Pres. Obama. We chatted for 15-20 mins or so and he was an absolute gentleman.


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## Nico5 (Jul 15, 2021)

pmountford said:


> At the time I was told by the distributor in London I was one of the first to buy Dr Ts KCS sequencer. Did anyone else use it or was I actually the ONLY one? 😉


Maybe you were the only one in London, but my first sequencer was also Dr.T's for the Atari 1040ST. And I've seen it mentioned several times by others here at VI-Control - also for different platforms.


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## pmountford (Jul 15, 2021)

Cool. Twas a good intro to Daws anyhow


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## puremusic (Jul 15, 2021)

It always surprised me that the IBM clones won the computer wars to take over the market back then. The Commodores and ATARIs were far better machines out of the box at the time and I figured they'd just keep upgrading as time went by and keeping ahead.


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## b_elliott (Jul 15, 2021)

bill5 said:


> I'm ancient so I remember the caveman days when only the govt and huge corporations had computers.


T'was back there too Bill5. 
My first computer memory was in my high school physics class. We were being taught how to use the slide ruler to do physics calculations. Then the teacher showed us the future: a computer the size of a cash register (an over-sized pocket calculator.) Likely I was the last class to be taught slide ruler technology. 





A few years later I took programming classes at Dalhousie U. Programmers presented their programs via punch cards to an admin dude who would get it compiled then give your results within a couple of hours. 





DAWs were still a twinkle in the eye of the not too distant future.


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## Gerbil (Jul 15, 2021)

cuttime said:


> The 16K memory pack always shifted off the back at the worst possible times, usually while POKEing a 5 or 6 page game from SYNC Magazine.


The ZX81 was the first computer I used. My mum's friend ran a kid's chess club at her place and her son had one with a dungeons and dragons type game on it. I had zero interest in chess but every interest in his computer and used to lose the games as quickly as possible so I could get on it. 

Oh and our school band was called GOTO10.


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## Kent (Jul 15, 2021)

bill5 said:


> So to save a document meant Control+K+S+Alt Z (or whatever the hell) made sense to you? OK.....


Absolutely! That article I shared outlines why:


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## cygnusdei (Jul 15, 2021)

Strip poker on IBM 8088 clone


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## chrisr (Jul 15, 2021)

Of course my sister had a Petticoat 5.


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## darkogav (Jul 15, 2021)

ZX spectrum .. my first computer. i programmed a circle that bopped around the screen. 

olivetti computer.. first computer used at first job.





__





Olivetti M290S - Computer - Computing History


Year of production: 1984Country: ItalyFeatures:1 MB RAM, 30 MB hard drive, 3.Year of production: 1984 Country: Italy Features: 1 MB RAM, 30 MB hard drive, 3.5inch floppy disk 1.44 Mb MS DOS 6.22 op...



www.computinghistory.org.uk






big ole floppies.. good times...


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## MartinH. (Jul 15, 2021)

My first fond computer memories date back about as much back as I can think back - tetris in ASCII graphics on an old computer with a green monitor. Don't remember the exact model, it belonged to my dad. Among the first "proper" games I played on a 486DX2 were "Stunt Island" (which was far ahead of its time imho) and Commander Keen 4.




bill5 said:


> "Remember?" I still use MS Paint.
> 
> And while I'm not into gaming any more, I would rather play DOOM than most of the games out there today. I hate that they never came out with a legit DOOM 3 (what they called DOOM 3 was a joke, nothing at all like the orig).



In case you missed them, after Doom 3 there were Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, which both were much better than Doom 3.


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## Ray Cole (Jul 15, 2021)

kmaster said:


> Absolutely! That article I shared outlines why:


If I recall correctly, the "Turbo' computer languages (e.g., "Turbo Pascal") also used the "Wordstar Diamond" for navigation.


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## PuerAzaelis (Jul 15, 2021)

I still remember my first high powered PC - a Sinclair ZX81.

Monster maze!

Loaded via casette.


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## bill5 (Jul 15, 2021)

pixel said:


> No it was actually a game called... "Castle" :D I just googled it https://dosgames.com/game/the-castle/


That reminds me of an old-time favorite: Scorched Earth. Simple and yet creative in how many diff kinds of weapons you had.




MartinH. said:


> My first fond computer memories date back about as much back as I can think back - tetris in ASCII graphics on an old computer with a green monitor. Don't remember the exact model, it belonged to my dad. Among the first "proper" games I played on a 486DX2 were "Stunt Island" (which was far ahead of its time imho) and Commander Keen 4.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


ugh. Agree to disagree. DOOM 2 will never get a worthy sequel. That company so screwed up.

But the first game I spent a crazy amount of time on was its predecessor, Wolfenstein. The first person perspective was ground-breaking.


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## Double Helix (Jul 15, 2021)

wahey73 said:


> . . .and funny enough the Trumpets haven't been too bad back in these days


I was gigging with--and playing horn parts on--a Prophet VS (rack) for a while when I bought a Proteus, and I agree that the brass did not sound too bad at all. Back then, our front man was a really good sax player (he would bring a tenor and a soprano) and people told me/us that when we played lines together, the two instruments actually sounded pretty darned authentic (i.e., the live sax and the sampled brass) as if the Proteus became "real"-er.
Same effect with the super-silky strings in the VS when played along with the Emu's strings.
Thanks for the memories, @wahey73


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## Loïc D (Jul 15, 2021)

In France, there was a deal between public education administration and French manufacturer Thomson back in the late 80’s
TO-5 and TO-7 were the models, totally proprietary but shipped with a optic pencil.
IIRC TO-16 was then released which was half compatible with PC programming.
The company was then sold and stopped producing these machines.
I guess you can still find some in schools basements.


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## sostenuto (Jul 15, 2021)

Late 1980(s) _ Atari 400 ? Cool at the time. 😎


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## MartinH. (Jul 15, 2021)

bill5 said:


> ugh. Agree to disagree. DOOM 2 will never get a worthy sequel. That company so screwed up.


Maybe "Brutal Doom" would be more up your alley. It's basically a mod for the old Doom, that makes it more... brutal.


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## GNP (Jul 15, 2021)

I'm relatively young, but I started with Modplug Tracker.


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## Dirtgrain (Jul 15, 2021)

Mike P. got the first VIC-20 in my elementary school. I went to his house, the only time, just to see it. He later got a Commodore 64 and bragged about it a bit, dropping here and there his superior knowledge on its workings. I wanted one so much. From the newspaper, I had cut out a Commodore 64 ad, and I kept it in my room, asking for one for birthday, then for Christmas. My dad never got me one.

My friend John had a Radio Shack Tandy 1000 (IIRC), and we played games on in. One was a Star Trek game, but it was more like choose-your-own adventure, and some visuals that were basically ASCI art. The text on the screen was green. We also played a James Bond type game, and maybe something like Asteroids.

I did a summer class through our rec department on Basic, when I was in eighth grade.

Honker, a friend, got an Apple IIe when we were in junior high school. He soon found out he could print out very small font text, and he sold compact and dense cheat sheets for a dollar.

In the '90s, I remember having a group of search engines that I would use, Webcrawler being my favorite. Some time before 2000, give or take a few years, I remember when I first heard about Google. This guy in my group in a National Writing Project program pointed out how it was a way better search engine. It was.


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## Saxer (Jul 15, 2021)

pixel said:


> No it was actually a game called... "Castle" :D I just googled it https://dosgames.com/game/the-castle/


That looks advanced... I remember that screenshot:






It was in Holland in a living community of music students... they had a Commodore with a soccer game and "Ballerburg" on Atari.
I didn't live there but they told me that one day there was a truck passing the house in that cobblestone street and dropping a beer barrel directly at their door. Instant carma.


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## rnb_2 (Jul 15, 2021)

chrisr said:


> Of course my sister had a Petticoat 5.


Fortunately, I was just reminded of this bit from "Look Around You" a few weeks ago.


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## Stringtree (Jul 15, 2021)

KIM-1, given to me by my uncle in a gift crate after he quit electronics.

TRS-80 that I first learned at the library, then became a pest typing in programs at the Radio Shack. 

TI-994A. Thanks, Mr. Huxtable. You fooled my dad into getting one, but it could do a lot, especially with the massive floppy drive rack and programs I typed in from magazines. Through hundreds of "CALL SOUND pitch, dur" lines, I could make a tune. Extended Basic, yeah. 

PC's from 5150 up to the present day, always Macintosh for photo, design, and then video. Until the PC world caught up. 

Good trip with you all remembering. I'm agog, but not surprised at many of the responses.


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## cuttime (Jul 15, 2021)

Gerbil said:


> The ZX81 was the first computer I used. My mum's friend ran a kid's chess club at her place and her son had one with a dungeons and dragons type game on it. I had zero interest in chess but every interest in his computer and used to lose the games as quickly as possible so I could get on it.
> 
> Oh and our school band was called GOTO10.


Spinal Tap was originally GOTO11.


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## doctoremmet (Jul 15, 2021)

Apple IIe (school)
Philips VG8020 MSX1 (1984)
Amiga 1200 (early 1990s)


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## Nico5 (Jul 15, 2021)

puremusic said:


> It always surprised me that the IBM clones won the computer wars to take over the market back then. The Commodores and ATARIs were far better machines out of the box at the time and I figured they'd just keep upgrading as time went by and keeping ahead.


Quite a few years ago, I read a history of Atari and if I recall correctly, it involved a lot of self destruction inside the company to lose the considerable technology lead they had at the time.

That reminds me of an episode in my 80s working life: I had an Atari 1040St as my home computer, using it mostly for music and gaming. At work there were only IBM PCs with MS DOS (without graphics cards) and some VAX/VMS servers. I worked as a DBA (database administrator) and was charged with developing a relational database for a new in-house system. So naturally I wanted to create a diagram (boxes with text and arrows) summarizing how the various database parts related to each other. Since none of the work computers could create even such simple graphics, I bought a diagramming program with my own money for my trusty Atari 1040ST at home, printed it on my Roland DG (yes Roland also makes printers!) dot matrix printer and brought it to the office (at least they had copy machines!) My boss was blown away - nobody had ever created a diagram with a computer at that place before. -- Soon thereafter I left for a company where I got a Mac SE on my desk and graphics creation was an every day occurrence.


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## HeliaVox (Jul 15, 2021)

Before I entered elementary school in the early 70's my mom took me to her place of work. She worked for a government contractor. The Reel to Reel Data tapes were taller than I was. The first computer I ever used was the infamous TRS-80 by Radio Shack. It was in my schools computer club. I was hooked. But then I became a Commodore person with the Vic-20, 64, 128D, then the Amiga. I DO reemmber going to the local military base and in the shopping center computer section, I was floored by the LISA. Ah...memories.


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## NoamL (Jul 15, 2021)

So this was advanced tech to some of you guys huh?


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## EgM (Jul 15, 2021)

Computer memories eh? In fact I remember it all  (* denotes machines I still own)

*TRS-80, one 32k and the other a 64k, I was mostly doing programming on that green screen

Atari 800XL, here too, mostly programming, felt nice to switch from green to blue

*Zenith Data Systems XT 8Mhz, Monochrome 12" Orange, 20MB ST-225 hdd, mostly programming and some games

Zenith Data Systems AT 286 12Mhz, 40mb hdd, came with 512k ram, bought an addon card to get to 640k, came with an ATI EGA Wonder and..an orange EGA monochrome 12" screen, played games, programming and started some music composing on it using Adlib Visual Composer and Voyetra Sequencer Plus. Oh also spent a LOT of time on Deluxe Paint fiddling with gradients for some reason.

Custom 386DX40, didn't keep this one for long

Custom 486DX33 with 4MB of ram, 170Mb HDD, 14" VGA monitor hooked on an ATI VGA Wonder, later upgraded to 8mb, all sorts of HDD sizes. Used for composing music and programming mostly

*Custom 486DX266, 5 1/4, 3 1/2, 16mb, 250mb HDD, S3 SVGA, AWE32 with 4mb x2 simms

_The rest I consider too modern for my era but here goes:_

Custom AMD DX4-120
Custom Pentium 66, 133, 200MMX, 233MMX
Custom Pentium II 350, 400
Custom Pentium III 800, 1000, 1333
Custom Pentium IV 2.0, 3.0, 3.2, 3.4
Custom AMD Athlon XP3000+
Custom Core2Duo E6700
*Custom Core2Quad Q6600
Custom i3-2100
Custom i5-2400, i5-4570, i5-6400
*Custom i7-2600, i7-3770
etc, etc, etc

_Edit: Oops, forgot the Macs haha._

*iMac G3, 650Ghz, 512MB, 40Gb
*PowerMac Dual G5 x 2
iMac Mid 2001, i7-2600, 16Gb x 2


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## Pappaus (Jul 15, 2021)

Wow!! I was in tech support for an insurance company in 1988 and I remember having to load Word Perfect from 10 or so 3.5 discs. Also did backups every night on those big reels you see in 70s sci fI films. 1 hour in you might hit a bad sector of tape and have to start over.
Also our mainframe was a data general computer that would break down a lot and the reps would have to drive in from 2 hours away at midnight to get it up and running with spare parts before the insurance sales guys would come in at 9 am and yell at us if the machine was still down. 

good times. Good times.

ps. Wolfenstein was huge!!

pps I remember when aol started with chat rooms and it was so new and exciting we didn’t even get upset when someone disagreed with us about things.


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## bill5 (Jul 15, 2021)

The "Trash 80" - did any schools not have those back then? 

My first experience with "modern" PCs was when I went into a mall and saw a "computer store"....never heard of such a thing. They had IBM PC Jrs and such for thousands of dollars. Hard to believe looking back how crazy expensive they were in the early years.


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## bill5 (Jul 15, 2021)

Pappaus said:


> I remember when aol started with chat rooms and it was so new and exciting we didn’t even get upset when someone disagreed with us about things.


Wow yeah - now that's as unheard of as TRS-80s. Sad.


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## Alchemedia (Jul 15, 2021)

My first true love. Stardate -335504.10958904104. It was a very good year.








Compaq Portable 386 - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org


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## bill5 (Jul 15, 2021)

Compaq were great computers, sad when they went away. 

And really surprised when Gateway went away, they were huge!


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