Commodore 64 in 1975...$499 without the $100 tape drive. Next was a TRS-80 from Radio Shack...it had an actual floppy disk (5 1/2")
Before personal computers became available I used those at work. Remember punched tapes and punched data cards? I also remember two years of arguing with the high school about myself and another boy who wanted to take typing/office practice. Those were only meant for the GIRLS. We also wanted Home Economics but the Methodist wouldn't allow that.
What do you mean, owned a VIC-20 (past tense)? It turns out I still do, and the auxiliary floppy drive toaster sized peripheral, because my father never threw anything out... Now, if I could find the three port accessory that plugs in the back, allowing for an extra 4K (!!!) of memory plus a game cartridge at the same time, I'd be in business! Don't forget the modem... And by the way that was a step UP from the Trash-80s we had in high school. Complete with cassette tape drives...
It occurs to me that some of you might appreciate this story... http://www.irwinsjournal.com/ijonline/ijzero.htm (I know we're going way off course here, but how often do you get to discuss TTYs these days... (Look it up, kids).
Your date (or model) is a little off. The Commodore 64 was released in 1982. Several friends had them, and they were really good personal computers. Commercial success attracted more software apps (including games) too. The Commodore VIC 20 was introduced in 1981. The Commodore PET was introduced in late 1977. It combined a small monochrome monitor and computer in one case. My high school had one of those.
First build was an Altair 8800, followed with an IMSAI 8080, and the graduated to an Apple 1. I learned on punch cards with a PDP 8. NOW I'm feeling old.....
My first programming class in college (learning Fortran) was during the first semester in which we didn't have to do at least one programming assignment on punch cards. We still had to create a JCL file, to run our programs. We had teletype terminals that year. Video terminals came in the next year; that saved on paper costs. I remember seeing an upper-classman that had just dropped his box of punched cards in the stairwell. Glad I never had that displeasure!
Used punched tape + cards in HS on Western Union ASR-33.... IMSAI 8080 afterwards and 6502 based mpus. plus others mentioned.. Let us not forget the CP/M based Osbornes and Kaypros .. The portables LOL Much Fun and memories...
I did. Ha ha. Now there is a memory from deep in the cobwebs. My first computer was military. Years later, the VIC-20 came along. Then I had an Osborne 1, which I wish had been kept. Followed by an Apple McIntosh. And...... Things I have not thought about in ages!
Whoa! I thought I was the only one to have an Osborne 1 by now. I still have it in my parents' place. Probably under a bed somewhere. Good ol' CP/M! Take that Windows!
That was a fun era when the sky seemed the limit. I had a TI-99/4A, cassette tapes, etc. and was a member of a local computer club in NJ. We'd gather to exchange programs and help each other write code. Some of the advanced users even had RS-232 serial telephone modems! Remember typing code from magazines? It took forever and then you'd have to troubleshoot your keypunching errors. I took some coding classes in junior college and really enjoyed them, often adding in extra flourishes not required by the assignment. I also learned something about people in these classes. There were students who'd share their completed code with friends to spare them the work and those who'd somehow copy work by others. This struck me as stupid. They paid money to go to college and learn new skills, yet they were getting nothing for it. Later I bought a TI-58 programmable calculator and had a ball with it. I wish I'd kept it.
Your mention of "TI" shakes loose another memory. Remember what just their basic calculators cost when first introduced? Yikes! Today an excellent quality phone with camera, calculator, etc, etc, costs way less than what those old things were commanding at retail. How times have changed....
My TI-58 at work in the dorm room, some 40+years ago. "Volatile" memory of course -- turn it off and >poof< , program is gone. The TI-59 had a built-in mag card reader to save programs, but it was much more expensive. I still have my TI SR-11 from 1973. Rechargeable batteries are dead, but I'll bet with replacements, it'd work again.
Former 99'er here as well - that was my first computer. Loved that thing. I was spoiled though and had the expansion box with a spare disk drive and the speech synthesizer. Did a lot of programming on that thing and often exchanged programs with my grandfather who also had a TI. At school (elementary and jr high) we programmed on Atari 800s. By high school we were on PCs. Sold the TI equipment to get a Commodore 128 in the mid-80s, then when I went to college I got an Amiga 500. In college I stepped back a bit using VT100 terminals to code Pascal but also learned Motorola 68000 assembly language. I missed the newer languages by about 3-4 years in college. Now I'm an SQL and web dev freak by trade doing intranet sites for my company. Before eBay got crazy, I bought a lot of retro computers when they were still cheap so I've got a small museum's worth... Atari 400, Atari 800, Commodore 16, Vic 20, Plus 4, Commodore 64, 64C, SX64, my original Commodore 128, 128D, my original Amiga 500, TI99 silver and beige versions, and a Trash-80 because I always thought they looked cool. Some stuff was inherited from my grandfather when he passed. He and I were a lot alike when it came to interests in technology. He would have loved the home 3D printing revolution but missed it by six years. Mike
I remember getting a printout of a hex dump of a Forth language runtime kernel (about 2 kbytes, IIRC) for the Color Computer II (6809 processor). I spent several evenings at home typing that data into my CoCo (using a basic program I wrote to interpret ASCII hex input into values to be poked into memory.) Then I wrote a dis-assembler to make it easier to debug the code in memory. Unfortunately, I never got the ':' definition debugged, so I could not create new, named routines (words). I lost interest once classes started up again in the fall, but it taught me a lot. We used Forth routines during my summer internship to debug new circuit board prototypes, because the Forth kernel is very small, ROM-able, and yet can quickly and easily test memories and IO with it. Forth is stack-based, with an RPN syntax (perfect if you like HP calculators.) It is a nice step between assembly and a more complex interpreted language (with a bigger memory footprint). Years later at work, I used what I learned from that exercise, and a book on Postscript (also uses an RPN syntax), to write a series of PS prologs to prepend onto our drawings' plot files, to re-size them and add our drawing format (border), prior to sending it to a printer/plotter.
I think the most productive code I wrote (in Extended Basic!) for my TI-99/4A was to recover freight overpayment on hundreds of railcars. The rate structure was extensive and exceeded the TI's memory capacity, so I created a serial database on a cassette tape that had to be read for each railcar. My program provided entry fields for the car's origin and weight. The program would read the database, calculate what we paid, what we should have paid and the difference. Reading that serial database was agonizingly slow, but I still saved a bunch of work hours. The result was 100% accurate and was quite a fun feat at the time.
I can't tell you how thrilled I was when Ashton-Tate introduced dBase III... You could actually have more than two files open at a time, which was the limit in dBase II. Then Clipper came along, and it was paradise...
