WordPerfect was first package. Our first computer was a Commodore 16 external cassette drive. Our daughter was the Little Programmer. Today she is a senior programmer/developer "I turn ideas into code".
We are quite proud of her. Best $89 ever spent!

My brother is a year older than me, and was into computers while I was still into sports mostly, but he had a Radio Shack TRS-80 then the Color Computer first. We would load from a cassette player and access BBS when our parents were asleep and no one would be calling the house phone.

First PC of my own was an Apple IIe with the dual floppy set up (Duodisk). I had an IBM based PC too, since I was in college for business school and it seemed that the business apps were all out for the IBM based PC's first. I had VisiCalc, VisiTrend and Word Perfect for the PC, and for the Apple I had the suite of software it was bundled with. I had a frat brother that was a rather talented black hat, and he always had a slew of games that were pirated. I think we had a Broderbund Karateka game a year before it hit the shelves. He had the fist 10Mb Apple HDD. It was about the size of two cookie sheets and took up the whole top of his dresser.

I worked for a short time while I was in college for an Educational Toy and Game retailer that was an Apple Seller, and I ended up buying one of the very first Macintosh PC's in Pittsburgh. Apple had a "Test drive a Mac" promotion and had a kit with the PC, an external 1.44 drive in a Mac soft case that they would lend out to customers for a week or so to test drive. The second unit never got any play, so it was basically brand new when I bought it. Software was more expensive and the 1.44 format was lagging so it was a PITA to run stuff on it as an early adopter. Only thing I ran all the time was a WWII Sub game (Gato).

Still, it was a neat little box.

My first computer was a UNIVAC with vacuum tubes. The software was top secret.

DOS 2.1
When I was in college we had a package called Perfectwriter perfectCalc. It ran on a single, low density 5 1/4" disk

quote:

Originally posted by LimaCharlie:
My first computer was a UNIVAC with vacuum tubes. The software was top secret.

I worked several years with the largest computers built--the SAGE computer complexes contained 2 complete CPUs and there were more than 100,000 vacuum tubes in them; the computer equipment occupied 2 rooms the size of basketball courts and the displays and interconnections occupied similar spaces. Those babies were HUGE! The software they ran was also classified (SECRET, IIRC).

flashguy

 
Chess on my TRS80. In the PC realm, my first was a 286 with a 287 math coprocessor (for running a "borrowed" copy of Autocad). First programs purchased were PKZip and WordPerfect, and the Telix comm program (free), then PCBoard BBS software to run a RelayNet BBS node (there was no WWW then). The BBS was also a FidoNet node. One of the developers of RelayNet was where I first heard of http and the birthing of the WWW. My local library had a public-use computer with lynx for text-based browsing. I continued to use lynx in my job for troubleshooting web site issues, and still keep it around.
 

RT-11 Basic running on a DEC PDP 11/34. Wrote my own shop floor tracking software at work. That 11/34 had magnetic core memory. A whopping 64K bytes of it. Few even know what that means, although there will certainly be some here who do. Later, I used Visicalc, dBase II, Lotus 123, PkZip, RCL, and a few more obscure software tools.

quote:

Originally posted by markand:
That 11/34 had magnetic core memory. A whopping 64K bytes of it.

Oh yeah... those little tiny ferrite "donuts" with wires through them that would register 0 or 1 with the appropriate electrical charge.

Found a picture.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: bald1,

A TRS-80 and I would type the code for programs out of the monthly magazine.

There was a game called Guadalcanal that I wated a ton of time playing. Have not found a game as fun as that since.

quote:

Originally posted by markand:
RT-11 Basic running on a DEC PDP 11/34. Wrote my own shop floor tracking software at work. That 11/34 had magnetic core memory. A whopping 64K bytes of it. Few even know what that means, although there will certainly be some here who do. Later, I used Visicalc, dBase II, Lotus 123, PkZip, RCL, and a few more obscure software tools.

Each half of the SAGE computer had 2 ferrite core memories, one of 256K and one of 16K. (Actually 64K and 4K "words" but those were the length of 4 bytes each.)

flashguy

AppleWorks for an Apple II

ALGOL on a B6000 Series, I think.

First pc was a Commodore 64...learned basic on it. Then an Amiga, Moto 68000 processor, true multi-tasking and a GUI interface...
When I finally went to DOS, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3,etc.
Don

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
ALGOL on a B6000 Series, I think.

ALGOL is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
– C. A. R. Hoare

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer with 16k RAM and the expansion box with floppy drive, and 64K RAM and Assembler Language expansion. I had a voice synthesizer, too.

TI kept everything proprietary so there was virtually no 3rd party software development for an otherwise very good computer.

Pertec XLOS in 1979. I don;t remember the app names. It was key to disk.

Punch cards and fortran. Joined the Navy and we had paper tape, nixie tubes and loaded data via binary data strings.

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
ALGOL on a B6000 Series, I think.

ALGOL is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
– C. A. R. Hoare

My brain thinks in ALGOL.

I don't know why I remember this, but when I was a kid my Dad owned a business and I would play with "Corel Draw" on his work computer, which was some sort of Tandy if I remember correctly.

My dad bought a TRS-80 for his business and somehow we ended up with some kind of Space Invaders clone, which we played for hours and hours!!!