Thread: your first PC?

A Tandy TRS-80 model I with 16Kb memory - bought this second hand in 1982. Upgraded to a Commodore 64 in 1983, then a Commodore 128 in 1986.

Ron

Built my own in 1978 from a design in Electronics Australia magazine. Signetics (Fairchild) 2650 processor, 1k RAM (later expanded to 4k, never did the expansion to 12k - who'd ever need that much memory?) 1MHz clock speed. The "BIOS" in ROM was called PIPBUG. Keyboard was in a separate box - miles of wires to get that going, and the display board was about 40 x 16 or 18pin ICs on a 6"x6" PCB - that was a bugger to solder. For a display, i fed the output to the grid of the first video amplifier valve in an old 26" B&W TV. 16 lines of 32 characters, with the cursor fixed on the bottom line, a bit like a teletype. Cassette tape for storage. Programmed it all in assembly language until I got a BASIC compiler that occupied 1.6k of RAM. Still have it. (who's a hoarder?)

In 1979 the school got it's first computer, a TRS-80. Taught myself and compared notes with one of the maths teachers (who'd done engineering at uni and knew a bit of FORTRAN). Was often called on by the science teacher to demonstrate the computer when they were showing prospective parents around.

I worked for a small local PC company in the 80's, building and selling XT clones, then AT (286) clones, then 386 and 386 SX, but when we built our first 486 I was blown away by the speed. We used to sell a 40Mb 'voice-coil' hard drive for $1200!

To unpack the MC10 from it's carton, then start it, load the program to use, use it and finish the job and pack it away again, still took less time than this laptop takes to boot!

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