My First Computer
This was my first computer, called a “PC” for Pocket Computer. Click for a larger, clearer picture.
This was a Christmas present from my father and stepmother in I believe 1983. 1982 Was the big winter overcoat I still have, that needs to be retired, but has served well as coat, blanket and pillow over the years. But I digress.
As far as I know, this should still run, except for needing batteries. It takes a pair of lithiums, which I never got around to replacing when they died after several years.
It has 1k of bubble memory. They were also available with 2k. You could use it as a basic calculator, and for things like storing addresses. You could also program in a modified version of BASIC. For instance, instead of the entire word INPUT for that command, it was shortened to the letter I.
The most significant thing I did with it was program it to return present and future value interest factors based on inputs then applied to the relevant formulas. That was pretty cool.
I’d played with other computers before then, starting with a friend’s TRS80 in… 1977? I believe it was the latter half of 10th grade, but maybe it was later. He had gotten his parents to co-sign a loan for $1000 to buy the thing, at any rate. That was probably where I learned the first elements of BASIC, at Bill Knight’s house on the computer.
I got my first computer larger than the pocket one in 1985, as a hand-me-down TRS80 Color Computer 2. When it died, instead of realizing the way the world was heading, I dead-ended myself into a Color Computer 3 and encountered my first software/hardware incompatibility. With the 2 I was using a superlative word processing software that would not run on the 3, so I had to spend a bunch of money on more software, and I spent too much on a mouse and on a 5 1/4” external floppy drive back when single and double sided and density were distinctions that mattered. The OS for the 3 was called OS/9 and was written by some company called Microsoft.
My first IBM compatible, which for an old-timer is not a strange term to use thankyouverymuch, I bought in early 1988 for way too much money. It was a Packard-Bell 286. I think it was 12 MHz. It had a huge 60 MB hard drive when 20 MB was pretty standard; I at least knew that much. It ran DOS 3.3, so no DOS Edit, just Edlin or Copy Con. What I didn’t know was it was nuts to buy an EGA monitor and a machine that required same, as VGA already existed and was the future. Oh well.
After all that has transpired, I still think of that old pocket computer as one of the coolest things ever.
How ironic: my first computer was a TRS80, as it was for the director of a technical college I worked with in Missouri. Personally, I liked the fact that mine ran on cassette tapes and it was hooked to an old TV. Ah, the good old days....
Posted by on 06/19 at 02:46 PMThe base operating system for the CoCo was Disk Basic, written by Microsoft. OS/9 was written by MicroWare and was in its day the finest operating system written for a microprocessor. It was modeled on Unix but real-time to the core. It was less than optimal for a home system, but I knew some kids who wound up with careers by mastering it.
The CoCo III was supposed to run any CoCoII software written per Tandy’s programming guidelines. It was interesting to note how many programs they themselves sold which made direct use of the video hardware instead of system calls, and thus crashed the custom chip which replaced the video and memory control chips they used to buy from Motorola.
Posted by triticale on 06/19 at 09:10 PMOMG, Beth, I remember that computer! Daaaayam.
Posted by Deb on 06/19 at 10:01 PMI had one of those. All I ever did was make it count down at a certain speed and then say “Boom” as if it was exploding.
Posted by on 06/20 at 07:51 AMLOL! It reminded me of the similar Casio (can’t remember the model name) I had back in the 80’s.. Very much similar to yours in capabilities.
Mine, however, came with an example game program (in that weird BASIC) which involved two characters (yes, literally characters) running around (or rather, left and right) in the one line screen. The chaser was computer controlled, and you, as the player, tried not to get caught.
I remember feeling like a true hacker when I had tweaked the program a bit and changed it so the player was trying to catch the computer character.
War Games was the greatest movie back then.
Great post, Jay!
Posted by Craig on 06/20 at 11:58 AMIt reminds me of when my neighbor got a Commodore, the first computer I ever saw, and we had to spend an hour typing in codes out of a book just to play a stupid video game.
Posted by Rob on 06/20 at 02:27 PM
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