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What Was Your First Computer?

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This is what we used in Jr. High School. (1981-1984)

pet2001-black.jpg
 
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NJ-Buckeye;895737; said:
Commodore 64

Commodore_64_System_s3.jpg
Click to expand...
Ditto. We spent hours oohing and aahing over repeating text strings in various colors and sizes. Look, we're programmers!

Listening to the data cassette beep and buzz in a regular tape deck was highly amusing as well. The aliens are communicating... :moo:
 
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Further back...way back! This is what I learned on in college!

Punch card from a Fortran program.

From the invention of computer programming languages until, roughly the mid-1970s, most computer programmers created, edited and stored their programs on punch cards. The practice was nearly universal with IBM computers in the era. In many organizations, programmers carefully wrote out their programs on special forms called coding sheets, taking care to distinguish the digit zero from the letter O, the digit one from the letter I, 8's from Bs, 2's from Zs, and so on. Completed forms were sent to the keypunch department where operators typed them in, one line to a card. In other shops, programmers did their own keypunching.

A box of punch cards with several program decks.


Program editing was generally done at the keypunch. It was easy to reorder program statements. A single character typo could be corrected by duplicating the card up to the error column, typing the correct character and then duplicating the rest of the card. More complex edits were harder and might require retyping the line after the point of error.
Many early programming languages, including Fortran, Cobol and the various IBM assembler languages, used only the first 72 colums of a card; a tradition that traces back to the card reader used on the IBM 704 computer. Columns 73-80 were ignored by the compiler and could be used for identification, such as adding a sequence number so that if the card deck was dropped it could be restored to its proper order using a card sorter. Programmers often didn't bother doing this during development or for student projects and, instead, frequently drew a diagonal stripe across the top of the deck using a marking pen as a check for proper order. Programs were backed up by duplicating the entire deck or by having it written onto a magnetic tape.
 
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If you dropped a deck there was indeed some trauma, but.......
" Columns 73-80 were ignored by the compiler and could be used for identification, such as adding a sequence number so that if the card deck was dropped it could be restored to its proper order using a card sorter."
:tongue2:
 
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Taosman;895803; said:
If you dropped a deck there was indeed some trauma, but.......
" Columns 73-80 were ignored by the compiler and could be used for identification, such as adding a sequence number so that if the card deck was dropped it could be restored to its proper order using a card sorter."
:tongue2:
Click to expand...

That was also the point of the diagonal lines and writing on the side of the decks (the posted images show it pretty clearly). :biggrin:


Disclaimer: I'm sure you and NJ know that already, just a PSA for those on the board under 100. :p
 
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Heathkit H-89 which I built as part of a distance learning class in 1981 or so.

h89_1.jpg


I remember finding out how to hard-solder a memory chip to expand the memory from supposed max of 32k up to 48k and how excited I was when I did it...
 
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