Your first computer?

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Your first computer?

We had our Teletype running at 110 baud back in 1975!

I must have had the newer improved version. I still remember that sound those nasty things made, "chak chak chak chak chak chak...ting...chak chak chak..."

By the way sorry for that critical response to your thread on the bus.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Your first computer?

Teletype like the stuff I talk about here?

yeah! Boy those old navy gray consoles bring back some...um memories for me.

[DaFerret]

Re: Your first computer?

before DOS or Donkey Kong there was vector graphics and Tank Commander.
And before that was block graphics and Pong.
Prior to all that graphics occured on TTY machines plugging away at 150 Baud and printing on typewriter style printers, typing on Canary yellow or Golden rod rolls of continuous paper.

Yeah, but all those were before my introduction to computers, so DOS and DK were my first computer/game experience.

I remember reading up about teletypes. Man, you all must've had fun with those. Same book also mentioned the punch cards, TMRC and Spacewar. Interesting reads.

[kimo55]

Re: Your first computer?

Same book also mentioned the punch cards, TMRC and Spacewar. Interesting reads.

gawd i remember punchcards. you see them computing some problem for the boys in the old hawaii 5-0 eps sometimes...

[j3rr3y]

Re: Your first computer?

My first computer was a 2GHz custom built. meaning I put it together... I fried the motherboard on that one by pulling a PCI card while it was on.. my most recent computer was a SFF (small form factor) Shuttle.
It had a AMD Athlon 64 3400+ , 1GB DDR3200 CAS2.0, ATI Radeon 9800XT. I built it myself.. here is a picture of it:



i have a video of it if anyone is interested

[helen]

Re: Your first computer?

Nah, might take a while to display the video on the sand color 110 baud teletype

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Your first computer?

Hmmm putting it together isn't the same as my first computer assembly. An Altair 8800. You needed great soldering and breadboarding skills to get that monster to work. Now it's simply plug in and configure. Back then configuring meant probing your clock with a frequency counter and tweaking in the clock frequency. Setting up a printer was the single hardest thing to do setting up dip-switch settings instead of scrolling thru lists of drivers. Setting up communications with your modem was just as tedious, having to know terms like: CTS, DSR, DTR, etc. Where the send and receive pins were on the 25-pin serial connector, protocal, xon/xoff, parity bit. Yeah it's easier now to build, the problem nowdays is when those drivers don't work. You simply cannot get into the firmware like you used to and make necessary corrections. Times they have changed.

[helen]

Re: Your first computer?

I remember using an Altair 8800 in college. Entering a machine program by hand using those switches. Hell the PDP-11 in the mid-1970's you had to enter the bootstrap program by hand to have the computer start from a disk drive.

[j3rr3y]

Re: Your first computer?

Hmmm putting it together isn't the same as my first computer assembly. An Altair 8800. You needed great soldering and breadboarding skills to get that monster to work. Now it's simply plug in and configure. Back then configuring meant probing your clock with a frequency counter and tweaking in the clock frequency. Setting up a printer was the single hardest thing to do setting up dip-switch settings instead of scrolling thru lists of drivers. Setting up communications with your modem was just as tedious, having to know terms like: CTS, DSR, DTR, etc. Where the send and receive pins were on the 25-pin serial connector, protocal, xon/xoff, parity bit. Yeah it's easier now to build, the problem nowdays is when those drivers don't work. You simply cannot get into the firmware like you used to and make necessary corrections. Times they have changed.

Now days its the modding thats hard, the cutting metal, sanding, painting, etc and making it all look good in the finished product. I agree.. its so easy to put the parts together and turn it on. It takes no skill... modding is different however, and I think thats the real challenge if you choose to do it, with todays comps...

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Your first computer?

I take it Modding is modifying your traditional looking computer into something different?

Now that sounds like fun being creative and all. I remember hiding an entire crystal radio in the cap of a Bic pen back in the stone ages.

I wouldn't mind seeing someone put a Pentium 4 computer inside an old Apple II case complete with an onboard keyboard and using the 5-1/4" drive slot for loading CD's. Gut out the green monochrome CRT and replace with a current display.

Put that on your desk at work and nobody's gonna want to use your computer less steal it. Oh yeah make a program to display a blinking green cursor in a DOS screen as your screen saver and the text, "Insert Program diskette in drive A" in a green dot matrix display.

Better yet put a computer in an old IBM Selectric typewriter and haul that thing in to work. Tell the IS guy to replace the BIOS battery because this model is kinda old.

[adrian]

Re: Your first computer?

Modding a computer is easy for someone who has the right tools and knows how to cut metal. I tried that, but I couldn't even use my dremel to cut a blowhole for a fan.

Now building a computer, that's hard. You have make sure every component will match each other to perforrm good, then make sure they all work together when you power it on.

BTW, Craig, someone is doing a project like that, but its kinda hard to find a motherboard that will fit that case, along with the opticals, LCD, and cutting the ports for the expansion cards.

But to get a perspective, someone is modding a Nintendo Gamecube video game system to use it as a computer case (gut the inside, and do the same thing as the mac).

[Hellbent]

Re: Your first computer?

i toyed with my brothers old 386 and played wizardry 1 on a monochome monitor.
my first 'computer' was a commodore 64 =p (i dont think anyone here mentioned that one yet)
the first real pc i bought was a hp pavillion pentium 1 with a roaring 133 mhz processor with monitor for a wopping $3k. I think i have part of that debt floating around somewhere =p
that was over 5 years ago and now i own an internet cafe with 19 modded pc's on a T1

[Hellbent]

Re: Your first computer?

btw, there are a ton of modded things going around. ive seen 2 pc's modded to look like a chevy big block, an xbox built into a phat lazyboy, pc's with water cooling tubes attached to the cpu, ram, and video card, even a pc built into a large model car. even a hand held atari 2600 with lcd monitor (google for vcs project)

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Your first computer?

I used to "Mod" electronics when I was younger and had greater patience but it wasn't computers. When I needed to fold a circuit board in half there was a lot of cutting and resoldering the copper traces. I once turned an old Delco AM car radio into a CD changer by using the preset buttons as cd controls. The display was set behind the slide rule tuning.

I guess modding can be fun, I just wish I stayed on top of computer repair when I was active in it up to the early 80's. I think if I took the time to understand today's terminology I could build some outrageous stuff. I have a nibbler tool to make square cuts in thin gauge sheet metal. I once built a telephone remote broadcast interface box out of an old Hayes 1200 baud external modem case made from an aluminum casing with heat sinking fins.

By the way for those electronic project enthusiasts out there, those old external modem cases with the red bezels make for excellent project cases especially the Hayes modem cases. And you can find tons of em at Goodwill and the Salvation Army for less than a buck!

A good source for electronic parts is Parts Express at www.parts-express.com
Use the hyphen if you have to as some businesses who let their employees use the internet have blocks on sexually sensitive wording as it partSEXpress.com which also works if you don't have any censoring. They sell cooling fans really cheap.

[adrian]

Re: Your first computer?

btw, there are a ton of modded things going around. ive seen 2 pc's modded to look like a chevy big block, an xbox built into a phat lazyboy, pc's with water cooling tubes attached to the cpu, ram, and video card, even a pc built into a large model car. even a hand held atari 2600 with lcd monitor (google for vcs project)

You seen those too? Do you remember the site?

What about a VCR computer? (a computer fitted in a VCR box) And what about when someone attached an actual AC system to his computer system.