What's the earliest computer you started with?

[glnc222]

Life at Data General in its heyday was recited in an old best selling book by journalist writerTracy Kidder, "The Soul of a New Machine", still in print. A tribute to people in the industry when advances were the new cultural thing and so few understood the tech. If you were young and worked there then, may bring back memories -- or you already read it long ago. Funny how "machine" used for computers instead of factory tools; the Association For Computing Machinery. Maybe Turing's abstract "machine". Back with real hardware, like ships of wood and men of iron... when tweety birds were only in cartoons.

[mfortuna]

I was sort of in the book, but only as a competent technician from Portsmouth (along with a couple others). My friend Don was a second shift team lead so he got 15% on top of his pay plus was paid for overtime. One of the engineers found Don's pay stub and was shocked to see a technician was making more money than him!

Portsmouth, NH did assenbly of all the DG mainframes which were then shipped to Southboro Massachussetts to be configured for the customer. I was involved with the MV8000 (the focus of Kidder's book) and MV10000 before moving on to a start-up and then into R&D.

It was amazing how much space a machine with 1 Mbyte of memory and 1 MIPs performance took. The memory was eight 15" by 15" boards and the CPU was made up of a number of other 15"x15" boards - micro-sequencer, ALU, ATU, Cache, memory controller, and IO controller. Then there was 8 slots for IO boards. The MV8000 was about the size of a washing machine.

[glnc222]

I researched the speeds of computers back then, interested in using PC's for our statistical things (like SAS today, or data mining). Those bigger boards used a faster, power heavy transistor circuit for logic, ECL I think, vs TTL or Complimentary, which could not be micro-ized. They ran tens of times faster than microcomputers, until over-taken in time. Even micro mini's were faster than PC's, one of the PDP's some engineer had in his basement, and then Apple LISA's or something with a Motorola 6000 16-bit chip instead of Intel's PC chips, much faster. Commercial apps all needed this, so the PC market was in transition. Today's drift into clouds shows the inherent need for centralization. It's time sharing all over again -- just lots more power and processors to share. Only vacuum cleaners and outer space probes can be autonomous. All those ufo sitings -- nothing but software failures in the cloaking devices, cheap programming from shysters on Vega, dubious second hand hardware on ebay. It's a wonder they haven't crashed. You don't want a ride in one.

[glnc222]

good history of the TI9900: http://chung.yikes.com/~leonard/mirrors/ti99/9900story.html

I first saw the 9900 on a custom board at the NJ Amateur Computer Fair, demonstrating four part wave table music instrument synthesis, impossible with all the 8 bit full computers displayed. Later adopted by the instrument industry in fixed ROM tables, then recorded real instrument samples. Now for a couple hundred bucks a PC can synthesize an entire symphony orchestra played simultaneously, sampled from the finest instruments, e.g. Garritan Personal Orchestra for professional musicians, composers, arrangers (who can play keyboards). You have probably heard the output without knowing it in commercial sounds, films etc. Concert grand on the desk, never goes out of tune. Cathedral pipe organ for variety. They can even synthesize the acoustic echo properties of the cathedral.

[glnc222]

I don't know if Forth exists for VMS but COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, and Basic are all available.

Forth was used to eliminate overhead of OS's like VMS dedicating machines to specific tasks, instead of running under the OS. Under the OS is when supplied assemblers were needed, to get links into the OS, from libraries.
Forth was for imbedded systems or running development inside an Arduino itself instead of an external aid, with it's compact methods. Don't know if Arduino's can do it, but little 8-bit machines did with 16K of memory.
Books on Forth still being released as recently as 2007, check Amazon. Someone uses it.
Done forthing at the mouth. Back to vacuuming. Hope you were entertained.

[addendum: Forth definitely used on Arduino: http://www.offete.com/328eForth.html and other; search forth arduino.]

[DewMan]

My first computer was an Apple IIc+ clone made by Franklin.

I think I still have my disk notcher I used to make my single sided disk double sided around here somewhere.

[mfortuna]

I just used scissors.