Monday, April 23, 2012

Computers I have owned or worked with.

We all have fond memories of the computers we used growing up, or as young adults for us older people.



Computers I worked on at school in high school

1981  Tandy TSR-80 Model III

1982 Apple II in the school library.  Helped them load up and test all the software to make sure it worked.  Wrote a scoring algorythm to generate the results for battle of the marching bands that year.

TI calculator with a rechargable 9 volt purple battery.  That was state of the art at the time.

Tandy portable computers, 2 different models.  One of them with a printer, plotter.

Timex Sinclaire 1000 with a memory expansion and a printer.  The default memory was 2K, and half of that could be used for the screen.

I wrote a couple of computer games, one a tail gunner, the other a frogger game.  I learned Z-80 microcontroller programming in about a week, used it to hand code routines to scroll the screen for my games.

I wrote loader routines to poke all the values into a rem statement for the machine code, and then erased the loader and wrote the game after the rem statement.  The machine code was loaded into the same place inside the rem statement and it would execute the code by calling the routine.

When I got into the Air Force I got a Commodore 64

Later I got a Commodore 128.

I used this through most of college.  I picked up nearly ever accessory at this time.

Towards the end of college I found out about Linux and had to buy a 386 with 4MB of RAM and a grey scale monitor in order to run it.

After that it has been mostly self built home computers, but there was a macbook and now an Asus laptop.

What computers did you all start with?  What was the most fun about them?

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