On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:24 PM, Brian Roy <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Michael Schultheiss <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>
>> Curt Lundgren wrote:
>> >    OK, if we're digging into the past, and if I may be so bold as to
>> >    suggest a slight expansion of the topic, in what year did you get
>> > your
>> >    first computer and what was it?
>
> My parents saved up and bought a TI - 99 4a when I was 10 years old. I loved
> it! They shipped me off to computer camp that summer and I learned the
> beginnings of BASIC. I remember saving programs on a damn cassette recorder.
> You could listen to it load/save which is crazy to think about now.
>
> After a few years I got an Apple ][c which I found out recently my mom
> kept. She brought it to me and I got real excited that it might be worth
> something on EBay. Wow, I was wrong. I still have it out in my garage.
>
> Looking back I was lucky that my parents had the foresight to spend their
> money on computers for me at such a young age. As frustrating as they can be
> sometimes computers have been good to me, and afforded my family a nice
> life.
>
> -Brian
>

My first computer ran XP.  :(  Got it soon after XP came out.  Around
1993, my mom got  something from '81 without a hard disk to practice
typing on.  Green phosphorous monitor and two giant floppy drives.  It
came with a stack of business floppies, but I never found anything
more exciting than spreadsheet applications.  I was 12.

Boy's Life magazine would run the occasional example 1 page BASIC
program as a feature, and I'd spend a few hours typing it in and
hunting for my typos just to play a text only mountain climber.  I
played another one that was ascii grapical and was supposed to be an
airplane flying over a skyline, but I had no idea how it worked from
the code that I'd entered.  I never learned how to save these, so I'd
have to find the magazine and recreate it each time.

I convinced my parents to let me leave the computer running for a few
days to count to a Billion with a GOTO loop.  It wasn't fast enough.
Got to 1,000,000 after a few days.

After this, I learned the wonders of "beep" and had to yank the power
from the wall to make the horrible sound stop.  I don't remember what
happened to the computer after that, but I don't remember playing with
it anymore.

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