My first computer was a MicroAce, an unauthorized clone of the Sinclair ZX80, in 1980 or 1981. It came as a kit for $200.00, which was a considerable amount of money for me at the time, given that I was working a minimum-wage job, part-time. I spent the better part of two days soldering it together, only to find that it didn't work. I then had to pay an additional fee to MicroAce to have them fix whatever I had done wrong.
The MicroAce had a flat membrane keyboard, two kilobytes of memory, and a Z80 processor. In order to save money on the hardware design, it didn't have a video processor chip, despite such being available. Instead, the CPU spent most of its time outputting the video signal (which was then routed through an RF modulator to a TV). During the short time interval between video frames, it would check if any keys had been pressed. If you did press a key, the computer would stop making the video signal until it had finished processing the keypress, and any resulting actions. So, each keypress resulted in the TV losing synchronization, and the picture rolling for half a second or so. A later ROM upgrade offered the choice of having the picture not lose sync, at the cost of having the computer run much slower. The worst part of the MicroAce's design was that the power supply heat sink was right next to the CPU and memory chips. This meant that, after ten minutes or so of operation, the computer would overheat and crash. I learned to run it for seven or eight minutes, save what I was doing to cassette tape, turn the computer off for five minutes or so to cool down, turn it back on, reload the program from tape (assuming that it could reload what it has saved, which wasn't always the case), and repeat the whole cycle over again. I later upgraded to a Commodore 64, and then the first of a long line of IBM-compatible computers. -- John F. Eldredge -- [email protected] "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria -----Original Message----- From: Todd Wittenmeier <[email protected]> Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 14:33:52 To: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [nlug] First Computer my parents bought an epson XT in the mid 80's It was the 3rd PC I took apart :D it had a 45mb HDD and 640 KB of ram, my dad had purchased a (i think) 2400 baud modem and we'd use PFS:First Choice to telnet to GE's GEnie BBS, It had CGA graphics.. I remember begging my dad for a VGA monitor and card... never happened tho.. in the early early 90's right around when Win 3.11 was wowing the corporate business space.. they bought a Pentium 60 Packard Bell.. that was the machine I really cut my teeth on and the first machine I ever got web with.. that machine had 9 mbs of Ram.. I don't miss the old days much, but it was nice having the tiniest little thing thrill you.. after I got online I wasn't really wowed again until I installed my first ever distro of linux which was I think around 98 or 99 for me. 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 first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I'm not sure when I got it > but since Wikipedia said it was released in July 1982 and discontinued > in 1983, December 1982 is probably a decent estimate. > > The membrane keyboard on it died a few years after we got it so we got > rid of it. I got another Timex Sinclair 1000 off of eBay a few years > ago. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<nlug-talk%[email protected]> > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en > -- -Todd -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en
