Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore Vic 20, C64, Amiga 500 (heavily modified) with HD and all, IBM PC Portable Intel 8088 (1984)
Then every pc/processor ever since

Cheers
Mike

I started college with one of these:


But in 76 or so, I got one of these. Fully programmable, a card reader and a battery life of about 2 hours (which sucked when a 3 hour final was underway).


About 2 years after I got out of college, I got to use one of these:

Sinclair TS 80 with data storage on cassete tape. I had an Amiga and wish I still did. Running a Quad 6600. I rememeber my first work computer was an IBM AT with 64 Mb of Hard drive. I was in heaven!

1983 was a good year (the zx80 / 81's older brother) . had an atari 800 xl (oh the joys of tape loading on that ) but elektraglide and rescue on fractulus were very good.

we used to have research machines (RM) in school, but the bbc micro was more wide spread. The tandy and things like the adam etc were a lot less supported in the UK.

I've still got all my old c64 stuff, c128, disk drives, development kit (ocean and a few more companies used the same kit). That's what got me into music, the demo scene.

I have an amiga / st also (and c-lab and a monocrome monitor for it).. someone gave me a vic 20... remember "blitz" ? and the Ram pack for it.hehe

Wookie, the bbc b was for rich kids.. £400. we used to use them in college to do ASM, was cool in the sense of you could just code directly off the basic prompt.

all of them are available to use under emulation... c64 - winvice , spectrum (check worldofspectrum.org) . I've got a fair few game consoles also.. but probably my favourite 8 bit machine is the 64, and YES people are still coding things on it 25 years later. You can compile the code on a pc for many machines and do the compression on it, do the art etc. and then send it to the original machine (you can add a network card, hard drive etc) . I still code 6502 / 6510 from time to time (it wasn't so bad to re-learn it after so many years) .

http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/
this song sums up a lot of that era

college, I moved onto my first pc an 8088 and at uni we used vax / unix. At work experience we used to use an ibm mainframe, and the cpu room was the size of a football pitch and the units were the size of a double wardrobe * 2 wide.

University computers, first using punch cards, eventually moving on to the modern miracle of magnetic tape.

My first home computer, not counting calculators, was a 1993 Gateway running Windows. I placed the order about 5 seconds after a friend showed me his own new Gateway playing back an elegantly notated score using a midi synth.

ORIGINAL: Beagle
My first college class programming (COBOL and FORTRAN IV!) was done on a PDP 11/70. Green monitors!

My THIRD job after college was programming on PDP 11/70's. Feeling old...

ORIGINAL: jpkeys

ORIGINAL: Beagle
My first college class programming (COBOL and FORTRAN IV!) was done on a PDP 11/70. Green monitors!

My THIRD job after college was programming on PDP 11/70's. Feeling old...

LOL! Sorry! the PDP was the oldest "large frame" computer I worked on and I never did have to program using punch cards!

The first I worked on was a timeshare terminal back in high school using punch tape-1972.

The second was a CDI Cyber- one of two in existence at the time (1975). A whopping 32k of RAM. My instructor had a crashed disk sitting in our classroom; it was the size of an SUV wheel. I was working with assembler- probably the reason I quit programming...

I didn't get a PC myself until 2001- a friend gave me an ancient Pentium I to play around with. I got hooked quickly.

ew

ORIGINAL: Fog

yep wookiee , I realise that. Do you remember the tv show? Fred Harris etc..hehe

Thanks for that Fog probably one memory I did not need to recall

just for u Wookiee .hehe
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IS-NYK-8KL0&feature=related

ORIGINAL: Beagle

Anyone remember the Timex/Sinclair Z80? I had one of those (and still do, actually, but it doesn't work anymore).

http://oldcomputers.net/zx80.html

I also had/have a Vic-20 which still works last time we plugged it in and played Cosmic Crunchers! I spent hours and hours programming that thing and saving to cassette tape!

http://www.oldcomputers.net/vic20.html

then later came the TRS-80 with NO HARD DRIVE. I bought an upgrade later to add a 20M Hard drive that was on an ISA CARD!

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1215

man, those were the days!!!

I had a Vic-20 affectionately referred to as the Sic-20 :) also with a cassette storage system using an interface that I built for $19. I tried to program it to do a melody and a harmony line and it was so far out of tune, it was terrible. I do not still have it.

Mine was a Commodore 64

zx spectrum 16k

My very first computer was the Casio PB100, which actually had a useable BASIC interpreter, but had only 512 bytes of memory:



Followed by the Sinclair Spectrum, which I spend many a long night writing programs on:

Science of Cambridge Mk14...


... I made my first sequencer with this with the help of an 8bit DAC chip driving an Arp Axxe synced to a Roland Dr55 (The first Roland Dr Rhythm?).

Jim