When was the first computer bug discovered?

[Greg Bernhardt]

The first computer I can remember being in our house was the Deskpro 386. The first computer I bought for myself was a Windows 98 machine in 1998 with a 3DFX Monster video card! Played Diablo and and was soon hooked!

 

[Borg]

Gateway 486 in 94. I was afraid to delete a simple text file.

 

[lekh2003]

The first computer in our house was a Toshiba or Dell, can't remember, I was 4 or 5. I never got a computer for myself, I always preferred laptops. My first laptop was a Dell Inspiron 3421 which I purchased about 6-7 years ago. I am using it right now since my newer laptop is getting repaired. It is terribly slow and I can't imagine myself being fine with it when it first arrived.

 

[Nidum]

Apple IIe was first personal computer actually owned by me .

Had shared HP 9845's previously at workplace.

 

[jedishrfu]

My first was a Digicomp-I and then later a Think-a-Dot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think-a-Dot

In school, I built a simple analog potentiometer computer to multiply two numbers. I also had a slide rule, an addiator and a Brother adding machine for college (used to add/sub logs of numbers)

My first electronic machines were:
- TI SR-50 calculator, HP RPN Calculator (TI was way cheaper)
- a Radio Shack TRS-80 (Trash-80) Model 1 with line printer and floppy drive
- a Radio Shack diskette laptop (my minimalist days - what can you do on a computer with 2MB disk storage)
- a Commodore 64 with intelligent floppy drive (drive was a computer too)
- IBM Aptiva 486 running OS/2 and DOS
- Lenovo Laptop with Windows / Ubuntu
- ASUS Laptop with Ubuntu
- Apple Mac-mini with MacOSX...

 

[berkeman]

Freshman year of undergrad... HP-25 programmable calculator, and a Burroughs B-6700 mainframe (learned FORTRAN and loved it).

(note -- pictures not to scale...)

http://www.hpmuseum.org/3qs/253q.jpg

http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/_/rsrc/1274418114721/home/projects/burroughs-b6700-mainframe/gallery/B6700 in Brazil ufrgs.br 1972 _4.jpg?height=263&width=400

 

[Dr. Courtney]

'Twas a 386 with 4 MB Ram and a 40 MB hard disk from a big box store. I bought the Borland C/C++ package and was off and running. I felt I had arrived a few years later when I could afford a 1st gen Pentium with 16 MB ram from Gateway. Lots and lots of number crunching on those machines.

 

[jedishrfu]

Did you hit the famous pentium bug?

 

[lekh2003]

I feel like an odd one out, everybody here has first computers from the time when computers were classified as items which did calculations

 

[Lord Jestocost]

A Commodore CBM 3032.

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1774/Commodore-PET-3032/
http://www.computermuseum.efb-1.de/CBM/index.html#cbm3032.jpg

 

[jedishrfu]

I feel like an odd one out, everybody here has first computers from the time when computers were classified as items which did calculations

That's okay just tell them about your abacus and counting stones... or the antikythera device which ever is older.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus

or rolling stones for rounded calculations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones

 

[lekh2003]

That's okay just tell them about your abacus and counting stones... or the antikythera device which ever is older.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus

or rolling stones for rounded calculations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones

Well then, is the human mind a computer?

 

[jedishrfu]

Well then, is the human mind a computer?

Good question for a Turing test...

 

[TheOldFart]

Radio Shack Color Computer II, loaded with all the deluxe bits: A whole 64KB of RAM (standard was 32KB) _and_ I had the tape player for storing programs on audio casette! :p

First "real" computer was a monochrome Atari 520ST that I added memory to - had to solder chips on to do that.

I got the Atari in '85, then I bought a dead 300 baud modem (screaming deal, was only $75 for a $300 modem) and repaired the power supply for it, so I could go online and use dial up BBS systems which were the "internet" of the day. USENET news groups for anyone lucky enough to know someone at an .edu who would let you access their news server.

 

[robphy]

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III ( http://oldcomputers.net/trs80iii.html )
[My dad bought it... but I used it a lot.]

emulator:
http://people.cs.ubc.ca/~pphillip/trs80.html (emulator in javascript)

 

[jedishrfu]

How could I forget?

I had an original Altair 6800 computer. You had to buy a $2000 televideo terminal to use it with its monitor program and with an extra memory card would have about 16K. I instead programmed it via the switches which was arduous and of little help in trying to debug the program so I lost patience.

It was similar to the earlier Altair 8800 but cheaper. I liked the Motorola chip better as it seemed better organized with memory mapped IO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

My mistake was I should have bought a KIM-I that used a MosTek 6502 chip but alas I was too stubborn (or broke I can't remember). I guess I liked the Altair more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

 

[newjerseyrunner]

I got to play with my dad's 8088 Victor Computer with MS-DOS 3.3, Windows 2.0, Leading Edge Word Processor, and Word Perfect 5.0. My first computer was a 486 Windows 3.1 machine. I learned QBasic on it.

 

[Mark44]

Apple IIe was first personal computer actually owned by me .

That was my second computer. The first was a Radio Shack hand-held computer that I bought in 1980. It had BASIC in ROM, and a whopping 2KB of RAM. I bought a printer/modem unit for it so I could print out the programs I wrote, and store them on a mini-cassette. One of the programs I wrote calculated an amortization table for a mortgage.

Did you hit the famous pentium bug?

I never hit the bug, but I submitted a short x86 assembly program to "PC Techniques," a magazine published by Jeff Dunteman, in the June/July issue in '94. The program would tell you whether the CPU in your computer had the broken division logic. As far as I know, this was the first program published about this problem. Although Intel at first brushed it off, the flaw eventually cost Intel over $1 Billion.

 

[PSRB191921]

My first computer : a ZX81. Who remembers it ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81

 

[Evo]

A Commodore 64.

 

[DS2C]

Not sure what the brand was. But it ran Win 98, and it was also for Diablo II. Had one of the mice with the ball in it, and a horrendous key board with those ridiculous membranes under the keys with a giant box monitor as the centerpiece. This was probably around 2000.

 

[DS2C]

Everyone in here is very old LOL.

 

[OCR]

Wife bought a Commodore 64 shortly after we got married, she says, anyway...

I probably didn't even know what a computer was supposed to be used for... she probably thinks I still don't... she's probably right. .

 

[OCR]

Interesting... lol

 

[QuantumQuest]

An Amstrad CPC 6128 with an "OS" - I can't resist putting quotes for that operating system, CP/M loaded from a floppy. Then a 386 and I went on in the path of Intel for the last 28 years for both desk - and lap - top.

 

[phinds]

My first computer didn't have a name, it was home built from parts. Ran DOS on one of the very early x86 chips (might even have been the 8086, I don't recall), one chassis for the motherboard, separate memory chassis (64Kbytes ram ... yes that's Kbytes, not megabytes), separate chassis for the 8" floppy drives (I splurged and got two of them), separate chassis for the power supply, TV style monitor (green text, no graphics), etc. I had to build a whole piece of furniture to house it. In those days, hard drives only existed on very expensive IBM mainframes.

 

[phinds]

An Amstrad CPC 6128 with an "OS" - I can't resist putting quotes for that operating system, CP/M loaded from a floppy. Then a 386 and I went on in the path of Intel for the last 28 years for both desk - and lap - top.

Hey, don't be trashing CP/M ... that was a major upgrade for me from my first DOS machine. It was a lot better than DOS and I re-wrote much of the BIOS and added some extensions of my own. Had my own EPROM-burner and UV eraser.

 

[Charles Link]

At my workplace, I had an HP9826. That was in 1981. It used Basic 2.0.

 

[QuantumQuest]

Hey, don't be trashing CP/M ... that was a major upgrade for me from my first DOS machine. It was a lot better than DOS and I re-wrote much of the BIOS and added some extensions of my own. Had my own EPROM-burner and UV eraser.

Yes you're right, I just couldn't resist to put it in quotes comparing to what an OS is today but of course it was very good for its time.

 

[phinds]

Yes you're right, I just couldn't resist to put it in quotes comparing to what an OS is today but of course it was very good for its time.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I've watched the evolution of personal computing from the earliest days and it has been truly astounding to see it evolve. I can remember things like my excitement when I got my very own hard drive, 10 megs. Today that's not even enough for a single raw image file and barely enough for a couple of JPEG files straight out of the camera, but it was a super thing to have back when I got it.

 

[OCR]

Had one of the mice with the ball in it...

I had a ball with a mouse in it... that way, I could just use gerbil verbal commands... . Trackball...

 

[Mark44]

I can remember things like my excitement when I got my very own hard drive, 10 megs.

And they were quite expensive at the time, somewhere around $5000, based on my memory of ads in computer magazines back then (~1982). I didn't get a hard drive until my 4th computer, a PC clone with a 386 CPU around 1987 or so. It came with a whopping 30 MB HD that I thought I would never fill up. About a year later, I upgraded to a 120MB drive.

 

[Mark44]

Everyone in here is very old LOL.

You betcha, grasshopper! Pre-baby boom, for myself.

 

[jtbell]

The first computer I ever worked with was an IBM 1130 at my undergraduate alma mater, c. 1972. FORTRAN IV programs and data input were on punched cards, and output was via a line printer.

The first personal computer that I used was Apple's "Fat Mac" (the 512K version of the original 128K Mac), which came with my office at the college where I ended up teaching, in 1985.

A couple of years later I splurged on its successor, a Mac SE with a whopping 1 MB of memory and two floppy-disk drives, for use at home.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

Did you hit the famous pentium bug?

Nope.