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.

 

[OCR]

My first computer didn't have a name...

Mine had a name, but... it most likely wouldn't get past the auto-censor... .

Lol... sometimes it had several names !

 

[Mark44]

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.

Something like that for me, as well. Probably an IBM of some kind. I took a programming class in which we used PL/C, a subset of the PL/1 programming language. Same deal with the punch cards and 17" wide fan-fold paper for output.

 

[I like Serena]

I'm starting to feel old.
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum with 48 KiB of memory, which I wrangled from my parents.
(After I was enamored by a ZX81 with 1 KiB that I could only access in a store.)
And the first computer I bought myself was a 286 AT computer (around 1986), which was replaced every 2-3 years by a newer model (as long as Moore's Law was still in effect).
To be honest, I felt cheated by the lack of features in PC's that my ZX Spectrum used to offer. ;)
Oh, and I do recall that in high school a particular teacher was trying to understand computers, and he felt kind of superior since he was able to type blind, while I couldn't (yet!). ;)

 

[phinds]

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.

I don't remember what I paid, but I'm sure it was nowhere near $5K. Maybe they had been out for a while when I got one. As I recall it was somewhere around 1980.

 

[I like Serena]

I don't remember what I paid, but I'm sure it was nowhere near $5K. Maybe they had been out for a while when I got one.

In 1991 I paid about $3.5K just for a monitor. That was a NEC 6FG with a 21 inch diagonal, which was the best monitor one could get at that time.
My boss didn't want to pay for it, so I bought one myself.
Afterwards, my boss kept bringing in people to look at that monitor, after which the company bought a whole lot of the exact same monitors to satisfy the business needs. :)

 

[Janus]

First computer I ever owned was a TRS-80 pocket computer. The first one I ever used(in a high school programming class) was "Valentine", it was a Hewlett-Packard 9830-A, with 4Kb of memory, a 32 character LED display, and a built-in tape drive. It had the optional thermal printer.
Before the day of microprocessor chips, it used 7400-series gates, shift-registers and decoders for its logic boards.

 

[I like Serena]

First computer I ever owned was a TRS-80 pocket computer. The first one I ever used(in a high school programming class) was "Valentine", it was a Hewlett-Packard 9830-A, with 4Kb of memory, a 32 character LED display, and a built-in tape drive. It had the optional thermal printer.
Before the day of microprocessor chips, it used 7400-series gates, shift-registers and decoders for its logic boards.

And what did you use it for?

 

[Janus]

First computer I ever owned was a TRS-80 pocket computer. The first one I ever used(in a high school programming class) was "Valentine", it was a Hewlett-Packard 9830-A, with 4Kb of memory, a 32 character LED display, and a built-in tape drive. It had the optional thermal printer.
Before the day of microprocessor chips, it used 7400-series gates, shift-registers and decoders for its logic boards.

Years later, when the school was holding a garage sale, I could've bought it for a cheap price. But it would have just been for sentiment's sake, and it probably just ended up gathering dust in the attic.

 

[I like Serena]

Years later, when the school was holding a garage sale, I could've bought it for a cheap price. But it would have just been for sentiment's sake, and it probably just ended up gathering dust in the attic.

I still have my very first ZX Spectrum. The only computer I've ever kept.
And yes, it has been collecting dust for about 35 years now, but as yet I haven't been able to throw it out.

 

[Janus]

And what did you use it for?

which one. the TRS-80 or "Valentine". The TRS-80 wasn't much more than a toy. You could write a few simple BASIC programs for it, but that was about it.
Valentine was used to teach programming In BASIC, Though I do remember that the instructor also used it for keeping sports statistics for some of the School's teams.

 

[I like Serena]

which one. the TRS-80 or "Valentine". The TRS-80 wasn't much more than a toy. You could write a few simple BASIC programs for it, but that was about it.
Valentine was used to teach programming In BASIC, Though I do remember that the instructor also used it for keeping sports statistics for some of the School's teams.

The TRS-80 came after the ZX81, and on a ZX81 I could program Space Invaders (just within 1 KiB!)
I could choose to either track high scores or add a special bomb, but not both, since then I'd run out of memory.
In high school we had a TRS-80 which was nice, but nowhere near as much fun!

 

[russ_watters]

My parents: The IBM PC. I was in junior high I think: it cost $3500 in 1988 dollars, including the not-standard 20MB "hard card" hard drive and all-you'll-ever-need 640k ram card upgrade. The first I owned myself was in 1995, a Zenith PC clone requisitioned by the Naval Academy. It had a 100mhz 486 processor and 400ish MB hard drive.

 

[Nik_2213]

I suppose you could say I began with a 'Sinclair Scientific' calculator. I replaced that battery-chomper with a rechargeable TI-57, shoe-horned my 'complex' 3D astronomy calculations into its 50 steps. The display was so 'beady eyed', and the keypad so tiny, I made a lot of mistakes. Late in 1979, I got an Apple ][ Europlus, the very first in UK with FP Applesoft in ROM. A month later, I had to add eight RAM chips to take it up to 48 kb, then totally maxed it out with math, graphics and my tape-loaded databases of nearby and background stars. Yes, my TV screen really was 'full of stars' !
Refreshing the 'orrery' view could take 1~~5 minutes for the smaller database, or fifteen minutes for the larger, but you could plot a route around the neighbours...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_Software_Gazette

 

[anorlunda]

I first learned FORTRAN on an IBM 1620, and machine language on a GE 4020.

My first home computer was a Commodore Pet followed by an Apple 2 Plus, but I used to sneak home an ASR33 teletype before that.

I recall the delight when the Commodore Pet said HELLO after power up without me needing to punch in a bootstrap program first.

But I think the most amazing computer I ever bought (for my sister) was a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell. That was a real breakthrough machine. If they still sold them today, I would buy one for my great granddaughter.

 

[ISamson]

Toshiba laptop. Pretty modern, but all I can remember.