When was the first computer bug discovered?

[jack action]

My first computer was a used http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibmportable.shtml. It was bought used for 1200 $, along with a brand new Epson LX-800 printer for 500 $.

For people who are beginning to know me, you won't be surprised to learn that I still have both. You shouldn't even be surprised to know that the printer is still plugged to a working computer and used from time to time. It just won't let go (unlike all subsequent cheap ink jet printers that came afterward).

 

[dlgoff]

It just won't let go (unlike all subsequent cheap ink jet printers that came afterward).

I hear that. I bought the Okidata Microline 390 with my first PC and it's still working on my weather station PC.

image compliments of https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828107156

 

[Laurie K]

LOL, when dot matrix printers sounded like personal sawmills you made sure everything was correct before you printed, especially after midnight.

 

[Nik_2213]

Hey, is that LX the version with both serial and parallel ports ? Looks seriously retro, but so versatile !

I had one on a trolley, with a box of cables and a list of the config settings to hook it up to everything from a vac-gauge to a flow meter. Routine calibrations and validations were so much easier when its wad of fan-fold was stapled to the back of the job-sheet...

 

[gleem]

My first contact with a digital computer was a UNIVAC 1107 (64K RAM) which I used for my dissertation along with an IBM 360. My first personal computer was a Gateway 20 MHz 286 in 1992 when I finally succumbed .

 

[OCR]

LOL, when dot matrix printers sounded like personal sawmills...

Lol... I never thought ours sounded that bad... .

We still have one, but I haven't used it in years... nevertheless, I think it was the best at doing the job it was meant to do... .

 

[Laurie K]

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

Oh no! No! We know, we know! ...

 

[OCR]

My God, that sounds like a sawmill ! .

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

I remember that noise sound, with fondness... of course, we had one - it's probably still around here, someplace. *

I'm just like "old Jim"... I never throw away any mechanical, device like, 'thing' !

Well, you know, I might dig explore around inside, find something else that might work in something else, that doesn't work in something else...


* ... And, I always tell myself... " I'll lay it here, so it's easy to find " .

 

[Asymptotic]

My Epson LX-80 was loud compared to a Laserjet, but a true contender for the sawmill award was the IBM 1403. Memories of 132 column greenbar paper and stringing anti-static tinsel to lessen paper jams.

 

[Routaran]

My first was a ZX Spectrum+ way back in 1988. I had an absolute blast with this thing. Too young to really understand but it came with a manual with some tutorials for writing programs in BASIC. Typing in some numbers and letters and then seeing boxes appear and move on the TV, that was so cool.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/ZX_Spectrum+.jpg

 

[Nik_2213]

Ah, line printers...

I remember our IT department's 'gofer' sneaking down to our labs, and hastily dumping an entire carton of triple-fanfold ( two carbons) green-striped '132' paper off his laden trolley into our skip.

As they usually shredded or re-cycled their waste, I investigated...

Leafing through the stack, I discovered each and every page was printed with two (2) instances of 'Syntax Error', one at the top, the other half-way down...

His department's gaffe kept us in carbon sheets and scrap paper for almost a year !

 

[dlgoff]

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

And like this:

 

[nsaspook]

I built several homebrew 8080,Z80 machines (with 8080 powered graphics displays) in the 70's. I recently resurrected one old DIY Z80 cpu card as a PIC controller project to emulate some of the original memory and I/O.
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/memio-emulator-for-z80.117003/

 

[deRoy]

Many computers from 1982 onwards.

My favorite still is an HP48 SX/GX ( had them both ) programmable scientific calculator. A great computer in its own right.

Numerous programs I wrote for this calculator in RPL language. The longest one was to calculate the first 1000 digits of Pi, a program that I am very proud of I wrote myself. Another was to do RSA algorithm, artificial intelligence, games, there was no end as to what this calculator could do.

I still have them if anyone's interested.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'll see your Eye of the Tiger and raise you an Imperial March - on floppy drives. (3.5 inches - I'd love to do this on 8 inchers)

 

[Stavros Kiri]

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. .

Was it Evo? (Keeping it secret? ...)

A Commodore 64.

 

[OCR]

Stavros !

...

 

[Stavros Kiri]

Stavros !
View attachment 217607 ...

Nice strike through! Did you use a Mac?

 

[OCR]

NO ... Evo's Commodore 64. .

 

[lekh2003]

My Epson LX-80 was loud compared to a Laserjet, but a true contender for the sawmill award was the IBM 1403. Memories of 132 column greenbar paper and stringing anti-static tinsel to lessen paper jams.

This is the kind of gold I like to see on the internet.

 

[Mr P]

Oric1 still have it in the loft somewhere.
A few years later we upgraded to a C64...

 

[John Malcolm]

I was at Oberlin College in 1965 when they got an IBM 360 "Cadet" which took up the entire basement of the Physics Building and had its own A/C. The manufacturer's rep said that "Cadet" stood for "Can't add, doesn't even try." Any smart-phone today can do much more.

We programmed the thing in Fortran, not so different a feel from BASIC. What felt really different is that each line of the program had to be typed into a card punch machine which would then output a deck of punched cards, one for each instruction. We had to carry that to the machine's card reader and insert it AFTER the compiler deck that told the machine how to interpret Fortran into machine language. If the compile failed, we would be told only the number of the first invalid instruction. After replacing that card, we would try again.

When our program finally compiled, we got an "object deck" from the output side of the machine's card reader-punch (which was the size of a nice bathroom cabinet, as I recall). We would then carry that back to the input side and feed it into the machine. Output, if any, was on a printer across the floor, about the same size as the card reader-punch. The output printer typed on green-and-white striped paper a couple of feet wide with a row of sprocket holes down the side that was conveniently perforated so you could tear it off. Storage was on massive magnetic tape drives along the back wall that stood at least six feet tall. Data access was slow, since the tape had to be searched by spooling.

There was no connection to anything outside the room other than through power cables. We used slide rules for ordinary calculations, since electronic calculators of the era were large, expensive, noisy, and required a power cord plugged into the wall. Looking stuff up meant walking across campus to the library, where actual physical books had to be retrieved and indices consulted to find page numbers with the data we needed.

Fortunately, climate change and dark matter were not of immediate concern.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

I was at Oberlin College in 1965 when they got an IBM 360 "Cadet" which took up the entire basement of the Physics Building and had its own A/C. The manufacturer's rep said that "Cadet" stood for "Can't add, doesn't even try." Any smart-phone today can do much more.

Way more! And, you know, these computers had real bugs sitting in and sometimes causing shortcircuit and malfunction! ... (That's where the term 'bug' actually comes from, as far as I know.)

 

[Terry M]

My first computer was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10, the first time-sharing computer and part of MIT's Project MAC. In grad school, I had the first mini-computer, a DEC PDP-11/20, all to myself. It took up 3 full-height equipment racks and was equipped with an admittedly small 64k disk and a teletype. The first personal computer I owned was the first model Macintosh.

 

[Sue Rich]

A Panasonic Business Partner in '93. Loved that machine.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

At school in 1971-1973 I used a timesharing computer service connected via acoustic coupler to an ICL 1900 at Southampton University, programmable in JEAN (a variant of JOSS) and BASIC using paper tape for storage. I also did some IBM mainframe PL/I programming during the summer vacation in 1973 and have spent most of my working life since programming IBM mainframes in various languages.

Other computers which I bought myself over the years during the pre-Windows era include:

- Sinclair Cambridge Scientific calculator (1974).

- Sinclair ZX80 (around 1980), on which I implemented Conway's game of life. Later upgraded to ZX81. Still have it.

- Sinclair ZX Spectrum (around 1982). Still have it.

- BBC Micro model B (also around 1982). The BASIC interpreter also had 6502 assembler built in. Still have it.

The cassette recorder I used for storage with the above three machines broke, so I'd need to find a working one to be able to use them again.

- Sharp PC-1211 Pocket Computer (early 1980s) which I think was later sold as TRS-80 pocket computer. Still have it. It uses Mercury cell batteries which I can't get now, but I got it running again temporarily using zinc-air batteries.

- Psion Organizer II (about 1987). Still have it. After I stopped using it as an organizer, I still used for years it as a digital metronome with a program I wrote myself.

- Psion Series 3a (about 1994). Still running although not used much; hasn't been rebooted for 23 years.

- IBM PS/2 and later IBM PS/1.

For most of my working life, I have worked using IBM mainframes. When I worked in Gothenburg, we had an IBM 4341 as a backup for our main IBM machine, but most of the time it was available for me to use for testing and experiments, so if someone asked if I had a personal computer I'd say yes, an IBM 4341 running MVS.

(I'm currently team leader for developing and supporting IBM's mainframe assembler, as well as helping to support various fossils such as mainframe Fortran).

 

[AgentSmith]

My first real computer was a Sears PC with 2 5.25 inch drives. One of the drives malfunctioned, so I had a huge 20 Meg HD put in. I thought my god I'll never need all this. It ran either PC-DOS or an early MS-DOS. Earlier I had a TI computer with a cassette tape drive, 16K of RAM, expandable to 64 K. I won't even talk about using a slide rule in physics, with the Bible(Haliday and Resnick), both of which I still have.

 

[BeamStudent]

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!

The first computer I worked on in 1961-63 was the AN/FSQ-7 -- the largest vacuum computer ever built (while in USAF). Kept us all safe from the communist hoards

 

[Stavros Kiri]

The first computer I worked on in 1961-63 was the AN/FSQ-7 -- the largest vacuum computer ever built (while in USAF). Kept us all safe from the communist hoards

Did it have bugs?
Cf.

Way more! And, you know, these computers had real bugs sitting in and sometimes causing shortcircuit and malfunction! ... (That's where the term 'bug' actually comes from, as far as I know.)