Thursday 28 February 2008

Ancient

Gianni was musing the other week about the history of the Macintosh and generally having a ‘my first computer I ever had at work’ moment, which rather got me thinking along the same lines. And good golly, but he’s a relative newbie!!

So here’s the list of computers I've used in order of (remembered) ownership/use for work. Home is another thing entirely!

  • CBM 96
  • Tandy Model III
  • Tandy Model IV
  • Tandy IVP (The 22lb ‘luggable’)
  • Apple II
  • Apple IIE
  • Apple IIC
  • Tandy M100
  • Tandy M1000 w/10mb external HDD (The 'look at me even a little bit wrong and I head crash' model)
  • Tandy M2000
  • Apricot F1
  • Olivetti M10
  • DEC PDP11
  • THEN an Olivetti M24, Gianni Catalfanewbie!
  • Toshiba T1600
  • Compaq 386
  • Compaq Presario
  • Digital Pentium
  • Fujitsu Laptop
  • IBM T43 (lovely)
  • Lenovo T61 (jury’s still out)

I remember laughing at the Lisa and furious arguments at the BASUG Apple user group about the evil 'closed top' Mac, 8” disk drives and the GEM GUI, proofing Ventura pages on a dot matrix and thinking that the Amstrad was a really cool computer. The Sinclair QL and the ICL One Per Desk (doomed from the moment someone said, 'Hey, why don’t we put a phone on a computer?'). The first computer I ever saw, in fact, was a Hewlett Packard mainframe that my school bought at huge cost (suppose it would have been a 3000 series) which was programmed using punched cards.

I think I’d better stop there, actually before the Geek Police come for me…

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK, so it's "Remembrance Alley" here ?

Here's another story.

As a junior systems engineer at IBM, the only computer I had seen during the 5 months induction course were true computers: Series /370 behemoths with millions of switches and generally speaking the whole blinkelights treatment.

Anyway, once I was hired, in perfect IBM style, I was introduced to my first client as a true DB/DC expert for a project; so I am trying to look like the real expert I am, and during the lunch break I loiter in the cold room and chatting with the operator I say: "...and the CPU, I suppose it's in the other room, right ?"

The guy looks at me, as if trying to figure out whether I am testing him and says with a subdued voice: "No sir, you're sitting on it, sir".

How the hell was I supposed to know that in the transition from the S/370 to the 43xx the lights and switches were all gone?

Experts, experts !

Anonymous said...

you do remember every computer you used! wow!

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