Take Yourself Back to the Beginning
What was your first experience with the PC?
Tuesday, July 2, 2024 by pelaird | Discussion: Everything Else
Ahh, fond memories of my first experience with the PC. The IBM PC. I was working for a software company selling mainframe utility software for the IBM 303X series. I remember there was also a hardware company in the building, and if I recall, a Megabyte of RAM for these machines was $10,000.00 US.
Please show your age and share your first experience with the PC.
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Reply #24 Thursday, July 4, 2024 9:23 AM
Reply #28 Thursday, July 4, 2024 11:44 AM
DEC had given my high school a PDP-3, so I was programming in a forerunner or offshoot of Basic called Focal in 1968, using paper tape on a terminal like the one previously pictured. I used punch cards for the first time in 1969, when I took a class for high schoolers at MIT, learning FORTRAN.
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Reply #21 Thursday, July 4, 2024 8:36 AM
Okay, so my real first experience with computers was in high school. We had an extracurricular class on learning to code with BASIC. We had a small room (closet) with a teletype terminals tied to the University of Texas computational center's CDC6600. You saved and loaded programs using ticker tape. Later in college, I had access to this same computer, but we used punch cards and the FORTRAN programming language.