Fraoch
Patron
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2014
- Messages
- 395
I was interested in science and technology from an early age, but the first computer of my own I actually won in Grade 4 (for selling boxes of chocolate bars for school, though this was a random draw). I won a Timex Sinclair 1000! I used a cassette player to save and load programs, a very frustrating exercise for anyone who has ever done it. But I remember my Dad having to buy a 16 KB expansion cartridge so I could play a Pac-Man clone, in black and white of course. The expansion cartridge cost more than the computer itself. And of course I remember how sore my fingers were after typing on that membrane keyboard for an hour or two.
Eventually I "upgraded" to a VIC-20. It was actually for my Dad who was supposed to use it to learn computers. I think he used it once. I used it a whole lot more, with its sleek white Datasette, though I longed for a floppy disk drive so much I'd type the load command for the floppy only to have it return an error. I learned BASIC on the VIC-20 and even tried to make a driving game on my own - not getting past the intro music. Ever written music for the VIC-20? PEEK command, hold it using a FOR loop, another PEEK, pause, PEEK...
In school I remember playing around with an Apple II at recess when a friend and I shouldn't have been playing with it. In high school I learned Pascal on Unisys ICON computers - so I know that @JoeVulture was educated in Ontario, Canada. ;-)
At University I worked on terminals connected to a mainframe running AIX so I was learning UNIX commands even before I knew it was UNIX. Word processing, WATFOR77 Fortran, but I also discovered e-mail and wrote HTML for my own web page. For thermodynamics modelling we used Sun SPARC workstations.
My first PC of my very own was an AMD K6-2 400 MHz. It still runs. I upgraded to Linux in 2005 or so after a hardware failure took out my Windows XP install on a RAID 0 array. First Ubuntu, then Linux Mint much more recently.
Eventually I "upgraded" to a VIC-20. It was actually for my Dad who was supposed to use it to learn computers. I think he used it once. I used it a whole lot more, with its sleek white Datasette, though I longed for a floppy disk drive so much I'd type the load command for the floppy only to have it return an error. I learned BASIC on the VIC-20 and even tried to make a driving game on my own - not getting past the intro music. Ever written music for the VIC-20? PEEK command, hold it using a FOR loop, another PEEK, pause, PEEK...
In school I remember playing around with an Apple II at recess when a friend and I shouldn't have been playing with it. In high school I learned Pascal on Unisys ICON computers - so I know that @JoeVulture was educated in Ontario, Canada. ;-)
At University I worked on terminals connected to a mainframe running AIX so I was learning UNIX commands even before I knew it was UNIX. Word processing, WATFOR77 Fortran, but I also discovered e-mail and wrote HTML for my own web page. For thermodynamics modelling we used Sun SPARC workstations.
My first PC of my very own was an AMD K6-2 400 MHz. It still runs. I upgraded to Linux in 2005 or so after a hardware failure took out my Windows XP install on a RAID 0 array. First Ubuntu, then Linux Mint much more recently.
