Back in the day...

[DifferentStrokes]

So, I got my start with computers ~1989 when I was 10 years old. I was given a 300 baud modem ~1993 and soon discovered BBSes. It wasn't long and I was running my own WWIV BBS during my high school years. I took an interest in modifying the C++ code for the BBS and thus creating an interest in programming. I never ended up pursuing and IT career, but I'm still a hobbyist to this day.

So, I'm curious. How did you get your start? Did you ever use BBSes? Interesting stories from years ago.

 

[Bidule0hm]

I'm younger than you and my parents weren't interested by computers so I started a bit late (with Windows 3.11 but win 95 and 98 were already here IIRC) but I'm a huge fan of old school tech so I think I've more or less catch up the others by now :)

I especially love the Amiga computers. I own a A500 (with the original floppy drive that still works :p) and a A1200 (slight problem with one of the audio channel, probably a dried electrolytic cap, didn't investigated further for now).

FYI it takes 8 sec to boot (including POST and co) from an old 2.5" IDE drive (and 2 or 3 sec more from a floppy drive) on a 14 MHz CPU (7 MHz for the A500) and uses less than 300 KB of RAM at idle (with a preemptive multitasking GUI similar to Windows 95...), if that isn't impressive then go back to your crappy Windows that need a SSD, a pentium at x00 MHz and many MB of RAM to do the same thing (and be less stable in the end...) :D

I've also a TI-99/4A (works perfectly too) ;)

 

[hugovsky]

I started with msx and spectrums. Then msx2. first 3 1/2 drive single sided/single density. Then on to 8088/8086. First hacks were changing jumper on board to change cga/hercules display type. Amber screen 12''. AMSTRAD 1512 and 1640 with first hardcard(old hdd). Then IBM PS/2 286 with a 20 MB hardrive<--;) and first ega, maybe vga, card and colour monitor. Hacks include format various types of interleaves to increase perfomance. IBM PS/1. Some 486DX. Then P3 and overcloking. Skip to AMD and more overclocking with voodoo cards. Then prometeia and more overclocking including a high speed, short, world record... Then network and storage and stability and work and work .... damn.... I'm old...

 

[hugovsky]

And PCTools... and defrag 720k diskettes...

 

[jgreco]

I've still got a Synertek SYM-1 hanging around here somewhere. I had a lot of Commodore stuff, including a SuperPET 9000 etc., wrote BBS software for the C64 which was popular locally, and on the UNIX side I started out with a Fortune 32:16 before moving on to the Sun 3/60LE, which grew to several 3/60's networked, a 3/260, and then I migrated over to FreeBSD and I've been mostly FreeBSD based ever since. Also have a pair of SGI Indy's still hanging around here somewhere.

I've mostly avoided buying UNIX vendor workstations for more than 20 years. No wonder Sun died. ;-)

As for the BBS thing, I have the unusual distinction of having written the only BBS software I know of that had most of its core coded as a kernal extension/rewrite, so that a sysop could have the BBSware run arbitrary BASIC programs (or even drop to the READY. prompt) over the modem, which totally blew peoples socks off at the time. I suppose doing all that coding kept me out of trouble, since other people I knew were getting into trouble. http://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2015/03/10/digital-shorts-original-teenage-hackers-orig.cnn

 

[cyberjock]

I got into computers when my family bought an Apple IIe from my Uncle (he was a computer salesperson back then). When I saw what this magic box could do, I was attached. I played a number of games on it (mostly learning games like Spellicopter and Math Blaster). Then, when I was about 7 or 8 years old, I was on the Principal's Honor Roll. That summer I was able to take a computer programming class that was for 7-8th graders even though I was just getting ready for 4th grade. My mom had to pay for the class up front knowing that I may not be able to finish the class since I was 3 years younger than the rest of the students. I ended up being the honor student in the class. After I figured out how to program the family's Apple IIe, I was hooked and never looked back.

Then in 7th grade my school had 30 Macintosh Classic IIs. I learned how to do some basic programming on those, Hypercard, and other cool stuff. Later in high school I got introduced to the IBM/Intel and never really went back to Apple. I consider the fact that they killed Hypercard to be a serious blow to the usability for me. I've heard that Apple may be officially ressurecting Hypercard. If so, that might be exciting. ;)

 

[Wolf666]

Just started in early 80s with a Commodore VIC20 and later with a 64.....playing with Basic.


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[Starpulkka]

There was already topic like this, witch i believe is in devnull

Commodore 64 c-casette backups
Amiga 500 3 1/2 DD Floppy Disk backups
Clone PC 3 1/2 HD Floppy Disk backups
Clone PC Quantum bigfoot (actually im thinkin when these 5.25 hdd's comes back)
Clone PC.. pc havent actually advanced from amiga times at all... even todays BIOS dont fit 1.44MB disk, so what does that tell about pc progress..



Weird DEC RL02 umm. a storage drive or is it a hard platter drive. well anyways its still fukken works, but i think snowden could not walk out with that its pocket, without being noticed. What a piece of # today you can put 1TB in a small sd card, but its a nice hack.
http://hackaday.com/2015/04/20/vcf-east-x-the-worlds-largest-usb-thumb-drive/

 

[fracai]

I've heard that Apple may be officially ressurecting Hypercard. If so, that might be exciting. ;)

Where did you hear that? It'd be huge news that would make a lot of people very happy. (Personally, I don't see it happening).

My family had an Apple II that my mother would type programs from the back of 321 Contact into. Then we had a Mac LC II that was so cramped on disk space that I had to uninstall Brushstrokes in order to have enough space to install and play Bungie's Marathon (swapping four floppies each time). Of course, it was running System 6 rather than 7, so the game would crash every time you quit. My dad took me in to work (UVM) one time to download an update for the game from, I think, Gopher. (I wish I could find the "One Nation Under Baud" sticker that used to be on his work computer.) In high school I started an independent study CS course because the four of us that were interested weren't enough to warrant a dedicated teacher. Mostly we played Doom, but I did write a Mancala game with a brute-force AI to play against. I've used Macs at every step, picking up *nix in college, and turning to FreeNAS when I got a bit too suspicious of my Drobo.

 

[cyberjock]

I can't find anything about Hypercard being ressurected via Google. Maybe it was an April Fools joke or something.

I remember watching some lecture by some higher-up at Apple back in the 90s, and one thing that he said he screwed up badly on was not taking Hypercard to the next step. The internet was in its infancy with internet standards just starting to be developed. He thinks it is very possible that Hypercard could have been the "browser" for the internet today if they had tried to push it into the market.

Weird to think that an app like Hypercard could have been the "internet browser" today.

 

[DataKeeper]

Sports, sports and sports! Ended a very early '90s Canadian cross country cycling trip 2 days from home and 78 amazing days on the road by tearing a half dozen tendons in my leg. Made it worse by finishing the trip gritting through the pain 4 days later. While resting, a friend (really.. I still debate this to this day over many drinks ;)) dropped an old IBM 8088 XT super computer on my lap.. and hence, my leg! With Dos installed, a 1200baud modem and a dial up account to a local technical university into a SCO Unix shell account, I started down the IT path by programming shell and ircii scripts.

Thus began my love for all Unix/Linux & dislike of Microsoft. Mac/Apple somehow never entered into things aside from my current collection of iPods, iPhones and iPads.
My personal systems since about 95 have been Debian starting with iirc .93R5 and it's been my desktop and server choice since. Dabbled in programming however preferred the administration and networking aspects much more. Work related was mostly involved in BSDi and network administration until my early retirement in my mid 30s. :p

For the most part these days I prefer not working on systems aside from reading email, browsing, etc and prefer spending time outside and/or playing my my young son.

 

[philiplu]

Started about 1975, hanging around the computer room of the local college while I was a high school sophomore. They let me play around on their GA 18/30, an IBM 11/30 work-alike minicomputer, programming in Fortran (IV and 66) using punch cards. They let me have complete access - I got really good at keying in the IPL (initial program load) sequence through the front panel switches, which would read in a punch card with 60 16-bit words encoded on it, which then loaded the boot loader-equivalent from the disk drive - single platter monsters that were over a foot across, probably the GA 1341 mentioned in the PDF I linked above, with a massive 5MB of storage, and transfer speeds of 156KB/s! About a year later, I wrote a MIXAL assembler/emulator which could run programs from Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming series - 7000 lines (erm, punch cards) of 11/30 assembler. Do not drop the deck, please.

Bought my first computer, a Commodore PET with 8K RAM, in 1977 or '78. Typed a lot of programs into that from David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games, wasted hours playing Super Star Trek from that book. Wrote a 6502 disassembler in BASIC, hacked up an IEEE-488 to RS-232 converter, and hooked the PET up to to an ASR-33 TTY at the college so I could print out a disassembly of the PET's ROM (I couldn't afford a printer of my own).

I was heavily into writing assembly code by then, and the Motorola 6809 had a much nicer instruction set than the 8080 or Z-80, so my next computer was a SWTPC 6809. I ended up writing a disassembler for that, too, but this one I sold through computer mags, at about $100 a pop. Made enough to start paying for my computer hardware habit during college. Also made enough to pay for CompuServe access, where I discovered the Colossal Cave Adventure and blew through $250 or so in online charges playing the game one month (whoops).

I had planned on going to grad school to work on a Ph.D. in math after my B.Sc., but computers were just too much fun and way easier than modestly-advanced math. I figured I'd try programming for a job for a year or two, then head to grad school. My prof warned me not to do it or I'd never return. He was right. I spent my career mostly writing programming tools and embedded systems - BASIC interpreters, C/C++ compilers, programmable calculator internals - and never made it back to grad school. Now I'm mostly retired, and spending time working on FreeNAS and FreeBSD - my last real Unix experience was Microsoft Xenix (!) back in the mid 80s.

 

[DifferentStrokes]

Great histories guys. I really enjoy hearing about the early days. I remember when I was about 12 I was working on coax networking between two computers in our house. I finally got Novell Netware working and then couldn't find a thing to do with it. :)

 

[hugovsky]

Loading games with tape recorder... endless minutes waiting just to see an error at the end... :) listening to those needle printers... mesmerizing your friends with double dragon in hercules mode... :D and making 400 lines od basic code... damn I miss those days!

 

[FritVetBE]

I started with computers on a windows 3.1 box we received from my uncle.
Initially, it was just to play some minor games and stuff (outrun, chess, tetris )

in 1999 my parents bought a pentium III 500 MHz with Win98 SE which was intended for light office work. I was playing with the OS quite alot, which made me the one to be blamed when something wasn't working anymore This is where my real interest in computers (hardware, operating systems and networking) arise i guess.
In 2009 i decided to go to college to study applied IT/System- and networkmanagement, there i had some basic Linux, someday i hope to say windows goodbye for every.

Now i try to have some projects running at home which will be feeding my interests, my FreeNAS server is a big part of it.

 

[hugovsky]

My first MS SO was DOS 3.2. I managed to install windows 2 with 4 3 1/2 diskettes and 1 5 1/4 drive used to swap.... And I loved that train station pic on win 95 :)

 

[DifferentStrokes]

...As for the BBS thing, I have the unusual distinction of having written the only BBS software I know of that had most of its core coded as a kernal extension/rewrite...

What was the name of the BBS software you wrote?

 

[DifferentStrokes]

...there i had some basic Linux, someday i hope to say windows goodbye forever.

I'I'm not sure how I've managed it, but everything in my house is Linux or BSD except for the wifes computer. :)

 

[joeschmuck]

Wow, reading all these posts brings back some memories. I started back in 9th grade (1975) in our Electronics class where we established the first computer club for the area which consisted of four students and the teacher. We ordered a hexadecimal computer which of course we had to build. I don't recall the name or any specs of the device but it was very basic and we self learned how to program basic things, nothing fancy that is for certain. The following year the school district (we had 3 high schools) somehow was given the opportunity by the school district computer department (where they did all the finances for the school) took a small conference room and allowed about 10 kids from the various 3 schools to come in and learn some advanced computer programming. The school did not provide transportation tot he class, it was on us to figure it out. I remember it very well. We had old IBM disk packs (big 14" platters I believe) and some main frame computer system that read punched cards for programming it. We had to sit down and develop a program (Tic-Tac-Toe was the first one I recall) and then punch the cards. The goal was to write a program where the computer either won or it was a draw. The school eventually purchased a TRS-80 and we then learned some BASIC programming and all the software was on cassette tape. So that was my start.

In 11th grade my family moved to a small town in which the school had no programs in electronics nor computers so I complained and they were able to get me into the local (20 mile up the road) community college the following year and again I had to get there myself but they did pay for the class so that was nice. It was Fortran IV and I didn't care, it was something. That was also on a large mainframe computer. The college allowed me to borrow a terminal which had a speedy 110 baud acoustic modem. Once I graduated High School I ultimately joined the Navy in the Polaris Advanced Electronics program and became very good at making complex circuits work (troubleshooting flip-flops). Imagine an old-time disk drive and troubleshooting hundreds of flip-flips to know what their states should be under just about every situation, head alignments, timing adjustments. I enjoyed it but not everyone could grasp it. I ended up teaching those topics to new sailors. But in the meantime I built and 8080 based computer running at a whopping 4.77MHz and after a year I upgraded it to an NEC V20 CPU running at 12MHz (what a speed boost!). I knew friends who had a PET, C64/128, and Apple IIc and we programmed those as well (lots of free time on the submarine while on alert patrol). I took my NEC V20 computer and used it to run a BBS for a few years in 1987/88, that was a lot of fun and great social benefits by meeting a lot of folks both online and then in person.

Around 1987 I got an 80286 PC and purchased a used Seagate 5.25" 5MB hard drive (MFM encoding) from a friend of mine and then converted it to RLL formatting and almost doubled my capacity. I became self taught in assembler language programming (those books were like $60 each) because it was easy for me to relate directly to the hardware level and then I also picked up C language. C++ was the last language I learned and never really used it so I forgot a lot. Now days I'm trying to pick up VXWorks but it is related to my current job and really only so I can try to understand what my employees are talking about, not that I need to do any programming.

I'm 52 now and still like a good project to keep my mind sharp.

 

[JoeVulture]

I got started in the mid-1980's on a Commodore 64 using BASIC. In the early 1990's, I was doing assembly language on the C64 (demo scene, but some GEOS development also), as well as helping a friend do some modifications to his BBS (C-Base, I think was the name of the program).

I got my introduction into the *nix world in high school; there were two labs for the Computer Science classes, a DOS/Windows lab and a Unisys ICON lab - I was put in the ICON lab. I learned a bit of sh and then applied that to my time in university where the CS labs were Linux only. I got an 8086 when I was in my first year, upgraded it to an 80286, then a 386 and got into the world of Windows a bit, but I mostly stuck to Linux (except when I needed Windows-specific applications). I used to upgrade my hardware regularly, although not so much anymore, as there is no benefit.

Now I use FreeNAS for my NAS, Windows Media Center for my TV (CableCard encryption won't let me use anything else) and Mac OS X for pretty much everything else.

Work has me doing eCos/Linux development (DOCSIS cable gateways) and some degree of IT work (managing some cable modems, a shared build server, that type of thing).

-- Joe