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This recent How I Got Started In Lotus Notes meme has me in a bit of a computer history mood. Actually, I have been in this nostalgic mode for awhile now, but it wasn’t until I was writing about how I got into Notes that I began to think about my first computer.

For me, it was the Commodore VIC-20. I was in junior high taking BASIC programming classes and my parents wanted to encourage my newly forming computer habit because, after all, computers were the wave of the future. They bought me the VIC-20 and my grandfather, an aerospace engineer and avid computer geek even to this day, bought the cassette tape drive. I was in heaven!

With that VIC-20 I expanded on my programming abilities with BASIC and filled up tape after tape with my programs. I remember getting to know the local Radio Shack very well because they had the best deal on 60 minute cassettes. Unfortunately, I no longer have the VIC-20 or any of the code I wrote. I do, however, have a PDF of the programmers reference guide and these were all the commands we had to work with at the time:

CLR
DATA
DEF FN
DIM
END
FOR…TO…STEP
GET
GOSUB
GOTO or GO TO
IF..THEN
INPUT
LET
NEXT
ON
POKE
PRINT
READ
REM
RESTORE
STOP
SYS WAIT

Can you imagine trying to write code with so few choices? Come to think of it, that actually seems somewhat liberating.

Even though I lusted after a Commodore 64, my grandfather who was the only other computer literate person in the family had moved on to Atari’s as the mid-1980’s approached so I did as well. My second computer was an Atari 800XL and it still remains one of my favorites. I remember thinking I was pretty hot at the time because I had two external 5.25� floppy drives and an Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer. Again, I used BASIC to create my own games, databases, and any other kind of program I could think of. After a few years I got my grandfather’s hand-me-down 800XE which really wasn’t all that different, it just looked cooler.

After that, I got my first PC. It was an 8088 clone made by Hyundai with dual internal floppies. After about six months or so I remember buying a 40MB hard drive and replacing one of the floppies with it. I was very nervous because I had never installed a hard drive before.

I remember every computer I have ever owned, but from that point on it was really just a collection of PC’s and Mac’s. My main machine now is a MacBook Pro.

Note: photo’s were obtained from old-computers.com, a fantastic virtual computer museum. I highly recommend visiting the site.