Our first computer experience

[angra]

Well it doesn't go as far back as Colossus, but I did a community survey in the late seventies and was offered the chance to analyse it by feeding the data into a DEC PDP-11 at work. (Thanks Whitlam). We even had a data entry team who did all the input.

The computer boss did send me my first ever computer-based message. It was "Get off the console, dickhead."

Rather percipient I think.

[Matthew Of Canberra]

I refuse to accept that I'm any sort of old-timer, but in a conversation that some colleagues were having recently about the computers they had as kids, I mentioned that I didn't get a computer until the apple 2c came out. The folks around me weren't quite sure what an apple 2 was.

[jreidy]

1st year uni for me.
I experience the last year the maths department had a pdp programmed using punch cards.
The electrical engineering already had a unix multi user system running 30 or so terminals.
So 30 people sharing a system less powerful than a mobile phone.
2 friends at uni bought a commodore pet pc - with 16kb of memory, which we programmed with MS BASIC.

[angra]

I bought my family a BBC model B in 1983. It had 36k of RAM, you loaded programmes from cassette or typed them in, and saw the output on your TV. And you could load programmes by plugging in a ROM (like WORD).

It was brilliant!

Elite was the best. The star-fighters were all named after snakes.

[Matthew Of Canberra]

"I bought my family a BBC model B in 1983. It had 36k of RAM"

2 Mhz. Luxury!

In hindsight, the BBC was actually a pretty swish machine. It was very intelligently designed - not quite so obsessed with Big Numbers and hardware and more with making the thing easy to experiment with. A basic interpreter with a flippin' inline assembler, for goodness' sake.

Despite the nerdy/square "learning" emphasis, it definitely won its place in history with Elite. People were buying BBC's just to play it. And of course it was the cash-cow motivator for the development of the Acorn Risk Machine ... and the rest is history.

The EcoNET had absolutely no security, though. That got me into a bit of trouble in high school.

[jreidy]

The processor in these was the '6502'
Motorola first brought out a processor called the 6800 - and charged serval hundred (1970) dollars just for the chip.
A company the offered the 6502 which was hardware compatible for around $50.
The acorn RISC processor is a parent of the ARM processor - used in around 95% of all smart phones.

[angra]

The BBC has a long history of innovation (see the Radiophonic workshop who did the original Dr Who theme on some of the first music synthesisers).

But the BBC Micro computer was a landmark. Commissioned by the Beeb to compliment one of the first computer literacy TV programmes. Before what we now know as as PCs. It was designed for educational use and started and quickly took over school IT. It had built in AD converters, a direct plug in to the bus (I think called the tube in a quirky joke) and stuff like Logo that kids could use to drive programmable turtles.

A real beaut! It introduced hundreds of thousand of people to computing.

See what you can get with a public broadcaster? But the IPA would have us dismantle even our humble ABC.

[jreidy]

If it was up to people like the IPA the Internet would not exist. In the early '90s many companies tried to build their own, controlled online service - GE, IBM , Microsoft and Apple to name a few.
It would be proprietary and commercial.
The Internet grew out of a 60s research project funded by the US DoD for a resilient 'backup network' that cold still operate even in the event of an enemy attack (you can guess what sort of attack they were thinking of).
As such it had no single point of failure, or for that matter control.
It was the perfect as a research network , linking the universities and research institutes with defense.
It was strictly non commercial and managed by consensus.