First "Day Job" computer was a Harris S-120 Mainframe which replaced a shared 7044 in the dungeon of the Atlas H Space Launch Vehicle guidance facility (General Electric HMED) at Vandenberg AFB. The system orbited most of the GPS sats and 200 or so other sats without an operational glitch of its own.

Ran proprietary DOD/General Dynamics Astronautics software in 32 bit Octal, with 32 K core memory.

After that "upgraded" to Univac 1240 MTC's at Ford Aerospace, used for command and control of military satellites.

Nary a blue screen occurred between them. Oh, for those days of simplicity and brute force...

Say, does anyone remember FORTH? A complete operating system, development system, and mid-level language compiler in about 16 KB of RAM! All integrated, open source, and modifiable to your heart's content.

Forth is actually the programming environment on the "ok " prompt on non-virtual SPARC hardware. I used it to do some calculations to show myself it worked but never scripted in it.

As this thread asks my first computer.

The first computer in my life - Digicomp 4 bit mechanical computer powered by sliding cards. Dad the mechanic was fascinated by how the sliding cards moved each other. I glanced at the mechanics and became fascinated by the concept of setting bits to change the behavior, aka programming. There used to be a web page that emulated the Digicomp. It might still be in the wayback archive.

The first computer at school - An AP/L interface to the mainframe at the administration center. Then sending cards for Fortran. Then the DEC-10 at college and so on through a long list of historical brands.

The first computer at work - Univac 1108 doing space program ground link software in Fortran.

The first online computer - A VMS VAX with account SPAN::JPLLSI:OUG also known as doug@jpl-vlsi.arpa. Plus a BSD 4.2 VAX with account ihnp4!escher!doug. I got both accounts about the same time.

You deserve some kind of prize for that one. I never heard of it, but there's a Wikipedia page for it. I can't remember ever seeing one.
At first I thought irrelevant to the poll, "What was your first computing device?" But maybe not, so let me amend mine.

The first computing device I used was in my high school computer science class--a teletype (can't remember the company or model) connected to an IBM360 computer at Slippery Rock College in PA.

I appreciate my teacher's insight. When I told him that I saved punched paper tapes of all my programs, he said it wasn't worth the effort because technology would change. I assumed he was wrong. I had seen teletypes on the news since I was a child. There would always be teletypes. What did he know? But as it turned out, those were the first and only teletypes that I ever had access to. I finally threw my paper tapes away a decade later.

I've still got a box of 80 column cards with one of my first programs on them. The same machine had paper tape though that was used to create control tapes for machine tools. Once tested, Mylar was used instead for durability.

Mine was a 80286 ibm compatible. It had DOS only. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives. No HDD nor a modem.

Since it was a mainframe I figured I should specify the contact device and language. I didn't know at the time but AP/L was only available on IBM mainframes so that indirectly specified the type to those sufficiently old.

At my first programming job there was a sign up sheet for the fast new 2400 baud connection to the Univac 1108 mainframe. So I could work at night if I wanted. In the basement one building over there was a row of card punch machines no one else used. Those machines worked much faster than I could type so I ended up writing Fortran on cards because it was faster in two ways. Access to the interface, physical typing.

My obsolete media storage story is losing my entire email archive from the 1990s about the year 2001. I put it in a tar file on an Exabyte 8mm spiral format tape. The year before they went obsolete. Rather than paying a fee to transfer the data I handed the tape to a guy who called in a 4mm DAT. Yeah, I used those at times, too. For the entire 1990s every email I could keep fit in a 1.3 GB tape. That's the demand side of Moore's Law!

First electronic computer I worked on was a pdp11-44. First electronic computer I owned I built myself, using a kit from Intel available to students. Intel 8080A, 8224, 8228, 4k of 2102 static rams, support circuitry. I built the chassis, power supply, circuit boards, and control logic, the started writing software for it in machine language. Good fun

It is not clear if this is about the first computer I used, or the first computer I owned.

The first computer I used was an IBM-370 running MVS. Punch card input. Algol-60. Fortran IV. JCL. Then a HP-1000 and PDP-11.

The first computer I built was a 6808 embedded controller for an SWTPC-bus 6809 system. Paper type and teletype. Running MIKBUG monitor.

The first computer I owned was a Kaypro 286, 6MHz, 1 MB RAM, 20 MB MFM hard disk, Hercules graphics. Dos 2.11

jlinkels

Hi,

I voted for 'other' since my first computer was a home brewed 8080 which led to my next being a Z80 based home brewed (S-100) that led to a Tandy TRS-80 purchase.

I still have the TRS-80 with the home brewed extension interface with data & address buss capture and single step options. Along with a S-44 buss for home brew interfaces.

I have been working with electronics all my adult live. I started working early as kid with vacuum tubes then the transistor was introduced so things started to evolve. Very interesting times!

Have fun & enjoy!

Hi,
Reminds me when our Prof made the statement that he could beat anyone with a calculator(4-banger) using a slide rule & table. I took him up on it and if I won then we could drop the slide and use the calculator in class/tests. At the time the calculator was a National 4-banger with memory. Of course I won, having a log table that required one to look up manually wastes time. Getting root was a no brainer plus logarithms were easy so we put the slide away and moved on with the calculator. Not long after that incident I purchased my first scientific, HP21 Reversed Polish Notation(RPN)
very costly at the time. But I did upgrade to the HP-25 released months after the HP21.

I have been reading the thread and it does bring back memories.
Have fun & enjoy!

WOOF... The first computer I used was a "PDP-8" it had a few rows of switches, you had to first put in a BOOT CODE all in Binary, then put in the paper-tape. I was working at Goddard Space Flight Center. At that time in the mid 70's NASA was still using this type of CORE memory type computer to track satellites like Landsat. The "Operators" that worked there had to do all their maintenance in 90 minute windows. That was how long it took the satellite they were tracking at that time to orbit Earth. I doubt anyone will recall the M642B, but we had that kind as well. Ours was refurbished from a battleship, and still had the "Battle Ready" button on the top even though it was more or less disabled, it was an interesting artifact.

Hi,

I took the poll as to mean the first computer owned not used. My first computer to be used by me was a IBM 360/20 a 16 bit system with a card reader and printer output. Cards are a pain. I would try and convince card punchers to create my decks by basically bribing them. My typing skills are fair but to punch a 500+ deck takes time. Let alone setting up wire boards for unit records to process the decks.

I later moved on to the DEC PDP-11 based machines and found that a move forward. Sure, booting required punching a tape for the reader but that was a short creation so I could create my boot tape. Better than stepping switches.

The micro-computing field opened doors that I would have only dreamed of working in. My professional work was micro based until my retirement. I love to design and build interfaces. I started out in programming but once the micro started becoming popular I wanted to use my electronics instead of just programming. Luckily my fields allowed me to have the best of both worlds.

Have fun & enjoy!

Did you not write out your programs on coding sheets and get the data-prep girls to punch the cards?? That was the way the companies I worked at did it. I only had to use the card punch to do the corrections.

Hi,

Yes, but working at a University required one to do most of the work. Schedule Unit record times to do anything. If you worked from a grant then priorities were set but sometimes you would get pushed back. So whenever possible I would get the ladies to work my decks. Re-submission after a patch was not always doable since you would fall back into a Que.

I would sometimes wait to submit at late night job so as to get in. Thus a well placed bribe would be easier to get by with. Even with a project grant number you sometimes would float your job.

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!