VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

[glittlefield]

Our first family computer was an Atari 800 with 16K of RAM and a cassette drive. My dad and I would go to the user group meetings and learn how to do all kinds of nifty programming in Atari BASIC.

The fun part was loading programs from tape. You could here the data through the speaker of the TV and it sounded like an EBS test tone. One glitch in the load and you'd have to start over. We were hot stuff the day Dad brought home an 810 floppy disc drive.
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Greg Littlefield
VO-BB Member #59

[todd ellis]

i started off on the TRS-80 - complete with cassette tape drive. it was awesome. some programs took 30 minutes just to LOAD!


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"i know philip banks": todd ellis
who's/on/1st?

[glittlefield]

I learned on the all-in-one TRS80 (model III?) with a cassette drive in high school. The previous year's class used big, honking IBMs with punch cards. My family got the Atari for Christmas that year so I had BASIC commands coming out of my ears then.
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Greg Littlefield
VO-BB Member #59

[Scott Pollak]

I absolutely am LOVING the direction this thread has taken. Thanks for getting it going, Todd.

BTW, my $200,000,000 Seagate 2TB drive shipped today. I can't wait. I'll be able to back up everything in my entire life and still have 98% storage capacity left over!
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Scott R. Pollak
Clients include Pandora, NPR Atlanta, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Humana, Publix, UPS, AT&T, HP, Xerox and more.

www.voicebyscott.com

[Boothvoice]

I wrote my first v/o script on a manual typewriter and had to be dragged into the world of IBM Selectrics with the rotating ball...Of course, the year I was born the Brooklyn Dodgers were in the world series. I still don't understand the title of this thread.
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Tom Booth
"Everything You Need in the Booth"
www.boothvoice.com

[Bruce]

I remember in the mid '80s my wife at the time buying a Royal dedicated word processor. New they were about $10,000. She got hers used for $5,000.

My first computer was on of these "laptop" models, if your lap was the size of a small coffee table, for about $3,000 in 1979. One 5" floppy to load the operating system and another for data.



B
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VO-BB Member #31 Enlisted June, 2005

I'm not a Zoo, but over the years I've played one on radio/TV. .

[Rick Riley]

When I was growing up, my father was National Product Marketing manager for IBM. He introduced the Selectric to the world. We had them all over the house. They revolutionized typing. No more jammed keys. Then came correcting tape. You could hit 'backspace' and it would erase everything you had ever done, faster than you had done it.

He also helped introduce the IBM 360, in 1964, which pretty much changed the face of computig. I remember he used to bring home these trays of patch cords that looked like Don King's hair stuffed in box. They had multiple trays for the computer and they slid them in to route a variety of functions.

My class project in 6th grade was 2 to the 64th power... on a computer. The answer was 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 or eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-four billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred sixteen."

To get it he took me to the office, had to program the punch cards, put them through a sorter, which I loved watching because it sounded like playing cards in my bicycle spokes, then put the cards in the computer, which then spit out reams of 'track paper' on a matrix printer.

I took the reams to school and since no one had ever seen anything quite like it, I got an 'A'.

IBM revolutionized the PC industry as well. My Dad is 83 now... and the old IBM guy, for the last several years, has used a Mac.

[Lee Gordon]

[CC Heim]