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My first computer was one I designed and built myself, starting the day the 8080 CPU was released, in late 1974. There was no commercially available microcomputer in those days. By Feb. 1975 I had it up and running, with a huge 1K of RAM! I had to put a small boot program using the front panel switches, and I had an old 33ASR teletype with a paper tape punch and reader for mass storage, as well as keyboard input and printed output.
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My first was a Philco C2 (named for the building that housed it). It had a fantastic 28k of RAM. Data and programs were loaded using 80 byte punch cards. Due to limitations, we could only load 2007 data cards. If we exceeded the data limit, I would have to do the calculation on a Friden calculator to determine which of the cards I could yank to complete the run on the C2.
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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My first was a Commodore Pet 2001 with no HDD, no FDD, and no cassette tape drive. I had to type programs in every time.
My second was a Commodore Pet 4000 with the integrated "datasette" cassette tape drive.
Third was a Franklin Ace 2000 (Apple IIe clone) with a 5MB HDD and 5.25" floppy. I added a Bernoulli box with two 10MB cartridges the next year.
I kept them in the garage until about 15 years ago, when my wife made me start "disposing" of all my old computer equipment.
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OriginalGriff wrote:
What was your first "real" computer? (I'm not counting Spectrums and their ilk here: if it had a cassette tape it doesn't count )
Mine was a Xerox 820 with the dual-processor option plus an eight-inch floppy drive and an eight-inch, eight megabyte hard drive in a separate case. It was already eight years old when I got it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_820
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My first real computer was a 16K TRS-80 Color Computer; I know that may not fit your specs as to it being a "real" computer. I started with a cassette tape, but quickly (within a year) convinced my parents to get me a floppy drive.
I later moved to the Color Computer 3, and eventually upgraded it from 128K to 512K. I still have both of those machines, and they both work today.
My last Radio Shack machine - which would fit your definition - was a Tandy 1100HD; it was also my first "laptop" (certainly not a luggable like the Kaypro, but nothing like today's lightweight beasts). It had a 20Mb hard drive, and a 3.5 inch floppy. I still have that machine as well (though I don't know if it still works - I haven't turned it on in ages).
My next machines after that were an Amiga 2000, then an Amiga 1200. Then I got a 486 DX2/50 after Commodore bit the dust - plus I fell in love with the game, Myst, at the store - and had to have that system to play it.
As far a PC CPUs are concerned, my favorite has always been the AMD 586/133 - a weird hybrid; basically a crazy-fast 486 - at the time, it could outperform some of the lower-end pentiums (back when there was a serious AMD/Intel rivalry), for a fraction of the cost. It could be overclocked to 166 MHz fairly reliably, too.
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Acorn Archimedes 305. A great machine for hacking about in both the hardware and software sense.
Great BBC basic with inline ARM assembler. I remember changing a magazine mandelbrot program to do 64 bit arithmetic. Lots of folks hacked the !Sprites files so icons for programs were unrecognisable on 'hackers' machines.
Matthew Broadbent of the Auckland Acorn Users Group created a sound sampler by attaching resistors to the parallel port lines. A binary chop style algorithm established the analog to digital value. I hacked the ST-506 cable to split the cylinders of a big external Hard Drive so it looked like two disks (too many cylinders).
I've never messed with my subsequent PCs like I messed with the Archimedes.
I am a set of distortions of spacetime. Jeremy Thomson
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I have an idea for an article, a not yet another CRUD implementation for the delectation of the community. The CRUD part is minimal though as I want to concentrate on an oft ignored part of the development process.
Listen carefully as I shall say this only once*, it will be looking at design decisions rather than just code. To do this I need a simple idea that will be [a] big enough to elicit decent ideas, yet [ii] small enough to not swamp the rest of the article. So, I ask you one and all for suggestions. I am looking at a web based solution, but not one that is front-end heavy.
I have dismissed the idea of a blog as it has been done too many times already; both here and elsewhere. A micro-commerce idea might work or some twisted hack on social media.
I will give credit [if required] to whoever gives me the bestest idea.
* We've been watching more Allo, Allo than is actually healthy.
veni bibi saltavi
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Software to do a frame-by-frame analysis of "One night in Paris"? 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Just for that, you can go to the soapbox and read the article I just added there...
veni bibi saltavi
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That's...um...disturbing
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I'd only need a "D" program for that; the "CRU" wouldn't serve any purpose.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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A project management site is too big?
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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One idea I thought of was an agile type storyboard / backlog / planner / oh feck we forgot that type thing, but I thought it might be too big for the purposes I had. I'll thunk about that.
veni bibi saltavi
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How about a Kanban board, or "sprint manager" for Agile development?
However, to be honest, I'm not actually sure what you're trying to accomplish.
Marc
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What I am trying to get to is a sort of user story / epic to describe a problem and then to walk through the design and development decisions that leads to. I started with this as an original requirement artefact:
Requirement: We are a small software company. We produce bespoke solutions and are currently working to a very rigid Waterfall Methodology. We want to be more agile, but need a way to record our backlogs and manage our sprints.
We have multiple projects and our staff regualarly work on different clients' requirements at any time. As an example Bob does pretty much all the UI/UX work for all our software and only hands over the mundane bits to some of the juniors. There is some infrestucture stuff that we do that is shared across most of our work, but on the whole projects are self contained.
A fair proportion of our business is done on-site and so the guys need to be able to log what is happening remotely. As I see it, to start with we will need to be able to record the user stories, prioritise them and build up sprints. Once the development work starts we will need to be able to record work done and monitor progress through metrics such as velocity.
I want to then use that to show how it works in real world thinking.
veni bibi saltavi
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Nagy Vilmos wrote: I want to then use that to show how it works in real world thinking.
I was putting something like that together with my articles on Relationship Oriented Programming[^]. There's some existing software out there (I think even Microsoft does something) but I wanted something really flexible. That for me is they key for this kind of productivity software -- it needs to be flexible -- and for that, I found that it needs to support dynamic relationships, because software development, user stories, sprints, bugs, tasks, documentation, all that, is extremely dynamic relationally. At least, if you want your team to also be flexible and able to respond quickly, the tools you use need to support that kind of work -- the tools can't get in the way.
Another interesting thing is visualization -- I find software development to be a living, dynamic thing, and so often, it's neat to see the relationships in a fluid, dynamic manner, and I find Force Directed Graphs a great visualization of that fluidity.
Not sure any of the above helps, but I guess I would start with how you express dynamic relationships and content.
Marc
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Financial Account management, ala Mint or Billguard (not as extensive, mind you, just something basic)...
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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A search engine. Google is just a simple form with one button.
modified 20-Oct-19 21:02pm.
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How about a sports league management system?
You need to enter teams, assign them to divisions (maybe in a season), pair them up in matches, record the results, display match results & league tables, and as an extension, manage promotion/relegation between seasons. Then think about cup fixtures that are played, but don't affect the league standings.
Team & fixtures can either be added singly or imported from a file.
You can decide to leave chunks of this out to adjust the size of the problem, or even add them as time goes on to demonstrate agility .
Regards, Stewart
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That's a fairly good idea. I've yet to see a decent package that meets the need of a Little League Baseball division.
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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I was reading a CodeProject article and noticed that it was marked as deleted; I was surprised as the article was good and looked at the author:
http://www.codeproject.com/script/Membership/View.aspx?mid=2757697[^]
Best article on C#/Database, MVP with 52,752 points.
So, I'm wondering, can there be a good reason for someone to delete his good articles?
(except, of course, account hijacking)
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This[^] reply (and the thread) should answer your question.
Not sure if it's a good idea to reference that thread from the Lounge. Please nuke this message if you want. 
Your time will come, if you let it be right.
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