in reply to My first computer was...

You have an 8088 on the list? That's pretty much the worlds most obscure processor, and also the one that I learned assembler on. These VM thingies came as a real shock, I can tell you*.

The Apple ][e will always be my object of lust, rivalling the 486. I can remember going around to a friends place and playing Conan the Barbarian on his ][e. That was awesome compared to the best game I had (at the time, it was "Pitfall II", or the "Ancient Art of War").

I actually feel reassured by the choices presented in the poll. If there were five flavours of PDP, I'd feel young. If there were five flavours of Visual Basic, I'd feel old. But as the poll stands, it is "Not too heavy, not too light - just right." But you'd have to be Australian to get that reference.

* I'm being serious about the VM thingies. I had a big discussion (read argument) with a friend of my age about why you couldn't arbitrarily write to arbitrary memory addresses to affect arbitrary peripherals arbitrarily.

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

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Re: Re: My first computer was...
by seattlejohn (Deacon) on Jul 08, 2003 at 15:46 UTC
    Unless I'm growing senile, the 8088 (at 4.77 MHz) was the microprocessor in the original IBM PC, which was hardly an obscure machine, as well as its successor, the PC/XT. (There was a 286-based XT later, I think.) Isn't the 8088 just an 8086 with 8-bit instead of 16-bit bus to save some money in the supporting components?

    Anyway, I answered 8088 because that was in the first computer I actually bought with my own money (not a trivial expense at 12 years of age, either, but it certainly ended up being a good long-term investment). Still, for some reason I've got a real soft spot for the Z80-based CP/M systems we used in school for a while. They were actually connected via a primitive network to a centralized 10MB hard disk. Learning assembly language and tinkering with the boot loaders on those things was fun, I must admit.

            $perlmonks{seattlejohn} = 'John Clyman';

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