As Bad Science [High Praise!] mentioned when he sent me this link, this is related to Frank J’s recent PJ Media column about whining:
[YouTube direct link] (Viewer #6,312,898)
The message is this: really, please, stop bitching about your worthless little first-world problems and start appreciating the miracles of technology and free markets.
[Sent from my $300 1.7 gigahertz laptop with 1 GB of RAM by a guy whose first computer was a $300 .9 megahertz TRS-80 Color Computer with 4K of RAM]
Hey, while we’re at it, tell me about how crappy your first computer was.
So, basically, a liberal douche whining about other liberal Occupy Wall Street douches…and not even realizing it.
My first computer was a KIM-1 single board computer with 1.1 K of RAM. We soldered an 8 K kit together which cost $300. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1
My first computer was a386 SX 16, with 1 meg of RAM. I think the hard drive was 10MB. It had a 3″ floppy and a 5 1/2″ floppy drive.
I used it mostly for word processing for college assignments, but also for some games. Those old DOS text games were good. Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. King’s Quest. The video games were so cool: Pong. Breakout.
Harvey, the audio in the video has a bit of reverb. Could you see if someone’s uploaded a better version?
A few years back, somebody gave my friend a large collection of games on 5 1/2″ floppies. To give you a literally graphic idea of how far we’ve advanced, some of the games were actually pron — text based pron games.
In MY day we didn’t have computers! We had rocks, and to count we had to move rocks from one pile to another! That’s the way it was, and WE LIKED IT!
First computer- TRS-80 Model 1. A whopping 16k of memory, tape drive to store programs, low-res black and white screen. Good times, good tims…e
My first computer was a TI-99/4A with 3.0 MHz processing and 256 bytes of RAM and 16KB VRAM. It was around 1988, and I was about 10 years old. You hooked it up to the television (the one I hooked it up to was the old style that was a vacuum tube television inside of a lot of wood). I got it as a hand-me-down from my uncle, and he didn’t have the tape recorder (hard drive) for it, so I learned BASIC programming on it, taking sometimes as long as 6 hours to make a simple program, like a slot machine. Then my parents would tell me to turn it off because I had been “playing” on it too long, and since I had no way of saving anything, all of my programming disappeared forever. I begged them to let me keep it on and just turn off the TV or change the channel (I think you had to have it on channel 4 to see the computer screen), but they didn’t want to waste the “massive” amounts of electricity required to do a few calculations per year to keep it running. Nor did they realize that their 10 yr old was learning how to program a friggin computer. It was my fault, I guess, for showing off the end result of my labors instead of showing what it took to create these “games”.
So you can imagine my happiness when I got my first “pc”, a 486 with a 66 MHz processor, 8 MB of RAM, and an actual built-in hard drive. And a screen! Man, it was like being in the future all of a sudden. My dad kept calling it a “word processor” and was upset that I would use it for things like playing games, making games in BASIC, learning how DOS works, that sort of stuff.
Now he calls me whenever his computer is broke. Ironic.
When I was a tot, long before PCs, I asked a lot of questions. I imagined having a device, about the size of a hassock, that would answer any question you asked it. Now, you can carry such a device in your pocket, thanks to government-funded roads, bridges, internets, and research involving shrimp and treadmills.
But we deserve much more, and the rich should pay their fair share to make it happen. New executive mandate: free happy helmets for all you sick little monkeys!
All together now, “Hopey hopey, change change…”
My first computer was a 4 MHz. Z-80 with 64K of RAM that I built in 1978. I think Frank was in the womb at the time and Harvey might have been shoveling coal on an old aircraft carrier or something.
Anyway, it rocked. Programming in Z-80 assembler was such fun. Come to think of it, I’ve never had a “crappy computer.” At one time, we had 10 at home, all networked, including a honey pot. Hehe.
I bought my first computer in 1993. It was, I think, a Gateway 80486, 25 MHz, which I thought was pretty nice.
As for the first computer that I ever programmed, here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101
Olivetti actually called it a calculator, but it was really a computer. Odd machine. No main memory for data, just registers. The high school
that I attended got one in the autumn of 1968, courtesy, I think, of the mothers’ club.
Amazing how all these first computers were all dumber than even the dumbest smartphone today.
Good thing the government’s been continually upgrading the industry with tough, new performance standards every year!
And I was right there with Keln – I had no external memory storage device on my CoCo, so every time I turned the thing off – POOF! There goes a good hour or more of hunt & peck typing.
10 PRINT “HELLO HARVEY”
20 PRINT “HOW ARE YOU DOING?”
30 IF “FINE” GOTO 200
40 IF “CRAPPY” GOTO 100
100 PRINT “THAT SUCKS”
110 GOTO 300
200 PRINT “I’M DOING FINE TOO”
300 PRINT “SORRY, MY PARENTS TOLD ME TO TURN THIS OFF”
310 PRINT “COMPUTER DEATH!”
320 END
My brother was the manager of a Radio Shack so of course my first computer was a Trash 80.
4k memory, upgraded to 16k, programmable via plug-in program cartridge port, or via cassette player, linked to a Zenith TV via cable to antenna connector.
The only game I had was Star Trek (never shoot a tribble!)
I think I still have it in a box somewhere if anyone wants an antique for their museum.
@Keln, I see you suffered through “basic” as well.
SoB – Whaddya mean “suffered”?
With BASIC, you had the magical power to make a TV do what you wanted it to do.
It was like being a 16-color Gandalf!
My 1st computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. It came with 2k memory and could be expanded to 16k. It hooked up to a TV for video and a cassette recorder for a hard drive. Woot, I was styling. I still remember how excited I was when I wrote my first program- a single dice.
The first computer I did any programming on was a mainframe at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I spent a couple weeks at a summer camp for high schoolers in 1981 learning some FORTRAN. Programming was done on a legal tablet, then transferred to 80 column punch cards which were then run through a compiler.
The first one I owned was a TI-99/4A in 1982. I think it had 16K RAM. I bought a tape recorder to store the programs on.
The first one I could get online with was a Mac IISi.
My first computer an IBM PC no hard drive 8086 chip, CGA graphics and a daisy wheel printer. a friend at college had the timex sinclair. They had the motto ” why spend hundreds of dollars to discover you hate computers”.
I used to be able to put my wife to sleep with talk of CGA to Super VGA, 8086, 286, 386, 486, pentium and beyond. Lull her right to sleep.
First computer? Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, whose bright shiny new feature was: “lowercase” characters consisting of small capitals, and a full travel keyboard. 256 bytes “scratchpad” RAM + 16 KB VDP (graphics RAM). Stored data on a cassette tape. Cost over $500 in 1981.
Speaking of computing in the Dark Ages of the 20th Century:
http://winningateverything.com/13409
My first computer was the mighty Commodore 64! Bow before its awesome 64K of of RAM and cartridge-based storage! Tremble before its optional tape recorder for even more external programming fun! Owning it automatically makes you the coolest kid on the block–ever so much more sophisticated than mere Atari owners! And with only a couple of hours of laborious typing, you can make it print text responses in various colors or even draw a polygon; how great is that?
At White Sands Proving Grounds (White Sands Missile Range today), before EDVAC and ENIAC, they were using a computer built entirely of telephon switches. It ran the same program over and over. It was used to calculate ballistics of a missile, predicting the position x of where the missile should be at time y. It would then check its calculation against radar data, correct its postitional error, then perform the iteration again. rinse, lather, repeat. The computer was the size of a small house. If a speck of dust (and New Mexico is made of dust) got between the contacts, it would cause a rapidly propagating error. The techs would have to drag out bedsheet size diagrams to try to determine where in the switches the error occurred, and clean the contacts of that switch. The programming itself was a circuit board with a doodoo load of spaghetti wiring plugged into various contacts. It caused a lot of heat. It could easily have caused global warming all by its lonesome.
The bloody thing was massive and kludgy, but it was faster and more accurate than having to do all the calculations by hand, which would have been impossible to do during the actual missile test. The computer provided realtime predictions and corrections as long as everything went perfectly. The techies were thrilled when they finally got a computer composed of vaccuum tubes. They were ecstatic when computers began to be built of transistors, and nearly orgasmic when integrated circuits came along.
Ha, Tin Man, I had a Timex Sinclair too. Came with Frogger, or a bastardized version of it, that took forever to load from cassette
My first computer had a 5GB hard drive. In 2004. Shortly thereafter, it met it’s maker in a puff of smoke.
My first computer was a slide-rule. I still have it, it still works, power source is still good enough, and it doesn’t seem any slower that it did all those many decades ago. Display resolution beats out todays computers, after all, it has a real “retina” display.
My next computer was an HP calculator. Wasn’t as fast, and more digits doesn’t mean more accurate. Batteries kept running down. Still have it. Still works, but seems really, really slow.
The computer I’m using today will be replace with something bigger, faster and generally better in a year, and it need to be.
First computer, Rockwell AIM-65, 1MHz 6502 , 20 character single line alphanumeric LED display, 1K RAM standard, stored programs externally on a standard cassette tape recorder which you had to provide and fabricate the cable for. Programmable in assembly laanguage, FORTH and BASIC (and maybe other languages, those were the ones I used. Cost about $450.
#25 – La Longue Carabine,
You win! I grew up reading classic 50’s and 60’s sci-fi where the hero would zip across the galaxy in a rocket ship, zap bad guys with lasers, cross alien landscapes with a rocket pack, and then do his calculations with a slide-rule. I thought slide-rules were magic. (tried to teach myself how to use one but failed.)
#27 – 5of7
I still read old pulp sci-fi on my Kindle. I’ve got 300+ stories still to go through.
I like to see what they got right and what completely obvious thing blindsided them. Keeps me humble when I predict what is coming down the pipe next.
By the way, do you wear one of those clingy costume that covers you completely but hides nothing? Are you a gal? Answer the second question first.
No and no. Geez, this conversation got creepy fast. Frank? Harvey? I think you better keep an eye on this guy! (Tip – Only Jimmy and ussjimmycarter are allowed to talk about sex here, and then only when it involves Hillary Clinton – long standing tradition. yep.)
Oh, wait a minute, that was a Star Trek: Voyager reference, wasn’t it? Never mind.
#29, 30
Sorry, I was channeling Groucho Marx in “Duck Soup”: Will you marry me? Did he leave you any money? Answer the second question first.
I am aware that not all Borg are babes, (sexist: -20 pts.) and most wear those very modest black outfits. Except the queen bee, who is SO VERY creepy that I have no idea what she wears because I am looking for Ralph in the nearest trash can whenever she is on screen!