First personal computer nostalgia

From: Hans Franke <Hans.Franke_at_mch20.sbs.de>
Date: Thu Nov 16 04:40:09 2000

> 1977: My first 'PC' was a KIM-1, which now resides in the Santa Barbara
> Fortress of Schloss Marvin.
> [...]

First ?

Well this woul be a never finished 4 Bit CPU build up from real
transistors in '76. Back than, at a training lesson, I did a
discrete NAND gate at the size of a bottle cap which stated the
thing. The task was to put 4 NANDs on a Eurocard board (4x6" ?)
with a defined connector - and I did put 'em as compact as possible
into the corners - as mirror images of each other. Doing this I
realized that I may put a 4 bit adder on just one board, and
it took of - just to be scraped somewhere halveways and replaced

in '77 by a design around a Valvo/Signetics 2650 CPU with the
terrible hughe MEM of 64 Bytes. All TTL, and horrible expensive -
I had no idea, and the TTL list was my best friend :) Data input
via switches and trigger button, output via 8 LEDs :) Next was a

KIM in 1978 ( I couldn't aford the AIM :) and in

1979 an Apple ][ - I had to take a loan to buy it - just to be
drafted half a year later.

1983 a PC-Clone joined my living room (almost as expensive as
the real one) - no, not for programming - I still did all IBM
Jobs with Turbo Pascal in CP/M on my Apple - transfered them to
the PC and did a recompile, colour adjustment ad teyboard test.

1984/5 Finaly a PC replaced my Apple, but again not a IBM, not
even a clone, but the Siemens PC-D (in my mind still the best
ever x86 Computer).

>From there on nothin special anymore :(

Oh yes, and another footnote in 1983 - the PET - the first computer
I bought just to have it... basicly the start of my collection.

:))
Gruss
H.


--
VCF Europa 2.0 am 28./29. April 2001 in Muenchen
http://www.vintage.org/vcfe
http://www.homecomputer.de/vcfe
Received on Thu Nov 16 2000 - 04:40:09 GMT

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