Brad DeLong reminisces about his first computer…

The first computer I ever programmed was like this one:

InfoDog, MB-F Newsletter, October 1992: a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP 1170. It came complete with 128K of memory, 100 megabytes of disk, [15 MHz]…. All this great hardware cost a mere $200,000.

Due to the fact that my laptop hard disk started screaming like a Bain Sidhe last week, I now have a $2,000 MacBookPro:

2G of memory, 92GB of hard disk, running at 2 GHz.

My first computer was a Commodore C64.  I bought it as a step up from the ColecoVision game station I had, and because computers had started to tweek the curiosity of my inner techno geek.  At first I used it to decipher shortwave teletype traffic.  Later, as my business building architectural models grew, I bought a word processor for it, Paperclip, and CalKit, a spreadsheet made by the same company, Batteries Included.  But even then my eyes were set on the ultimate personal computer: the IBM PC…a monster of a machine, with a whole 640k of ram and huge 340k capacity floppy disk drives.  It was well out of my reach, until parts to build one yourself started appearing at the local HAM fests. 

Building my first computer turned out to be much easier then building the Heathkits I so loved back then.  It was mostly just a matter of buying the right circuit boards and plugging everything together inside a standard sized case.  I decided on a clamshell case for the ease of getting at the computer’s innards (the FCC later banned them due to the amount of radio noise they leaked).  I bought two of the best quality disk drives of the time, Teac 360k double sided-double density drives, and the best monochrome monitor made, a Princeton Graphics amber screen.  The monitor plugged into a Hercules Graphics card.  I bought a copy of IBM-PC DOS 3.2 for it, rather then MS-DOS, on the grounds that if the computer I was building could boot it, then its hardware was absolutely IBM compatible.  I remember the thrill of turning it on for the first time, and the heart rending shock when I got a series of error beeps during the POST test and nothing happened.  It turned out I had a jumper pin on the motherboard set wrong (I had it set for a CGA color graphics card instead of a monochrome video card…there was no plug and play back then…).  On the second try the computer booted, and I beheld my first A:\> prompt.

I remember later that night, sitting on the edge of my bed, staring in a kind of awe at the thing I’d just built.  This was no toy computer, for playing games.  This was the real thing!  How little did I know, even then, how much that computer was going to change my life.  By today’s standards that 8088 PC-XT compatible is as much a toy as the Commodore it replaced.  But that computer was literally my doorway to the edge of the universe.