At a business dinner last night that Reltio hosted, I was engaged with some of our guests (mostly Gen Xers like myself) in a discussion of how far software and hardware had come during our careers. Today computing power, and storage is ubiquitously available with merely a card swipe, and elastically scalable in the cloud.
Discussion of job history, led to programming in languages on business machines dating back to the IBM AS/400 and RS6000s in the 90s, still further back to Tandem, Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
I decided to up the historical stakes and ask our guests what their first ever computer. was. Responses ranged from Commodore PET, Atari 800 to the Commodore 64. I think I had them all beat with the obscure and relatively rare Sinclair 80, which I got as a birthday gift while I lived in London, UK with my Uncle.
The Sinclair 80 came without a screen (you plugged the video output into a TV as a monitor), and you saved your programs you wrote to a cassette tape. I recall painstakingly typing in BASIC code and attempting to save to tape, only having it crash/fail as I attempted to “record” the lines of code that I had written. And it came with a whopping 1KB of RAM!
Such nostalgia. Anyway as with anything vintage, I found someone selling a Sinclair 80 for 450 GBP on ebay. Chalk it down to another item I should have saved, including my mint Marvel comic books when I was 8, for my retirement 🙂
What was your first computer, and what nostalgia does it bring back when you think about the first program or game you played on it? Do share.
