I’ve been interested in computers for almost as long as I can remember. The first time I saw one in real life, though, was way back in 1975 when my dad brought me to work one day. Nothing could have prepared my six year old mind for the coolness of “Spacewar!” beaming from a black & white vector graphics terminal connected to a giant PDP-11 minicomputer rack. Shortly thereafter, I went on a school field trip to a bank where we got to see an IBM System/360 in action, and we were all presented with a blank punch card on the way out! I guess you could say that I’ve been hooked on computers ever since.

I thought it would be fun to document some of the machines that I’ve used over the years — along with some that I continue to use as part of my retrocomputing hobby — with particular emphasis on the ones I felt had real character. Following is a brief timeline of my interest in computers, along with descriptions of some that I’ve rescued from the dustbin.

The “CoCo”, as it was affectionately called, was my parents’ first personal computer, so I never actually got a chance to take this one apart. It had a pretty slow Motorola 6809E processor, only came with 4K of RAM, and could only display four colors, but the price was hard to beat at the time. Despite its limitations, my dad was able to use an assembler to successfully program a “horse racing” game that was a big hit at “Vegas night,” a fundraising event at my grade school. This was the first computer that I ever tried to write Basic programs on, and it actually wasn’t too bad once we upgraded it to 16K of memory, although I honestly can’t remember ever doing anything too amazing with it. Mostly, I just used the “Typing Tutor” program to try to learn how to type, which is kind of ironic given that this machine had one of the worst “chiclet-style” keyboards ever made.

In the early eighties I decided I wanted to buy a computer of my own, but since my only income at the time came from mowing neighbors’ lawns at $10 a pop, my budget was very limited. The two main candidates when I first started looking were the Sinclair ZX80 and the Commodore Vic 20, but I ruled these out pretty quickly given their limitations. Then in early 1983, the TI-99/4A dropped in price from $300 to $150, at which point I picked one up at Skagg’s Drugs at the local Ranch Mart along with a $50 Extended Basic cartridge featuring Sprite graphics! I liked the way the TI-99 looked, and it actually had a fairly powerful 16-bit TMS processor. I had a lot of fun learning to write Basic programs on this machine, and with my Dad’s help, I was able to put together a decent clone of the Intellivision game Star Strike. After a while, I became interested in possibly doing some assembler programming using a $50 add-on package, but unfortunately adding a floppy disc was a fairly expensive proposition, requiring the insanely expensive $1500 extension box. There was just no way I was ever going to be able to afford one at the time. There were only a few cartridge games available, and the quality of the ones I had was pretty atrocious.