Computers I have known

I bought my KIM off the doorman of the bank where I worked (in the mailroom). He mentioned he had a computer for sale on the message board in the hallway and I went with him (on the back of a rickety old motorcycle, scariest thing I've ever done) to his house in Almere, came back home by train with a bag full of bits.

This particular KIM-1 was sold as a kit which had been partially completed and some of the parts were installed the wrong way. So I got to practice double sided PCB parts extraction for a while before being able to program it.

The FSK chip eventually got cannibalized to do duty in a home-brew modem for the BBC (which had a dedicated serial port).

There is nothing sadder than old computer hardware and what you paid for it.

I shudder to think what I paid for my first portable PC (the size of a very large toaster), my first laptop and my first > 100 MB hard drive.

64Kbit of ram, cost $50/chip (bits, not bytes) and it needed an awful lot of them to populate a motherboard, cache chips were even more expensive.

For one project I hacked together a memory expansion that held a full page of data to be sent to a laser printer as a bitmap at 300 dpi, weeks of wire wrapping and a bill for the memory that you could easily buy a very nice car for. (But it did give me the ability to do grayscale printing when everybody else was still stuck with dithering :) ). Operating on an in-warranty $10K or so laser printer to be able to modulate the laser in real time as it lights up the drum is lots of fun.

387s, Weiteks, DSP boards, now FPGAs and GPUs and an endless lists of expensive goodies at the bleeding edge of computing (bleeding edge as far as ordinary mortals were concerned). I still have a bunch of Indys laying in the basement that I paid ~$10K a piece for, they're worth next to nothing now. The funnies bit about those computers is that today - a good 15 years later - I still use their keyboards, through a ps/2 to USB dongle. Those keyboards are both fantastic to type on and practically indestructible.

We bought a PDP-11 off NikHef for scrap in the 80's and used it to design electronics and route PCBs, it had cost a small fortune new.

Yep, my first own computer was an Atari ST plus 20MB hard disk (probably the same setup as described in the article). IIRC it was 1800 DM for the computer and the disk each, i.e. ˜1800 Euro total in todays money or ˜3600 Euro total when adjusted for inflation. The positive side is: I can justify that it is reasonable to still spend that amount today.

I previously left a nostalgic list of the computers I owned on a HN comment last year - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052679

One thing I didn't previously mention is that the first computer I saw & used was a Sinclair ZX-81. It was my best friends but he couldn't make head and tail of it. So when I visited he left it mainly for me to use and that started my addiction to programming :)

Large dataset addiction :)