I
LOVE threads like this — what great memories!
My first computer was a home-build from 1976, based upon the COSMAC Elf, a construction article in
Popular Electronics magazine. It featured an RCA 1802 processor and a whopping 256 BYTES of RAM! Here's a picture of the original as it appeared in the article.
I wire-wrapped my own version of it, which I expanded, adding 2K of RAM, a couple of 2716 EPROMs, a HEX keypad and LEDs for all the data and address lines. When I first built my ELF, I had trouble filling up the 256 bytes of RAM just loading simple machine code programs that would monitor a switch and turn on a LED. Bu ya gotta start somewhere!
Here's a link that shows
MY COSMAC ELF sitting on the kitchen table sometime before I reluctantly 'let it go' sometime 25 or so years ago... It was the first in a long line of home computing.
Next up was a MOS TECHNOLOGY KIM-1 single board computer, which I had connected to an old KSR35 teletype machine in my basement. I paid about $250 for it some time in the 70s, and sold it for just under $2K in 2012.
After that, I built Clive Sinclair's dandy little ZX-81 kit, decked out with a 64K ram pack, full sized keyboard, a 300-baud Byte-Back modem, ZX printer and several small wirewrap boards that I could hang on the Z80 bus and drive with BASIC or Z80 assembly language programs. Examples include: a digital musical doorbell that played the theme songs from
Car 54 Where Are You? and
Leave It To Beaver, an EPROM reader/blaster, serial port, and an interface for a moving sign board populated by alphanumeric Panaplex displays. Untold hours of fun & frustration writing bad programs!
During this time, I also acquired one new and several used Timex-Sinclair 1000s and a TS-2068, the American version of the Sinclair Spectrum.
Then I 'moved up' in the computer world and built an Apple II+ clone kit from
James (later,
Jameco) Electronics. I bought a 128K memory board for that, and then added a PCPI CP/M card, and spent a lot of time writing stupid little programs for my own amusement. I already had a leg up from writing the Z80 assembly code for my ZX81, so switching to ASM80 and CP/M wasn't too much of a reach. Got my first hard disk for that machine: an Apple 'Sider'. Recollection is fuzzy, but I think it was 20MB and cost well over $700...
Also along about then, I started haunting computer trade shows and bought several cheap used CP/M machines: a Morrow MD-3, a Kaypro 4/84, a Tandy TRS-80 with an external 8" disk drive enclosure & 4 drives.
Finally, in 1992, I fell into the PC trap and bought my first IBM-compatible. This effectively ended my hobby sideline of building and programming electronics projects, because the graphics and complexity of the software were beyond my capability, written by teams of programmers rather than a guy sitting at a keyboard like me. The stuff you could get for free -- legally! -- was light years beyond what I could hope to create at home, and I became a computer user, forever hanging up my
hardware hacker hat.
I've been through a succession of PCs since then, building all but one — an HP that I was given to us by my employer in a mass PC-at-home program they ran for awhile.
I continue build and keep around most of the PCs until they die or take up too much space, They're disposable, now and not worth mentioning. mostly generics that I put together from purchased parts. All the pre-PC stuff is gone now. The oldest things remaining are a Dell Latitude (Win XP) laptop, and Acer Netbook and a Windows XP Professional desktop. Everything else has been updated to Windows 10, and I don't have anything new enough that will run Windows 11.
I do fiddle a little with linux, but don't use it on a frequent basis. Maybe a few times/year.
That is all!