All photos © copyright as of the given date.
Commodore PET.
The first
microcomputer I used was the
Commodore PET
way back at the end of my sophomore year
in high school. Our school bought four of the 8K PETs, complete with chicklet keyboard
and built-in tape drive. The photo here was taken at the 30th International Science
and Engineering Fair, where I was exhibiting my work on "Computerized Chemistry". To
the best of my knowledge this was the first commercially-produced microcomputer to be
used in an exhibit at the ISEF.
Photo shown here is from a October 1981 presentation given
to a delegation of educators from the People's Republic of China on a program I wrote
that would have the PET collect and analyze gas chromatography data.
Apple II.
My first
experience with the
Apple II was when I was working for
Dr. John W. Moore,
at that time a chemistry professor at Eastern Michigan University. The Microcomputer
Lab there is where both this photo and the one for the DEC 10 was taken. I got hooked
on the Apple II, and bought myself a system in the summer of 1981. Back in those days
a 64K computer with color graphics was a real thrill!
PDP 8/I.
The PDP 8 series
was a very popular minicomputer put out by Digital Equipment Corporation. I worked
on this machine as part of a high school research project back in the summer of 1979.
The task was to connect this computer to the PDP 11/40 on campus and use it as a
"superterminal" for such tasks as off-line storage (using paper tape!), graph generation
using an X-Y plotter, and remote printer facility. In the photo I'm toggling in
commands on the front panel - today's computer manufacturers have taken a lot of fun
out of their products!
DEC 10.
The DEC 10 was
a large mainframe computer which I worked on when at Eastern Michigan University.
Note the old-fashioned modem on top of the terminal being used to connect to the
machine.
It was very sensitive to thunderstorms, so such so that the login messages would
include the weather forecast, and the editor had a special "Save the world" feature
activated by a single keystroke. I learned my first real high-level structured
language (Pascal - I read Grogano's book) in order to write the adventure game
Chemical Dungeons back in 1980
to run on the DEC 10.
(This game is still available for the PC! Follow the link and in the Adobe
document look for disk PC4603. One click and you'll download the game.)
Other computers used but with no photos to show for it are the IMSAI, Northstar Horizon, Atari, and the VAX 11.
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