When was the first computer bug discovered?

[Laurie K]

I forgot that I also had a HP25c programmable calculator in 1977 so that technically was my first computer.

 

[vanhees71]

Well, I get nostalgic seeing many of the posts above.

My very first computer was something, you'd not call a computer nowadays. In Germany we had an electronic-kits company called "Busch", and I got my first one when I was about 10 or so. It was a great system with the electronic elements like resistors, capacitors, coils, transistors, LEDs, photo resistor etc. etc. mounted on little plastic plates, and you could connect them with cables and little fixes. I played hours with it, and they had great accompanying books, explaining how all the stuff worked, and why the circuits worked. One could buy many extensions to the basic box. One was digital electronics with NAND gates, and it was explained how to wire them to get any logical calculation. Another box was a micro computer which could be programmed with a very basic machine language. I think, one must not underestimate such kind of technical toys. I fear, nowadays they have come out of fashion, and the kids just want a smart phone or tablet to browse through the internet and chat on socalled "social networks", but that's not how you get hooked up to science and technology, but such electronic kits definitely do, and I think it was one of the most important influences in my childhood to get into physics later, which gives me great fun in my live :-))). Maybe today, Raspery Pis and the like gadgets are a great substitute for the electronic kits of my childhood days.

The first "real" computer then was a Commodore 64, first with a "Datasette" (I don't know, how it's called in English) to store code on an audio tape. Later I bought floppy-disk drive (with 5.25'' disks) from my own pocket money, and it was as expensive as the Commodore 64 itself at the time ;-). The Commodore 64 was an alround thing: First of all we had endless sessions with many friends playing games (using a joystick), but we also learned the basics of programming (first with the bulit-in BASIC language, later Pascal :-)). To the disappointment of my teachers, I used to do my homework on the Commodore 64, particularly making plots, which I was never good in drawing by hand.

At school we also were the first generation, who got voluntary IT courses. At my school they had some Apple IIe, and the teachers were of course of the "nerd kind", i.e., math and natural-science teachers who used to tinker around as a hobby and then also got hooked up by the then becoming popular home computers. These were among the best teachers ever (anyway, my high school experience is that the best teachers are those who haven't been educated as teachers at first but became teachers for whatever reason later; this particularly includes my physics teacher who worked some years as a postdoc in experimental atomic physics before she became an ingeneous high-school teacher).

Later on I got of course a PC. The first one was a 286SX, then a 486 desktop. From then on I've only bought laptops for my private use. First, I used Windows (starting from 3.11, 95 etc), but when I started the work on my diploma theses, the PhD students and postdocs told me, you must not use Windows, beause it's bad but Linux. In these days (around 1995 or so), you got Linux either as a set of disks (3.5'') or on one CD, including all kinds of software. I started with a Slackware distribution and soon even compiled the kernel myself adapted to precisely the hardware of my computer (then still a desktop). Of course, I think the advise of the PhD students and postdocs was very right; today, I'm very puzzled by the fact that some people seem to be really able to do serious work with Windows. Whenever I boot Windows 10 on my laptop (usually just to update my GPS navigation device), some hell breaks lose. Last week, it started some "Fall Update". Whatever it was, it took 8 hours to get ready. Fortunately I had the laptop at the institute, where I work on the desktop computer (of course also Linux), so that I had not to wait for Windows to finish an update, I've never wanted to install in the first place. I don't know, what changed. At least Windows kind of works in the same way as before ;-)).

 

[rcgldr]

The first computer I ever laid hands on was an IBM 1130, as part of an experimental educational program for high schoolers. About a year after that, I actually got to run a program on a 1950's computer that used magnetic drum memory(!).

I had a similar experience but in reverse order. I was in the Los Angeles school district, and a program combined 7 high schools with each one specializing in a few subjects. In 1967, we got a MonRobot with a drum memory, paper tape input and a language called quickcomp. In 1968, that computer went to Beverly Hills High School and we got an IBM 1130 with card reader, card punch, line printer, typewriter / keyboard console, and toggle switch / display panel. It mostly ran Fortran IV, and some assembly language, plus occasional runs with APL. There were also Saturday classes at the IBM data center in downtown LA, using an IBM 360/25 or 360/30. For me, the most impressive device at the data center was the 1200+ line per minute 1403 model 3 "train" line printer.

My first job was back in 1973, using HP 2100 series mini computers.

As for a home computer, I had an Atari 400, with a replaced keyboard, on sale for $20 ($70 with $50 rebate). One guy used them as an alarm system, since the 4 joystick ports allowed for 20 switches to be read. I later got a CP/M system, then Atari ST (1987). My first PC was a 386 in the late 1980's.

Back in 1972, I recall a guy in college getting a HP35 programmable calculator (we called it an electronic sliderule back then). His name was Bill, and someone got clever an entered some numbers so that upside down it read "hello bill" .

 

[Chronos]

As a late bloomrer, my first real home boole was a TI-99/4A. It was state of the art with a mind boggling 256 byte cpu,16K RAM, 8K ROM, and 48x64 grahics in 16 glorious colors. You could bump the graphics to an astounding 256x192 with machine language. Unsatisfied with the tape recorder memory, I then splurged on a PEB with a 16K hard (actually a 5-1/4 floppy) drive. For nearly a month I was convinced I would never fill up that beast! I used it to prematurely invent my own version of PONG, although the CPU was overmatched to track 2 moving objects in real time. That subsequently prompted acquisition of an Apple IIe, thus launching a lifelong spiral down the rabbit hole.

 

[Mark44]

my first real home boole was a TI-99/4A. It was state of the art with a mind boggling 256 byte cpu

Per this wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS9900, the CPU was a 16-bit processor, with three internal registers that were 16 bits wide. One of the registers contained the address of 16 general purpose registers in RAM, with each of these being 16 bits. Perhaps these are what you're referring to as a 256-byte CPU. The normal way of doing things is to describe a CPU by the size of each of its registers, not the total number of bits in all of the registers.

 

[Chronos]

256 bytes was the size of the TMS9900 cache, it is, however, more conventionally described as a 16 bit processor

 

[scott ketter]

Tandy TRS-80

 

[yungman]

My first one was a Radio Shack TRS80!

 

[Tom.G]

My first contact with a computer was in my first 'real' job; in the Engineeering R&D lab at a large multi-national company. Along with my R&D duties, I was doing repair and refurbishing of some Analog computers. Physical size from two to eight 24-inch relay racks. Lots of patchboards, 10-turn pots, relays, and vacuum tubes.

My first purchased computer was an Altair 8800 in early 1975. (by MITS, Microcomputer Instrumentation and Technology Systems. See the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics) It had an Intel 8080 CPU running at 2MHz clock, 12KB of dynamic RAM and 256 Bytes of static RAM. I/O was an ASR-33 Teletype at 10 characters per second on a large continuous roll of paper (for a picture, see https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-was-your-first-computer.934851/page-3#post-5906114). The Teletype was connect thru a 20mA current loop interface. Mass storage was paper tape that was punched and read by the Teletype. My wife and I had many late nights building it from a kit on the kitchen table. First power-up was around 3AM, when it shortly blew a fuse. (A solder splash shorted the +8V supply.) Then we taught ourselves machine language programming, entering it all on the front panel switches. There was not ANY software available for it yet, but
we did make good use of the included instruction set description.

We still have it and fired it up a few months ago; it's tired. One front panel switch was damaged and a few of the power supply filter caps are running hot... Then I got distracted by PhysicsForums.

Well this could go on for a few pages and it's past my bedtime.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

Macintosh LC II. Still facing me on the other side of the room as an antique memory ...

Or, before that, programmable calculator too (as @Laurie K ), [Casio,] and/or a couple of Sharp 'Wizard' organizers (accepting data cards and discs).

 

[Nik_2213]

"... and hercules monochrome graphics..."

After Apple introduced the ][e, which was not back-compatible {SPIT !} with my ][+, I swore off the brand. Bought a BBC 'B+' Micro in 1982. Wrote a patch for its serial port. Transferred my tales etc from ][+ as text-files at 300 Baud. Relegated the ][+ to a games machine. Upgraded B+ to a B+128. Later, got an Acorn Archimedes A440/1. Added external floppy port to access the old BBC's 5¼" drives. Added internal hard-drive and a math co-processor.

One curious feature of the Arc was that it could emulate a DOS PC in software. Read low-density 3½" PC disks, run programs at about 10% of 'native'. I used this facility to learn the rudiments of QuickBasic and Q-Basic for work. One of the PC cover disks I got included a 'System Reporter'. On a whim, I fed it to the Arc.

After much peeking & poking into obscure virtual corners, the utility returned to report, 'No Hercules Card Within'.
Then, it said, 'Math CoProcessor present.'
Finally, it reported, 'Unknown Hardware Emulator'.
Yay !

After the 'Millennium Bug' fuss blew over, I bought a 'real' PC to access the Internet, do e-mail and, most importantly, run MIDI. This, a nice sound-card and a MIDI-entry keyboard plus bundled 'Cakewalk Home Studio' let the PC play 'Second Viola' to my wife, while driving her Casio CPS 101 as a harpsichord...

When we got our kitchen refurbished, the rep showed us 'VR' pics generated by his office PC's CAD package. After checking the necessary specifications, I realized I could run FloorPlan 3D and TurboCAD Deluxe 2D/3D on our PC. I later found Poser 3 on a cover disk, upgraded to P4. Which, via several iterations of 'CAD Tower' and a decade out due Spring electrical storm and dire family illness, brings us to the 'self-build', 8-core AMD, 32 GB, twin-card, triple-screened cat-warmer lurking under this desk.

I kept the Apple ][+, B+128 and Arc until recently, but we needed the space so I gave them plus umpteen crates of 'stuff' to local Radio Hams' RetroComputing club.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

I feel like an odd one out, everybody here has first computers from the time when computers were classified as items which did calculations

What, don't tell me your first computer was a smartphone? (If you're young ... no problem with that.)
[Smartphones, tablets, phablets, ipods and ipads have actually advanced computers built-in ...]
Which brings up the question: which one we take as the definition of 'computer'?
Simply having microprocessors and a CPU or programming ability? [With relevant softwear]

For example, my almost first cell phone (around 1994, the smallest NEC back then ...) was it a "computer" or not? I assume not, because it had no programming ability. But smartphones, or even earlier generation cell phones (~after 2000) [2G, and 2005 3G ...], are/were clearly programmable, accepting downloaded apps, even connection to the internet, YouTube (the 3G ones), etc. . Smartphones are just the most advanced programmable cell phones, accepting in a simplified manner downloaded apps from a store, which gives you the ability to modulate them by yourself. In my opinion, these are clearly computers too.

 

[lekh2003]

What, don't tell me your first computer was a smartphone? (If you're young ... no problem with that.)
[Smartphones, tablets, phablets, ipods and ipads have actually advanced computers built-in ...]
Which brings up the question: which one we take as the definition of 'computer'?
Simply having microprocessors and a CPU or programming ability? [With relevant softwear]

For example, my almost first cell phone (around 1994, the smallest NEC back then ...) was it a "computer" or not? I assume not, because it had no programming ability. But smartphones, or even earlier generation cell phones (~after 2000) [2G, and 2005 3G ...], are/were clearly programmable, accepting downloaded apps, even connection to the internet, YouTube (the 3G ones), etc. . Smartphones are just the most advanced programmable cell phones, accepting in a simplified manner downloaded apps from a store, which gives you the ability to modulate them by yourself. In my opinion, these are clearly computers too.

No... I'm not that young. My first computer was a computer from the days when Toshiba reigned the computer market. Smartphones were still yet to arrive to the world affordably

 

[Nik_2213]

IMHO, the borderline falls between that Sinclair Scientific calculator, which only had memory registers, and the TI-57 which had a (volatile) program store, too.

I craved a TI-58 with its mag-stripe storage cards but, by the time I could afford such, I'd discovered BASIC and realized I'd need a better keyboard and display than the Commodore Pet. I priced the HP-85, but that had no way to drive an external screen. Besides, the cost of HP add-ons was totally horrific. Then the Apple ][+ appeared, with its 48 KB capacity, TV modulator and FP BASIC in ROM...

 

[Stavros Kiri]

No... I'm not that young. My first computer was a computer from the days when Toshiba reigned the computer market. Smartphones were still yet to arrive to the world affordably

Ok

 

[Mark44]

One curious feature of the Arc was that it could emulate a DOS PC in software. Read low-density 3½" PC disks, run programs at about 10% of 'native'. I used this facility to learn the rudiments of QuickBasic and Q-Basic for work. One of the PC cover disks I got included a 'System Reporter'. On a whim, I fed it to the Arc.

A couple of years after I had bought an Apple //e, I got a Commodore Amiga. You could also get PC DOS emulation software + 5 1/4" drive, which I used to run a DOS-based C compiler. The simplest program I could write, with a minimum of #include files, would take a full minute just to compile.

Within a year or two I started teaching classes in C as a contractor for Boeing Computer Services, so I bit the bullet and bought a 386 clone, with my first-ever hard drive, with all of 30 MB of storage. That would have been about 1986.

Along about that time I had had a couple of Macs at work (teaching at a community college), including a Mac SE with a hard drive. Because the programming classes I taught used PCs, and because a PC clone was half the price of a comparable Mac, I decided against getting a Mac, and haven't owned one since.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

and because a PC clone was half the price of a comparable Mac, I decided against getting a Mac, and haven't owned one since.

Me too. I've moved to PC 's since 2010. Besides price, compatibility is what made me totally against Apple (pretty much, more or less ...). Not even an i-phone, although they may be good.

 

[BillTre]

The first computer I owned was a Mac Plus (second or third model of Macs). I got it to write up my thesis (because I'm a bad typer and bad speller).
Prior to that, at work I used Apple IIe's, an IBM (DOS), and some PDP thing (can't remember the number).

 

[jtbell]

I forgot that I also had a HP25c programmable calculator in 1977 so that technically was my first computer.

About that time, soon after I started graduate school, I bought its non-programmable sibling, the HP21c. I didn't think it was worth spending the extra money for programmability. It seemed kind of wimpy compared to the physics department's PDP-10, on which I was doing FORTRAN programming for my HEP research group.

 

[dlgoff]

It seemed kind of wimpy compared to the physics department's PDP-10, on which I was doing FORTRAN programming for my HEP research group.

Ah, FORTRAN. When I learned FORTRAN is was presented as a Math department class. There wasn't such a thing as Computer Science back then.
Did you ever think the power of PCs would be what they are today?

 

[jack action]

My first computer was a used http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibmportable.shtml. It was bought used for 1200 $, along with a brand new Epson LX-800 printer for 500 $.

For people who are beginning to know me, you won't be surprised to learn that I still have both. You shouldn't even be surprised to know that the printer is still plugged to a working computer and used from time to time. It just won't let go (unlike all subsequent cheap ink jet printers that came afterward).

 

[dlgoff]

It just won't let go (unlike all subsequent cheap ink jet printers that came afterward).

I hear that. I bought the Okidata Microline 390 with my first PC and it's still working on my weather station PC.

image compliments of https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16828107156

 

[Laurie K]

LOL, when dot matrix printers sounded like personal sawmills you made sure everything was correct before you printed, especially after midnight.

 

[Nik_2213]

Hey, is that LX the version with both serial and parallel ports ? Looks seriously retro, but so versatile !

I had one on a trolley, with a box of cables and a list of the config settings to hook it up to everything from a vac-gauge to a flow meter. Routine calibrations and validations were so much easier when its wad of fan-fold was stapled to the back of the job-sheet...

 

[gleem]

My first contact with a digital computer was a UNIVAC 1107 (64K RAM) which I used for my dissertation along with an IBM 360. My first personal computer was a Gateway 20 MHz 286 in 1992 when I finally succumbed .

 

[OCR]

LOL, when dot matrix printers sounded like personal sawmills...

Lol... I never thought ours sounded that bad... .

We still have one, but I haven't used it in years... nevertheless, I think it was the best at doing the job it was meant to do... .

 

[Laurie K]

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

Oh no! No! We know, we know! ...

 

[OCR]

My God, that sounds like a sawmill ! .

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

I remember that noise sound, with fondness... of course, we had one - it's probably still around here, someplace. *

I'm just like "old Jim"... I never throw away any mechanical, device like, 'thing' !

Well, you know, I might dig explore around inside, find something else that might work in something else, that doesn't work in something else...


* ... And, I always tell myself... " I'll lay it here, so it's easy to find " .

 

[Asymptotic]

My Epson LX-80 was loud compared to a Laserjet, but a true contender for the sawmill award was the IBM 1403. Memories of 132 column greenbar paper and stringing anti-static tinsel to lessen paper jams.

 

[Routaran]

My first was a ZX Spectrum+ way back in 1988. I had an absolute blast with this thing. Too young to really understand but it came with a manual with some tutorials for writing programs in BASIC. Typing in some numbers and letters and then seeing boxes appear and move on the TV, that was so cool.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/ZX_Spectrum+.jpg

 

[Nik_2213]

Ah, line printers...

I remember our IT department's 'gofer' sneaking down to our labs, and hastily dumping an entire carton of triple-fanfold ( two carbons) green-striped '132' paper off his laden trolley into our skip.

As they usually shredded or re-cycled their waste, I investigated...

Leafing through the stack, I discovered each and every page was printed with two (2) instances of 'Syntax Error', one at the top, the other half-way down...

His department's gaffe kept us in carbon sheets and scrap paper for almost a year !

 

[dlgoff]

Just in case you don't know what a dot matrix printer sounds like.

And like this:

 

[nsaspook]

I built several homebrew 8080,Z80 machines (with 8080 powered graphics displays) in the 70's. I recently resurrected one old DIY Z80 cpu card as a PIC controller project to emulate some of the original memory and I/O.
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/memio-emulator-for-z80.117003/

 

[deRoy]

Many computers from 1982 onwards.

My favorite still is an HP48 SX/GX ( had them both ) programmable scientific calculator. A great computer in its own right.

Numerous programs I wrote for this calculator in RPL language. The longest one was to calculate the first 1000 digits of Pi, a program that I am very proud of I wrote myself. Another was to do RSA algorithm, artificial intelligence, games, there was no end as to what this calculator could do.

I still have them if anyone's interested.