alt Hacker NewsOld man story time. This was the first computer we had in our home, I believe in the summer of 1978 or 1979. Mom was working on her Masters in education (high school mathematics) and also taking Fortran courses on Hofstra’s PDP-11. She took me (~6 years old) to the machine room once, and one of the bearded sysadmins printed me a giant ASCII art of Snoopy on his doghouse on white and green fanfold paper with a dot matrix printer.
Her high school took delivery of its first ever computer, a PET with a chiclet keyboard. She was assigned to take it home over the summer to learn, and figure out how to use in the curriculum.
A few memories- it was the first piece of electronic equipment in the house with a grounded plug, and the house had no grounded outlets. Most people would have used a cheezy adapter, but Dad sledgehammered an 8’ copper rod in the backyard and installed a single grounded outlet for it.
The cassette loading could be very fiddly and slow. A favorite game was “Hangman”, played that for hours. Observe the beautiful graphics.
https://youtu.be/jnj2ZgOYYDQ?is=zZauKOy5f95wDqrg
The PET went back to the school in the fall, and I started begging for a PC of my own. For the longest time I was constantly asking for a Timex/Sinclair. Christmas 1983, a TI-99/4a appeared under the tree, thanks to them being sold far below cost after failing in the market. That lead to an Apple //e in 1987, and a Dell 486 DX2-66 in 1993.
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I had the same TI. And it started my career. And I have one in my garage I’m not sure works but I cannot get rid of it! Too sentimental!
I had a different home computer, with a cassette player hooked up to it, and I remember well having to fiddle with volume and tone controls to get things to load. I'd always been envious of Commodores and the like, which came with what I assumed was a specially built and calibrated tape drive, so surprised when you said it was quite fiddly to load as well. What kind of adjustments could you make to get stuff to load properly?