First micro or computing experiences

[wayfarer]

My first computer was a Commodore C=64
I had the 1541 Floppy Drive and a Cassette Tape Drive
Several Joysticks and a donated 13" color TV.

Circa 1988-1990.

[allisonlastname]

The first computer I regularly used was a Thinkpad x60s running Ubuntu 14, in 2014. A few years after that I got an Acer laptop for Christmas, which I still use to this day.

It may be worth mentioning that I was born in 2004. There are posts on this forum older than I am. I would hedge a bet that I'm the youngest person here.

[Dr Jefyll]

Welcome, allisonlastname!

-- Jeff

[kernelthread]

First computer I used was a Commodore PET 16K at school. First one I had at home was an Acorn Atom, originally with 1K of RAM which I soon expanded up to the maximum 4K the standard board would take.

[floobydust]

Well, the first computer I used was an IBM System/3 Mod 10... 16KB of Core storage, 96-column cards were used and a 5MB removable disk in a drawer. Fortran was the language... and yea, the machine was older than I was at the time (1970's).

[Yuri]

My first actual memories of a computer are of my dad's Apple II, though he never let me use it. I didn't really start using computers until after he got the Mac 128k, which I pretty much took over and started learning how to write BASIC on. After that I recall haveing a NES and SNES and wanting to program on those as a kid, little did I know they had 65xxx CPUs in them! XD

Later as a teenager my parents actually bought me a 386SX16, spent hours of my teenage life on that thing, learned Pascal and assembly on it. Good times hacking away at the hardware from DOS and Turbo Pascal.

[Broti]

My first contact was around spring/summer in 1990 (a few months before I turned four) when my dad brought home a C64 with a 1541 and a green monochrome monitor.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Broti wrote:

My first contact was around spring/summer in 1990 (a few months before I turned four) when my dad brought home a C64 with a 1541 and a green monochrome monitor.

I suspect you probably found that green-screen monitor somewhat unexciting when playing games on the C-64.

Quote:

ROR A? Where we're coding, we don't need A.

Funny you mention that.

ROR A is the official MOS Technology syntax, although a lot of assemblers omit the A operand for accumulator addressing.  My understanding of why MOS Technology required an operand for accumulator addressing was that the parser in their reference assembler was easier to develop by requiring all instructions that target the accumulator to have an operand so the assembler could differentiate between accumulator- and memory-addressing modes.  Also, the 6502 assembly language is a reduced version of the 6800 assembly language, the 6800 having two accumulators.  The 6800 assembly language, of course, needs to specify the target accumulator for accumulator-mode instructions, such as CLRB or LDAA.  So the 6502 assembly language inherited that feature, A became a symbolic reference to the 6502’s lone accumulator...and we have ROR A, DEC A, etc.

[Broti]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

I suspect you probably found that green-screen monitor somewhat unexciting when playing games on the C-64.

It didn't take long for us to hook it up to the TV too And we soon got a used color monitor.

About my signature... there has been a lengthy discussion on Forum64 whether ASL A or ASL should be "right" and the "Standard" for Assemblers.

I use ACME for programming and it works fine without A

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Broti wrote:

About my signature... there has been a lengthy discussion on Forum64 whether ASL A or ASL should be "right" and the "Standard" for Assemblers.

This lack of uniformity in 6502 assemblers has long been a problem.  Some assembler authors evidently don’t know there is a syntactical standard for the 6502 assembly language, which was published by MOS Technology for the NMOS 6502 family and subsequently enhanced by Western Design Center (WDC) for the 65C02 and 65C816.  Using an assembler that complies with those standards, one would write ASL A to left-shift the accumulator.

Quote:

I use ACME for programming and it works fine without A

Quite a few assemblers are that way.  For example, the Kowalski assembler dispenses with the A operand for accumulator addressing.  However, when configured to assemble for the 65C02, INC A and DEC A, respectively, become INA and DEA.  Contrarily, when configured to assemble for the 65C816, INC A and DEC A, respectively, become INC and DEC, with no operand.  That difference has tripped me up several times.

[barnacle]

Frank Kingswood's AS65, which I use, accepts the A but offhand I can't recall if it complains if it's missing.

Using different names for the same operand in different modes seems counterproductive.

Neil

[barrym95838]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Contrarily, when configured to assemble for the 65C816, INC A and DEC A, respectively, become INC and DEC, with no operand.  That difference has tripped me up several times.

I kind of like that they follow the pattern of the other RMW instructions like ASL and friends, and they're already in the mnemonic table of the assembler/disassembler. Requiring an A in the operand field precludes its use as a label in certain instances, which isn't a huge loss but irks me for being needlessly inconsistent.

[BigEd]

It’d be great if a moderator could rehome this sidetrack

[WCMiller]

As a kid in elementary school, I used an Apple II in the school computer lab and the after school program I was in had a couple Commodore 64s. I fondly remember playing Oregon Trail on both of them (even if the Commodore Oregon Trail felt a bit primitive, even compared to the Apple), as well as various other games. We didn't have a computer at home for a long time, until we got an old IBM XT from a garage sale in the early 90s.

[nadia2]

While I'm from well after the era of microcomputers (shrugs), one of my earliest contacts with a computer was visiting the children's museum where they had a replica TV station studio, in the editing area they had an Amiga 500 and probably an Amiga 4000 (it surely had a Video Toaster) one could play genlock with the (2) cameras and a TV receiver.

It was the early 2000's.