We called it the Lemon Hundred.

I just remembered: we called it the “Uniquack Lemon Hundred”!! AHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

UNIVAC 1219

Dude! I never owned a mainframe. The closest I came was sneaking into the local university computer center at night and running decks on their (already ancient) IBM system. Which, being at night, the operator didn’t bother whether we had accounts or not.

Boredom, probably.

My partner-in-computer-crime from those days is now on the CS faculty at Purdue. Go figure.

26: yup, still only complains about pm, not am, in the comment editor on Leopard, using Safari.

27: Did you have exclusive access to the entire Univac machine? As in: my actual first ever program (Sieve of Eratosthenes, written in Algol 60) I ran on an Elliott 803, but I was batched in with a bunch of other folks, so I do not think it qualifies as “personal” use, unlike my 4130 access.

My first home machine? Atari 800. l Did my M. Sc. work on it. With original Visicalc goodness and 700K floppies. The games pack cost me a girlfriend. I got it Xmas eve, next time I looked up, 2 days later, she was gone. I saw Asteroids falling down my inner eyelids when I slept for weeks afterwards. Not much changed since then – I had a life before home computers blurred the distinction between work and play.

Q: talking about Algol 60, and bearing in mind that Hoare is still around, at Microsoft I believe, does anybody here remember the Algol “Universal Function”? It took advantage of Algol’s ability to pass function bodies as first class objects, combined with typed behavior. You could call it to evaluate anything you wanted (by a judicious choice of the four arguments), hence the “Universal” tag. But I have forgotten / lost the source for it.

Ramble:

IIRC, Algol 60 is the grandfather of the imperative language style most in use today, starting with C and its embellishments. Even now there are some language features not commonly implemented. And Hoare wrote a compiler for this language that ran on the 803! In 1960 (+/-) yet.

There is a Wikipedia page on this machine, search for “Elliott 803”. 8K/40b core memory, but it omits one of what I think is the most unusual feature of the machine: it implemented its CPU registers as magnetostrictive Nickel delay line loops; basically each 40 bit register was implemented as acoustic waves traveling round a small strip of metal, with a 1 bit serial read/regenerate/write coil at its root. By a vast coincidence, it was the 803 architecture that got me the job at Elliott’s, at 19 and without having completed my degree (yet): I had become fascinated by Boolean algebra, and had done a paper design for a 7.7 FPU with registers that used a 1 bit data path, so needed circulating registers. Used 800 gates. I thought nobody would ever build such a huge monster, at the time, but had fun with it as a gedankenexperiment. Then I saw the real thing, at my interview, and realized I had been thinking small, not large.

The C64 was a monster for its day,

Ain’t that the truth! Let’s count some of the ways it was better than the Apple II:

It had an actual sound chip with three voices, where the Apple had that motherfucking speaker that software could “click.”
It had up to 320×200 graphics capability, instead of 280×192.
It had up to 8 sprites on the same scanline, that could be displayed either on top or below the underlying graphics. The Apple had…nothing.
You could change the location of the 16k of graphics memory with a simple softswitch. The Apple…nope.
It had working programmable interrupts, which could be used to increase the graphics capabilities by switching things around, or intelligently time sound playback. The Apple never got interrupts to work right.
The C64 drives were slow, but could be made reasonable with a simple cartridge, and it was because the drive operations were off-loaded to the drive instead of being controlled with softswitches in the Apple.
The Apple II – I think it was $1200.00 retail, sans drives, 80-column card, and monitor. C64 – I think it was $600.00 retail.

I started with a TRS-80 with 4 k.

Same here. When I went to college, the computer we used for our Computer Science 101 programming assignments was a Univac 1100 mainframe. We called it the Lemon Hundred.

Actually, funny you should mention that. The Pentium III (specifically, the third-generation Tualatin core) is my favorite Intel processor of all time — it was the one that proved the Pentium 4 was a steaming pile of crap. IIRC Intel didn’t know what to do with it at the time, since clock for clock it was faster than the P4 but it was supposed to be an entry-level chip; I think the Pentium M/Centrino design started out more or less as a tweak of Tualatin.

You aren’t? Screw you then. The C64 was a monster for its day, not to mention the most robust hacking platform I’ve ever seen. You could change absolutely everything, but since the OS was in ROM you never had to worry about bricking it or corrupting the OS. And say what you will about half-assed disk support, but dumping the filesystem logic off on the drive as if it was NAS is a good way to get rid of overhead.