What year did you get a desk comoputer/laptop?

[ryco]

Was looking at my TB join date of April '05.
My computer appeared on my porch a couple of days after Christmas '04 sent by my mom. Had no idea what a computer was or how to use them. Didn't even plug it in 'til mid January '05 and immediately locked myself out. Went to the local computer store in a very small isolated town to get help. The owners stated firmly they didn't *do* Mac and sent me to a couple of local folks who were AppleHeads. Slowly figured it out enough to browse and email, signed up for a dial up internet provider, and started searching out bass info and sites. First belonged to a small bass community called BassDogs (long defunct) and then found TalkBass.
Some professional companies I worked at in the '80s had computers, but the graphics were so terrible, and a lot of stuff involved coding with massive binders of COBAL and FORTRAN, and not being a typist put me right off. My bad. Really should have taken the opportunity to jump right in and learn - especially CAD, but like I said the graphics were horrble. Maybe could have helped designed something better.

Anyway just for fun asking the question when did you start using a home computer, and your start applying it to bass and music?
Maybe one day I will advance enough to own a smart phone :/

 

[MuseChaser]

First home computer was a Radio Shack "CoCo," their nickname for "Color Computer," around the same time the Commodore Vic20 and 64 were also making some headway....1982 or '83? Built my first DOS/Win 8086-based desktop a few years later and have built desktops ever since. These days I almost never fire one up.

 

[Jeff Scott]

Anyway just for fun asking the question when did you start using a home computer, and your start applying it to bass and music?
Maybe one day I will advance enough to own a smart phone :/

In the late '80s I borrowed my brother's Compaq Portable to play around with (my first introduction to computers was in the early '70s when an old friend would take us to the computer lab at CWRU (huge room full of DEC PDP computer, with tape drives and punch card readers; we learned how to make our own cards, too).

I got my first desktop in May '99; some sort of Dell. Switched to a Mac (20" iMac) in February '07. Some time after that is when I started diddling around with GarageBand (GB). In spring '14 I bought a Mac Mini which came with a new, updated version of GB, that's about when I stopped diddling around doing my own music on a computer. To me, that newer GB, and current versions, are bloated and very unintuitive (again, to me) to use; the old version I started with was pretty easy to use.

BTW, I now have a Mac Studio M2 Max, having semi-retired the Mini.

When practicing bass, I will often record my "sessions" into my Marantz PMD661 and then, if I feel like it, transfer it to the Mac.

Most of the time though, I just grab one of my acoustic guitars and sit on the couch to play.

I too, don't own a smartphone, not even a flippy one.

 

[MJ5150]

1994.
For the sole reason that I wanted to play Star Wars: Tie Fighter. Along the way I learned about the internet, BBS's, AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe/Juno, then chat rooms, now here I am.

-Mike

 

[pcake]

i got my first PC (win 95) in 1996.

my son had one before that, and we had a radio shack trash 80 (actually the TRS 80), but i'm not counting that although it was sort of a desktop computer. its storage was on cassette tapes

 

[Tom Lane]

Bought my first laptop in 1984. First desktop, a Dell, in 85. Don't own a desktop any longer. Two laptops and a few tablets and a big smartphone. Learning to use "micros", C, and assembly launched my IT career.

 

[pcake]

1994.
For the sole reason that I wanted to play Star Wars: Tie Fighter. Along the way I learned about the internet, BBS's, AOL/Prodigy/CompuServe/Juno, then chat rooms, now here I am.

-Mike

my son's prehistoric desktop was so he could chat and play star wars games online. on dialup. the dialup was sooo slowww LOL

 

[fdeck]

Sanyo MBC-550 in 1984. It came with BASIC and a word processor. My dad got me Turbo Pascal 1.0 for my birthday.

 

[bholder]

I was one of the lucky ones to get in on the "first day" employee purchase program for the very original IBM PC, in 1982.

 

[James Hart]

Ti99/4a in 81-82, bought an Apple ][c with dual floppy drives, 8" Amber monitor and a dot matrix printer in the late 80s. First "Internet compatible computer" was a PowerMac in early 96... 1gb Hard drive and a 14.4 modem! Current set up is a pretty recent Dell laptop with maxed out ram, a bunch of monitors, SSDs, m-audio Air interface, and running Ubuntu Studio.

 

[Tom Lane]

Sanyo MBC-550 in 1984. It came with BASIC and a word processor. My dad got me Turbo Pascal 1.0 for my birthday.

I learned turbo prolog! A very cool language!

 

[bholder]

Sanyo MBC-550 in 1984. It came with BASIC and a word processor. My dad got me Turbo Pascal 1.0 for my birthday.

Turbo Pascal was good stuff.

 

[fdeck]

I learned turbo prolog! A very cool language!

What happened to me is that Pascal got a lot of "buzz" in my area, southeast Michigan. The regional colleges had switched to Pascal as the teaching language for computer science. Engineers were of course still learning FORTRAN, or PL/1, which was favored by the car industry. My mom taught PL/1 at a nearby community college, then they switched to Pascal. Also, my brother was learning Pascal in college.

My dad had no interest in computers, but of course we were all talking about Pascal, and he read about Turbo Pascal in the Wall Street Journal, so he got me a copy, and it was one of the few apps that would run on a MS-DOS computer that was not "IBM compatible," like my Sanyo.

The Borland languages were surprisingly high tech. Coincidentally, the author of Turbo Pascal became the chief architect of the C# language, which is one of the front runners today.

So, these odd coincidences turned me into a Pascal freak. In fact, I was dead certain that Pascal would obviously win out over C. I still laugh about that. But I kept up with every new version of Pascal, all the way through grad school in physics. I was always the freak who used the weird language. But while I never became a software developer, programming has been a cornerstone of my career.

 

[donhank]

. . . maybe probably 1987 ??? Amstrad PC1512

 

[Bob_Ross]

My business partner got an Apple Macintosh SE in 1988, so that was my first desktop personal computer. We upgraded that to a Mac II-something a couple years later. Then in early 1993 we dissolved the studio so I could go to grad school, and, since I definitely needed a computer for schoolwork, I bought a Mac II-SE (I think that's what it was called). Man, sometimes I really miss System 6!

 

[Tom Lane]

What happened to me is that Pascal got a lot of "buzz" in my area, southeast Michigan. The regional colleges had switched to Pascal as the teaching language for computer science. Engineers were of course still learning FORTRAN, or PL/1, which was favored by the car industry. My mom taught PL/1 at a nearby community college, then they switched to Pascal. Also, my brother was learning Pascal in college.

My dad had no interest in computers, but of course we were all talking about Pascal, and he read about Turbo Pascal in the Wall Street Journal, so he got me a copy, and it was one of the few apps that would run on a MS-DOS computer that was not "IBM compatible," like my Sanyo.

The Borland languages were surprisingly high tech. Coincidentally, the author of Turbo Pascal became the chief architect of the C# language, which is one of the front runners today.

So, these odd coincidences turned me into a Pascal freak. In fact, I was dead certain that Pascal would obviously win out over C. I still laugh about that. But I kept up with every new version of Pascal, all the way through grad school in physics. I was always the freak who used the weird language. But while I never became a software developer, programming has been a cornerstone of my career.

But you weren't wrong. Pascal, which I learned along with its IBM version PL/I were more readable than C. Did I prefer C? sure, but do I think it's a good language... not so much because of memory management, which led to lots of bad software. I really liked C# and Java was a bit too verbose for me but tolerable.
I haven't coded anything outside of SQL, HTML, XML, or Javascript in many years but when I had my say, 15, 20 years ago, the firm settled on C# because the best documentation was coded in C#, and accurate doc is key.

 

[pfschim]

I was a CS student in 1977 and used punch cards to do programming in RPG, COBOL and Fortran. I was also able to use a remote dumb terminal with an acoustic coupler modems (300baud !) to submit my jobs too. But none of that was personal computers.

As far as "personal" computers, I got a TRS-80 in 1979 (with a cassette tape drive!) and eventually an IBM PC (5150) running MS-DOS (1.2??) in 1982.

I was a terrible programmer, and ended up in the then exploding field of computer telecom/datacom, where I made a great living for 40 years until very happily retiring in 2018.

 

[Prodigus Filius]

1994. My first hard drive had a monstrous 25mb capacity he he. As Long as I could play Mystic Towers I was happy enough

 

[gricko]

1990

 

[Wyrdlow]

2012 for my first laptop. (And my first look at the Invalid Link Removed.) It's been replaced once, and it remains the only device I have that connects to the internet. Phone-wise, I'm still using my trusty Nokia 105!