I read Robert X Cringley's book Accidental Empires shortly after it was published in 1992. It's a gripping worm's eye view of Silicon Valley's formative years. It's also Doc Searls' favorite book about the computer industry. Highly recommended.
My first computer was an acorn electron then an Acorn BBC, but back then my dad was a programmer for British Telecom. I remember sitting next to him while he ran through vast programs written in Basic and talked me through how they worked. I also have fond memories of typing in lines of basic code from the back of the computer magazines and messing with the school programs to change the graphics and colors. Ah, the innocence.
Being a web developer now and having delved into desktop applications in my younger years I have to say that in the past my experiences of these early computers however long ago have helped me solve problems that newer younger programmers have scratched their heads over for hours. hee hee!
I also have fond memories of typing in lines of basic code from the back of the computer magazines and messing with the school programs to change the graphics and colors. Ah, the innocence.
oh yes-- Creative Computing!
I seem to recall entering lines of code from Byte magazine.
The TRS-80 was my first computer: http://www.haacked.com/archive/2005/06/06/4430.aspx
I still have it somewhere. I went from there to Commodore.
Another born in 1970 here, my first computer was the Vic20, I was so excited the first time I made the bird fly across the screen. I couldn’t afford the tape drive though, so I had to leave mine on for days at a time, when it turned off, so did all the work. I remember being so excited when I bought a used PC/XT in 1987, it actually had a 10 meg hard drive included, and DUAL floppies baby…
Oh well, I guess I need to grow up some too.
Ah–I don’t even know the brand of my first computer. It was some big behemoth keyboard with a built-in tape drive and two joysticks (and each also had a numeric keypad)–just a plastic suitcase with keys that plugged into a TV–but it came with a BASIC tutorial cassette, and that’s how I got started programming.
I moved from there to the beloved Commodore 64. I still miss it even to this day–it had some great games for the times (M.U.L.E., Red Storm Rising, the summer and winter olympics games that were hell on joysticks, etc.).
Anyway, I’ve been owning and programming PCs for over 20 years now. This past weekend, however, I went and bought a MacBook–my first Mac. I figure it’s time to try the other guy out for a while–and since it can run Windows and Windows apps, it may just be the best of both worlds.
Ah, yes, 1970 was a fine year indeed 
My first home computer was ZX Spectrum (from Clive Sinclair, great engineer but not so great businessman) - it’s the same generation as Commodore 64 for example. I used to swear by Z80 assembler but later on I had the chance and used 65xx series processors too (C64 had 6510 if memory servers well, a variant of 6502).
Great days, we were young and still enthusiastic 
Dar, accoding to your description both yours and my first computer was the ADAM. Did you have a Buck Rogers game on it?
I also liked Bob’s book and the miniseries. He followed it up with another right before the dot com bubble burst and now writes a regular column and hosts an interview show for PBS. Check it out at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/ I actually have his Google widget right next to my Coding Horror widget.
I got to play with an IBM mainframe as a kid (OK, OK I got to sequence punch cards for my aunt) and my friends and I shared a Vic20, TX Sinclair, Apple II and an Osborne suitcase “portable” but my first “mine” computer was a IBM PC. Looking back on it I think maybe I was being punished. Oh well.
I haven’t read Accidental Empires, but I did see Triumph of the Nerds (all 3 parts).
It was interesting. It’s definitely not as silly as the dramatization of the same period (Pirates of Silicon Valley).
We had an Altair at my high school; I remember nothing about it beyond the front panel and the OS name: CHAOS, for Clairemont High Altair Operating System. If it weren’t such a good acronym, I probably wouldn’t remember it at all.
interesting. I was moved to watch “Battlestar Galactica” because Elliotte Rusty said it was a Great Show. not so much. but one thing led to another, so wikipedia it was, to find out what the hell I had just watched. well. in one of the pieces, is a PR still from the original. and there in plain sight was a Tektronix 4051, the very machine I used. my boss, a statistician, had been able to get it because it was on the GSA schedule as a calculator.
I’ve never been able to keep straight whether it pre-dated the Apple.
Cringley’s book is one a series that should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of the computer and PC industry. Steven Levy’s “Hackers” goes way, way back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and its transformation into the beginnings of hacker culture on early minicomputers. (Levy has little to say about Gates other than to note – not approvingly – that he essentially brought the business mentality to what was a community that looked a lot like Open Source.)
Levy also wrote a compelling history of the Mac titled “Insanely Great.” It is left to the reader to determine whether this refers to the machine or its high priest, and on which word in the title should get the emphasis.
The funny thing is that I remember the good old days of our IBM XT. I was born in '82 so many of these things happened before I was born. That does not however stop me from appreciating the old systems.
I still have an Atari 2600 and an 800XL. Those were fun systems…
I started out with computers when my father got an Atari ST. Later on we got an Amiga 500 which is - in my eyes - still the greatest (gaming-)computer ever.
Sometime during my first Amiga 500 years someone gave an ZX Spectrum to me and I spent weeks copying lines of code from some book. When I finally finished with a program and hit the magical “RUN” button, all I received were some interpreter errors which I didn’t really understand at that time.
Also, because I couldn’t find a cassette-recorder old enough to attach to the Sinclair and had to start all over again after turning it off I usually spent 2-3 weeks typing, one day being totally mad and 2-3 months to recover and build up enough hope that I wouldn’t make any mistakes the next time…
Also I fondly remember the times of tuning the autoexec.bat and config.sys to free up as much of the 640k memory as possible and still having sound and mouse support to get some games in dos running.
Would be Apple_soft_ Basic (actually a Microsoft product)or Integer Basic (a woz product)?
Personally, I went from ITT 2020 ( a ][ clone ) through some homemade //e clones to a real //c, quickly followed by a Macintosh Plus, then an SE. Got some side action on a couple of PC’s for school with a Pentium 133 (big step up speed wise from an SE) then back to a whole bunch of other Macs and i still use my PowerMac G4 Cube 450 for pretty much everything at home. At work i use a pretty fast Dell rig, but i cannot get used to the crappy keyboards PC’s seem to come with these days so i’m using my trusty old Apple Pro keyboard, the black one that came with the Cube. Now looking forward to transition myself to intel on a MacBook Pro, I’ll be running Vista probably at least half the time on there, but i’ll allways be a Mac guy.
P.S. Am i weird for still owning around 30 of the computers that i once fell in love with?
It’s so good to read that there were other Atari ST owners out there. I’m a slightly later vintage, 1973.
I recently threw away my old copies of STart magazine. Thumbing through the old copies was interesting.
I loved that machine and programmed many late nights until I moved on to the PC world.
Garret
My computers :
The Amiga was most amazing. Main CPU and some helper chips for graphics, synthesis, and text rendering I believe. A multi-tasking OS.
They produced a model that had a plug-in board with an Intel 286 on it so you could run DOS stuff, but I never got to try that out.
My first computer was the little Vic-20 and a wierd little game involving money, serfs, soldiers, and taxes. I was ecstatic when I could get a C-64 and spend hours typing in code from the magazines. I stayed with the next computer, an Apple IIE for a few years after that. Great apps to use and more than a few great games.
About the time a lot of posters here were born(early 70s), I was in high school and we were able to get an hour or two of time from the mainframe at M.I.T. Heady times.