#first computer

The first computer I spent any significant amount of time on was the predecessor to this, the Sanyo MBC-1000.

It was a 1982 model that ran CP/M on a 4MHz Z80. It had a wonderful green phosphor display, and you could edit the character maps to display custom glyphs (it had no other graphics capabilities).

We had the dual disk drive expansion and a dot matrix printer to go with it. Not much software outside of the Star office suite, but it did have BASIC. I spent a lot of time exploring BASIC on that old machine before I really knew what I was doing.

We got it second-hand around 1998, and replaced it in 1999 with a Macintosh Classic from 1990. The next year we finally caught up to the times and bought a new eMachines (“Never Obsolete!”) desktop. In just two years, I crossed some twenty years of computing history.

Somehow it feels like so much longer than that. Perhaps it’s because of how much I was able to learn so quickly.

I may have gotten a late start, but it laid the foundation for a passion and productive hobby working with older computers, and set me up for a career in IT.

I don’t have any pictures of the MBC-1000, but Old Computer Museum has a great one.

(oh that keyboard was lovely. I wish I could have caps like those again.)