My first intensive contact to a computer was in 1982 and it was a small Sharp PC-1500 with 11.5 kB RAM, a color plotter and a casette recorder for program and data storage. Very cool machine for the time and a good BASIC interpreter. Usually it ran on safe 1 MHz but I managed to safely go up to nearly 3 with some mods 🙂
Still have a lot of printouts of the software I wrote at that time, science, games, a small ELISA program, …
Next was a, Apple II+ clone with Z80 CP/M card, 2 floppy disk drives, 80 character video card and even some homebrew developments like an 8255 interface card. Completely self soldered, the only machine where I knew what each of the TTLs on the board were doing 🙂
It had 6502-Assembler, MS-BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, MODULO, FORTH, …. you name it. Had a lot of fun and a nice community (Robert Röhse and others).
Then started in J. Gmehlings group (Industrial Chemistry, Chair of U. Onken) and worked for years on an HP 1000 – A900.
Privately I moved from the Apple to the upcomming IBM PC, my first clone had 4.77 MHz CPU, FPU, 640 kByte RAM
From MS-DOS I moved to Windows 3.1 and on …..
Software development was data management for the Dortmund Data Bank including an interactive menu system and graphical data output in 2 and 3D as well as thermodynamic model development and data regression.
I also used the IBM PC XT for the controll of my Stat-VLE apparatus, which required some hardware interfacing to self designed stepping motor driver electronics via assembler programming.
Today I supervise a very inhomogeneous network (4 machines) in my office and 3 further machines at home.
Blogging Experiences 