[LAU] [OT] first computer ?

[david]

Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 10:47:05AM -0400, Dave Phillips wrote:
> 
> 
>> What was your first computer ?
> 
> BBC B. 32k ram, later expanded with 100k floppy disk. 
> My loved one at the time wrote her >300 page degree
> thesis on this, printed on a loaned daisywheel printer
> using a driver written in BASIC. We used to set up
> things to print a few tens of pages and go to see a 
> movie, hoping the rattling would have finished
> without a paper jam when we came back.

Started my first book on typewriter, finished it on a C64, printed with 
an NEC SpinWriter that sounded like a machine gun while printing at 50 
characters per second.

>> What was the first music/sound software you used that really hooked you 
>> into this making-music-with-computers fad ?
> 
> The sound chip on the same, again programmed in
> BASIC. Also the parallel port which could be
> made to shift out 8 bits at 1MHz, used as a
> 1-bit converter.

My first encounter with digitized audio was via a C64. The computer had 
an 8-bit parallel port built into it. With assembly code and an 
analog-to-digital converter hooked into the port, the C64 do 8-bit 
digitizing. I never did that, but did find an audio sample once that 
someone else had done, some Van Halen song IIRC.

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community