What Was Your First Computer's Operating System?

What was your first computer's operating system? How many OS's have you owned?
I came late to the party! The first computer I owned had Windows 98. Crash after crash!
Then Windows XP Laptop which the screen broke .
Win XP Desktop I keep to run a embrodiary sewing machine, it's no longer connected to the internet.
Linix on a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. I loved that thing until I broke the charging connector. Better WiFi range than my laptops.
Windows 7 Desktop which I still use a lot, great work horse.
Windows 8 Laptop , updated to Windows 8.1, and now to Win 10. So far so good with Win 10.
My favorite OS is still Win7 for office use.

 

Intel 8088 with DOS, then Win98, skipped straight to XP, then Vista, and straight to 8,8.1 and 10

 

DOS 5.0, then Windows 3.1, Win 95, 98, NT, XP.

 

TI-Basic.

CP/M 3.

Win 3.1/NT4/W95/98/ME/W2K/XP/Vista(Beta only)/W7/W10, alongside Mac OS 7 > Tiger and some NT Server/W2K Server/2003 Server.

Dabbled with various flavours of DOS/early Windows (1/2/3.0/3.11, various *nixes, Solaris, OS/2 and more that I don't recall.

 

CP/M on a homemade Zilog Z80 microprocessor kit that I put together. Later I had an 8080 Developers kit that somebody gave to me.

My first gaming computer was an Apple IIe Europlus with twin floppy drives running AppleDOS and a green screen and I later bought the predecessor to the Macintosh called an Apple Lisa then a year later bought the first Mac. At work I was using Intel based pcs with Microsoft software and also Sun SPARC Stations with UNIX. When I was working at General Motors Holden I also used to work on several DEC PDP-10, PDP-11 and PDP-12 computer systems running CP/M with the bootstrap manually loaded from punched paper or mylar tape and they had huge removable drives like this to store the data and applications
https://static.spiceworks.com/shared/post/0003/6795/14100172357_04fcf5c14b.jpg .

OS Software I have had includes:- all the versions of DOS including Microsoft, DR and Apple, several versions of Unix, the two versions of OS2, several versions of Linux and every version of Windows.

Prior to 1990 I used to do PLC (programmable logic controller) programming on robots and CNC (computer numerical control) machines as well as fault find and optimise variable frequency drives up to 400HP so I had all the PLC programming software languages for every mainstream PLC and CNC brand commonly used in industry such as :- Bosch, Mitsubishi, ANCA, Allen Bradley, MELSEC, IPC, Hitachi, Toshiba, Square D, ASEA ABB, several Landis brands, Siemens, Omron, GE/Fanuc and lots of machine specific software for CNC pick and place machines, CNC mills, CNC lathes, CNC laser cutting machines, CNC waterjet machines and CNC multi machining centres.
I have also used these programming languages:- BASIC, visual BASIC, machine code, Perl, C, C++, Turbo C++, Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Forth and Fortran. There are some I have probably forgotten as I haven't done any programming in anger since 1995.

Around 1990 I got sick of crawling around dirty industrial machines and getting covered in stinky dirty coolant so I switched to a nice clean desk job designing PCBs and so I have also used all the major CAD packages.

I have had a very busy but interesting working life and it is not finished yet

 

My first personally bought cp was an Xerox 860 with CPM. This had an 8-inch floppy drive. Later a IBMjr for the kids. Later still the first full fledged Windows machine was a Zenith 286 with Windows 3.11. Have had 8086's and z-80's that only ran Dos plus basic or gwbassic. Did general electronics repair in the Navy and a boat I was on had dozens of TRS-80's and Model 4's and 16's. Most repairs was cleaning the heads on disk drives since smoking was allowed in work spaces then.These had a true motherboard that every other card plugged into. Have a 5 1/4 floppy box here with Win 3.11, MSDos 4.1 MSDos 6.11 and stepup disk plus Win 95 and 98 and XP. Running Vista, 7 & 8.1. First programming I did was on TRDos Basic. Made an inventory sorter for all the test equipment on a calibration schedule that could be sorted by due date, alpha numeric or 3 month / 6 month look ahead. And a report generator for other ships inspections and discrepancies for review to priortize work schedules. Saw my first touch screen around 1984 in a calibration shop where I did repairs on failed equipment. A Hewlett Packard pc was the main test-bed and had a touch screen driven menu system. It could calibrate to standards any test equipment owned by the boat or any other ships we serviced. Still see plenty of the machines joffa talks of ; Allen Bradley and ABB varible drives for motors are common and Mitsubishi also has some fine drives. And he's right about the grease and conditions in some of these mechanical/ electrical rooms. Had a trs 80 hooked to a mitsubishi robotic trainer arm in the late 80's that could be programmed thru basic to move and store motions to be repeated later on to introduce students to the principles of robotics. Used to hack some of the software back then. Like MS used to restart after doing certain tasks and would report on screen "MsDos is restarting.....". I found it on disk and changed it to "MSDos is SCRE>>>>> up again......" Had "multiplan" word processing program that would let you make 5 copies of the master disk then no more. I found in the middle of the first sector of the disk was the number "5". Changed it to "ff" and could make plenty of copies. Didn't do it. Just wanterd to know if I could. It's been fun and still is!

Have and have used many of the FreeDos FreeBSD and Linux's over the years and a few others. Always willing to try anything. These machines have never been my lifeblood so I can afford to mess around.

 

TRS-80 way back from Radio Shack. Had to learn BASIC to program anything then. Moved up to Apple II-e next then to a desktop. Things have really changed over the years. First had to load programs from a cassete player and it had like 4 MB of storage space. Took forever. 1st online was a terrible 14kb. So slow I could feel my whiskers growing.

 

The first computer I was exposed to (maybe not really a computer) was a punched paper tape NC milling machine.

 

@Imandy Mann I used to use Multiplan too and your post just reminded me
IIRC Multiplan was the spreadsheet and Multimate was the word processor

Hmmm I also changed the DOS screen message to be flashing on and off and it said "MSDos is keeping me waiting.....again" hehehe In my area there were two female coordinators and a secretary so I couldn't have any rude messages even if they were witty

A few years later, working at another company, I played a great trick on the Chief Computer Systems Analyst. I had just run up a brand new IBM 386 and handed it over to him and he signed off that it was working to his requirement. Now all the old timers will remember a game called Paratrooper and this game runs from one very small exe file. When I handed over the 386 I left a small TSR (terminate and stay resident) routine (that I had written) running in extended memory. The routine becomes active on shutdown or exit where it then calls a batch file which renames command.com to paratrooper.exe and paratrooper.exe to command.com so every time the computer was rebooted it would immediately launch into the game Paratrooper. Of course this wasn't discovered until the following day after the computer was first turned on and then even when the bootable DOS floppy disk was inserted (of course I had already doctored this too) it was the same result lolol
It took two programmers until morning tea to figure out the joke and when I went to go home late that night I discovered my car was on blocks and none of the wheels were touching the ground and they had hidden the jack so the programmers had a good laugh too

FYI Memories
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4u67lo94tRM/UzW2paGCR9I/AAAAAAAACJU/psuB01MoP5A/s1600/dos+paratrooper.png

 

Well, my 1st computer was an Atari 400, yeah the one with the cheesy flat membrane keyboard. But, since I never used it with a disk drive, I guess it cannot be said that I used Atari DOS. I just used the BASIC cartridge and a couple of game cartridges on it. Likewise, on my next computer, a Commodore 64, I didn't use a disk drive with that either.

So, my very first exposure to an actual DOS was CP/M 86 on Victor 9000 computers at work. Later MSDOS on those same computers.

Then around 2 years of TRSDOS on a TRS-80 Model III at work.

After several more years of MSDOS, I finally made the jump over to Windows 98. After several years there, I finally went Back to the Future to experience the LEGEND ... the ubiquitous Windows XP. I of course dabble with Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8 and 10 when I get access to computers with those, but Windows XP Blvd is where I live.

 

644mzh processor on a 600MB harddrive with windows 95. i had zork, paint, and netscape 1.3, which ran a chat room game i used to play called netdragons. it was essentially d&d2.0 but in a chatroom with all the numbers pre-plugged in and a randomizing number gen for dice rolls.
two years later my mom comes home and gives me a 1.2gzh with a whole 1gb of ram and a whopping 30GB Hdd. i remember looking at her and saying. "30gb? when the hell am i ever going to be able to fill up that much space? it was 1998, top of the line HP made for and with 98 on it, fresh from the college's surplus locker. her and her boss just finished setting up 40 of them and got to keep the 6 left over. i inherited one of them.

on that win95, i because one of the first 500 people to ever make an account or play runescape. in da way back old days

 

First computer I had a lot of contact with was running Windows 3.1 . . . I also had dabbled a bit in MSDOS around this time.

The first computer I owned ran Windows 95, which I later upgraded to Windows 98.

The first computer I built I installed XP Pro 32bit on (later upgraded to Win 7).

Installed Windows 7 64bit on my current computer build.

 

Sinclair Basic on a Sinclair ZX-81 was the first machine, I owned.

 

Apple IIc Plus, ROM version 5.

 

Growing up during the computing revolution in Silicon Valley.....
I built an Altair, got advice from the Homebrew club in San Jose, met The Woz.
I managed to get a Startrek type text game coded in Altair (MS) Basic.
Apple ][, Apple ][+, Apple ][c, Apple ][e, Apple ][GS (so many features PC's never had, never will)
Macs (lots of em and still have one today)
PCs running QNX, Windows (certified for most from NT 3.51 on), Linux
What a long strange trip its been!

 

I'm not even sure my first ever computer even had an OS! It was a Sinclair ZX81 with no disc drive and a ridiculously small amount of RAM, 16k I seem to remember, and that would drop out if you pressed the keys too firmly But I blame it entirely for getting me hooked after I managed to create a primitive model of the solar system in Basic. Next was a BBC Model B with 32K and floppies for storage, but with no programming knowledge whatsoever (few had in those days) I managed to write a draughts (checkers) program in 6502 Assembler and persuade one of the software newcomers to fork out £2000 for it. It was by far the most mentally challenging task I have ever undertaken and can hardly believe now, 30+ years later, that I managed it. I haven't been tempted to try programming since - not too keen on waking up at 3AM with the answer to the latest problem forcing me out of bed to test it

 

When I got that first Win98 desktop I knew absolutely nothing about specs. I was told by the salesman that 8MB Ram was more than I would ever need. LOL .... My first attempt at being geeky was installing 128mg memory. I thought I had really done something.

 

First computer was a Heathkit. Had to build the damn thing first.

Then Army, '74. The military operating systems were of course proprietary, specialized. My particular discipline was voice intercept systems maintenance.

 

Ssss SO, if we input ALL of that info into a state of the art computer of today, would it be safe to say that it will calculate that KatKat is the youngest member here?

I don't believe I saw anyone here use the Vic 20. DID anyone ever use it? Or was it pretty useless? I got tempted, but never pulled the trigger on getting one. Good thing the Commodore 64 came out before I threw the dice on a Vic 20. Then again, I was also tempted by the Sinclair, but just never pulled the trigger on that one either.

 

Ha...if we follow that line of reasoning, then I am probably the oldest member here - oh noooo !!!

 

I had lots of the cheap computers for a short time <6 months to try out different things for work and I had things like Amiga, TRS-80, Atari 800 with cassette loader, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, Amstrad and a Dick Smith Super-80. There were a couple of others whose names escape me for now....
Lucky for me I didn't pay for any of these although I did buy the TRS-80 for almost nothing when work was finished testing

 

I wish! You must of missed the part where I said I came to the party late.

 

Okay okay, so maybe it's not a rocket science foolproof way of telling who's the youngest and oldest member.

 

Just for you...

 

Apple DOS - learning programming in BASIC.
PC DOS - using a program written in dBase to control about 9,000 stock items.
Windows XP, Windows 7, (trying) Linux Mint.
I do help a friend with Windows 8, and my 76 year old Mom using a Windows 10 64-bit laptop.

 

Mimsy, thank you for the sound byte reminder. Maybe that's what is meant by being great again. Count me out!

 

The first computer I bought had Windows 98 2nd ed. The camera not included. Sony Vaio PCV

 

Mine was a TSR 80

 

Have you tried "Universe Sandbox"?

 

I spend too much time on computers already - that might just be the last straw

 

On a somewhat related note the first computer I remember using was a mainframe in the computer science building of my university in the mid 70s. I had to sit at a keypunch terminal and punch out commands on paper cards. After typing up a stack of cards I fed them through a card reader and went down into the bowels of the computer building to get my paper print out of an experiment I had run. I suspect the mainframe likely ran Unix.

 

Early computers ran Machine Code and then they ran Assembly Language and after these the high level programming languages we now know which were more geared to end users being able to use the computers.
Hmmm....mid 1970s......... depending on the brand of mainframe it would have been more likely programmed in either FORTRAN (IBM), ALGOL (Burroughs) or COBOL (Remington Rand)

Just a side note FYI...... that the computer language Lisp in 1958 is recorded as the first computer language that used dynamically typed input from a keyboard as everything else used paper tape or punch cards.

 

At office, we had Control Data Corp. (CDC) 3300s with MASTER OS and assembler was COMPASS. Production programming on them was mostly with COBOL, using cards. Database query support was by MARS (Multi- Access Retrieval System). Storage was on diskpack and magnetic tape. Output went to 80-80 cards and 132 col fanfold. My, how great it was ... not!

 

Windows 3.0 I believe, possibly 3.1.

 

Win 98

 

I started on a VIC 20, loved it, wanted to write my own games after playing the 2600. Had the datasette, then got a 1540 floppy, Also started programming in school on a Digital PDP 11/34? then I got the C=64 and stayed with Commodore and got the Colt, their IBM clone.

 

mid to late 1980's, my parents bought their first computer. i was trying to convince them to buy an epson computer, which booted into a word processing program. you could end the word processor to get to the computer's guts and run other programs. however my dad felt that it was not a "true" computer. my older brother said he knew some guy who ran a computer parts warehouse, where there were buckets, and barrels, and boxes, and crates, and shelving just brimming with spare computer parts of every conceivable type ( they were fun to walk around and browse ). they also sold complete systems, so my parents drove down to palo alto california, where the computer parts warehouse was, picked up my older brother ( who also lived in palo alto ) and went to see what the guy had, and they did buy a computer system from him. i've been racking my brother's brain for the last 2 weeks because i can't remember the details, he can't remember much either, and both of our internet searches have not been fruitful. the french company, honeywell-bull, made a pc, that ran cp/m, but honeywell-bull made an excessive amount of this particular personal computer, and a pallet of these computers, some how, ended up in that computer warehouse in palo alto. and that's what my parents bought as their first computer. there were 2 five and a quarter inch floppy drives, but the computer formatted the floppies in a non standard way, so no other computer could understand or use floppies that it formatted, and normal formatted 5 1/4 floppies could not be used in that honeywell-bull computer. and that's all both of us can remember. my parents did drive back down about a year later and bought a 2nd one for parts because normal standard computer parts did not work in it. i wish i could remember more about it, actually, i wish we still had it so i could show people, because i've gotten a lot of blank stares from people over the years when i have tried to explain this french computer to them and why we ended up with it.

late 1983 ( i think ) i helped another brother of mine, buy his first computer. a kaypro II.
http://hallsted.ws/misc/2016/kaypro/kp2-kaypro2.jpg

now that was a heavy, well built computer. and another computer i wish we still had. the one thing i remember about the kaypro was watching my brother play and conquer the ladder game it came with, many times actually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_(video_game)
it was fun to watch him because he was very good at it.

http://hallsted.ws/misc/2016/kaypro/kp2-laddergame1.jpg

and

http://hallsted.ws/misc/2016/kaypro/kp2-laddergame2.jpg

well, my first computer was not as exciting... it was a white box generic win95 computer from the late 1990's.

 

Forgot its name but used a tape to load and donkey kong took for ever to load from tape. Going back about 34 years ago when i was 16. still confused considering i am sure i am only 21 years old, Hmmm LOL...

 

my first windows was 3.1 remember it well but my first computer i had was a amstrad cpc 464 know those were the gaming days lol. Still got the amstrad to this day and still works with about 200 cassette games with it.

 

I vaguely remember Apple 2, Vic 20 (still in the attic!) Commodore 64 and a dabble with Sinclair and Amstrad!
All operating systems from Windows 3.1 to Windows 10 except Windows 8.
And I still don't have a clue!

 

windows 3.0 i still have that and some dos 5.0 and a dos ibm dos disc 1.5 or something and win 3.11 95 98-buncha junk

 

had some old 8088 computers too that just played games or wordpad one was kingdom of the kroz i think-bought used-had 30 computers at one time ibm 1980 one etc