My first computer #computers #commodore
Today 40 years ago I bought my first computer - a Commodore 64.
I didn't have enough money to buy a new one, so I told my parents I wanted to buy a used one. They decided to add enough money to get a new one.
I hooked it up to our black and white television set and started typing commands and small BASIC programs from the manual.
In the evening I had to disconnect the computer so my parents could watch the news on TV.
Unfortunately this meant losing all I had typed!
(I'm not quite sure why the computer couldn't just keep the contents of memory when disconnected from the television, maybe I didn't understand that I could just keep it turned on, maybe something happened when it was disconnected.)
This quickly led to my parents giving me an early christmas gift: a tape deck for the computer, so I could save my work on cassette tapes. Phew!
I never got a floppy disk drive for the Commodore 64 - they were very expensive, and I didn't really have the need. Only when I bought my second computer, an Amiga 500 I got a (built-in) floppy disk drive.
My first harddisk was a 40 MB Tiny Tiger II which connected to the Amiga 500 through an interface for the parallel port, but that's a story for another time.
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