My first computer

my first computer

The VTech PreComputer 1000, from back in the days when “1000” still sounded futuristic. It had a screen with one entire row of pixellated LCD characters, a qwerty keyboard complete with Caps Lock (?!), and a wide variety of trivia games. Ran on six C batteries.

I seem to recall that the behavior of Caps Lock was to reverse the usual capitalization, by which I mean holding Shift while Caps Lock was on would produce lowercase characters. Wild. (edit: A great many people have informed me that this is in fact how Windows always worked, which surprises me a lot, because I very distinctly remember being surprised by a real computer’s behavior! It seems that at least some combination of MS-DOS 6.22 and a particular keyboard model would ignore Shift when Caps Lock is on, so maybe that’s what I remember.)
In a kind of precursor to DLC, there were also several extra cartridges you could buy. They were about the size of a thick wallet and came with different sets of… more trivia games.
Then there was the part that changed my life forever: a built-in BASIC interpreter.
It was a huge, huge pain in the ass. I could only see or edit one line at a time, of course. There was also no writable internal storage — this machine was released in 1988, when the idea of a video game that could save your progress was still novel! — so any program I wrote was lost as soon as I turned the thing off.

It did come with a book full of documentation and sample programs. The documentation was helpful enough to get me to make some things, but perhaps not particularly well aimed at the target audience of 9-year-olds, as I remember there being several constructs I didn’t understand in the slightest. The sample programs weren’t described particularly well, had no comments at all, and at the longest ran beyond 30 lines. 30 lines doesn’t sound like a lot to me now, but it was the biggest program I’d ever seen at the time, and typing it all in on a one-line display was daunting. (There were nine “canonical” sample programs baked into the ROM, but the programming tutorial had several lengthy examples that had to be typed in.)

Today's world is often called a computer world and it is truly so. Computer is an electronic device which can carry out a set of instructions. It is difficult to imagine the modern world of high technology without computers. Moreover, it is the fastest growing industry nowadays. Fifty years ago people had no idea what computers are and what they can do. Today, people can't imagine living a day without them. While the first computer was the size of a minibus, modern devices can fit into a palm. And the computer revolution is still going on.

The first computers were developed during the Second World War to break the codes or send secret information. They were also used to do calculations for the first atom bomb. Today, they are used to store the data, handle banking transactions, manage governmental files, keep statistics etc. Generally, all that computes do is calculate. They turn numbers into pictures, words and sounds. The Japanese have already created the device which responds to human language. Computers have opened a new era in many spheres of life, especially in manufacturing and communication systems.
The word “computer” was first used in 1613 in a book, written by English writer. It referred to a person, who carried out calculations. Soon the first mechanical calculator was invented by Blaise Pascal. However, the actual father of the first recognizable computer was Charles Babbage. In the first half of the 19 ^th century he created a fully programmable mechanical device. The sophisticated analog computers appeared in the 20 ^th century. First functional computer was called Z1 and was created by Konrad Zuse.
Today, nearly everything in the world is done with the help of computers. No man alive can do 500,000 sums in one second, whereas computers can. They have a much better memory and faster reaction. Computers have extended the power of the human mind across the existing barriers. Many fields of science are dependent on this device today. For example, medicine is almost impossible without computers. Over the last 50 years all medical information, discoveries and data have been stored there. Moreover, computers play an integral part in diagnostics and treatment.
Although there are two types of computers, analog and digital, only digital type is widely used in every field. Digital computers perform a number of operations at an unbelievable speed. For example, they can handle 2,000 million discrete operations per second. More computers handle many billions of cycles enhanced per second. There have already been several generations of digital computers or processing units.
Computer science is even taught in modern schools. It's called IT (Information Technology). Children at secondary schools learn how to handle computing machines and store basic information. Besides using computers for IT lessons, schools need this device for test and examination purposes.