Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Early PCs at the National Museum of Computing" video.

  1. Earliest memories I have of a computer at home was in the late 80s... this is in Brazil, so tech came late at high prices here. I'm still not sure exactly what computer it was, but it was a blue-gray keyboard style computer that you needed a tapedeck to run programs and it connected straight to a TV. Everything that came to Brazil back then got rebranded to local names like "Itautec". If I'm not mistaken it ran some form of BASIC too, and I remember at least one game - Zaxxon 3D... so it was most likely a TRS-80/CoCo. After this, it was already a PC-XT with that green phosphorous screen. My first contact with a programming language was DBase III Plus with Clipper as compiler. I think the first serious thing I did with it was a sort of costumer control database for a home based console game rental thing... my dad helped me with it. This was probably back in 93-94, so I was around 14 yrs old. xD We also had this ancient 600 baud rate modem that was almost the size of a computer nowadays, heavier all metal, that I don't remember ever being used. Perhaps it came from my dad's work, I just found it one day in home storage. When I started dabbling with BBSs and IPX connections to play Doom we already had a US Robotics 5600 board - that's 5600 baud rate, not the more popular and last of the line 56Kbps. This of course only happened because my dad got into computers very early in the age of computers here in Brazil... he worked with valve computers, punch cards, mainframes with tape storage and the likes. When he died back in 1999 he was still working with a small team porting stuff from old IBM mainframes to more modern platforms, at Itaipu hydroelectric power plant/river dam. He lead the division of computers for HR on one of the main contractors building the dam back in the 80s, Unicom. Great memories of the time. I still remember very clearly the Sundays my dad had to do something in the offices, he took me there... huge floor space filled with offices with dumb terminals with desks built to house them. They were all connected to the refrigerated "server room" filled with mainframes. I was a kid back then, so I was both fascinated and kinda bored. xD Didn't understand the value of it all.
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