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Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Computer? 3

destinyland writes: Today GitHub's official Twitter account asked the ultimate geek-friendly question. "You never forget your first computer. What was yours?"

And within 10 hours they'd gotten 2,700 responses.

Commodore 64, TRS-80, Atari 800, Compaq Presario... People posted names you haven't heard in years, like sharing memories of old friends. Gateway 2000, Sony VAIO, Vic-20, Packard Bell... One person just remembered they'd had "some sort of PC that had an orange and black screen with text and QBasic. It couldn't do much more than store recipes and play text based games."

And other memories started to flow. ("Jammed on Commander Keen & Island of Dr. Brain" "Dammit that Doom game was amazing, can't forget Oregon Trail...")

Sharp PC-4500, Toshiba T3200, Timex Sinclair 1000, NEC PC-8801. Another's first computer was "A really really old HP laptop that has a broken battery!"

My first computer was an IBM PS/2. It had a 2400 baud internal modem. (Though in those long-ago days before local internet services, it was really only good for dialing up BBS's.) I played chess against a program on a floppy disk that I got from a guy from work.

What was your first computer?
Earth

Mystery "Warm Blob" In the Pacific Ocean Could Be Causing California's Drought 173

Mr D from 63 writes A mysterious "warm blob" in the Pacific Ocean could be the reason why US West coast states like California are experiencing their worst ever drought, a new study says. From the article: "Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, began watching the blob a year and a half ago. 'In the fall of 2013 and early 2014, we started to notice a big, almost circular mass of water that just didn't cool off as much as it usually did, so by spring of 2014 it was warmer than we had ever seen it for that time of year,' Bond said in a news release about the studies appearing in Geophysical Research Letters."

Comment Porting to Android is trivial (is it?) (Score 1) 316

Apportable lets you compile Objective-C to native ARM and x86, making porting trivial. I heard many success stories but did not actually use it myself. But having one code base is too good an opportunity to miss. I would like to hear downsides as well. Any developers using apportable to do Android ports, reading this, please share your experiences.

Comment apples to apples please (Score 1) 716

How can one compare a routine work like wall construction to a creative work like programming? One has proven technology used since maybe thousands of years now, while the other has unique problems which involve problem solving, trial and error, interfacing, compatibility... etc. Be sane for God's sake.

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