My first computer

My first computer
It was it late 1981 when I decided to actually build my first computer, it was a single board project.
The project was called the ETI-660 and it used an 1802 processor and would have had a 2 ‘k’ of RAM! No floppy drive (forget about hard drives, they were far too expensive in the early days – I think early hard drives sold well over $2000 for a 5 or 10MB (yes that’s right megabyte!) model. Way out of reach for 16 year old, like myself at that time. I had to ‘cobble-together’ a hex keypad from two telephone push button keypads. It was connected to an old black & white telly and a cassette tape recorder and I used to enter programs like ‘pong’ by hand into the thing. This early computer taught me a lot about how the things worked.
I remember saving my pocket money and my after-school pay (Delivering for the local pharmacy on my bike…$15 per week!) to buy the parts!
Getting the expensive printed circuit board and parts from various electronics stores around Sydney was definitely a challenge (no online stores @ 1981), only a few carried the custom boards for the Australian project magazines like Electronics Today International . ( I had to catch a train to Dick Smith at Chullora to get the CDP1802 processor( around $100 back then), and got most of the components at Jaycar at Petersham and my local Tandy at Marrickville. #myfirstcomputer