My first computer

A post on IIDB triggered a flood of memories about my first programming experiences. My first computer was a Casio PB-80 as shown below.


My father gave it to me when I was in the 4^th grade. This places this around 1986 or so. Apparently this was a rather limited release computer. It boasted 512 bytes of RAM (0.5 KB, 0.0005 MB) and a rather limited BASIC programming language. Despite the limitations I managed to get it to do an impressive range of things some of which were thought impossible by my dad. Kids in my school got officially introduced to computers in the 5th grade so this one-year headstart gave me massive number of nerdpoints and most of them bowed to my superior knowledge of all things computer related.

Among the things I managed to get it to do that it was never meant to were things like "animations" by rapidly placing different characters at the same spot to produce weird shapes. I used them for making action games figures though you needed a little imagination to play the game. I think me and my bro were the only ones to really get into it. The programming skills did come in handy on bigger machines though some habits I picked up were hard to lose like using only single character variables to save space and reusing variables as it allowed for only 26 variables.

We only got 2 hrs a week of actual "real computer" time in the school which had to be shared among so 6 or so kids so to maximize the use of that time I made shorter programs which I tested out on this beast. Eventually, in the next 3-4 years, the membrane keyboard started giving out. The shift key was the first to go. I tried to repair it with a separator piece of tape and some copper but it made things worse as often as it made them work. I never threw it away and I wonder if it is still at my home in my junk somewhere. I cried the day when I realized the shift key was definitely dead.