What Was Your First Home Computer? Mine Was A £500K Analogue Computer

Around 1978 a friend of mines father came round one day to say his department at University were about to dump a computer, and was I interested in it.  Imagining a suitcase sized device I said yes. He told me it had to be out of the department by the end of the week or it would be dumped.

As I didn't drive at the time I asked one of my Student Mental Nurse friends Walter if he could possibly give me a lift to the University and our friend Martin said he'd like to come along for the ride.

We arrived at the University and discovered that this wasn't a suitcase size computer, but was a huge table sized analogue computer from Electronic Associates, Inc a model TR-48

This is the Model of Analogue Computer now in the National Computer Museum in Bletchley UK

To get it in the car we had to remove the back seats and the front passenger seat.  Manhandle the beast into the back of the car, refit the passenger seat then all climb in.

When I got it home it created quite a stir.  As I was teaching myself electronics at the time, by building my own analogue synthesiser, I could plug this into the synth and do some amazing things. For years people came around the house after the pubs closed to look at the amazing machine working adding voltages together and making weird and amazing sounds through the synth.

I too had a huge oscilloscope on top of it so you could watch the complex waveforms it produced.

It was truly stunning to have half a million pounds worth of machine in a Whitfield Council house.

Then I got a ZX80 which was a huge disappointment. LOL It didn't have patchboards huge coloured panels with motors to load and unload it and Voltmeters and best of all precision 20 turn pots to twiddle.

I'm posting this on Facebook so Walter, Martin, Debbie and others can recognise the beast of 23 Elms Road :-)

Come to think of it, I must be the only person in the world to ever have such a complex analogue computer in their home to play with LOL a crazy achievement to be proud of :-)

#fixed1tVintagekit