Your first computers

[SanibelMan]

After watching "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" the other day, I got nostalgic for old computers. Sure, the iMac G5 on my desk is powerful and spiffy and all that, but it doesn't have the character. So what computers did you first use?

My first computer was a Toshiba T1000 laptop my dad gave me in the late 80s, after his office moved to Macs. It had a 1.4 MB flash drive for a hard drive - that had to be expensive then - and I used its 2400-baud modem to connect to Prodigy. I remember when it took 20 minutes to download a weather map, but man, it looked cool on the 16-color CGA monitor I hooked up to it. Dad helped me write an AUTOEXEC.BAT file that gave me a menu of programs at start-up.

(When I called to cancel my Prodigy service at the tender age of seven, they guilted me so much I cried. When I called many years later to cancel AOL, the emotion tended more to the homocidal.)

After I got intrigued by my dad's Powerbook 140, he brought an old Mac Plus home from the office. It died a Sad Mac death after a few months and in the 3rd grade, we went to Micro Center and I got an LC III+. 68030, 33 MHz. I loved playing SimCity 2000 on it.

Later on, I got a leftover Quadra 650, a Performa and one of the first beige G3s. I traded the G3 for a G4/450 in 2000 and got this iMac last year, giving the G4 to my grandmother.

[citybadger]

A cute little thing with a membrane keyboard. Has a 16K memory module attached to the back which would work its way loose as you typed, eventually causing a system crash.

[CanvasShoes]

Heh....

It was an old Amstrad PC clone. It didn't even qualify as a 286. I couldn't put real MS programs on it, I had to use shareware copies of Word and Lotus 1,2,3.

That was in 91 or so. There were better computers already out there, but I couldn't afford one at that time.

Now I have two, a little averatec laptop and a custom build desk top, which I put together with the help of my old boyfriend.

Funny thing, I use the little laptop far more than the big fancy best parts money can buy custome build.

That one, as much fun as it was to put together, is basically just my studio for putting together my aerobics and dance class CDs. I almost feel guilty about all those empty gigs of hard drive space. Almost........

[citybadger]

Another membrane keyboard, now with 16K built in, color, and a tape recorder. And games on cartridges. Did some serious BASIC programming with this one. Had libraries of very unreliable tapes.

[Waterman]

How about the 27 pound Compaq portable that required a hoist from the mid to late 80's? Or the Osborne (I think trhat is the right spelling) Computers? The first computer I remember working with was an Apple something or other in 1984 that I ran VisiCalc (the forerunner of Lotus 1-2-3 which was the forerunner of - Oh stop already) on that machine. Can't remember other comapny names but I do recall the first IBM that I used was the IBM-XT with no hard disk and ran everything off of floppies and composed text documents using a program called PC-Write. The PC-Write program file was 23 kb big! Now the programs are 230 MB.

[cormac262]

The one and only: Osborne 1 !!!

Two, count em', 5 1/4" floppy drives (no hard drive), 64k RAM, CPM OS and the little 3" black and white screen (to lose your eyesight with). Along with the Kaypro which came out around the same time (around '82), the first "portable" personal computer. What a classic.

Best of all, I still have it. And though it's been years, I think if I fired it up, it would still work !

[Eliahna]

My first computer was a Spectravideo, which no one else seemed to have ever heard of and it used to confuse the heck out of people when I told them the brand name (they always thought it was some kind of video player). I remember Armoured Assault as being the single greatest game of all time, although I saw it again just a couple of years back and they must have changed it because there's no way it was so ugly and boring (I swear it was better in the 80's!). I used to like copying the programs out of the book into it which at least gave me a good grounding in Basic for when I graduated to my second computer, a 286 (circa 1990/91).

[SanibelMan]

A cute little thing with a membrane keyboard. Has a 16K memory module attached to the back which would work its way loose as you typed, eventually causing a system crash. That reminds me, my dad bought a Timex Sinclair at the grocery store in 1983 so he could put "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING" on the TV for the New Year's Eve party. That might have been the only time he used it. I pulled it out of the closet years later and played with it, but never got very far. That membrane keyboard was a bitch to type with.

[uglybeech]

TRS-80 Model II (http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/design/images/computers/trs80b.gif) Yup it used a cassette recorder for data storage.

[silk1976]

First was a radio shack TRS-80 (trash-80). Forget how much memory, but had no sort of drive at all. Although it did have a cartridge slot for games and programs. Best was Dungeons of Daggorath. You could also connect a tape module to it and save data to a cassette tape. Logo (the 'programming language' with the turtle) and basic were just about all I had.

Then it was a Tandy 1000. What an upgrade! Two 5.25 inch drives, 384 KB of memory (which I upgraded later to 640 KB - yeah, I was the cool kid for a while). Almost spent about $250 of my hard earned cash (hey, I was about 13) on a 20 MB hard card. But that was right after tthe stock market crash in 89 or whatever, and my mom suddenly didn't find it wise to spend money on something like that.

From there is was onto 286's and 386's. However, the Tandy did give me the best game ever , Starflight. Took me two years to finally finish that game.

[cwthree]

I got a Coleco Adam in the mid 1980's. Don't remember most of the specs. It was a large monster of a PC, and the power supply was in the printer, so you couldn't just run the PC, you had to have the printer plugged in and attached as well. It came with tape drives (audiotape cassette format), but I later upgraded it to have a disk drive.

I did use it for a couple of years as an undergrad. It beat going to the computer lap to use the mainframe text editor from H*ll. Once they started stocking the labs with Macs, I stuffed the Adam in a closet and didn't use it again. I gave it away when I graduated.

[Otanx]

First one was a VIC-20, Then a Commadore 64. Anyone remember Compute! magazine? Went from the 64 all the way to a off-brand 386, then a Packard Bell 486, Then another off-brand Cyrix chipped 586. Started building my own systems after that.

I remember installing Windows 95 on the 486 the week it was released. After a few days the CD-ROM stopped working. Took it in to Sears for repair(Don't laugh we bought it from Sears, and they fixed it for free). They replaced the CD-ROM drive, but also reloaded the hard drive with the original image. I reinstalled 95, and a while later the CD-ROM stopped working again. This time they replaced the CD-ROM, and the motherboard. Again wiping the hard drive. Again the CD-ROM failed. Took it in and they basically replaced the entire system except the case, and monitor. Even gave us a new keyboard and mouse. Again CD-ROM stopped working. I decided too fix it myself this time. I found out that Windows 95 will not load multimedia drivers if getting low on memory. With only 4MB of RAM we were at minimum requirments. Went out and bought another 4MB for $107.

Now for $100 I can get 1GB of memory.

-Otanx

[Eleusis]

TRS-80 model I with 4k of ram.

[asterion]

First computer Dad bought was a true IBM 286. I was four, so I can't give all the specs. Though I do remember being scared when I pushed a button and the power supply failed simultaneously. Dad had to send it for repair, something I've never done in the 18 or so years since then. (When the power supply in my Dell failed, I paid through the nose for a properitary power supply and put it in myself within 15 minutes.)

[Stranger On A Train]

A cute little thing with a membrane keyboard. Has a 16K memory module attached to the back which would work its way loose as you typed, eventually causing a system crash.I had one of these which got replaced by a Trash-80 Color Computer, with its glorious 32k of ram, chicklet keyboard, and external tape drive (later replaced by a 5.25" floppy drive mounted off the game controller). It was a POS, really, though if I'd known the right crowd I guess I could have installed a real operating system on it and made it do more than run the fairly cheezy BASIC programs I wrote for it. (Did you ever try to write a spreadsheet app in BASIC? Don't bother...a simple sort on a 200 point data set would result in a system crash.) Needless to say, I envied the Commodore 64 crowd, and later the Amiga. I was never particularly hot about the Apple, though. For years after my final and most successful attempt and running away from home my single "computer" was an HP-32s, but since I was attending one university or another soon thereafter I had access to PCs and Macs of that era.

Now I've got a mishmash of Intel x86 and PPC machines performing, or more often failing to perform, various tasks. To hell with the "good old days"; I like the Linux and MacOSX graphical desktops.

Stranger

[RaftPeople]

Trash 80 color computer with 4k of ram. However first 1k was taken up by system addresses and video memory, and last 512 was the stack. Didn't leave too much to work with.

Although the computer was designed to upgrade to 32k it could address 64k. After I bought new memory chips, I had some friends that made the necessary modifications to allow 64k memory. They had to bend up one of the pins of one of the memory chips and soldered a wire from that to some other spot on the circuit board. Then, in my programs I had to toggle a bit in memory to swap between the upper 32k and the ROM that occupied those same addresses (which provided the BASIC language/operating system).

[Amazon Floozy Goddess]

I had a VIC-20. Didn't even have a disk drive for it - I had to load up programs on cartridge or CASSETTE TAPE. I feel old.

Commodore 64 came next. I still have it and use it - although my 1541 drive bit the dust recently, so I have to hunt one down somewhere now.

[Interrobang!?]

We had an Apple IIe. I remember using Bank Street Writer for word processing, obsessing over Infocom's Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide, and spending hours playing Taipan. (Bad joss, Taipan! You've been blown off course!)

[Ranchoth]

The first new computer we ever bought was an LC 575, in 1994. I still remember driving home with it... 33mhz 68040 CPU, 8 megs of ram (eventually upgraded), I forget how much hard drive space. No modem for the first couple of years, then a 14.4, and finally a 56k modem. The floppy drive died after a few years, and it ended up just being cheaper and easier to get an (external) Zip drive to replace it. We called her "Elsie."

I used that computer until almost six years later, on the day I got it's replacment, a G4 that I'm typing on now. About a year or two ago, we tried hooking it up again so my mother could have something to type on, but the hard drive, which had been getting more and more finicky in it's later years, finally died.

We have it in storage, right now. I have no intention of ever throwing that computer away.

[Imasquare]

My first computer was a Spectravideo, which no one else seemed to have ever heard of...I remmebre the SpectraVideo from around about the time of the Commdodore 64.

I got my first computer in those days, it was a Texas Instruments TI49A. But I really did want a SpectraVideo because it had an incredible 128Kb of RAM. 16Kb was the norm in those days.

[Imasquare]

...although my 1541 drive bit the dust recently, so I have to hunt one down somewhere now.There is a vintage computer section on eBay that has a lot of Commodore bits and pieces.

[lorinada]

My family's first computer was the TRS80 Model 1, purchased sometime between 1976 and 1978 (I just remember that it was while I was in college). We mostly played pong with it...or was the with the Timex Sinclair ZX80 that came later, about 1980 if I remember correctly? No, must have been the Tandy becuase I left home in 1978 and I don't remember playing pong to any great extent while visiting.

My first computer was also a Tandy 8088, the 1000. No hard drive, but two floppies so I had no problem putting my WordStar (the greatest word-processing program ever written) disk into one drive and saving my data on the other. It was especially great because my dad had the computer first and before I got it he had already replaced one of the 5¼" drives with one of those nifty new 3½" drives! I used it mostly for homework when I went back to school in 1989. Somewhere around 1995 I lent it to my brother, who somehow thought I said "here, have it, it's yours" and sold it in a garage sale!

[Waterman]

I forgot all about the joy of a TRS-80 and putting basic (IIRC) programs onto cassette tapes and then waiting forever to load the program and god forbid if you ever wanted to do anything with entering data. My first hard drive cost me about $200 and it was a hard drive on a card (what were card slots at that time - 1988? - can't remember) and had a whopping 20 MB.

Went through an Epson computer (got it for free as a good friend worked for them) that was clunky but their dot-matrix printers were the cream of the crop in those day.

[mks57]

My first computer was a Digi-Comp 1 (http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/Digicomp-Kit-1963.htm) that I purchased from Edmund Scientific Company. It was a kit composed of plastic and wire parts. It had three bits of memory.

[d1a1s1]

Apple IIc here. It was the "little" version of the IIe.

[dwc1970]

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair/2068 (http://www.concentric.net/~Alxevans/TS2068.html). I got this for Christmas in 1983. Disk drives were a luxury then, so like most home computer users, all I had for data storage and retrieval was a cassette tape recorder (very slow and unreliable). All my friends had Commodore 64 computers and I envied them as they could all buy cool games and other programs at the store. I was probably laughed at after I left asking if they had anything for the TS 2068. I managed to make it do a few cool things with the BASIC programming it used. The keyboard was very complex with all the BASIC commands and functions available at the press of a single key or with a combination of other keys (shift). It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I would have rather just typed out the command words manually as it was very cumbersome. If I had to do it all over again I would have asked for a C64 for Christmas instead.

My second computer was a Tandy Color Computer 3 (http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/coco3/). (Coco 3 for short). I got this for my 18th birthday in 1988. I did a little better with this computer. I had a floppy disk drive (5¼" drive, about $500 optional), and while there was no software at the store other than Radio Shack, I could order software via mail order. The Coco 3 (and its predecessors) were supported by a magazine called The Rainbow. Each magazine contained dozens of BASIC program listings to type in. I spent countless hours late into the night typing those programs in and debugging them (argh). To save one's time and patience, you could order the programs ready to go on disk or tape, but I didn't have the money for this, unfortunately. As the computer became obsolete the magazine, retaining its $3.95 newsstand price, shrank in size and in the quality of its content as its user base was dwindling. At its peak, issues of The Rainbow weighed in at over 200 pages. The last issue I bought before giving up was in November 1991, a mere 50 pages thick. That was when I thought it was time to move into the PC world.

My first "real" computer, bought in November 1991, was a 386SX machine, 16 MHz processing speed and a whole 2 MB of RAM. For about $200 I upgraded it to 4MB. I also added a sound card, which was optional back then, along with a 2400 bps modem.

In 1993 I moved up to a 486 DX33. It started out with 4 MB RAM, 170 MB hard drive, 2400 bps modem, no sound card and no CD-ROM. I threw just about every upgrade into that thing. By the time I retired this machine it had been upgraded to 8 MB and then again to 16MB. I added a sound card, 14.4 modem, 2X CD-ROM drive and a 1.2 GB hard drive. I also upgraded the processor to 66 MHz. I put a lot of money into that thing.

In 1997 I upgraded to a 486 DX4/100 system, transferring the hardware from the old machine over to the new box. A few months later I finally got a Pentium 200 MHz system and used it until 2001, when I got a system with 1.2 GB, 40 GB hard drive and 256 RAM along with a CD burner. I was also up to using DSL by this time.

My current system has the same 256 MB RAM, but about a year ago I upgraded the motherboard and run at 2.6 GHz, plus I have added an 80 GB hard drive. Next upgrade will be the DVD burner and more memory.

[TellMeI'mNotCrazy]

A cute little thing with a membrane keyboard. Has a 16K memory module attached to the back which would work its way loose as you typed, eventually causing a system crash.
The first family computer was a Commodore 64, but my first very own computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I loved that little thing.

My computer progression:

C64
Timex Sinclair 1000
More C64s
Tandy (286 with I think 10 meg harddrive)
AST (486 with a whopping 24 meg of RAM)
Gateway - this computer is still chugging along, and even running XP, which I figure isn't too shabby for a computer that is now 6 years old.

And now my HP Pavilion laptop.

[nivlac]

In 1983 I walked into an IBM store, plunked down over $3,000, and walked out with an IBM PC1 with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 chip, 64KB RAM, one floppy disk drive, no hard drive (what's that?), monochrome monitor, keyboard. It came with DOS 2.1 and BASIC. And I had a blast with the machine, an absolute blast! Those were heady times indeed.

[Elmer MuD/PhuD]

I was born in '82, and my family had a Commodore 64 for as long as I am able to remember. Better still, our neighbor must have been one of the first to go to college for computer science, so he used to copy and write all sorts of games for us. It was great until my second youngest sister stuck a silver dollar into the 5 1/2" floppy. Nothing worked after that.

[GorillaMan]

We didn't own a computer for a long time - but I had plenty of access to those of my dad's school. Link 480Z (http://www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk/Museum/rm/480z.php)s were the first ones: I still remember the excitement of discovering the dual text/graphics mode, where you could have colour graphics in three-quarters of the screen, and 80-column text in the remainder!!!

After that, it was a steady progression of PCs. The two 8088 machines were particularly special, because they had a printer that could produce sixteen colours. The 286s seemed almost magical in the way they could boot without a disc in the drive, loading this fancy program called 'Windows' (v3.0). 386s coincide with high school, and their first network - for several years the IT teacher either didn't know or didn't care that hardly a single member of staff had changed their password away from 'password', and that we could boot up File Manager even though we didn't have an icon for it, as long as we knew the right path to type. Heh heh.

[Malacandra]

The first computer I ever actually touched was a Commodore PET, with 8k memory, in a university lab in 1979. (The lecturer had a 32k PET in his office, and it had an actual-like typewriter keyboard, instead of a QWERTY layout of flat square buttons).

The first home computer I ever saw was a Sinclair ZX81 that my older sister got as a Christmas present, which you programmed by touching keys on the QWERTY keboard that had BASIC keywords printed on them.

My first home computer was an Amstrad CPC464 which was an incredibly advanced package, in that the cassette drive was integral to the keyboard/CPU and the colour screen came as part of the deal. It had a nominal 64k of memory but the system hogged a quarter of that. I played Elite and Lords of Midnight and eventually Gauntlet on it for years. A week or so after I bought it (~April 1985) Amstrad brought out the CPC664, which had an integral 3" (sic) floppy drive.

My present 2.6GHz Pentium with a flat screen monitor cost me less, in real terms, than the Amstrad. :eek:

[Mangetout]

I started off with a Sinclair ZX81 (the same as the machine marketed as the Timex Sinclair 1000 in the USA, I think), a 16K rampack that suffered 'wobble', causing crashes; later, I added the ZX printer which worked by burning the aluminised layer off the top of a roll of special paper. I also added a module that would allow me to get user-definable graphics.

After that, I had a 48K ZX Spectrum (the one with the weird blue rubber keyboard), to which I added a Currah MicroSpeech synthesiser, an Opus Discovery floppy disk drive (180K on a 3.5" floppy! WooHoo!).

There followed about a decade with no computer, then I availed myself of the awesome might of an IBM PC clone - a 386DX40 with 4MB memory, TWO hard drives (one 40MB and one 80MB) and a Citizen colour dot-matrix printer.

[Pushkin]

The first computer I myself owned was a crappy old P100 that was enough to run Word and a few games to see me through about 3 years of uni'. It did its job until it died (mostly) and was cannibalised to help our old 486 run a bit quicker.

The first computer my family owned was an old Dragon 32 we got from an uncle on Mum's side of the family. It played a few decent games, Kong (a Donkey Kong rip off) and a sort of two player Solitaire.

[Walkabout]

The first computer I used was an Apple II+ , which I used for inputting research data. It had two 5 1/2 floppy disks, and I remember switching floppies in and out as I ran Visicalc and saved the data. The biggest frustration I had was the size of the spreadsheet. Since it could only use 32K of memory, the spreadsheet was only 256 rows long and about 50 columns wide. It was pretty aggravating to be inputting data and suddenly have the 32K limit sign blinking at me from up in the corner, and have to start a whole new spreadsheet. Later when I moved on to bigger computers and Lotus 1-2-3, it was astounding to see spreadsheets that seemed to go on forever.

[Scissorjack]

Sinclair Spectrum, with a Z80 processor, a mighty 16K {later upgraded to 48K}, the "dead flesh" keyboard, no soundchip, and a huge 8 colours {15 if you count the BRIGHT mode}: tape drive, natch, although I remember some giveaway progammes which came with magazines on record. Yup, you dubbed the record onto tape, and then hoped like hell it would load. Ah, the days of 8 minute loading times followed by the dread message TAPE LOADING ERROR.

[Khadaji]

My first computer was a Tandy Rainbow Color Computer (aka the CoCo)

I used a Black and White TV as a monitor. I used a regular tape recorder as a tape back up.

[Mr. Jibby Jabbish]

Atari 130. No hard drive, game cartridges that didn't work. At least it was cheap. After that, Packard Bell 33 Mhz (I debated for weeks over whether I should get 25 Mhz or go all out for the 33), 4 MB and about 120 HD. In 98, I got my first laptop, and I'm still using it.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

I had a Leading Edge Model 'D' (an XT clone). Dual 5.25" floppies (I couldn't afford the $500 10Mb harddrive upgrade!).

I paid the same amount for it (about $1500) in 1988 as I did for my computer (Dell 8300 w/120Gb HD) last year.

[fishbicycle]

1998: Sony VAIO microtower. P2, 266. 6 gig HD, 32 MB RAM, Win95. $1500. My wife is still using it, with a replaced power supply, RAM upgrade and Windows 2000.

[FordPrefect]

Dungeons of Daggorath.
That game kicked ass! I bought a CoCo 3 a couple of years ago so I could run an emulator to play that game :)

My first computer was not the CoCo, but the MC-10. It came out at the same time as the Timex Sinclair, had 4K memory with a 16K expansion pack, I also got the tape deck for it. It's one great advantage over the Timex was the chicklet keyboard. I did a lot of BASIC programming on that little sucker.

[Giles]

The first computer that I used was Utecom (http://www.users.bigpond.com/robin_v/deuce.htm), back when I was in second-year mathematics at the University of New South Wales. It was huge -- it used valves, not transistors -- and was programmed in a reverse Polish language called George. Programming was on punched paper tape -- no cards, no magetic tape, no cartridges. It was about as powerful as a prorammable calculator is these days.

[AHunter3]

Learned on a Mac 512Ke but the first one I owned (used) was a Mac SE with a 40 MB HD. Had a 2400 baud modem and an original StyleWriter to go with it. Around maybe 1990, it had fallen way behind what a modern computer could do, so I bought an Applied Engineering accelerator card for it and ended up with a 40 MHz '030 powered SE, which was very snappy, and the card supported four 4-MB chips (which was actually the expensive part) so I had a 16 MB 40 MHz SE. That was one sweet machine. I fried the accelerator card around 1996 and, having no use for an 8 MHz 2 MB SE, sold it for $30.

Meanwhile I'd bought my second Mac around 1995, a PowerMac 7100/80. That was my first color Mac and I ran two (later, three!) monitors on it. That one has been durable and dependable (it's still doing auxiliary duty with a Sonnet G3/300 card in it and running MacOS 8.6) but I dont' think I ever fell in love with it for some reason.

My third and current computer has been a total joy and delight to own: a beautiful WallStreet PowerBook (aka PowerBook G3 Series '98). This was my first laptop and I quickly got addicted to owning one computer and having it be wherever I was! I got it at a time when the G3 chip was an amazingly fast chip and this PowerBook was faster than most folks' desktop computers. For a laptop, it's been surprisingly expandable and upgradable and now runs a G4/500, 512 MB of RAM, add-on USB and FireWire, and a card to let me run an external monitor and use the built-in TFT as a second screen when I'm at the office. It also lets me run with two internal hard drives and I've got fast ones (7200 60 gig Hitachis).

But I'm on the verge of giving it its pension at last. I'm going to get one of these (http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/72804/wo/Ox2v9Zp1gKlP2h3K6oZ1st5ayOM/3.?p=0) as soon as the price dips a bit.

[NE Texan]

First computer was an Apple II, in '79. With cassette tape for storage of programs. It was a Big Deal a few years later to add the (external) floppy disk drive - and play Zork for the first time!

[Gymnopithys]

A Smaky 6, made in Switzerland in the early 80s, the first computer to use windows, I believe. They are still being manufactured (but the keyboard is now separated from the main :rolleyes: ).

[Qadgop the Mercotan]

A Vendex 8088, DOS 3.1 with dual turbo speeds, from 4.77 Mhz to a blazing 8.0 Mhz! It came loaded with a 20 Mb hard drive! In the course of upgrading it, I added my own RAM expansion bank, giving it a total of 1.64 Mb of RAM! I installed my own modem, a blazing 1200 baud puppy, to connect me to compuserve (before compuserve connected with the internet).

[wonderlust]

Mid-70's, my brother's Trash-80, no color, no games that I can remember (pong maybe?). You needed to hook up a cassette recorder to it in order to write a program. I borrowed it for a day, learned BASIC on it, found out I liked programming, went on to get my second degree in Computer Science, became a COBOL programmer for GM/EDS in the 80's: business programming, mainframes.

[dasgupta]

My first computer was a nice CBM PET 2001 (http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html), complete with attached 9" monochrome monitor, built-in tape drive and chiclet keyboard. Mine was the second picture down.. blue trim. Lovely 6502 CPU, running at a blazing 1Mhz, with a whole 4K of memory.

That was followed by an Apple IIe, also running a 6502 at 1Mhz, then a spiffy Apple IIGS (http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html) (GS = graphics & sound, or as my mother thought - Granny Smith). This bad boy ran a 65C816 @ 2.8MHz, and I had upgraded it to a whopping 1M of memory. We had an external 5.25 floppy from the IIe and got a 3.5 floppy as well.

After that, I moved into PC world with a Leading Edge 386.. [Leading Edge was the make, not a description. They were sold in department stores.]

Ahh.. good games for those old Apples, and a few for the PET. Plus I used to have great times on my friend's CBM 128/64.

[What Exit?]

Looks like I'm the only one that started on a TI-99/4a.
1982, good machine with only 16k but a great set of manuals that let me teach myself Basic.
Also acted a game console. So many hours lost to TI-Invaders. :Sigh

[slortar]

First computer: Commodore Vic20. 3 kb ram, expandable to an enormous 16kb with a cartridge, but you lost the ability to play the rocking Vic20 games while doing it (I wish someone would do a Windows clone of that haunted pinball/breakout game--that would be the bee's knees). Had a cassette drive, but I never used it much because it was such a pain.

Second: Upgraded in '87 to an Apple IIc. 128 kb ram, pseudo-portable, classic green on black monitor, although I later got the widget as a present from my Mom which would allow me to output to a tv so I could finally play games in that full glorious apple color (8 at a time, some of which were repeats, or 16, take your pick). Spent a hell of a lot of time with it doing actual homework (on Appleworks), playing Pirates, Deathlord, Bard's Tale I & II, Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Carmen Sandiego and dozens of other games. Hell, if I made a pie chart of my gaming experience over my life span, a huge wedge of it would still be labelled "Apple IIc". :)

Lasted me all the way through high school and my undergrad degree in college. Still have it in my closet and it still works great.

I feel more nostalgia for the Apple. Nothing like green on black text and sound effects that sound like "SKEE! SKEE! SKEE! BEEP" to make me all teary-eyed. :D

[Thudlow Boink]

Timex Sinclair 1000

A cute little thing with a membrane keyboard. Has a 16K memory module attached to the back which would work its way loose as you typed, eventually causing a system crash.Yep, that was mine too.

You had to use an ordinary cassette recorder to save and load programs, and if I remember correctly, the TV screen went all ziggy-zaggy while you did so because the poor little thing diddn't have enough brainpower to refresh the screen at the same time.

I was doing some machine language programming on it (almost necessary because of how hopelessly slow it was in BASIC) before I graduated to a Commodore 64.

These were both "family" computers. The first computer I owned personally was a Tandy 1000 (IBM PC clone) with 2 floppy drives (no hard drive), 128K of RAM, and the advanced graphics capacities (16 color graphics!) that IBM only offered with its own PCjr. Its successor was a Packard Bell 486 PC running Windows 3.1, followed by the eMachines PC I've had now for about 3 years.

[Dragwyr]

Another person checking in here who started with a Timex Sinclair 1000 with a 16Kb expansion pack and a tape casette recorder for loading and saving programs.

In 1987, my dad was assigned a Tandy 1400 Laptop. It had 2 HD disk drives and a 1200 bps modem. I ran MS-DOS 3.2. This was what I used to connect into the university's mainframe system and also to dial out to the local BBS boards. I LOVED that machine.

[pestie]

A cute little thing with a membrane keyboard. Has a 16K memory module attached to the back which would work its way loose as you typed, eventually causing a system crash.

Ahh, the Timex Sinclair 1000! That was my first computer, too - I got it when I was 10 years old. I never did have the 16K expansion module, though - by the time I'd saved enough allowance money to afford it (we're talking months to save the $75 I needed), a friend of my mother's offered to sell me her TI-99/4A for the same price. Obviously I jumped right on that - the Timex was fun, but it'd never be the machine that the TI-99/4A was.

So, while I was aware of the infamous problems with the 16K RAM expansion module working its way out of the back of the Timex, I never experienced it first-hand. What I did experience, though, was random heat-related crashes. In the summer, in our non-air-conditioned house, that machine would get so hot after a while that it would simply freeze up hard, destroying whatever BASIC program I was working on at the time. I spent hours programming in BASIC back then. Anyway, I came up with a solution - a plastic baggie filled with ice. I set it on the spot on the case that got hot and the crashes stopped happening. The membrane keyboard was fairly immune to the copious amount of condensation that dripped down the front of the machine.

[Jman]

My FIRST computer (well, my family's first) was:

Franklin Ace 2200. It was an Apple II clone, and was actually a bit faster than a real Apple II, and looked nicer IMO. Here's a picture of one (http://apple2history.org/museum/computers_clones/franklinace2200.html)

Then, in 7th grade we finally ditched the Franklin and had a local computer store build us a:

386sx/33MHz, 2MB RAM, 80MB hard drive with DOS / Win 3.1.

In high school, after MUCH prodding from me, my dad upgraded, and we ended up with a:

Packard Bell (yes, I know) Pentium 120MHz with 16MB of RAM and a 1GB hard drive.


Now MY first computer, as in the first computer that I alone owned, I bought with my HS graduation money, and I splurged big time, getting a custom built:

Pentium 166MHz with 16MB of RAM (which I later upgraded to 32), a 2GB HD, and an ATI 1MB video card. I later added an additional 6GB HD to it.

I then purchased a Gateway Pentium II 350MHz with 64MB of RAM (later upgraded to 384MB), 8GB total HD (later had 28GB) and an nVidia RivaTNT video card.

I then started building them myself, building an Athlon XP 1700+ which I overclocked 150Mhz, with 512MB of RAM and 100GB of HDs. Originally had a GeForceMX 2 in there.

My current computer is:
Athlon64 3000+ overclocked to 3500+ speeds
1GB RAM (dual channel)
520 GB of HDs (3 internal, 80, 80, 200, 1 external 160)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB

[Voyager]

The computer I learned on in High School (1968) was an LGP-21. (Manual here. (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-21-prog-man.html) ) 4 K of rotating memory, 32 bit words, 16 instructions. No interrupts, text was not in ASCII, and they didn't even use abc...f for hexadecimal. No assembler (and obviously no compilers) - the first assembly language programs I wrote for it I assembled using an assembler I wrote myself.

The first computer I owned was a C64, but I had used many, many ones by them, including the PDP1, PDP 11, DEC 10, Cyber 7600, IMB 360 and 370, GE645 running Multics, a Honeywell machine also running Multics, 3B2, 3B1, Data General Nova, and a bunch of others I've forgotten.

[Magiver]

The first computer I used was in HS and it we programmed it in basic using punch tape (not cards). It connected via modem to a local university. The first computer I used at work was an IBM DisplayWrite (mostly a word processor) that used 11" floppies and a 300 baud cradle modem. The first computer I owned was an IBM PC knockoff with: a single 5 1/2" floppy, no hard drive and a Panasonic 9 pin dot matrix printer. You had to stick a DOS disk in to boot it up and then load each program as you needed it. Printer drivers were built into the individual program so you had to match hardware to software to print anything. The first Window's operating system was booted up off of DOS and whenever new hardware or software was installed you had to manually update DOS to accept it. When I upgraded to a 386 it cost me $700 to put 16 mb of memory on it.

We were livin large at work when we upgraded our only computer to one with a hard drive (10 mb). When it died I took the hard drive out of it for posterity. To giver everyone an idea of the size of the hard drive it was as big as a rotary wall phone.

[GorillaMan]

Ohhh, maybe a slight hijack...who else here has actually used Windows, version 1?

[Mangetout]

What I did experience, though, was random heat-related crashes. In the summer, in our non-air-conditioned house, that machine would get so hot after a while that it would simply freeze up hard, destroying whatever BASIC program I was working on at the time. I spent hours programming in BASIC back then. Anyway, I came up with a solution - a plastic baggie filled with ice. I set it on the spot on the case that got hot and the crashes stopped happening. The membrane keyboard was fairly immune to the copious amount of condensation that dripped down the front of the machine.My school had a ZX80 - the predecessor to the ZX81/TS1000 - this machine also suffered from overheating and we found a solution printed in the troubleshooting section of some computing/electronics magazine - the suggestion was to balance a carton of frozen milk on the hot spot.

How far we have come.

[Dunderman]

What's with this "CASSETTE TAPE!!!!11"? I expected most people in this thread to wax lyrical about storage on cassettes.

The first computer I used was a friend's Vic 20. My first computer was a Commodore 64 (Oh, the games! Oh, the learning BASIC!), then an Atari 520 ST (Dungeon Master!), then an Amiga 500, and then a 486 100 MHz.

Now, I own two Pentium Is, one Commodore 64, two Amiga 500 and the Atari (but it displays some very peculiar problems) and my main computer, a Pentium 3.

[Quartz]

I cut my teeth on a Sinclair ZX81 - complete with wobbly RAM pack. At school, we had an RML 380Z - front panel and all. We later got an Apple ][+. The first computer I purchased for myself was a 80286-based PC clone.

And Windows? 1.03 here.

[Sam Stone]

The computer I learned BASIC programming on was an HP2000 mainframe at the University of Lethbridge. We were connected to it from our school, and we had an ASR33 teletype as our interface. I believe it was 110 baud. We had no permanent storage space on the mainframe, so before we logged out we would have to save whatever program we were writing on the ASR-33's paper tape punch/reader.

I remember finding a 'Star Trek' game* source code in a computer book (back then computer books and magazines would have full BASIC or assembly code printouts of the programs they were discussing, and you were expected to type them in to your computer yourself), and I spent hours and hours laboriously typing the game in by hand, then saving it out onto a huge roll of paper tape. When I walked out of the computer room, a kid smacked the paper tape roll out from under my arm, and it unravelled all the way down the hallway. Of course, the other kids immediately jumped on it and pulled it all apart with their feet. I just about cried.

Around this time, I also joined a homebrew computer club, and we used to have nights of extreme excitement when one of the members would actually have his computer WORKING. By 'working' I mean that an hour of laboriously hand-assembling code and typing machine instructions into a hex pad of a Rockwell SC/MP single board computer might get the words, "Hello World" to scroll across the single-line LED display. I still remember the party we threw when we managed to interface that little bugger to a used teletype machine. The computer I lusted after then was a COSMAC Elf, which was a single-board computer that had a hex pad for input, a single-line display, and 2K of RAM. But you could get relatively inexpensive add-on cards after you bought the backplane card, and you could actually build some pretty cool stuff. The Elf itself was $99, which was an amazing bargain in those days.

In high school, I got a part time job and saved my money for a long time, and eventually bought myself a TRS-80 Model I in Grade 11. 4K RAM and a tape drive for storage, which seemed like a huge advancement over the paper tape (and it was!). All this for only $1399, including black and white monitor with, as I recall, 128 X 192 graphics resolution.

That year, a friend and I wrote a game for the TRS-80 called "Wall Street 1929" (basically a ripoff of the board game 'stock ticker', with a few enhancements and some kick-ass animated graphics), and sold it to one of the largest game distributors at that time, "Instant Software", which was formed by the same guy (Wayne Green) who founded BYTE magazine. Anyway, I thought I made it rich. As the game went through the various phases of production and packaging, I was told that the initial run would net us around $40,000, and if the game was one of their best sellers I could expect thousands of dollars a month in royalties.

Then the company went bankrupt just before releasing the game, and I got a settlement cheque for $250. This after waiting for over a year for my wealth to start rolling in.

After that, it was a Radio Shack color computer (with the same 'solder the ram together' trick to double the memory described above), then an Atari ST which I used in college. That was a cool machine. That was my last computer before entering the endless progression of IBM PC clones.

BTW, in high school and college I worked in various computer stores as a salesman. In Canada, the original Apple MacIntosh, which had a tiny monochrome screen, 384K of Ram, one floppy drive, and no hard drive, was $3495. The first IBM XT with a 5 MB hard drive and B&W monitor was $4999.

And back then, business software was expensive. Microsoft Word alone was almost $500. Lotus 1-2-3 was hundreds of dollars. Accounting packages could be thousands of dollars.

*That Star Trek game became a classic. You had a grid something like 16 X 16, written in text, which represented a 'quadrant'. There was a special character for the Enterprise, one for the Klingons, etc. You'd enter a move by essentially giving an angle and thrust, and then you'd wait while the teletype chugged out a new 16 X 16 grid showing your new position and that of the enemy. Then you could fire a torpedo by typing in the angle in degrees, and the teletype would chug out a series of grids showing the progress of your torpedo until you either missed or hit your target. That was pretty much the game. The entire 'galaxy' was made up of a large grid of these smaller grids, and you basically just flew around and fired torpedoes.

It was unbelievably primitive, but I enjoyed that damned game then as much or more than I enjoy some of the incredibly sophisticated games we have now.

Other classic games from the time: "Colossal Cave" ("You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all alike"), and "Hunt the Wumpus" ("I smell a draft. Bats nearby!")

[What Exit?]

Ohhh, maybe a slight hijack...who else here has actually used Windows, version 1?
I did, but only once for about 20 minutes in 1985.



Actually it was it was MS Windows 1.03 and I used it for closer to an hour and said I'll stick to DOS. Boy was it a dog. It was also more like 1988.
My first real GUI was Amiga in 1989.
My first Windows Package I really used was WIN 3.1

[Sam Stone]

Windows 1 and 2 truly sucked. Windows 3.0 was the first 'modern' windows OS, and it was a massive improvement.

Of course, the Mac and the Atari ST/Amiga were doing GUI OS's for years before windows 3.0 came out.

Anyone remember Microsoft Word for DOS? That was a strange word processor, but kind of neat. A key combination would open up a 'graphical' menu at the top of the screen for accessing commands.

Most people hated it, but I rather liked it. I never did like the old DOS Wordperfect, which was for a long time the gold standard in word processors.

[TellMeI'mNotCrazy]

What was the name of that horrible interface that was on Tandys? Did it have a name? IIRC it was a blue screen with different boxes in it, each with different directories. Of course, I didn't have a mouse, so it was all "right arrow, right arrow, down arrow twice"... Man that seems like forever ago. I can see it clearly, but can't for the life of me figure out how to describe it any better.

[DoctorJ]

TRS-80, Color Computer II. I actually wrote some reasonably sophisticated games on that thing, at least for an eight year old.

And then, of course, there was Dungeons of Daggorath. (http://mspencer.net/daggorath/dodpcp.html) I can still type a-space-l-enter with remarkable speed.

[Voyager]

I remember finding a 'Star Trek' game* source code in a computer book (back then computer books and magazines would have full BASIC or assembly code printouts of the programs they were discussing, and you were expected to type them in to your computer yourself), and I spent hours and hours laboriously typing the game in by hand, then saving it out onto a huge roll of paper tape.

Ah yes, Dave Ahl's book of 100 Computer Games, of which the Star Trek game was the best. I translated it into Pascal for our PDP-11 when I was in grad school (ouer group wrote the Pascal compiler) and it was the standard test program for all our operating system work. I from time to time added features and changed things around. Quite a good game, actually.

[Unintentionally Blank]

Looks like I'm the only one that started on a TI-99/4a.
1982, good machine with only 16k but a great set of manuals that let me teach myself Basic.
Also acted a game console. So many hours lost to TI-Invaders. :Sigh

Nah, you're second on the list here so far, i'm #3. I learned on an Apple II at school. The first machine at home was a TI-994a with the program recorder and Touch Typing tutor. My parents were guilted into buying a smaller color TV for it when I complained that the BIG B&W TV is was hooked up to was burning the back of my brain.

Got it for $350...three months later, clothing stores in the mall were selling them for $50. My dad got pretty bitter about that.

My Highschool got Amiga 1000 and 500's and I _ached_ to own one. Fearing the same result as the TI, Dad got me an XT Turbo. 8088- 12Mhz, 640k RAM, EGA, 2400 baud modem, Logitech 3 button busmouse, and for HS graduation, a 32Mb HD. I was psyched with Autocad 2.12 (one floppy) went from 32 seconds loading from floppy to 6 seconds off the RLL HD.

[What the .... ?!?!]

In the mid 80's our office got a Bernoulli Box (sp?) which was a storage device that was relatively portable and used "discs' that kind of resembled laser discs as I recall, maybe a little thicker. Can't remember how much storage but probably not much! Anybody remember?

We also had a couple versions of the Compaq portable that was mentioned earlier. I remember trying to "play" Hithikers Guide to the Galaxy with them ..... never could get past the first few parts of the story. You typed in instructions like "Get out of bed" "Open the window" to advance the story. As I said, I couldn't advance it very far.

[engineer_comp_geek]

The first computer I ever programmed was a boxy thing about the size of a large microwave oven. It had a place where you could stack punch cards on one side (maybe on the top), a hex keypad you could use to manually enter a program, and a slot on the other side where you could insert a magnetic card kinda like a credit card that stored the equivalent of a bunch (I dunno, maybe 20 or 30) of punch cards. This was in about 1976 or 1977. There was no monitor but there were some 7 segment displays on it. If this machine sounds familiar to anyone PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I have no idea what computer this was and no one I've talked to in recent years has any idea of what it was.

The first computer I programmed was a TRS 80 Model 1 with a cassette interface. I remember that an el-cheapo cassette player and el-cheapo tapes worked a lot better than the special "computer" cassette player and tapes that RS sold. A whopping 4k of memory. Wheee!

The first computer I actually owned was a commodore 64. I managed to wear out the keyboard on that little beast and replaced it with a compatible keyboard that I found in some mail order catalog (the keys were a different color, other than that it was the same). I can probably still draw a 95 percent accurate schematic of a c64 from memory.

The first IBM compatible I owned was an XT clone made by Kaypro with a monochrome monitor. I hated word perfect. I always used Wordstar (anyone remember that one?).

After I graduated from college, I did some work on a PDP-11. While it definately was not the first computer I've ever worked on, it was definately the oldest. I've got a PDP 11 now sitting out in my garage but I can't get it to run. It's not like you can go down to CompUSA and buy parts for it. If you want some idea of how old it is, it has a CPU BOARD, not a CPU CHIP.

[engineer_comp_geek]

What was the name of that horrible interface that was on Tandys? Did it have a name? IIRC it was a blue screen with different boxes in it, each with different directories. Of course, I didn't have a mouse, so it was all "right arrow, right arrow, down arrow twice"... Man that seems like forever ago. I can see it clearly, but can't for the life of me figure out how to describe it any better.

Deskmate.

Took me a while to think of that.

[gotpasswords]

Not sure I've ever been face to face with Windows 1.0, but I did have Windows 2 ages and ages ago to run Aldus Pagemaker. Typefaces were a PITA back then - need Times Roman in 24-point italic but don't have it installed? Sorry. Having to run the font generator to create 24-pt italic Times Roman or whatever else you wanted, was a "start it and go to lunch" sort of project.

[pestie]

Holy crap, I remember Deskmate! Some of the Tandy models of that era (the 1200, maybe?) had Deskmate built into ROM, even! Whoa... Flashback! Hahaha... My first PC compatible was a Tandy 1000A. I forget now what made it the "A" model, but it was some trivial upgrade to the original 1000. Anyway, Deskmate was tolerable, I thought, but I was hooked on Borland Sidekick. I still use the "joe" editor on Linux because I learned all the Wordstar-like control-this-that keystrokes from the Sidekick text editor.

[LionelHutz405]

A cute little thing with a membrane keyboard. Has a 16K memory module attached to the back which would work its way loose as you typed, eventually causing a system crash.
Ah, but by the time I bought mine the engineers at Timex has solved that problem. The memory module was held in place with velcro! How could you not love a computer whose memory was partially held in place by velcro?

[Sleel]

Commodore 64. If I were just a bit older that would have been the impetus for a great career in computer hacking. I used to type in BASIC programs from a book and save them on casette tape. We later got one of the first 5.25" floppy drives, but for a couple of years, it was tape all the way baby. Of course, at least 1/4 of the programs in those books had syntax errors that I'd have to hunt down and figure out. That's not all that fun or easy when you're five. If I'd been, say, 10, I'd have loved it; I was one of those kids who could concentrate obsessively on something until it got solved.

My first personally purchased computer was many years later. I got a Macintosh Quadra 610, and a couple of years later got a deal on the PowerPC version of basically the same machine. I had that for about 7 years and eventually sold it to my girlfriend's landlord when I got my first notebook, a PowerBook G3 Firewire.

So, I went from one of the early home computers to relatively modern times. I remain a conservative adopter. I don't think I've ever gotten the latest and greatest anything. Commodore was kickass in its day though. I remember being snotty because it was a couple of years before most people's computers had color.

[Bytegeist]

Commodore was kickass in its day though. I remember being snotty because it was a couple of years before most people's computers had color.

Well now, the C64 came out in '82. The Apple II series began in '77. The Atari 400 and 800 came out in '79, and the XLs were I think '82 and '83. Also, Tandy's first Color Computer came out in '80, and their Color II came out in '83. Not to mention the Texas Instruments 99/4, from '79.

All of these were very popular color computers, some of them predating the C64, as you can see. Of course, around this time you'd still see black and white machines people had bought a few years earlier: the Commodore PETs and TRS-80s, for example. And many people who bought the early IBM PC (1981) bought it with only a monochrome video card. This might be what you're remembering. I would still say that color support had become very common by the time of the Commodore 64's introduction.

I certainly won't dispute your first sentence however.

[romansperson]

The very first computers I ever worked on were mainframes that we used via dumb terminals, and I don't remember much about those.

I do remember this little baby, though:

The TRS80 Model 100 Tablet PC (http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/trs80-model100/). The first job I got out of college in the mid-80s used these, and for the time they were pretty sweet little machines. I believe they cost about $800 apiece back then - think how much computing power that would buy you now!

[Jman]

A friend of mine had Windows 2 running on his computer. It was practically unusable. Of course, I used it after I had been using Win 3.1 for a while, so it really showed its age then.

[Bytegeist]

A friend of mine had Windows 2 running on his computer. It was practically unusable. Of course, I used it after I had been using Win 3.1 for a while, so it really showed its age then.
The windows were tiled, weren't they, before version 3? (As opposed to arbitrarily ordered and overlapping, as we've all grown used to.) I'd think that would be one of the biggest annoyances about Windows 2.

Or were there bigger ones?

[romansperson]

A friend of mine had Windows 2 running on his computer. It was practically unusable.

Oh yes! I remember getting that when I first started working for the Navy. We had three programs: WordPerfect, Windows 2.3 and some graphics program - Freelance Graphics, I think. Anyway, Windows was pretty much unusable. You certainly couldn't run either of the other two programs at the same time (they were DOS-based), and if you wanted to open Windows for any reason, you couldn't use the graphics program first, because then when you tried to start Windows it would crash and you'd have to reboot the whole thing. God, what a piece of shite that was ...