1981 or 1982. We bought an Atari 400 and paid dearly for the upgrade to 8K RAM. It had the really cool membrane keyboard of the future, the really cool cassette drive and the really cool 40-column display that you connected to your TV.
I can’t remember how much we paid for it, but I remember when we got our SECOND computer (an Apple IIe) we got a bank loan for it.
I had an 8K Commodore Pet with a tape drive. I believe I was in 4th or 5th grade, so it would have been around 1978, plus or minus a year.
My parents bought me an IBM PCjr in 1984, a year later it was orphaned.
128k RAM, upgraded to 256k.
It came with a free trial to Prodigy at 300 baud.
ps. did anybody buy one of the PS/2’s when they first came out? I remember the top of the line one was over $10k at radio shack.
Oh my pc jr cost ~$1200 with monitor. With repairs and add-ons, I probably spent over 3k on it.
Boy, I don’t remember much.
It was a 286.
It was a long time ago.
I think it was the same machine that had a 40 meg HD. I can remember thinking that would be the most HDD I would EVER need. Bwaaahaaaahaaaahaaaa. 1200 baud modem.
I have a vague memory of an “8086” or “AT Frame”? I have no clue anymore. Maybe I need more RAM. <sigh>
That just reminded me – my first computer wasn’t a C-64, it was the Commodore Plus/4. Man, was that computer a piece of shit. Had a cassette drive for it too which was junk.
Luckily, it broke about two months into owning it and the sales guy just had my mom take a Commodore 128 rather than try to replace the Plus/4. The C-128 ran in 64 mode 99.995% of the time, hence my confused memories.
Well, the first computer I used regularly ran FORTRAN on punch cards, but it wasn’t exactly mine. The first one I could kind of claim as my own was a dummy terminal and a 300 baud acoustic modem to connect to the university mainframe. For anyone who doesn’t remember what that kind of modem was, it was a box with two “cups” that you would put the reciever of the phone into.
As far as my first PC though, it took me a while to get my first 286, because “serious” Comp Sci people didn’t play with these toys… we used mainframes. Only the people who couldn’t cut it and went through the business school used these new silly PC’s. I remember using Compuserve and looking at things being used in the first Gulf War which would be '90 or so so we probably got it in '88 or so. My kids have iPods that fit in their pockets with more storage and computing power.
I did have a girlfriend who’s father bought a TRS 80 and had no idea what to do with it. I wrote some Tank simulation (all text) in Basic that took about a half hour to get through. They thought it was great and played it quite a bit. It was saved on a cassette.
I remember when my department at work got our first LAN and the server had 2x1G drives!
IBM PC, with AST Six-Pack (bringing it up to 640 kb), with an additional AST-RAMpage (2MB of extended memory), Hercules graphics card and an AmDek amber monitor.
I later bought an expansion chassis so I could install a 5 1/4 full height 30 MB hard drive and convert the full height 5 1/4 floppy drives to half-height.
Hold onto your seat.
I still own all of it, along with the original boxes.
64k was the access limit of the memory banks for the computers back then. It was a CPU addressing limitation. You wrote to a hardware location to switch between memory banks for accessing all 128k.
I got my first computer (well, my parents paid half) in 1996 IIRC. It was a Pentium 75Mhz with 8MB RAM and a 1GB HD and came with Windows 95 and costed 50,000 Belgian Francs (1250€). I upgraded it by adding 8MB RAM, a sound card and a 3dfx voodoo banshee. And my first internet connection was 10mbit cable (max download speeds were like 6mbit though) in 1998. You guys’ computers/internet connections sucked 
Sonny, it took 3 hours to get a postage stamp sized, black and white picture of some ugly naked chick and WE LIKED IT!
Ummmm, yeah our internet connections sucked but if that’s what you were buying in 1996, our computers most certainly did not suck.
That year I got a Pentium 200Mhz with 32MB RAM, a 6.4GB HDD, sound card, 2.1 speakers, 3D video card, etc. And it was NOT top of the line. My neighbor across the street got a better one around the same time.
First one was a Christmas present, an Apple ][e, must have been '83. I remember doing papers for eighth grade on it, and dialing in to local BBS(es) with a 1200 baud modem. Then my parents split, my dad ran off with the Apple, and I ended up with a Commodore 64. Around about '86 I got a subscription to QuantumLink (man, those per-minute/per-message charges were EVIL) and it was all downhill from there.
I remember one of the newsletters from QL had a three- or four-panel comic telling subscribers what the hell : ) meant.
One of the biggest regrets of my life was not buying the IIe and getting the PcJr. Iirc, the reason was the PcJr had 16 colors, while the IIe had monochrome.
First computer was a C64 because even though PCs (commonly referred to as IBM compatibles) were around, I didn’t much about them at the time and didn’t trust them, but I had used C64s for years. Eventually I wanted to get a hard drive or at least a floppy drive to save my Basic programs on. I for one of the two on my 18th birthday and got a real PC instead. A 286.
Hah, I remember that. When and why did that get phased out?
I’m not sure about either of those. Well, for the first question, I guess somewhere in the early to mid 90’s, but that’s just a guess.
And since I’m guessing, I think what happened was that IBM was dominant in the home PC market, then, for whatever reason the quit making home PCs and just stuck to business computers.
Living in Europe, I paid premium for my first computer, Commodore 64 (about $500 or so?) and had friends come over to oooh and aaah over this new technology.
Then I was working at a school and got a “special teacher discount” for the Apple IIc when it first came out for “only $1000” and was pretty happy with it. Actually used that far after it was getting out of date.
However, the dot matrix printer back then was so loud, I could really hear it cranking away even when I was outside! And ripping those perforated edges off the paper - man, I do NOT miss that crap!
I don’t remember when I first started paying for Internet…like the others, I had a simple dial up modem and it would take hours to download some stupid picture and basically only used it for the old BBS.
I currently have a Fujitsu Lifebook laptop I bought 5 years ago and am still happy with it.
What I can recall, the PS/2’s weren’t backwards compatible with the 8088/8086 standard they themselves developed, and barely worked with the 286/386 standard either. Therefore, the clone makers gained a bigger market share in PC’s than the inventors, and eventually IBM degenerated into a clone maker of their own standard (their last gasp at the home market were the Thinkpads and now Lenovo brand computers.)
On the other hand, Intel, who made the chips, profited from both, and thus the Intel chip became the generic for “PC”, not IBM anymore.
