I’d be shocked if there aren’t 100 threads exactly like this zombified. But what the hey! I can’t find one by searching for “First computer” in a title scan, and at any rate, this should be interesting.
What was the first computer that you ever owned?
When I was 3, my mum thought that this whole computer business might be the way of the future. And so she got dad to trot down to the Radioshack and get me a Tandy RL-1000:
Dos/Deskmate dual boot. CGA graphics. FAX modem! MOUSE! Plus it came with an Epson Dot Matrix printer with those most brilliant of inventions, the ink ribbon…it never tore or melted or got stuck on my printer head! Not even once…:rolleyes: </sarcasm>
Well, if we’re trying to one up each other with our antiques, you’re probably older than me, and thus going to win…
But I see your 200MhZ Packard Bell, and RAISE you an IBM Aptiva. It ran Windows 3.1 and OS/2 Warp in a dual boot. But it came with a voucher for a free upgrade to windows 95 that I couldn’t possibly turn down, and in the process it killed OS/2…
75MhZ, ONE GB hard drive, 8MB RAM upgraded to 32MB. I believe that one set us back an even $1200!
8080 system based on a CPU card from a company called Digital Group, and some hand made interface and memory. Couldn’t afford any more than that at the time.
When I was in kindergarten, my parents bought a vic-20 because my mom needed it for a computer programing class. Then they taught me to program in basic.
We got an Apple IIe some time around 1985-1986ish. Same disk drive as in that picture and a similar monitor. Eventually got a second 3.5" drive and a Panasonic Dot Matrix printer. Like elfkin, I learned BASIC on that computer.
People need to be told what “audio tape storage adapter” means, because it’s just too precious.
My dad got a TI-99 when I was a kid, and I never get tired of telling people about the audio tape storage thing.
To be perfectly clear on this: Computer software came on audio tapes. I’m talking about the things people used to listed to music on before Compact Discs got popular.
You could also write a program and save it to an audio tape. Or, you pretty much had to, because there was no other way to save it. Otherwise it would be gone when you turned off your computer.
So, you typed a BASIC program into the computer’s tiny RAM, then entered the command to save the program to tape. Then you pushed RECORD on the tape recorder… the tape recorder!!!… and it would save it and I don’t know why I find it so amazing that such a mechanism existed, I just do.
A Royal Alphatronic — 4 MHz Z80 processor and 64K RAM. Came in a bundle with a monochrome monitor, floppy drive, OS (CP/M) and word processing and spreadsheet software. IIRC the price in 1985 was something like 800 USD.
I believe mine was an Atari 800 my father bought. It wasn’t until our next computer that we got a tape drive to go with it IIRC.
Oh, there was an alternative of sorts - you could write it down and type it back in. I remember typing in programs - and how seldom I got it to work, there was always a typo somewhere.
Came with DOS 2.4 (I think or maybe 2.2). Full set of manuals.
I bought it because they were offering a rebate. Bring in an adding machine or typewriter and get $$$ back. They offered a 10MB hard drive that was way too expensive and 16 colors, also too expensive. So I stuck with mono. Years later I bought a hard card with a 25 mb hard disk and installed it.
Later, I regretted getting a PC with an integrated monitor. I would have preferred having the option to upgrade to a better monitor when they came out a few years later.
Commodore VIC-20 with Datasette cassette storage drive. I was actually pretty happy with what one could do with 3.5K of RAM at the time.
Now that I think of it, I may be a little odd. I had the VIC-20, and then a Commodore 128, but then did not own a computer of any sort in college or my first few years of employment. So that works out to being without computer from 1993 through the end of 2003.
The first computer I ever programmed I have never been able to identify. It was kind of a boxy thing, with a hex pad on it and a few 7 segment displays on it. You could key in a program one instruction at a time (very slow and painful) or you could stick punch cards in it (slightly less painful). It also held programs on a thing that looked like a long and skinny credit card, with a magnetic stripe on it. Each card held the equivalent of a whole bunch (not sure how many) of punch cards. It had a printer on it that was one of those skinny little cash register types of printers. This would have been in about 1977 or somewhere thereabouts. If you have any idea what this thing was, please let me know.
I next learned a lot about programming on a TRS-80 model 1. 4k of memory! Yippee! Wow, what a machine. I think I still have a cassette from it that I used to store programs on, though I’m sure bit rot has long since destroyed any data that might be on it.
The oldest computer I ever used was a PDP-11 from the early 70s, though it was well into the 80s by the time I used it. If you know what PIP means, you have my sympathies. I’ve done a lot of work on old vaxes over the years as well.
An old DOS PC… you call that an old computer? Sheesh. I had gone through quite a few computers before I finally got to something that ran DOS.
I had gone through quite a few computers before I finally got to something that ran DOS.
