I [del]hated[/del] remember those days. 
I got a Sharp PC-1211 (called a TRS80 PC-1 in the USA) in 1981, followed by a ZX81 and ZX Spectrum when they came out. The PC-1211 was a pocket computer that had a one-line lcd display, just under 1.5K of RAM and if I remember correctly 2 4-bit CPUs. I had a lot of fun writing simple games for it back in high school.
Apple IIgs circa 1986 or 87.
Phew, good question. I think it was an IBM AT clone in about 1990: 8086 processor, 40 MB hard drive, single 5.25-inch floppy. Some sort of DOS as the operating system. I upgraded to a 2400-baud modem so I could access the local BBSs.
I think it was an Atari 600 XL. I remember it as being a 1600 XL, but Wikipedia says that never made it out of prototype, and the 600 XL looks about right. Mom wouldn’t buy us a machine just for video games, but this had a keyboard and was programmable, so it was educational. It had no non-volatile storage; if you wanted to run a program, you had to type it in by hand every time you started up the computer. It also, frustratingly, used different cartridges from the much more common 2600, so we could never find games at garage sales or the like, and so never got any other than Frogger, Centipede, and Jungle Hunt.
Some time after that, when I was around 9 (around 1986), we got an Apple ][e, and inherited a huge pile of games from my 4th-grade teacher, who was retiring. Most of them were educational (lots of the old MECC games where you did five math problems and then got to play a little of the actual game, and repeat, plus Oregon Trail, Lemonade Stand, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and several Muncher games), but it also included King’s Quest (which the the teacher mostly had as a reward for good students). Like the Atari, it didn’t have any onboard storage, but it did at least have a floppy drive, so it was possible to save things.
Dream 6800that my brother built.
I had a TI99 4/A that my father bought for us when they were being discontinued. Some programs came on cartridges, some on cassette tape, some on both. I had one program that had a basic cartridge, and I bought several tapes for different adventures. I think it was Scott Adam’s Adventure…at any rate, I’d plug in the cartridge, then start up the tape for a game. Another dual input game was Tunnels of Doom, which was a primitive D&D type game, with an actual PARTY of four PCs, of different classes. I got into the bad habit of not plugging my tape recorder into the wall (plugs were at a premium) and when the batteries ran down, the computer didn’t recognize the input.
I also bought magazines with programs that one could type into the computer. Fortunately, I’d had a touch typing class…and while my speed went down, my accuracy went way, way up. I hated proofreading the program to see what I’d mistyped.
An Atari 65XE in 1987.
Loved that thing! I still have my old Ataris. An Atari 130XE which was a slightly improved 65XE, and an 800XL which came before the 65XE, but are technically pretty much the same.
I still play the games, but usually on an emulator. It’s way more convenient to play Atari 8-bit games on my PC than to dig out my old Ataris.
Disk drive? Monitor? Luxuries! We used our Commodore with a cassette player and an old B&W TV, and we were happy!
Dad had an Apple of some generation at least by 1981 - assume it was an Apple II and I would have been 5-6. We got to play computer games and we were also enrolled in a computer class so were doing the basic programming other people have mentioned previously.
Acorn Electron: Acorn Electron - Wikipedia
Still got it at my Parents’ place, in remarkably good nick too. I was never good at getting rid of computer gear, my Amigas 500 and 1200 are kicking around somewhere too.
Double Post.
Yes
Oh, you kids and your new-fangled ideas.
I learned to program Basic on a teleprinter, which operated as a time-sharing terminal, connected to the University mainframe by an accoustic coupler. We saved our programs on paper tape.
Magnetic media? VDUs? You don’t know you’re born.
Spectravideo SV-318 with tape storage. I loved that thing. If we’d had more than one television in the house, I’d have never been off it.
CGA? Didn’t the RL come with 16-color Tandy video?
Mine was also a Tandy 1000… I think it was a TX.
I guess I am the first to say IBM-PC. It was in April, 1982 about 8 months after it first came out. It had a serial number in the 140,000 range. I read somewhere that they started at 100,000 so it was about the 40,000th made. It came with 16K of memory (immediately raised to 64K) and one 160K diskette drive, single-sided. The IBM-DOS that it came with had no release number. That summer DOS 1.05 was released. It changed the 8 sectors per track to 9 and so disk storage went up to 180K. It also supported double-sided disks and I eventually got one (and then two) new diskette drives that could read double-sided. Wow, two diskette drives that held 360K each!
I still have the machine. Waiting for a museum to want it. But I did a lot of good things with it. Finally got a Packard-Bell with a hard drive in 1987.
I had the ZX81 - Old man still has it in his loft - was telling a friend in IT lately that it was 30 years old this year and he reminded me he was only 29 and was too young to know what I was talking about - what! with a tape - what is that… Thermal printer??? God did it make me feel old
I’m another who had a TI-99/4A as a kid. It gets the credit/blame for me going into computer science and becoming a software engineer.
I also typed in BASIC programs from magazines.
My first PC I go myself was in my 20’s - I had the ZX81 at 16 that my dad bought.
Was the Olivetti pcs11 – 2Mb RAM, 20Mb Hard disk – DOS 5 and Windows 3.1.
I remember trying to upgrade the hard disk to 100Mb hard disk – the bios would only accept less than 100Mb - so I had to return the it and get a 80 Mb and double space it.