This one. Pretty much of a novelty toy, said to have about 0.01k of ROM. But it did compute, after a fashion and probably taught the basics of computing…and this at a time when the word “computer” was not commonly heard in everyday conversation.
The first “serious” computing machine I used with any degree of skill was the old TI-58C programmable calculator with attached printer…used it for land surveying applications.
The first thing I learned to program in BASIC was an antiquated ADDS system that used, IIRC, 8-inch floppys that actually looked like the old 45-rpm records (bonus points if you remember those)
BBC Micro B that I inherited from my brother. It cost 400 pounds sterling in 1982, which seems like an awful lot, but according to the retail price index that’s only 1200 pounds in today’s money.
I remember 45s. I used to buy a lot of them. And I remember 78s, too. I didn’t buy them, but my grandparents had quite a collection of them.
My C128 had a very slow disk drive that took 5.25 floppies. I had a few floppies that became so horribly damaged that they could no longer be reformatted (remember formatting new floppies? I do) and so I sent them to school with my daughter, with a note for her teacher that he could possibly cut them open and show the computing class what the insides of a floppy looked like.
Oh, and remember notching floppies, to use both sides? And then covering the notches with tape, so they wouldn’t get accidentally written on?
Mom bought us an IBM PC jr. I remember playing endless hours of Jumpman and King’s Quest on that thing…when it wasn’t in the shop being repaired (every other week).
I still have a couple of those somewhere along with cassette decks for program storage. They were obsolete when I got them. They were donated to my IEEE chapter when I was in college. They came from a realty firm or bank that used them for mortgage amortization. Imagine pulling out your computer, loading the program from an audio cassette, then punching in the numbers, so you could show your client what his monthly payment would be!
I would have used them more, but the batteries were obscure/expensive…and my HP-41 would handle most things. I would count that HP-41 as my first computer, as I learned a hell of a lot about programming on that.
I had access at work to PC’s starting with an actual PC, not an AT! (it was Sperry Branded, not IBM)
The first computer I actually bought was not 'till 1997. It was a AMD probably running at 266MHz. I still have that MB somewhere.
Heck, I remember buying a special punch for 3.5" (one I was rich and could afford a 3.5" drive) so that I could buy inexpensive, single-sided 3.5" floppies and convert them into double-sided floppies. The C-1581 was double-sided; you didn’t flip 3.5" floppies!
I’m trying to remember. I know it was a Gateway running Windows 3.1. I didn’t use the computer much until we got Windows 95 and a suite of really awesome games.
Another Commodore 64 owner here. I just recently moved and found the old relic in a box in the attic. Hooked her all up and she actually still works! Too bad the 5.25" floppies are unreadable - I really wanted to play some test drive and oregon trail on it for old time sake.
I really need to clean her up, but here’s how it looks now:
By 1981 there would have been the original Apple II (in 1977), followed by the Apple II Plus (1979). There was also the Apple III, introduced that very year, though it’s unlikely your Dad was one of the 14 people who ever bought one.
As for my own experience …
The first computer I ever got to play with regularly was in the school’s library: an early model of Commodore PET, the one with the 9-inch black-and-bluish-white screen, and the sadistic, made-in-hell “chiclet” keyboard. Nevertheless, I built up a collection of about a dozen cassette tapes with various BASIC programs stored on them — some typed in from magazines (like Softside or Creative Computing), and some of my own.
The first computer we had at home was an Apple II Plus, circa 1981. It had 48K of RAM initially, a single 5.25-inch disk drive, and a pair of paddles. Later, we augmented this with another disk drive, a 16K RAM card, a joystick, and oodles of games and other software. I believe I ended up buying every single Beagles Bros title, more or less on sight, without even caring whether I had use for it. Infocom games were also a favorite.
The first computer I bought with my own money was an Apple IIc in 1984, when they were brand new. Also bought an Epson dot-matrix printer of some kind — possibly an MX-80 or FX-80. This is the setup I took with me to college, and, along with a bootleg copy of Appleworks, it got me through writing essays and term papers. (Or at least it did when the professor didn’t specifically forbid output from dot-matrix printers, which happened occasionally.)
First computer I got to play with (and after school it was all mine) was an LGP-21. A mite large to lug home. The first computer I owned was a Commodore 64, though by that time I had used a lot of them, from PDP-1s, to Multics (GE and Honeywell) DEC 10s, PDP-11s, Data General Novas, and PDP 11/780s.
While I learned to use an Apple IIe in high school, MS-DOS PCs at a business-oriented trade school, and Mac SE30s at the local community college, all by my early 20s, I didn’t own my own computer until 1996, at age 30, when I got an Apple Power Mac 7200. Yay, 75MHz, 128MB RAM! 500MB hard drive!
An Apple-II knockoff that I bought in Singapore. It had a card that would allow to run CP/M, a printer and four floppy disk drives. One had the operating system, one had a Cobol compiler, one had the linker and the last was for data.
My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20, which I still have, with all the original documentation, box, and accessories I bought for it; tape player, expansion cards, programs, games, etc…
Apple II** c.** Bought it the first semester of law school, (1984) and had word processing for the first time in my life. (no hard drive, alas). Lasted me about a year into being a lawyer. Then switched to PC.
My one friend had what is apparently the Atari 600XL (someone else mentioned it and when I followed the link, sure enough that was what he had). We would sit there and type programs in Pilot and Basic to create graphs and other junk (making swear words repeat over and over using “goto” commands)
My other friend had the Commodore 64 on which we played an awesome golf game (only one I ever liked).
Some years later, a third friend got a Tandy. It didn’t even have a hard drive, just two floppy drives (5.25" drives). That was where I first played Sierra’s Adventure games.
So finally in high school I got my first PC. It was an Amstrad which was a European brand. It was an 8086 processor with 640 K of RAM and a 20 MB Hard drive (woo hoo!).
It had DOS of course but it also had an ancestor of Windows called GEM. It was like a cross between Windows 3 and the MAC OS at the time but it was a graphic user interface and it was pretty good.
It was a good computer but I used it most for games and while it had EGA, it was some weird Amstrad version of it so most games looked either CGA or black and white. The other weird thing about it is the PC didn’t have it’s own Power Source. The power for the PC was on the monitor. When I turned the monitor on, everything turned on.
It was weird and temperamental with regard to programs it ran but I loved it. I am pretty sure I still have it in my attic.
