We had a ZX Spectrum 48k when were were kids (mid-80s) - the one with the rubber keys and the tape drive. Keep thinking about bring it out but most of the games are available on a PC emulator so no real need.
First PC was an Atari 286 in the late 80s.
For Christmas 1980 I got an Atari 400 and 410 tape drive. Oh how amazing it seemed. A couple years later I got the 835 modem. 300 bps mind you, and now I could connect to BBS’s. Waiting… waiting… waiting… as line by line the image filled in. Boobies!!! Amazing how much things have changed, and haven’t changed.
IBM PC XT. Summer of 1984. Dad sold his share in a business and came home with the PC, a VCR, and a giant freezer all on the same day.
We had a family friend (who later went on to help found Apogee software) come over and set us up. Eventually we had to get a second phone line because we were constantly dialing in to BBS’s. The Abyss BBS was a favorite, but we had a big yellow legal pad scrawled with phone numbers and notes. Oh the time spent on Kannons and Katapults, Barren Realms, Space Dynasty. . . those were the days. I was also one of the few kids in my class to turn in papers typed and printed dot matrix style using PFS Write; dude I was ahead of the curve.
Commodore 64 (c. 1985)
It wasn’t the first computer I touched (an IBM System 360 at Jr. High) or the first computer I played with (a friend’s Apple ][) but the first computer I owned was an Amiga 1000. I still have it and have been known to pull it out on occasion because, believe it or not, there are still programs on that platform that have never been duplicated on Windows. An Amiga 1000 with Elan’s Invision for the Live! board and a Supergen was a potent tool for making some really wacked-out visuals. Unlike most anything I found since on PC or Mac it was playable - hit keys like a monkey on crack while scrubbing with the mouse and it just did not crash. That and an Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster and I did video for Moby at the Kansas City Spirit Festival.
First computer I remember using was an IMSAI 8080, circa 1977, when I was a really little kid. I recall both being interested in computers beforehand and coming to the IMSAI with some hands-on experience, so it’s definitely not the first system I ever used… I’d wager that my prior experience was with timesharing systems, probably used a teletype to access some PDP system. It was a local university outreach class, and I recall the lecturer being frustrated because I took the class to get computer access and try my hand at tweaking some BASIC game concepts I’d picked up from David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games books, while the lecturer was trying to just acclimate folks to the idea of computers.
For years, I just got whatever computer time I could on whatever system I could. My mom was too poor to buy a system. Learned to program on a TI-99/4a, a Commodore VIC-20, a Commodore 64, Apple ][s/Franklins, the TI Professional, a DEC Rainbow, TRS-80 Model I, III, 4p, CoCo 1 &2, generic S-100 boxes running CP/M. Begged/borrowed/stole computer time from friends, family, church, my mom’s work. Got kicked out of the local university’s computer labs too many times to recall. Probably a good thing overall, as I learned basics of computers and programming instead of becoming used to a single system which could foster bad habits.
First system owned: Atari 600xl, after Atari lowered the cost to $100. Pretty good deal, considering the $100 competition at the time consisted of Timex/Sinclair Model 1000, surplus TI-99/4as, Mattel Aquarius, and used VIC-20s and PETs. Upgraded a few years later to a Commodore 128, which became my main platform until 1992, and got upgraded and expanded to a frightful Frankenstein system which necessitated an electrician coming in and rewiring the house to serve its needs, as well as a professional-grade power supply for the computer itself.
I started with a ZX81, but I never got the 16kb expansion pack - it was too unreliable. The only way to get it to do anything cool was to program it in machine code, which meant typing in screeds of hex with no editing. The best was a Space Invaders game in 1kb (1400 typed characters with no errors), which could only use every second line of the screen due to memory limitations. But it was fun.
Then I got a UK101 (also sold as the Ohio Scientific), a 6502 computer with Basic, 8kb ram and 4kb ASM in ROM. This was pretty cool, and had a turbo switch to flick from 1MHz to 2MHz. Pacman at 2MHz was impossible. I did lots of Basic and 6502 asm programming on that system, and could save to tape at 1200 baud.
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My first PC ran at 16mhz, had a 10MB hard drive, and 256k of RAM.
But the first computer I had the use of was a TI99/4A - and the first one that was explicitly mine was a Coleco Adam. (It had a 3.5Mhz Z80 processor, 140k of RAM a 300baud modem and had slow-ass cassette storage that was good for 255k. It used the same video chip as the TI994A.
Seeing as I started this the last time around, I’ll go ahead and answer again.
I had a 286 with 1mb of ram and a Hercules monochrome graphics card and a 5.25 inch disk drive. It had a 20 MB hard drive, doublespaced so I could fit Windows 3.11 for Workgroups on it. Windows incidentally was the only graphical program that worked on it, as everything else required CGA as a minimum.
The first computer I ever used was an Apple //c. I don’t know any real specs, but I remember you just used 5.25" floppies in it–and you’d often have to pull them out an turn them over to continue.
I’m still looking for a game called Driver for that device, as it wasn’t in the 2GB archive of all known Apple II software that I downloaded back in 2004.