What was the first computer you used?

First computer I remember touching was an Apple][+ in Jr High.

In high school, the computer lab had half and half Apple and IIRC, Franklin Ace. The Apples were the black Bell and Howell editions and had a flair for overheating. All of each variety was on a Corvus network (one net per type) for no particularly good reason other than preventing them from working. This net didn’t even share the printer. Want to print? Save your work to a floppy and carry it down to carrel with the printer.

First computer I owned was the Sinclair ZX81 kit, followed by a very brief flirtation with a Radio Shack CoCo.

First PC was an IBM XT clone running at a breakneck 10 MHz in turbo mode. First line in autoexec (after “@echo off”) was “speed high” The beast had EGA graphics and an 8087-1 math processor and a spacious 20 meg hard drive that never got close to capacity. Of course now, I’ve got individual MP3s bigger than 20MB!

Oh yeah… Born in 1968.

286 12mhz, 40mb hd, 1mb ram, 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives

I got this around 1990.

I was born 1979.

Professionally: IBM System/3, in 1976.

Personally: a Royal Alphatronic (manufactured by Triumph Adler) in the mid-80s, followed shortly by a Laser 128. After that, I was dragged kicking and screaming into the PC world for professional reasons.

ODF v1.0 was introduced in 1947; rumor has it that a bug-free release of the OS is “just around the corner.”

First computer seen in person? Commodore SuperPet, spring of 1981 (grade 13 calculus). A student carried it into the room and I remember thinking, “Wow! A computer so small one person can carry it!”

First computer used? A punch-card terminal, that same spring, at Waterloo University during the days when the high-school students came to tour the campus.

Second computer used? Any of a number of character-based terminals unsedin my intorduction to computers that fall, also at Waterloo. (The punch-card terminals had disappeared during the summer. I know. I went looking for them.)

First computer owned? Sinclair ZX81. :slight_smile: Summer 1982.

I was born in 1963, but I’m still in beta. :slight_smile:

Babbage Difference Engine

:smiley:

Seriously, the first I used was in college, but I don’t know what it was. You had to keypunch a whole stack of cards to run a (program? script?) in BASIC.

PC-wise, it was the IBM XT in the mid 80s.

The first one I touched was a Black Apple in Kindergarden '78 or so. I don’t off hand remember if the Black Apple was a II or a II+

I’m a WANGer, too. Did your’s have the keyboard in alphabetic order, with a shift to enter a BASIC command word directly?

The second computer I used was a CDC 6600, with punched cards and FORTRAN IV, like FairyChatMom. (Probably was the same system, too, at Purdue) I knew what a hanging chad was before half of you Dopers were even born.

I also lay claim to several flavors of PDPs, and I’ve had to boot them off a paper tape. I like boot ROMs much better.

The first microprocessor I ever used was an Intel 8085, fresh to market.

BTW, I was born in 1961.

Sinclair ZX80… One whole Kilobyte of memory and you had to write the program in every time you used it…

Thirtyoneteen…

The first computer I used was an Apple IIE, my freshman year (I think, it may have been sophomore year) in high school. I was born in 1973, so that would have been somewhere around 87 or 88.

Tandy 2000. Had two games (Amy’s First primer and Funnels and Buckets), and some word processing program. I think it was from the late 70’s, early 80’s. Not sure.

I was born in `83, so the comp may very well have been older than I was.

I was born in 74 and I’m pretty sure it was an Apple II+ and the game was “Aztec.” My dad worked at the computer lab at UH Hilo and it was either that or have me play with the reams of punchcards around there. Now that “Aztec,” it’s a tough game. I’ve played it on an emulator and still can’t get very far.

The first one we purchased was a TI-99/4A. Kind of a concole/computer deal. I could do BASIC I had taken a class in that when I was about 8 but I mostly played “Tombstone City” which I’ve also played on an emulator. Man, now that game I was a god at but now I just can’t seem to get very far.

First computer used: Commodore 64, in 1984 or so. I loved playing with LOGO when my class got to use the computer lab at school.

First computer owned: My family got a Tandy of some sort (not sure what model, it had a 286 processor) when I was in grade 5, so around '88 or '89. My parents tried to foist that thing off on me when I started university in 1996 - can’t imagine why I didn’t want it. :wink:

I was born in 1978.

A Commodore 128. I was three or four and my dad freaked out when he saw I had turned the prompt screen all different colors - I had figured out all the different key combinations that controlled the background and text colors. I had to show him how to do it, he thought I’d broken the thing.

My mom brought home her school’s (she taught 4th grade) TRS-80 for the winter vacation back in 1982, and I was hooked.

In 1982-3, my 5th grade teacher had a Sinclair ZX-80 (with 4K expansion!) that she let me and another kid program with. Pressure keypads that limited you to 5wpm, and no way to save anything we created. It was great.

  1. Our first home computer. An Apple IIe with 80-column expansion and a duodisk drive. I used that all the way through my 1st year in college in 1990, after which my mom took it to school to let the kids use. When my mom retired in 2000, the thing was still working.

Born in 1971.

The first computer our family owned was some kind of Atari that used cassettes and those really big diskettes. It used a TV for a monitor. I grew up on a cattle ranch, and my dad used it for bookkeeping. My sister and I played lots of Pong on it. :smiley: This was in the early 1980’s, mind you, and Pong was just about the coolest thing ever. I was born in 1971. Man, I feel old compared to those who have posted so far.

Talk about flashbacks! My first was either a Vic 20 or an Apple ][… can’t remember for sure, as I started using both around the same time.

I remember tape drives and one of the very early iterations of Compuserve.

The first computer my family owned was an 8088. The first computer that I used was a Vic 20. I don’t even remember what i used it for, i was pretty young. I remember playing lemonade with a commodore 64 somewhere along the way but the vic 20 was definately first though.

Both of my parents worked for IBM, so I was introduced to computers soon after my birth in 1983. IBM PC model 5150 was the computer we had for a while, with my father occasionally bringing home other computers, including a portable model. Neighbors occasionally owned an early Apple, and most of the computers I worked with at school during the earlier years were Commodore models.

First computer I used was an Apple IIC. And we had the color screen! Man I loved that computer. I spent most of my time on it playing “Seastalker” (cos the other Infocom games were over my head). I was probably about seven or eight, but we had had it for years. I was born in 1981.

The volume control was on the left side of the computer. I will always remember this because during computer classes in fifth grade, there was one IIC and a bunch of older ones(+ maybe?)

Anyway, one of my friends was using the IIC, and she hit some combination of buttons that made the computer start beeping incessantly. I instinctively jumped up and turned the volume knob down. The teacher came over to me and made me show her where it was!

Almost exactly 40 years old (born in January 1964). First computer I used was a Morrow Designs Micro Decision 2, running CP/M. My roommate my sophomore year of college (1983-84) was a wirehead and worked in a hobbyist computer shop in his hometown, and bought it with his earnings. Had a Qume VT202-clone terminal (with the ultracool amber monitor). Zilog Z80 processor, 64K RAM, two single-sided, single-density floppy drives (no hard drive, of course). A Panasonic serial daisy-wheel printer (the machine didn’t have a parallel port). Running one of the earliest versions of WordStar. Used to send a two-page paper to the printer, head down the hall to take a shower, and get back just as it finished the second page.

I also logged a lot time that year and the next two on the school’s VAX 11/780 mini. I still have nightmares about the bug I found in the MASS 11 word processor on that system: everything would be fine until you went to print, at which point having a tab inside a footnote would cause MASS 11 to revert to a primordial card-deck-era error handling routine that had it print a period and then a form feed indefinitely, until your MASS 11 job ate all of the available CPU time on the system and got killed by the VMS OS. I killed several forests’ worth of trees trying to figure out why my damned honors paper wouldn’t print.