First I used was an old Pet - well it wasn’t old then. First I owned was a C64, but I played extensively on a friend’s Vic20 before I got my own. I was born in 1969.
First one of my own was a TI-99/4A. That would’ve been 1981 or '82. It came with a really simple instruction book for TI BASIC, which made the transition to DOS BASIC pretty easy.
While tere was a hideously expensive floppy drive you could buy, I used a cassette recorder (with a faulty footage counter) for storage. Software came in solid state cartridges (Space Invaders - Aaaack!)
I’m not sure what I might have first actually used in school. At work it was a dumb terminal on a Prime 360.
And I’m a '53 model, myself.
The first computer I used was an IBM 360/(don’t recall model number). Connected over modems via Model 33 Teletypes. Yellow paper, uppercase, punch tape, the whole deal.
But that was a “modern” computer compared to the IBM 1130 I was forced to use later. 16KB of true core memory. (At $250K a pop.) Batch mode, punch cards, 3 hour turnaround time, etc. Fortran II. That’s II!
DOB: Figure it out.
A very early Compaq DeskPro with an amber monochrome screen, 2 5½" floppys, no hard drive, and a modem. It was my mother’s work computer. I played Tetris, Chess, and banged out assorted rubbish on an old version of WordPerfect.
That was in 1988. I was 5 years old, which means I’ve been using computers ¾ of my life.
My first computer was a Mail order 80286 16mhz with a VGA screen, 40 MB hard drive, MS-DOS 4 and a neat shell program called “Menu Matic”. Must have been in 1989 or 1990. That computer lasted, after being upgraded to a 486DX 33mhz with a 80 MB hard drive, until 1998 when the hard drive gave out. The monitor was about the only original component left.
I miss that old machine.
Of course, the still-present knowledge that the screen memory of the Commodore Pet went from 32768 to 33767 really helps me out a lot whenever I’m contemplating a WebLogic server issue or Oracle database problem these days.
I seem to have forgotten where the screen memory was on the Vic-20 – a quick glance at a memory map on the Net says 7680 to 8191, but that doesn’t ring any bells for me.
Here’s some excellent pictures of the chicklet-keyboard Pet that was my first computer experience.
Univac 1205.
It was water-cooled. Seriously. The computer was designed for use onboard battleships to do trajectory analysis. Data entry was via paper tape, and the I/O was mercury-wetted reed relays.
You know those banks of flashing lights you see sometimes in really old sci-fi movies? Those lights are also switches – and represented the values of the registers. So you could also program the computer in binary using those switches.
It was installed in the first flight simulator I worked on, device 2C47, an A6A Intruder simulator built in the late 50’s by Goodyear. An updated version, a Univac 1230, was in the simulator next door, device 2F67, an A6C simulator built a few years later.
I hear it’s in some museum somewhere now – ours happened to be serial number 001 of that model. It was built before I was born.
Apple IIe. Fifth grade. I would spend hours after school trying to win “Snooper Troops.” When the second one came out (I think it had something to do with a missing dolphin), I nearly ruined the patience of my G&T class in solving the damn mystery.
By the end of my freshman year in HS, I had saved enough to buy an Apple IIGS. Graphics AND sound, baby! Optional HARD DRIVE!!! One big huge motherfucking MEG of RAM!!! Programs would load in mere MINUTES!!! IBM what? I was on the cutting edge!!!
Do you know how much money 1200 bucks is to a 14 year-old kid in 1989? Fuck you, Apple. Thanks for discontinuing my damn computer. I was looking forward to Manhunter 3 like you would not believe. Come back, Sierra On-Line. All is forgiven.
Born in 1974, as if y’all didn’t know.
The Vic20 in 1983 (I was six). I could program it in basic even, to make colored balls bounce and “birds” fly across the screen. 
I first used a BBC Micro at school (when I was about 7). Our first home computers were the Commodore 64 and the Spectrum ZX (Dad didn’t want us to be partisan about this!). We got an Atari a bit later on as well. Then, one day, in the attic, we found an old pong machine, that dad had bought when it first came out.
I was submitting Fortran programs on 80 column cards to a university computer that I never saw about 1969.
About the late 70s I was writing IBM Assembler and COBOL programs again on cards for a distant mainframe. Ah, the joys of a compile error.
First desktops were IBM XT/AT 20 meg harddrive clunkers with the conventional 640K of memory. They cost thousands. So my first home computer was an Amiga 500. I told everyone that if they would start making hard disks for Amiga and market them properly it would dominate the market. Good call, eh.
Wow, that reminds me. Anyone else remember having to write 64K code and trimming routines into sub-routines in order to swap the in and out of memory?
TRS-80, circa 1981.
I remember Eliza, the early AI psychologist, and the Dancing Demon. These programs came on tape cassettes.
The first one I owned was a Commodore 16 in the middle Nineties, long after it went out of production.
I got no software at all, limiting myself to the software I would write by myself, usually with mediocre results. My father is still not used to the idea of buying software (“A C compiler for the university? Why not write one yourself?”)
Oh, and the video chip was defective and after a couple of hours would get overheated and fill the screen with random junk.
FYI I was born in 1976.
Tandy Comlor Computer. I remember changing out the 4K RAM chip to a whopping 16K chip one day, we were stylin! 0.894 Mhz clock speed. Cassette tape drive. Game port on the right side for DigDug.
Sorry, born 1966. This was maybe 1980-81.
I was the proud possessor of a Sinclair ZX81 which I bought off a mate – complete with 16 kb rampack. I learned to type on it too – which is why I type so badly now.
At school we used apple II+'s which were later upgraded to apple IIe’s, and I got to borrow the Apple IIc one weekend – dinky little portable thing. We used to buy single density 51/4 inch floppies and cut a notch out of the other side so that we could use both sides of the thing. I never managed to fill one completely, but it was great having two different operating systems (Not that you could actually tell the difference between them).
First PC I ever saw was a “Compatible Kaypro” which was entirely portable (The size of a suitcase and weighing maybe 15 kilos). It had a built in six inch green CRT screen and no less that two (can you believe it) floppy drives! The lid doubled as a keyboard and it was a clunky ugly looking beast. It clocked in at a measly $6000 but that was still a whole lot cheaper than any IBMs that were around. Shudder
Does anyone remember the eight inch floppy drives?
It was an analog thing with cards. We used it in the ICU for entering patient names for billing. One morning, it started smoking and we had to evacuate our patients. It was gone when we came back.
I was born in 1970 (hence my username).
First computer I actually used was an Apple IIe in 1983 when I was 13. I took a summer computer class with some other kids and learned LOGO and BASIC. The following Christmas I got a Timex/Sinclair 2068, which was an upgrade from the ZX/81 in that this one was color and had 48K of RAM (no add-on RAM cartridge needed). It still used tapes, which were not very reliable and took forever to load (I had thrown many a tape across the room and broken it when a program I had worked on for so long glitched and failed to load at the last second). I wish I had gotten a Commodore 64 since this was what all my friends had. A trip to the computer store was no fun since there was nothing available for my computer, but there was an abundance of stuff for Commodore users as well as IBM and Apple. I ended up having to get by on what I could program it to do, which wasn’t much. Still, I learned a lot of things from using it.
In 1988 I got a Tandy Color Computer 3. It was a lot of fun and I could do a lot more things with it. Software was still limited and difficult to find, but a lot of things I could get through mail order. The computer was also supported by a magazine called The Rainbow, which contained dozens of BASIC programs one could type in. I spent many hours and late nights typing in those programs. Oh, and I actually had a 5 1/4" disk drive with this machine (160K storage, whoo hoo!).
First PC-compatible computer was a 386 SX which I bought in 1991. It had a 40MB hard drive and 2 MB RAM, no sound card or modem; these were added on later.
First computer I ever used was a Wang mainframe in my high school’s “computer room” (actually a second-floor alcove fitted with three teletype terminals.) We used to write BASIC programs and type them in on the terminals; from there we could save them to punched paper tape for later loading and running. I wrote a text-adventure game and a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style maze exploration game for my final grade in BASIC Programming.
The first computer I ever owned was a TI99/4A. I had the cassette tape drive, an 8-inch floppy drive, acoustic coupler 300-baud modem, and the voice synthesis modules for it, along with tons of game cartridges. It rocked.
Later, I bought a brand-new 286-16 with a 5.25 floppy, 3.5 floppy, and 30 meg hard drive and 1200-baud modem and thought it was the cat’s ass. Over the years I kept upgrading it until the hardware had changed so much I couldn’t keep just replacing parts to keep it “state of the art.” The 3.5 floppy is still running, though, installed in my P4 these days.
Oh, yeah. I was born in 1960.
Used? An Apple IIe or IIc or IIgs, something like that. Our elementay school had them.
Owned? Let’s see, around 1993, we got a 486/25 with 4 MB RAM, 1x caddy-loading CD-ROM, 200 MB hard drive, Windows 3.1, DOS 6, and no modem. Oh, and some crappy printer. Cost: $2000.
My dad bought me a Texas Instruments computer that I would spend hours on, writing programs in Basic.
At school in the early 80s, our lab was outfitted with about a dozen of those funky, Radio Shack specials–TRS-80s. Mmmm, those were the days! Printing out pages and pages of code to see where you left out a comma or mistyped something so you could get your five second program to finally work.