My first was a Commodore 64 with the monitor, floppy drive, and an Okidata printer. I had a joystick for it and a program called “Koala Stick” that let you do graphics using the joystick. There was no mouse. I had a 300 baud modem that I used to connect to local BBS systems.
I had a Compaq…Presario, I think? My dad bought it for me for my sophomore year of college, so 1996 or so. It had a floppy drive and CD-ROM drive. No printer. I think it came with a 28.8 modem, but someone in my dorm helped me install a network card so I could hook it up to Ethernet. I also upgraded the RAM at one point - I think it came with 32 Mb and I upgraded to 64 Mb? (It might have been 16 --> 32.)
Amstrad CPC 6128. It had in-built disc drive but my brother had a tape deck for it. Had a green screen monitor but brother bought a tv modulator for it so we could play games in colour through the telly. He also got a mouse for it for use with Advanced Art Studio. Those were the days.
I used an Apple IIE in school through a special program starting in 4th grade. It was practically mine because I was the only one in the program.
My first home computer was at age 9. It was a Commodore 64 with a floppy drive hooked up to a black and white TV. I drooled over that thing before Christmas like Ralphie drooled over Red Rider bb gun in ‘A Christmas Story’. I had a subscription to Byte magazine and a bunch of others. My goodness, I could spend the whole weekend typing in programs that would have made the best crappy game ever if it weren’t for the syntax errors they misprinted only to be corrected in the letters section 3 months later. I learned to fix some of them myself and eventually ended up as an IT professional so it was just the early story of my life.
I loved Infocom text adventure games so much. Zork I, II, and III were my domain as was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I have no idea what people these days see in the World of Warcraft. We didn’t need any graphics. Just a few typed verbs and nouns were more than enough to keep you entertained for weeks.
I still have a Commodore 64 emulator on my current PC and play with it fairly frequently. It harkens back to simpler times and I have the skills to fix all those syntax errors myself now.
An Atari 800 I think, I don’t believe it worked with anything but cartridges and manually typed in programs. Our next computer got a tape drive, which we considered really high tech.
My first computer was a Toshiba T1000 laptop. It had been my dad’s, and he gave it to me after his office upgraded him to a PowerBook 140. It had a small ramdisk and a modem, and he got me a dot-matrix printer and a CGA monitor for it. I used it to play games and access Prodigy - I remember waiting about 10 minutes for a crappy little color weather map to download.
My first computer was a ZX81 with a 16k RAM pack. I also had a cassette deck to load and save programs and a black-and-white CRT TV to look at the output on. i dreamed of getting the hi-res adaptor, all 192 x 128 pixels of it. These days, cheap phones have more than that.
16k RAM
External tape drive
Built in green monochrome screen
Character graphics only, no bitmapping.
Eventually got a 300 baud modem when they got below $500.
Held off on 1200 baud until I could get it for $275 from DAK Industries.
Taught myself BASIC and Assembler on that computer. Good times
Oh. That started in 1982.
ETA: I still have every issue from my subscription to Compute! magazine.
Commodore VIC-20 with the cassette tape drive, and a 13" color TV. I also had a joystick, but only because it happened to be the same one that my Atari had.
I later upgraded to the Memopak 64k RAM pack, the one that actually fit. i also read two different ZX81 magazines, (Sync and I can’t remember the other one).