The Tandy Color Computer with 128k memory. The cassette drive. The two analog joysticks. The color monitor. The voice cartridge for speech synthesis. The sound cartridge for making it a good quality music synthesis. The 4 pen color printer that used a 6 inch wide roll of paper. I just threw out the phial like container that held the pens last week. I used it for small seed storage when I hiked and gathered seed. A bit later I had a Panasonic KX-P 1080i dot matrix printer.
My first computer was a TRS-80. Don’t know exactly which model, but I distinctly remember getting a book on BASIC programming for my 8th birthday - I mark my introduction into geekdom as starting on March 13, 1980. I distinctly remember, with love, our Model III but, according to that site, the Model III was introduced in July 1980, several months after my birthday (and I doubt my dad got it new). We moved to Winnipeg from living way up north for several years in January 1980, I don’t remember him having a computer up north, so he must have bought a Model I or Model II between January and March of that year, but the Model I doesn’t look familiar to me, and the II only vaguely. We got a Model 4 later, but the III is the one I remember most. The Model II or whatever it was may technically have been my “first”, but the Model III was my first “real” computer. It’s my first “long term relationship” and my first love.
I remember the old 300 baud modems. I remember when our modem baud reached 4 digits, and I thought it was blinding speed! (Of course, just today the cable Internet guy said that my Internet was slow because I had so many splitters connected to the cable - and I didn’t even know the Internet was slow (seemed fast enough to me!), so your definition of “blinding speed” may vary.
I remember lusting after a few computers because they had gasp LOWER CASE!* on their systems! My computer seemed to “computer-y” with its all caps, and the ones with mixed case seemed more … fun.
*yes, I know the irony of posting the words “lower case” in all caps.
Aside from the last half of the last sentence, story of my life as well. Well, aside from the Commodore 64 part - the c64 was what I lusted after, it had much better graphics and (if I remember right) COLOUR! But, yeah, as I mentioned, I got a book on computer programming (in BASIC) for my 8th birthday and was cranking out programs months before I was 9. I also read my dad’s Byte magazines as often as he did, and yes, I learned to debug code by myself, and would fix my own programs, those that I got from Byte, and those we got from other sources. While it didn’t lead me to the IT professional route, it may have been a contributing factor to my learning HTML all by myself in 1994 merely by looking at the source code of webpages.
Agreed. You cannot be a true nerd if the thought of an old fashioned text adventure game doesn’t make your loins tingle. Even if you were born in 1994 or some other era well after text adventures were made, it’s a pre-requisite to geekdom. (Cite: All the “cool nerds” (the ones on Big Bang Theory) love themselves old fashioned text adventure games (AND WoW, for the record), and they’re too young to remember the real things.)
I loved the tape drive in the TRS-80, for years afterwards my dad kept the tapes, and I’d sometimes even play them in my stereo just for the hell of it.
Oh yes, the noise only a dot matrix printer can make. That also takes me back. Why on earthy don’t they make fanfold paper any more? That stuff can be so useful in today’s world …
I think I held out for a 386. It had both a 3 1/2 and a 5 1/4 drive. I think I spent $400 for 16 mb of ram. Printer was a Panasonic 9 pin dot matrix. The software was horrible. All of it except for stuff used in college computer classes. I still have Textra on a floppy disk which was a word processor with spell check.
Now I’m getting all nostalgic. I miss my Commie 128. SimCity, Neuromancer, great sound, and all the BBSs.
IMSAI 8080 that I soldered every connection myself, with 22 S-100 expansion slots. 32K RAM, every chip hand-soldered on about 8 boards ranging from 1K to 16K each. I added (for $1800) a dual 5" floppy drive Micropolis unit which stored 360K on each single-sided, hard-sectored disk. Soroc 9" terminal (screen + keyboard), monochrome, text only. Merlin monochrome graphics board for music display, 320x200, cut the 2Mhz CPU speed by half when active, used a 19" BW CRT TV monitor.
Malibu dot matrix printer, 60x75 DPI, $2000, required writing all software, even for text display.
I had a Vic 20. Sorry to say I got bored with it after a couple of months. At the time I was being trained on electronic switching systems, and the Vic 20 just wasn’t in the same league.
I should stop, I’m getting all sad… I started with the terminals at and from my father’s workplace. After getting to the “cave is closing” point of Adventure, I lost interest because I found Rogue. And that was a bummer, 'cause you couldn’t play Rogue at home with the print teletype machine. I grew up for a few years thinking I was the only 9-year-old who read BYTE magazine. I had a lot of fun a few years later playing this on the first IBM peanut. Anyone got any mixers?
A Tandy 1000EX with a floppy drive, and then we upgraded to a 3.5inch drive. Had a color monitor and a printer for the pin-fed paper. I don’t think the Internet had been invented yet, so no need for a modem! That must have been in about 1984 or so. My brother fell in love with it and bought his own…I think he still has it, and it may still work…his wife was using it a few years back. I really don’t remember specifics about it.
Atari 800 XL with a 5.25 drive, hooked up to a small TV and a daisy wheel printer. Used it for law school from 84 to 87. I had used a friend’s Radio Shack with daisy wheel while in college for word processing and I was hooked. It reduced typos enormously. I still remember using spell checkers on these machines. I’d learned to do some programming in the 70s in high school on a telex terminal hooked up to main frame, and my father managed to borrow a Commodore Pet with tape drive and monitor in it for a few months, but it was just a toy. My brother went into computers and had lots of experience. Back in the 60s my dad had a minivac he borrowed that required hard wiring to do flashing lights and clicking relays.
I got a VIC-20 in 1983, and added a tape drive a few months later.
By the time I abandoned my VIC for a PC in 1990, my VIC had a 1541 disk drive, a 1200 bit-per-second modem with dialer, and the huge VIC-1020 “garage” that allowed me to fit multiple memory cartridges into it (and served as a support for my “monitor”, a cheap black-and-white TV). It had 40 kilobytes of memory in all. When I outgrew my Fidelity impact printer (which printed in pale violet ink on cash register paper), I bought a Comrex CR220 printer (a clone of the Commodore MPS-801). I also had a joystick and a pair of “paddles” (rotary game controllers).
First computer I owned was a used Macintosh SE.
At peak peripheralocity, I had…
• ADB graphics tablet from SummaGraphics
• Floptical 21 MB drive (SCSI)
• 2400 baud modem
• DaynaFile 5.25" and 3.5" DOS floppy drive (SCSI)
• ADB handheld 32-level greyscale scanner
• external spare 800K floppy disk drive (dedicated port)
• Apple StyleWriter printer
• AE TransWarp '030 40 Mhz accelerator with 16 MB RAM on it
EDIT: oh and of course ADB mouse and ADB keyboard
Apple ][e, 2 5.25" floppies, 1 3.5" floppy, dot matrix printer, two monitors (one color, one monochrome, so the parental units could use it for typing) and for some reason I recall having a Koala Pad, but I don’t know why we could have had it. Probably got it from my uncle, but I’m going to guess it was never hooked up or used. I think we also had a very crude joystick that we used for playing Lode Runner.
Ya know, you could probably sell all that for $40 or so at the flea market. I’ll buy you a coke.
The very best thing about the early big Cray computers is that they retain their worth as furniture.
IBM PCjr
64kb of RAM
5.25" floppy
BASIC (programming language) cartridge
Parallel Printer port “sidecar” attachment which added another 64kb RAM
The better infra-red keyboard (not the chiclet style)
and an IBM dot matrix printer
I still used it well into the 90’s for a dart-scoring game I wrote.
TRS-80 - we had no tape deck drive, so my brother and I entertained ourselves by writing code that made it fill the screen with dirty words.
Commodore VIC-20
Datasette
An Atari 2600 joystick (they had the same interface)
One of them old paddle controllers for those Breakout/Arkanoid-type games.
Had a bunch of cartridges. Loved the old Scott Adams text adventure series. Omega Race was awesome, and I was addicted to Radar Rat Race. I remember enjoying Tooth Invaders, too.
I don’t remember the brand or model of the first computer I owned. It was back around 1990.
I didn’t have a mouse, a modem, or a printer.
It had a CGA monitor.
It ran on DOS.
It had a five and a half inch floppy drive.
I later bought and installed a joystick for it. That involved opening up the case and plugging a card into one of the empty slots inside it that were there for peripherals.
Our first computer was a TRS-80. I don’t think peripherals had been invented back then.
I think I was around 5 when I first got exposed to Lode Runner on an Apple ][ or similar. Then I was given an old IBM keyboard and rearranged all the letters into alphabetical order and pretended to be some sort of hybrid secretary/air-traffic-controller/liberator of the free world.
Then around 8, I think, I got my own first machine: An IBM PC compatible 386 at 33 or 66 MHz, I forget which. I think Win 3.1 was around then and The Incredible Machine was awesome, but the real action was Prince of Persia in DOS and BBS door games on a 14.4 modem. LORD corrupted me forever – ASCII titillation galore! I thought zmodem was the most amazing concept ever and I was flabbergasted when I discovered deltree. It was at this tender age that I leaned to hate config.sys and A220 I5 D1 is now forever burned into the dark recesses of my soul.
The next year or two I explored the wonders of the Mac debugger, thermal grease, and using Word macros to bypass the lousy system protections they had back then. Oh, and Out of This World was as bizarre then as it is now, but at least there was C&C and Warcraft actually had a manual.
By the time I was 11 or 12 I’d learned about the Internet, Fish Cam, porn, Geocities, IRC, warez, and script kiddie-ism. I remember getting interviewed on TV because I made my very own Geocities site, big whoop. Naturally, not long later I got myself in trouble and had to explain to my junior high principal that yes, I understood that “back orifice” could also mean his asshole and that it was not to be discussed as such in polite company.
Needless to say I didn’t date much, but ah, good times… 
[/nostalgia]
My first home computer was a Commadore Amiga with a colour monitor that you could watch tv on and a dot matrix printer. The exact specs I can’t remember but I did go to computer camp in grade school and we learned on Apples.