Inspired by brag about your computer, what was your first one?
For me, it was going to be a Commodore64, but they had this trade in deal, where they would give you up to $150 if you traded in your “old” computer. Because of this, I had a TimexSinclair with a whopping 1k or 2k of memory, I don’t recall.
I did get the Commodore64 (Best selling computer EVER!), but sadly, when it’s mother board died, I purchased a Commodore128, instead of moving to the Amiga at that time. It would take me a few more years to learn the power and artistic freedom the Amiga offered.
First one I remember having around the house was an Apple IIe. I was a wee lassie, so all I remember was playing Oregon Train and Lemonade Stand on it.
Ahh, back in the day when programs were on floppies…
I soon upgraded to the Commodore 64. I loved that computer. I still remember the day I got that breakthrough program that would format a floppy disk on only THREE MINUTES!
Not only did it have the cassette deck built into the keyboard but it had a whopping 64k of memory and also came with 10 free game cassettes.
I only recently managed to finish one of them - Heroes of Khan - courtesy of an emulator I downloaded and a cheat sheet I found. So it took me nearly 2 decades to complete a game, which is quite a feat really.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 with a whopping two thousand bytes of RAM! Yup. 2K. I got it on sale for $50 around 1983. I could write BASIC on it, but never got much use out of it. I lost it in a closet somewhere and never found it.
My next computer was an Atari 520ST. It was fun for graphics, but not much good otherwise. I mostly used it as a word processor. I eventually gave to to the Salvation Army.
The third one was built from parts and used a 120mHz Pentium chip. I used it for about three years, then gave it to my sister.
Now I’m on a Gateway 500mHz PIII. Yeah, I’d like to have a faster computer with gobs more memory and a killer video editing suite, but this one will do for now. I’ll leave the editing to my friend with a Mac.
Tandy Color Computer. Rockin’, baby! Played Dig-Dug (a Pac-Man-ish game) and a Radio Shack version of Breakout. Cassette data tape storage, 4K RAM, and the amazing ability to have colors and lights and noises play with a BASIC program! I trembled with anticipation as we installed the 16K RAM chip!
Then the original Mac in college, a hand-me-down from the roomie who got a Mac III or something gee-whiz like that. Then in 1992 my first real PC, the Compaq Presario 125, a screaming 385/25 rocket with a 2400 kbps modem, don’t recall the RAM, and the decent monitor I JUST got rid of. Or maybe I still have it.
How about discovering that you didn’t need to buy double-sided disks. You just took a hole-punch and clipped a notch in the other side. Instant double-sided disks.
1981…The epitomy of hi tech…The Adam! Used cassette tapes and did practically nothing. Moved up to the Commodore 64, then to the Amiga which was so advanced I could actually use it to write letters, and, it had lots 'o pretty colors you could use. Then a Sanyo “portable”. The sucker weighed 15 pounds and had a 5" monochromatic screen, but, gosh darn it, it could connect to the World Wide Web, (well, AOL anyway).
1994…got a “real” computer with a 56K modem. Since then, we have been through several, updating constantly. I don’t even bother to remember what they are/were.
The first computer I used (I certainly did not OWN it) was the one (yes, ONE) in our computer lab in High School in 1976. We sat down at terminals that were like typewriters and typed in commands. The computer typed back. There were no CRT monitors. I don’t remember what it was called. I was dragged through the process of writing a program in fortran which did something like sort and align data. The commands I write out were keyed in and the punch cards were created and loaded, the program was run, and the results spewed out on that connected accordion-paper.
The first computer I owned was a used Mac SE with a 40 MB hard drive and 2.5 MB of RAM. A few years later I put in an Applied Engineering accelator and it became a 40 MHz '030 machine with 16 MB of RAM, and it served well as my self-supplied computer at the social work office until 1997 when the accelerator board fried out.
I still have several hundred 5.25" floppy disks with games galore on them. It’s the main reason I keep a 386 around with 5.25" and 3.5" drives, so when the urge strikes, I can play a classic game (Mo’Slo, you’re the best) or port it to a 3.5" and play it on a blazing fast machine.
My very first computer was from Edmonds Scientific, an analog computer with 3 big dials and a meter you dialed two of the knobs for the problem (addition subtraction multiplication division) and pressed the button and turned the 3rd till the meter reached the center and read the answer off the third dial.
my first digital computer was a development board based on the RCA 1802 processor and had 256 bytes of RAM, a Hex keyboard, a port to plug in a tape recorder (you had to write the code to read and write to it) and composit video output.
My first computer was the legendary Commodore PET. I still have a computer magazine from 1980 that advertises an additional 16 K of RAM for a cheap $340. Man I wish I still had the machine.
First computer I actually bought for myself by myself? A Compaq Presario 4712 that is, simply, a $1400 paperweight (bought in 1997). That POS completely crapped out in a matter of months, needing a new hard drive in less than a year. Replaced that, and watched the other parts crap out. Because of a bug in the system, it would randomly access the floppy drive–eventually grinding it into nothing. I’m actually party to a class action lawsuit against Compaq for selling me crap. (“Sparky,” as I call it, is now in my classroom. I have a Dell now, thankyouverymuch.)
If you’re talkiong about the first computer I had at home that I did not purchase–basically, the family’s first computer–then it was a loner Apple IIGS my Mom brought home for a few years (the school lent it to her for her to learn on). I remember my favorite game on it was a Winter Olympics thingy. It was cool, but I sucked.
Oh yeah, that was neat. I had a Commodore Vic-20 to start with, then upgraded to a Commodore 64 with floppy drive and a dot-matrix printer. I had a ton of pirated games from my cousins, plus a good number that I’d bought myself. After that I didn’t actually own a computer until grad school; I think I bought a 386 of some kind.
Mine was the ZX-Spectrum, with rubber keys that you had to press several times before you hit the sweet spot, and pre-typed commands in the ALT and CTRL positions.
I remember upgrading from 16K to 32K of memory, and being all excited because we could now play “Horace goes skiing”.
Ah the joys of fastforwarding and rewinding audio tape to get it in the right place, then listening to the whine of the program loading for 5/10 min and then getting the error message at the end and having to do it all over again Those were the days…
Count me in on the Vic-20 thing. In about 1981 I bugged my parents until they gave me $500 to buy a computer with. With that amount, I could get the Vic-20 with a cassette recorder and a couple games, a TRS-80 with nothing, or a Commodore 64 with nothing. I decided on the Vic-20. I spent many hours playing with that thing.
In about 1984, I upgraded to an Apple II clone - a Franklin Ace 1000. From there, let’s see… an Epson QX-15 in about 1986, a Kaypro 286 in about 1988… and then it gets fuzzy. I started in on building my own in the late 80’s - mid 90’s and had several no-names hanging around. Then in 97 or so I bought my first laptop - a Winbook - and traded that in last April for my current beast, a Dell 8000 laptop.
