I had a Cordata 80/88? with a 20mb HD. RAWR!
It was the shizznit. Monochrome with the monitor built into the CPU. Even had a new and fancy 2400 bps modem in it.
The year I graduated high school ('86), Dad bought a nearly complete Commodore 64 system. He said it was for him to write résumés but I took it over and played games. Once I convinced him to buy a modem - 300 baud - I discovered the wonderful world of BBSing and downloaded loads and loads of cracked games. I still have my original 64 and 1541 drive, plus a 64C with its 1541II and a 128 with a 1571. I also have all my disks but I don’t know if any still work being so old and hardly any have their sleeves. Of course, I now play those old games on my PC via an emulator.
My first computer was a Commodore 64, which I still have. (Haven’t plugged it in in a while, though.) 5.25 disk drive, tape drive, and (woohoo!) a dot-matrix printer that printed approximately 1 page every 5 minutes. We had a bunch of games that went with it, including Pac-Man. My mom’s favorite game was one called Raid on Bungling Bay (sp?) where you flew a helicopter all over the place blowing up tanks and war compounds. She used to sit up and play that game until 4 in the morning. I haven’t seen it since.
My parents gave me a book that taught you how to write ‘programs’, but I used to get frustrated and give up. I think I still have that book somewhere.
Ahhh…
http://www.thepcmuseum.com/misc/Compaq/Portable/default.htm
Mine wasn’t exactly like this one, I think mine was an '83 ('84?) model. Also, mind had a gasp hard drive!
Used it until 1993, when finally we let it R.I.P. after being in 3 states, surviving 5 moves, a motherboard split in two and jury-rigged back together, a dead monitor (we were using a TV from Sears as the monitor: neat TV, it had a settting especially for use as a computer monitor), dying floppy drive (whirr, whirr, click, whirrr, grind, whirr), dying hard drive (can we say over 20% bad sectors and climbing folks?), but amazingly enough the original keyboard worked perfectly despite having who-knows-what over the years spilt into it.
It’s still sitting in box, probably in the attic somewhere… I’m tempted to gut it and use the case for something.
<< A computer’s attention span is as long as it’s power cord. >>
First computer: Commodore Vic 20!
Whoo hoo! That puppy rocked!
Once I got the cassette tape drive, I wrote a TON of BASIC programs! At one point I had a program I had written that listed all of the girls I wanted to boink, cross-referenced with what setting/costume/fantasy, etc… (I still remember one: Holly, red-headed model on The Price Is Right, in the pirate outfit, on the set while Bob Barker was saying “come on down!!!”). Whoa, I had fun with that!
Once I was in college, my roommate had a Commodore 64! Wow! A modem! We discovered the internet circa 1984… and were really impressed with the text ‘StarTrek’ game that we could play… took 10 or 15 mins to download a page of text so we could make our next move…:rolleyes:
Anyone remember “Jumpman” for the Comm 64? THAT was a game! Our whole dorm floor used to come into our room for tournaments…
Them was the days!
The first one I worked on was a Kaypro, then I took a summer computer course working on Apple II’s…(not even IIe yet I think, maybe a +). Lemonade Stand and Star Wars and Wombat rocked!
The first computer I bought was an Apple IIc, the first ‘light-weight’ travelling computer (About the size of a briefcase). It was $1,700 with monitor and a few programs back then (1982? 83?). I had just received a bit of money from my father’s death, so bought the computer. My nephew has it now and it STILL WORKS! A few of the games seem to be losing their bits and pieces, but most still work. Lode Runner still rocks.
Remember Locksmith 5.0? Oh yeah, come to Beavis…Or back in the day where the billboards were ruled by guys like The Godfather, Wiz and Blue Adept (at least those were the few guys I knew). Black, red, blue boxes and spare circuitry hot-glued onto compressed cardboard sheets sitting next to the computer. The first thing I remember downloading were Michael Jackson jokes and how to get things through credit card scams.
It took me until 1996 to buy another computer- IBM P166, which my mom still uses. Now I’m trying to convince my boss we need to upgrade to 2 gigs…
-Tcat
I had an old IBM 8086 “portable” PC. 'bout the size of a vaccum cleaner, with a black and gold monitor.
I remember the day when we upgraded that thing to 640k of memory from 256. Man was that fast!
I was so disapointed when I found out my dad took that thing from its hallowed place in the closet and threw it away. I want it back!
I’m another who started with the Timex Sinclair 1000. Possibly the best computer ever (for throwing like a frisbee, that is). We had the thingy that plugged into the back, giving you a whopping 16 Kilobytes of memory! Except we had to rest it on a little box to keep it from wiggling and crashing the computer. And using an ordinary tape recorder to save and load programs–ah, those were the days! I was even programming it in machine language before I graduated to the Commodore 64.
TRS-80, with the cassette player as a drive. “CLOAD” and pray was the rule. So long ago. . . .
-me
I had a Vic-20 too! With cassette games! And some cartriges… anyone remember ‘Gorf’?
Then, later on, I had a Commodore 64, and I played my first Ultima game (Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny) on that system. When I ran that game on my grandfather’s C128, boy was I in for a shock… there was music!
Ahhhh, the memories!
The first computers I ever used was at my dad’s office: Commodore Pet and a CBM.
The first computers my parents had:
Mom:Vic 20
Dad:Monroe Litton PC
First Computer I ever owned on my own:
A Zenith PC IBM Compatiable (AT - 086)
Apple II. Not II+, not IIe. 48 whole K of memory. I did my masters thesis project on it.
When I see that &*$%# office assistant come up in Microsoft
Word I realize that the stupid thing uses up more computing power than I used for the whole research project for my thesis.
This annoys the living daylights out of me, but I don’t know why.
He He -
I forgot to mention, my dad also had an accoustic coupler modem. My first time on BBS’s was about 1985 and on the internet about 1987.
In a box in my dad’s basement there used to be a collection of modems.
The Accoustic coupler, a 300, a 400, a 1200, a 2400, a 9600, and a 14,400 - I think he threw them out.
My dad is a programmer and used to work for the university and he had computers from work that he would bring home regularly. From the time I was 14 to when I left home at 18 we probably went through about 10 computers.
Another cool thing is we had the internet since the 80’s - remember MUDs, Talkers, and tiny MUDs - gee its been a long time. Telnet was the main protocol and Gopher - trying to find things using Archie and Veronica - those were the days.
I didn’t really get into the internet until about 1990 after I moved out of my dad’s house - my dad still maintained a “free” account for me via the university.
My mom on the other hand ran an ANSI BBS out of her house from about 1992 to 1998 - used to spend hours tying up the phone line chatting on that thing. I think I typed to my mom more than talked to her.
Some where on floppies at home I have old key mappings for my BBS game short cuts, I have old basic programs and antique pascal programs too.
No wonder I ended up being a programmer. 
The first computer I routinely used: A Univac 1205. It was water cooled. Really. IIRC, the memory was 8x256. Bits. Each bit was a separate ferrite loop on an individual circuit card. 8 drawers with 8 rows of 32 cards. It was serial number 001 – it’s now in some museum.
The first computer I owned: Commodore 64. 20 years ago.
I’m going hobble off to soak my corns now.
Hey, thanks!! Not like I need more stuff, but I think I must have this.
TI-99/4A in 1981. We were too poor to own the whole thing, so we’d drag it out and hook it to the TV as a monitor. We had the speech synthesizer, though, which kicked ass for its time.
I remember many long nights dictating BASIC code out of a magazine to my brother while he typed it in for the latest cool game. Page after page after page after page of hideous, inefficient spaghetti code. Yuck. But what great memories.
Parsec, TI Invaders, Alpiner, Tombstone City. Ah yes. I remember them all.
Commodore Vic 20 here. Folks bought it at Montgomery Wards for about $100. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but never bought anything to go with it and could pretty much only play with BASIC programming a little. We ditched that computer a few years later and they didn’t get another one until about 2 years ago.
The first computer I used was a TRS-80 in high school in the late seventies. The first one I owned was a Sanyo MBC-550 “silver box” An MS-DOS but not fully IBM compatible PC. I think it was the only IBM semi-clone that was actually slower than a real IBM, 3.54MHz IIRC vs. 4.77MHz for the original IBM. 256k RAM allowed me to split 128k out for a RAMdisk which speeded up the overlay files for Wordstar.
First one I ever used would have been the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II. Black and White, 80 x 24 display, and one floppy drive.
First one I ever owned was an Atari 800, with such luxuries as a full-stroke keyboard and 48w hoppin’ K of memory. Woo hoo! I would’ve gone for the Apple II, but programming graphics and sound on the Atari was much easier, and I needed those to be an 733T G4m3 Pr0gr4////\3r…