Glad to be of service. You never know what’ll turn up on eBay, I also found a donor 5155 for parts.
JR-01, built from the Edmund Scientific Company kit for same.
My next computers were:
[ul][]TRS-80 Color Computer[]TRS-80 Color Computer 2[]TRS-80 Color Computer 3[]Digital Starion 942 (still in the apartment for emergency use)Dimension L700cx (this is the current machine in my “office” (actually, the office is a walk-in closet).[/ul]
ATARI 65XE
Hard to believe no one mentioned this one. I had a disk drive and a printer . They would daisy chain together. I could play Spy vs Spy, Goonies, Spider Attack. Almost compatable
286 @ 12 Mhz, 1Mb RAM (256Kb SIMMs x4), 40Mb hard drive, 5.25" floppy drive, 3.5" floppy drive, no mouse.
First - Atari 400 back in 1981 or whatever.
Second - Atari 600XL
Third - Commodore 64
Fourth - Pentium 150
Fifth - Pentium III 440
Sixth - Pentium 4 1.7GHz
My first was an Atari 800XL I got from my dad. We had about 3 boxes full of disks (remember? the black squarish things?) and some cartridges for it. I used to play Seven Cities of Gold and Tail of Beta Lyre into all hours of the night. It even had a speech synthesizer back in 1983!
When it died, I traded down to a 286 with a whopping 10 MHz and cruddy 16 color graphics. It would not work unless the case was open or screwed down VERY tightly. I never did figure out why.
All my computers since then have been some sort of el cheapo wintel box that I usually built myself. I still like the old Atari the best, though. I guess you never get over your first true love. 
The first computer I ever touched was a TI-99/4A, when I was in kindergarten…my school district has them around until I was in 2nd grade, then we got mighty Apple IIe’s ! Those populated our computer labs until 8th grade! that’s 1992! Then we got Macs (Classic II’s , I think) my freshman year. Finally, my parents broke down and bought one! A Performa 425, running on a 808040 (actually, a modified one, as I understand; note: my grandmother was the secretary for the processor design team!) at about 24 mhz, with 4, count 'em, 4 whole megs of RAM, and a vast 120MB Hard Drive. It came with a modem, that, to this day, has never been used (now mouldering in the garage…). While my parents were willing to make paper writing easier, research still involved books until I went to college. I then bought, all for myself (and under the influence of cavewoman, who has had a PC since she was 4…an AT of some type, if I understand…), a real-live PC, with a Cyrex 100 mhz pentium-class chip (they claimed it was equal to a 120…) 16MB Ram, and a whole 1GB of hard drive!
Put me down in the Commodore 64 club, too. Great games, especially as the C64 had good color and a decent sound chip.
Anybody remember GEOS? The GUI for the C64. Came with GeoWrite, GeoPaint, later GeoPublish. I used to lay out our club newsletter with that last one.
Remember Quantum Link (AKA Q-Link), the forerunner of AOL? With a 1200 baud modem, I was King of the Nerds!
Then I got a Mac Classic in 1990. Gave the Commie to my nephew. Gave the Classic to him years later when I got my Mac IIsi.
Anybody know of a good C64 emulator for the Mac? I’m feeling nostalgic…
You guys are making me smile all over the place! Love these memories.
Like AHunter3, my first was a terminal - CDC-Cyber 7000. A card-drunk-punching, cyber-burping PITA that also introduced me to TALK, RSTS, SPSS and Advent (Colossal Cave). That was the mid 70’s. What a love-hate relationship.
The first non-mainframe I used was an HP 150 with a touchscreen. Finally bought my own computer, a little Pentium 60 by Quantex in the mid 90’s.
Oh, I forgot…
I actually replaced that first C64 at least twice. The motherboard developed a hairline fracture that would let it run for about an hour before heat expansion caused hardware errors. After spending about $60 trying to get it fixed, I figured with easier to just buy a new one, for about the same money (this was around 1986, when C64’s were getting dirt cheap).
HE’S Mr Cazzle? I’ve been at his site before!
Timex-Sinclair TS-1000 w/16k pack and a printer. Followed by most of the others that were made before 1990 except no Commodores. I currently have at least two computers that are old enough to vote.
Ya know, that’s a standard XT motherboard, so it’s the same footprint as many more-modern motherboards. A little work and you can have the screamingest suitcase with a monochrome composite monitor around.
Always hated that model because I could find no way to turn off the color signal so any colored text was illegible. Quite unlike the old Compaqs, which had a gorgeous picture.
I had a Data General 8086 luggible with a 8 inch Gas Plasma display and a 20 meg HD. That thing was awesome. I learned to type on it when I was 4 and remember playing games like Pango and 3-demon on it. How I miss it.
OMIGOD I used to do that… remember they even sold a tool for it! (xacto knife was good enough for me, though)
My first was a Commodore 64, and I still have it somewhere. Remember Zork? Jumpman? Ultima I, II, III, IV… Choplifter… oh man. Remember when magazines would print programs that you could type into your computer to play the game?
Remember when you had a 300baud modem, and your friend got a 1200baud one, and they’d send you text messages so fast you couldn’t read them?
Wow I think my brain had blocked out the trauma of load times… remember how big games (like Ultima IV, for example) you would type LOAD “*” ,8,1
Then you would go eat dinner
when you came back, you HOPED the game had loaded properly.
First computer worked on:
A time-sharing terminal using a teletype at 110 bps – which was actually faster than needed since the teletype couldn’t go that fast anyway.
First computer(s) owned:
A homebuilt Southwest Technical Products computer based around the 6800 chip and the SS-50 bus. Thousands of solder connections. By the time i had finished it and was looking for a cheap teletype or VDT to connect it to, they came out with the TRS-80 which was cheaper than either, so I bought that and never put the SWTPC computer to good use (it was just used with a borrowed VDT to prove that it worked OK.)
I couldn’t afford to buy the monitor, so I bought a cheap kit that modified a black-and-white TV to have a standard video input. (The kit was put out by a company called Pickles and Trout for those geezers like me old enough to remember those days.) 
My first computer was a Digicomp I. It was a mechanical computer, made entirely of plastic and springs, and was programmed with plastic tubes. It had a three-bit output, and was clocked by hand. You coul write unbelievably primitive programs for counting , addition, subtraction, and logic on it.
“My” first computer for programming was an IBM 360/370, which I programmed using punch cards. Later on I used a VAX.
I found aCommodore PET in the trash, and I still hav it in my attic. Either the read or the write head is broken, though, so can’t use the built-in cassette tape drive. The litle “Chicklet” keyboard is kinda neat, though.
The first real PC I owned is a 484-DX, with an embarrassingly tiny amount of storage. I still have it, though.
I came into computers comparatively late, but Mr. Legend’s first (and I moved it from one house to another, so I consider it mine too) was an Altair 8800B. He designed several boards for it and he helped out with the design of the first sound card ever (Tom Schneider was the lead designer). It had switches and lights on the front instead of a keyboard.
Me, I’ve just always used whatever computer he puts on the desk.
First computer I used regularly was my college’s VAX 11/780, in early 1983, when my professor for my playwriting class set up accounts for all of us on it and insisted we use it for our drafts so that he could look at them without our having to turn in hard copy. There were about five VT100 terminals for the whole student body to use, and the only time there was any contention for them was when the SPSS-heads from the soc. sci. departments, or the COBOL/FORTRAN classes, had a project due. Even then it wasn’t too hard.
A few weeks later my roommate, who was a wirehead, brought back a new toy from one of his weekend trips home: a Morrow Designs MicroDecision 2 (a Z80-based computer running CP/M as the OS), along with a Panasonic daisy-wheel serial printer and a Qume VT202 (DEC VT220-clone) terminal (with amber display!) – both better than anything in our computer lab. 64K RAM, two floppy disks, and nothing much in the way of software beyond a very early version of WordStar (dot commands, anyone?). I started doing most of my work for classes other than playwriting on that – send a two-page paper to the printer, go down the hall to take a shower, and come back just as it was finishing.
After my roommate and I went our separate ways at the end of that year, I used the school’s VAX again for my last two years, by the end of which they’d replaced most if not all of the VT100s with newer, nicer terminals, and added a lot of new ones.
Somehow, even though I’ve worked in technology and used computers on a daily basis for fifteen years, I never got around to actually buying a computer myself until 1999 – before that, I either hung around work after hours and used company machines or used machines borrowed from or issued by my employers. The first one I bought was an iMac. I acquired an old Pentium Pro box from a former employer in an equipment giveaway, and I recently bought an HP Pavilion XL776 to use, in lieu of the laptop I had to return to my most recent employer.
My first was an Apple ][+, way back in the dark ages of 1981. It was state-of-the-art…64K (a major upgrade from the standard 16K). No hard drive. Boot disk. One 5.25" floppy drive. We used a 13" TV as a monitor (the most unnerving thing about this post is once again remembering that the computer is LOOONG gone, but that TV, a Kmart blue light special, still functions just fine after 21 years, and sits on my bedstand as I type).
I can honestly say I’ve had a personal computer ever since then, moving to an Apple IIc for college (now THAT was a portable PC!), then a 386/12, a 486/40, and more than a few hand-builts.
wistful sigh I still miss some of those old games, as primitive as they were.
-Redhawke