What was your first computer?

[Linus_Van_Pelt]

Ah, the memories, the memories.

Put me in with the Vic 20 crowd. However, my family didn’t want to spend the money on the cassette drive, so it was type 'till you bleed time. Then - the breakthrough. I found a schematic that would allow you to build a connector to use a regular tape recorder. My father built the connector for me and that was an amazing improvement. With some help from a friend, I got a program that I would use for studying vocabulary words. I worked in an office where I had a lot of time for studying, and would pack up the portable TV, the tape recorder, the computer and all the cables. I was portable!
Oh, and my first modem. I have no idea what the baud was - I think I picked it up at a yard sale. It was an ancient model that you dialed the phone, waited for the connection tone, then plugged the phone into the modem.

And I loved my C-64. How they got the games to do what they did with 64K of RAM is beyond me. If those same people were programing for Microsoft today, you could probably run XP on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM.

[Coil]

Originally posted by OpalCat *
**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. **

Yep, I remember that too.

My first comp was a C-64 with a tape deck (bought a diskette station later on.

[ralph124c]

Fascinating thread-I wonder if a class of collectors has emerged for old PC’s-machines like the SINCLAIR-TIMEX, Colreco “ADAM” or the old DEC “Rainbow” series PCs-seems like it takes around 20-30 years for collectors to becomeinterested in stuff-I doubt that old PCs are easy to find…people just trashed them! Compare this situation to that of antique radios-some radios from the 1930’s (like FADO) are going for huge prices today. I can’t imagine the aesthetic appeal of an old Commodore PET PC though…

[rubes]

Just how pathetic am I? About 3 years ago, I downloaded a c-64 emulator and still remembered that poke 53821 changed the background, and 53820 did the border. (man, now I’m hoping those are the right numbers)

OpalCat, I forgot about ,8,1 when doing the loads, but I remember that the computer desk was near the kitchen table, so I could see when things loaded.

I am the only one in the family with glasses, and somehow, just maybe, it might be that I stared at a 13" TV screen only 8" away from my face, showing me my c-64 screen. If I take off my glasses, that’s exactly where my “natural” focus currently is.
rubes

[Skywatcher]

*Originally posted by ralph124c *
**Fascinating thread-I wonder if a class of collectors has emerged for old PC’s-machines like the SINCLAIR-TIMEX, Colreco “ADAM” or the old DEC “Rainbow” series PCs-seems like it takes around 20-30 years for collectors to becomeinterested in stuff-I doubt that old PCs are easy to find…people just trashed them! Compare this situation to that of antique radios-some radios from the 1930’s (like FADO) are going for huge prices today. I can’t imagine the aesthetic appeal of an old Commodore PET PC though… **

Have you looked at eBay lately?