I don’t know why, but this question just popped into my head.
The first computer I used was an Apple//c. The first one I owned was a 286 with 1 MB of memory, a Hercules monochrome graphics adapter, a 20 MB hard drive with MSDOS 6.2 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
BTW, no worries if you don’t remember all the details I do. 
<-supposed to mean a nerd smiley.
As far as I can remember, my family’s first was pretty close to yours: an Apple IIe. Don’t even ask me about specs apart from a noisy dot matrix printer, a green screen, floppy disks, and other stuff… I don’t even remember…!
Amiga 1000, and as soon as it came out the 500 with the hard drive and a screamingly fast 9600 baud modem which was an upgrade form the 2400 baud modem. Did hit a few BBSs, mainly one owned by a friend of mine that was teh only one that was not a long distance call. I changed to a PC when I wanted to get online after AOHell finally got a non long distance number for our town because I could no longer get the proper internet program for the amiga. See, back when the program was freely available to get online with genie, all the numbers were long distance calls, and one also paid for access by the minute and I was not going to pay to call a number to pay by the minute to play online. Once I could get online on a local number, I couldnt get the program for my amiga without going online to get it. See the problem here? =)
On the other hand, my first PC was a custom build by a computer store owned by a friend, so I never was tormented by a packard bell piece of shit =)
BBC Model A (16K RAM, no disc drive, Black & White TV set for monitor).
I upgraded to a Model B (32K RAM), got an external 5" floppy drive, and wrote my doctoral thesis on it.
My parents bought us (my husband, daughter, and me) a TI99/4A. Its memory was a cassette tape recorder, and it had a lot of cartridges available, sort of like NES/SNES cartridges. We had some great games on that thing, like Temple of Apshai trilogy, Tunnels of Dome (both dungeon crawls), Hunt the Wumpus, Scott Adams Adventures (plug in the cart for the basic program, and then load up a particular game from the cassette), and quite a few others. I had a lot of fun with that computer. The second computer we had was a Commodore 128. My husband was very excited about this one, because it had THREE operating systems! That computer had just a floppy drive which took the old 5.25" discs, and no hard drive at all. It required a special computer monitor…we couldn’t use a TV as a monitor. This was the computer I had when I first started exploring the Great Underground Empire.
I couldn’t tell you the specs. Hell, I couldn’t tell you the specs of my CURRENT computer without looking them up. All I can really tell you is that my CDRW drive won’t open without using a paperclip. Specs and technical stuff isn’t really important to me. All I really want to know is whether or not I can run a program on the computer without any problems.
Commodore 64. When my birthday was coming up I told my mom that I wanted to get a floppy drive so that I won’t have to re-write all those Basic programs each time I turned the computer on. At the time she was dating an upper-middle-class guy and he bought me a 286 PC which had a <gasp> hard drive (as well as a floppy drive).
1982 (?) – Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with built-in BASIC and 16K RAM; and to save anything you connected a Cassette Recorder and recorded it on a Cassette…
Well, technically it was my brother’s, but I ended up with pretty much equal time on it.
I think at the beginning we couldn’t appreciate the new!! color feature, because all we had to hook it up to was a B&W TV… :smack:
That summer, I think (or maybe a year or two before?) I helped out at my parents’ University Computer Center, porting FORTRAN WATFIV code to FORTRAN 5 – and debugging and running the results by printing punchcards (including the JCL for them) and running them through the reader… :eek:
The first computer I used was a kind of rectangular boxy thing. It had a punch card reader on the top, and a slot on the side where you could stick this kind of thin card with a magnetic stripe on it (like a credit card only not as wide) into the machine. Each magnetic card held something a whopping 50 punch cards worth of data! Whee! It had a hex keypad on it and a small display that could output a few hexidecimal characters, and that was about it. I have since tried to identify this machine and have never been able to figure out who made it or what it was. If this sounds familiar to you, please let me know.
From there I progressed to the TRS-80 model 1 with its whopping 4k of memory and a cassette interface. I learned BASIC programming and machine language on this machine. I was in Jr. High school at the time.
The first computer I actually owned was a Commodore 64. I think I can still draw a schematic of this thing from memory. The Commodore had the distinction of having possibly the worst cassette interface ever created. It stored every program twice on the tape for redundancy and error checking purposes (its designers had apparently never heard of things like checksums or parity bits). This meant that it took twice as long to load and save programs and was half as reliable because if either copy got corrupted it marked the whole file as bad. I was so glad to get a 1541 disk drive.
Ah, the good ol’ days.
IIRC, it was an Atari 800XL; eventually with a cassette drive which was better than typing programs in. The next one was an Atari 520 ST; I can recall me and my brother being awed by a whole half a megabyte of memory. And actual disc drives! That had some great games, I thought.
First I used was an Atari 7800, though that’s strictly speaking a game console. The first one I ever did anything useful with (started programming on) was some kind of Sony HitBit MSX machine. Other machines I saw occasionally at that time were the Commodore C64, VIC-20 and the totally unreliable ZX Spectrum with the rubber keys. Oh and I think even before those, the Phillips P2000, which I suspect is virtually unknown outside the Netherlands.
First computer I owned was a second hand C64 w/ disk drive. Cost me a year’s pocket/birthday money and then some.
Mine was a ZX81 with a 16K RAM pack.
Apple ][ GS with a hard drive and two floppy drives. We also had a screaming fast 16k (I think. Do those even exist?) modem.
The first one I used was a terminal hooked to a main frame over telephone lines at school.
The first one I owned was a Tandy color computer with 128k memory. It had many features better than the Apple IIc I owned next and upgraded with an Applied Engineering board that took the memory to 1M and installed a Real Time clock allowing the system to start without me typing in the date and time so files had a date and time on them. Some people still won’t believe that computers didn’t always have a Real Time clock unless you bought and add on card. I could use the extra Apple IIc memory for a RAM hard drive that allowed me to not have to switch out programs via floppy exchange all the time. I could also use that extra memory for programs I wrote.
The next one was a 33sx computer that worked for less than a month before the motherboard fried due to a bad IDE cable. It took the store I bought it from almost a year to the day to replace the motherboard and processor. I won’t go into the levels of pissed off I was with that company. The computer was worthless outdated shit by the time it was replaced. We all know how fast computers devalue.
The next one purchased soon after the last one died had problems with the memory and ran erratically. It went back the next day for a new one of the same model. That one went back the next day with the same problem for a full refund. I then purchased a top of the line Pentium 60 that I upgraded the memory to 16M right away. I used it a couple years before I upgraded the defectively manufactured P60 chip for one of those after market doubling chips that made mine a P120. I used that computer for a few more years. After this computer is where I started building my custom systems.
The first that I used was Utecom, as a student at the University of New South Wales in 1964. Utecom was 8 years old then, and coming to the end of its life, which meant that mere 2nd-year students could actually be in the same room as it and touch it.
I think the first that I owned was a Commodore VIC-20.
IBM PC/AT. It actually had a hard drive!!! I had to install DOS, and of course it could only render text.
Boy, I feel like such a late bloomer.
I didn’t actually own a computer until I bought one of the first IBM PCs back in 1982. I bought it with 640K of memory (which I bought despite the salesman’s insistance that it could only handle 512K), two160K floppy disks, text-only monitor, and 80CPS dot-matrix printer. Cost me over $5000.
The first computer I ever worked on was a CDC (I forget the model number) in college in the 1970s, followed by an IBM 360/50 the next year.
Another Atari 800XL owner here. A lot of late nights playing Donkey Kong!
Mine was a TRS-80 MC-10.
Our first family computer when I was growing up was a TRS-80. I learned a lot of the essentials of programming with the BASIC mode on that old unit. 
The first computer I bought for myself was a Windows 98 Compaq laptop with a 4 gig hard drive - pooled the graduation present money from my parents and the bonds that I’d gotten from grandmother on my mother’s side.
The first computer I ever used was a friend’s Apple II that used cassette tapes to load programs. This was in 1979.
A year later, in 1980, I used a terminal connected to a main frame using a primitive modem at school. The modem had two circular rubber holders in which you placed the telephone handset.
The first computers I used regularly were the Macintosh 512K computers at college in 1986.
The first computer I bought was a Macintosh IIsi in 1991. I sprung for the high-end 5MB of RAM and 80MB hard drive when I bought it. I upgraded it to the maximum 17MB of RAM along with a 500MB hard drive in 1996.