That was the first computer I, personally owned—I used it in college. It’s been years since the last time I turned it on, but it might still work—but only if one of my floppy boot disks is still readable. The Tandy 1000 was essentially a clone of the (original) IBM PC, but with the better graphics capabilities of the PCjr (you could display graphics in 16 colors at once, rather than just four!).
The first computer my family owned, that I used extensively, was our Timex Sinclair 1000. Membrane “keyboard,” black and white display through an ordinary TV set, 2K of internal memory but with the 16K expansion module that plugged into the back and you had to be careful not to jostle or the computer would freeze up.
My dad bought a Kaypro when I was four or five. This would have been in…I don’t know, the 1984ish range.
We had that thing for YEARS. My dad pretends to like technology, but the truth is that he only likes technology he already understands. He picks random things that other people have and decides that they’re pointless and not good enough for him. He decided for years and years and years that there was no reason that anyone would need a mouse, of all things, reducing us to tabbing around on Windows 3.1.
Not that we had Windows 3.1 when it came out. Because we had our trusty Kaypro.
I remember spending two weeks trying to debug the assembler program I had spent two weeks entering in as numbers. Comparing a printout to the original text was very frustrating. I don’t know how many thousands of numbers I compared in the end.
IIRC the Texas Instruments 99/4A level stuff had around a 1 megahertz processer. Todays computers are hundreds to thousands of times faster. Not to mention more powerful in fair number of other ways.
TRS-80 Model II, in 1976 or thereabouts (it might have been a Model 1, but if it was we didn’t have it long and upgraded it soon). We had just sold our motorhome (I still remember my dad letting me play with the $10,000 cash before they deposited it!) and Dad had promised that he would get us a computer. He was friends with the local Radio Shack owner, so we got a deal on it.
I had a lot of fun with that old thing, learning to write BASIC, playing silly games loaded from tapes (we had a subscription to CLOAD Magazine, which was delivered on cassette), writing stories on the primitive word processor, and interacting (veerrrry rarely–it was $9.95 an hour!) with The Source, the precursor to Compuserve.
It had its own printer (the DMP-200, which led to many “let’s sent the TRaSh to the DuMP” jokes) and its own modem which you physically had to put the phone receiver in. 1200 baud, baby! We were smokin’ over those dweebs with 300 baud modems!
OK, you’re on. The first computer I used was installed at Los Alamos High School in the mid-1970s. Our means of accessing it was to go into the computer lab and sit at the terminals. The terminals did not have CRT screens; instead you would type a command and it would echo onto the paper; the computer would reply by typing back to you. Green and white tractor-feed paper in boxes. If you wanted to program for it, you wrote in FORTRAN and your code was converted into punch cards which were then loaded.
What are the likely candidates? I don’t remember what it was called, if I ever knew (aside from “the computer”).
The first semi-modern computer I used was the Macintosh 512Ke with the 800 MB floppy disk, Mac System 3 and MacWrite and MacPaint and Font / DA Mover.
First one I owned was the Macintosh SE with 40 MB HD and the very-new ability to read DOS diskettes and use hi-density 1.4 MB disks as well as the 800s. System 6.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but…
It was an Apple III. Yes, that short-lived, expensive failure. I recall my stepfather having to solder some kind of connection. And, the first floppy disk you’d put in, after turning it on, was usually an “Apple II emulator disk”, so you could run Apple II programs.
The first computer I owned was a Commodore 64. But the one I really wanted was an ICON, which is what we had in elementary school, and was developed specifically for school use as per Ontario Ministry of Education standards.
Timex-Sinclair 1000, which was the American version of the Sinclair ZX-81. I didn’t have any sort of storage media, and the computer would overheat and shut off after about half an hour. That meant that I’d regularly type a program in and then it would shut down before I could run it.
The first computer I had that I could actually do anything with was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.
My first computer was also a Timex-Sinclair 1000. I didn’t have any problems with overheating that I can recall, but the programs I would write were pretty simple, like rolling stats for Dungeons & Dragons characters. If you ran it in Turbo Mode, every random number would be the same, so I had several characters with 18 for all stats
I could also save my programs by hooking up a cassette tape recorder.
Of course, it was still more a toy and not a “real” computer anything like today. My next computer was an Apple ][+, which I used until college, long after it was obsolete.
I saved up for months to buy my first computer, the TRS-80 Color Computer. I learned to program in BASIC! I think I was in 7th grade. I don’t remember the exact cost but it was a fortune for a 13 year old.
A Leading Edge. As far as I can remember, it had an Intel 8086 or 8088 processor, a hard drive (10Mb?) and a floppy drive (360k) and a monochrome monitor. 1 Mb of memory. I had access to a bunch of free hardware back then, so in short order I installed a 20 Mb Hard Card (remember those?), which seemed huge in those days, more memory, with software to get around the DOS 640k memory limit, an external modem, and some other stuff I can’t remember.
By today’s standards, it was pathetic, but it was state of the art for its time.
I’m fortunate enough that my dad was a computer geek when he was my age (still is), he had a kit for a kitbuild LNW80 computer that I can’t recall if he ever finished.
The first computer I do recall using was a TRS80, model I or II, can’t remember. For my 8th birthday in 1980, I got a book on BASIC and wqas writing programs by the age of 9 and debugging the programs we had.
In grade 4 I was blown away! :eek: by the Commodore 64 computers that was in my elementary school’s computer room (computers in the classroom in 1982? And C-64s as well? Looking back, we were priviledged!!) I desperately wanted one, and I’m sure the rest of my class did too, but at least I was one of the few in the class who could go back home to his own computer and knew how to use it.
In 1987, we got our first PC, and of course I quickly abandoned the TRS-80 for it (it was colour and used floppy disks (yes, the 5-1/4 ones) instead of cassettes (though I do still have a fondness for programs on cassettes)), we had a “cool computer” now. Then, in grade 11 (1989) the computer lab at my high school upgraded from the PET computers (they were worse than the TRS80s I used almost 10 years previous!) that were used the year previous, to new Macintoshes (forget what kind, but they were whatever Mac was putting out circa 1989). Again I was impressed and started me believing for the next 20+ years that Mac has a superior product (and that Windows was a rip-off of Mac ). However, in the 20 years since, I have yet to buy a Mac of my own. I’ve resolved that once my current comptuer, which has served me well for the past 5 years, needs to be replaced, it will be with a Mac.
). However, in the 20 years since, I have yet to buy a Mac of my own. I’ve resolved that once my current comptuer, which has served me well for the past 5 years, needs to be replaced, it will be with a Mac.