# Yer first computer! **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [July 21, 2002, 2:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042 "2002-07-21T02:49:07Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/21 "2002-07-21T06:06:17Z")
My first computer was also a Sinclair ZX81 with 16K of RAM. I wanted a ZX-80 earlier, but couldn’t afford it. Later I bought the Memopak 64K expansion… and lusted for the Memopak HRG (High-Res Graphics) add-on, which I think was 192 by 140 or something pixels. These days we have icons that are bigger than that. Later I lusted for the Sinclair Spectrum, which could run ZX81 programs, and in _colour_!!! Then there were the Sinclair QL, the Commodore 64, the Atari ST, none of which I could afford, being a Starving Student [sup]TM[/sup] and all. Still later, after getting my first after-school job, I saved up 1800 dollars and bought an Amiga. 🙂 I still have the ZX81. It’s right here on my desk. When the PC is turned off, it looks like the ZX81 has been connected to a 17-inch monitor. 🙂 I’m now wondering how many hundreds of times faster than real life a 2-GHz PC could emulate the Z-80 in the ZX-81… ---
**Author:** ![Darwins\_Finch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darwins_finch/32/20304_2.png) [@Darwins\_Finch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darwins_Finch)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/22 "2002-07-21T06:12:00Z")
Another TI99/4A here, with a tape drive. For some reason, I was never able to find an Extended BASIC cartridge (which was necessary to do any real programming with sprites and such); I was quite bummed about that. ---
**Author:** ![CnoteChris](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/278dde/32.png) [@CnoteChris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CnoteChris)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 6:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/23 "2002-07-21T06:25:42Z")
The first computer in our house was my brothers HeathKit (For those of you who don’t know, or remember, what HeathKit was, it was essentially a company that mailed you the parts and you put it together). I never really understood what the thing did (I have a sinking suspicion my brother didn’t know either). The first that **I** ever owned, or ever really got into, was an Apple ][e. I was the shit because out of my friends, I was the only one with an orange screen and two, count 'em, **two** floppies (Made bootlegging games a breeze). About the only use I found for the thing was playing games and writing silly programs (I wish I actually kept up with that end of it all, because I actually enjoyed it back then). The games that come to mind are Wizardry, Karateka, some Olympics game that was actually pretty fun, an odyssey game where you sailed around to different island and conquered people, but basically got scurvy every time you tried to set sail for a new island, oh, and yeah, I too had Seawolf (… “Checkpoint!”…). Too bad I never stuck with it. Soon after that I found girls and then college so I never really played around with the technology unless I was writing papers or the like. If I had stuck with it, I’d be in a much better position to cash in on it now, instead of trying to catch up and try and enter the market. Oh well. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 6:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/24 "2002-07-21T06:40:29Z")
My first computer was a Coleco Adam. 1983. You laugh. _Real_ computers don’t come bundled with a 24k _Donkey Kong_ game cartridge. And you can’t be fooled: Those “High Speed Digital Data Packs” are really cassette tapes. Sure, it’s faster than a VIC20 tape drive, and it had a real FAT, and you didn’t have to press play yourself, but \*still[/]. And real computers don’t have an NTSC standard RF-modulator for the video out. True. At 12, the main appeal of the Adam _was_ the cheesy games, but I held onto that thing for long enough to want it to do the things a real computer oughtta – and by gumm I had the most tweaked Adam you could hope for. It had a honest-to-goodness Z80 processor, so I figured it oughtta have a real OS. I had CP/M, so could dick around on message boards with a real terminal program, that allowed XMODEM file transfers, unlike the Coleco offering “SmartModem” which was actually pretty dumb. I also had a hacked RS232 port, so I could use a 2400bps external modem, instead of the 300bps internal that Coleco marketed. I even ran a bulletin board on that old beast for a while, which I’d written myself (in BASIC – ick) called _Grandfather’s Alligator Farm_ Near the end of its pitiful life, the enormous daisy-wheel printer had given up the ghost, although it still had to be dragged around, as it housed the computer’s power supply. 😕 What the hell were they thinking? My next upgrade was to a 16Mhz 286 with a whole meg of memory and a 40Mb hard drive, which was nothing to sneeze at, at the time. I occasionally run an Adam emulator on my current computer, whether it’s for the nostalgia trip of programming in LOGO, (heh heh,) or just giving in to the irresistible urge to play _Smurf Adventure_. ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 7:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/25 "2002-07-21T07:15:21Z")
Apple ][+, serial #32767. 1979. I was 16. My brother still has it somewhere. Casette tape storage, 32kb RAM. Woo! Initial software was Scott Adam’s adventures (the vampire one) and Space Invaders. Only took 10 minutes of frustration to load either from casette, but novel enough fun once it worked. And of course Basic. AppleSoft was so limited I learned assembly language shortly, just after we got some floppy disk drives (140K of storage, woo!!). ---
**Author:** ![Mudshark](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f04885/32.png) [@Mudshark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mudshark)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 7:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/26 "2002-07-21T07:51:25Z")
The first computer my family bought is the one I am using right now. They bought it in 1998. ---
**Author:** ![Second\_Echo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8c91f0/32.png) [@Second\_Echo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Second_Echo)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 7:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/27 "2002-07-21T07:58:58Z")
My first computer we got sometime around 1986 or 1987. It was a Leading Edge Model D (for some reason I will never forget that). 80086 processor. Monochrome monitor. No Windows, just a friendly DOS prompt. Games were not installed, they had to be run off 5.25" floppy disks. The computer did not have a 3.5" drive. To run some games, I had to “trick” the computer into thinking I had a CGA monitor by using a special floppy disk before I put in the game disk. Somehow it worked. It was the only way I could play Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy on the thing. And finally, I remember you had to park the computer when you were done. At the c-prompt, you had to type “park” and then the computer would run its shutdown sequence and you could turn it off. Different times… ---
**Author:** ![Rico](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rico/32/3582_2.png) [@Rico](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rico)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 9:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/28 "2002-07-21T09:38:58Z")
First computer I ever PROGRAMMED? An IBM model 360 mainframe in downtown LA, hooked up to my high school (circa 1973) via an acoustic 300 baud modem (remember those? You dialed the number (yes, DIALED, not pushed buttons), and when you heard the squeal, you slapped it down into the cradle over the foam pieces to make a tight soundproof seal). Then you typed to the mainframe on an old Teletype machine. Funny, I was just talking about this the other day. In order to save programs onto the IBMs tape drive, you typed the following: **SAV-NAME** (where NAME was the name of your program) Now - when you EDITED the program called NAME, you then had to resave it onto the tape drive by performing the following command sequence: **KIL-NAME** The computer would respond with: **NAME KILLED** Then you would type in: **SAV-NAME** And the computer would respond with **NAME SAVED** That’s right, you had to KILL the program, erase it from the tape, then re-save what was in the RAM. First time I did a major program (over 300 lines), I saved it. Went back the next day to edit a few lines before I submitted it for my mid-term grade, then did the routine. **KIL-IMPORTANTPROGRAM** **IMPORTANTPROGRAM KILLED** **SAV-IMP**** CONNECTION TO HOST TERMINATED** Yep, you guessed it. I had just killed the important program and before I could save it, the modem connection was lost. Damn! Teach me to back up to punched tape, right? Oh - as for the first computer I **owned**?? TI-994a, baby! Best computer on the market, as far as I was concerned! 64K Ram, cassette interface to save programs, vocal synthesizer, and a console Color TV to program it on. I got AWFULLY good at manipulating pixels on the screen! ---
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 10:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/29 "2002-07-21T10:30:48Z")
Add me to the ti-994a people I just had the game cartridges blasto hunt the wumpus and a couple of others , tho … and a few programming books This and my vic 20 is where i learned to hate coding … ---
**Author:** ![tetsusaru](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f14d63/32.png) [@tetsusaru](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tetsusaru)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/30 "2002-07-21T13:18:18Z")
Sinclair ZX Spectrum. 16K of Ram, 8 colours {which clashed and bled horribly}, and loaded programs from audio tapes, somewhat erratically - 5 minutes of strangulated farting sounds, then the dreaded message Tape Loading Error. Curse dreadfully, rewind, and start again. Somewhere I even have {it was a magazine giveaway, I think} a program on vinyl record: the idea was that you taped the record, and then loaded the tape. ---
**Author:** ![Sublight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Sublight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sublight)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/31 "2002-07-21T13:52:45Z")
First computer I ever used: my 5th grade teacher’s Timex Sinclair ZX-80. Pressure-pad keyboard that let you type at a blinding 3wpm. Only 8K of RAM, so when the three of us who were allowed to use it were looking through programming magazines for things to try, we were constantly disappointed that the cool stuff was just too big to run. First computer to own: Apple //e, 1984. Sucker still works. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d26b3c/32.png) [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/32 "2002-07-21T13:55:39Z")
Another Leading Edge Model D here. Dual 5¼" drives (I couldn’t afford the extra $500 for a 10Mb hard drive!), 512K memory. It came with a Lotus 1-2-3 clone and a pretty decent word processor. ---
**Author:** ![dantheman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dantheman/32/9421_2.png) [@dantheman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dantheman)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/33 "2002-07-21T14:10:19Z")
I always heard that the TI-99s made great planters or doorstops… Any truth to that? 🙂 Speaking of Leading Edge, the first word processor I ever used was called Leading Edge - I still have documents I wrote in that program. Found them on 5.25" floppies, and had someone convert them onto 3.5" floppies just so I could see what the heck they were. Neato. ---
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/34 "2002-07-21T14:45:54Z")
ehh I always thought vic 20s and ti comps were basically programmable atari 2600s Just like I was unimpressed wih the nintendo system becuase I already seen what you could do in 8 bit programming on the c 64/128 Now when the sega genesis came out there were a few converted comp games i thought that were better on the sega than the pc … most of eas early catalog were ports like kings bounty .centurion of rome, M&M2 ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/35 "2002-07-21T16:07:18Z")
My first computer? Technically, **Digicomp**. Extremely high-tech – it was made completely out of plastic and required no electricity. You programmed it by putting tiny tubes (like inch-long drinking straws) on pegs on the back of the computer. You were somewhat limited in what you could do, but I did program it to count to eight in binary (as high as it would go). You pushed a lever in and out and that allowed it to count. There were other functions, but I don’t recall them (this was about 1963 or so). Next, I worked on a General Electric mainframe. You typed out punch cards and they ran. My first minicomputer was an IBM PC (8088 chip) that I used at a job I had in 1982. The first computer I actually owned was an Apple ][e I got in 1985 with a whopping 128K of memory. ---
**Author:** ![Billy\_Rubin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/billy_rubin/32/3622_2.png) [@Billy\_Rubin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Billy_Rubin)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/36 "2002-07-21T16:52:44Z")
An [Altair 8800](http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~csclub/museum/items/mits_altair_8800.html). Thanks to this bastard, the now-useless ability to convert decimal to hex to binary to bcd is now irretrievably jammed in my head. sons of bitches. b. ---
**Author:** ![Number](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/number/32/242_2.png) [@Number](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Number)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/37 "2002-07-21T16:59:05Z")
TI99/4A here as well. Unfortunately I was a lazy kid and only used it for games like The Zone, Burgertime, and Demolition Division. If I’d put more effort into learning BASIC I’d probably be a programmer today. ---
**Author:** ![blinx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a5b964/32.png) [@blinx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blinx)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/38 "2002-07-21T17:03:52Z")
Mine was a Commodore PC10-III (8088 cpu) with no harddisk, just 2 floppy drives - I had an EGA graphics card for it though. A few years down after buying it I managed to save enough money for a 20MB harddisk that came on an ISA card. I’ve never had as much fun with computers as I had with my first 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/39 "2002-07-21T17:14:32Z")
Tandy Color Computer 1983 (I was a Radio Shack salesman at the time) First real PC was in 1987 and was a Compaq 30386-16sx (16 mhz 368sx chip with no math co-processor) desktop with a NEC 14" Multisync color monitor. This PC had 1 meg RAM and a 20 meg hard disk and as far as I was concerned it was the bomb. I got a 2400 baud modem and the world opened up with BBS’s of every sort available. The Compaq cost approx $ 3,000. by itself and it was, bar none, the most finely constructed bit of PC engineering that I have ever owned to this day. The jewel like fit, finish and engineering precison evident throughout was leagues beyond anything I have seen outside of milspec stuff. It was _too_ good apparently as Compaq began making less expensive to construct PC’s a year or two later in order the stay in business. ---
**Author:** ![Ringo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/779978/32.png) [@Ringo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ringo)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2002, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042/40 "2002-07-21T17:23:27Z")
TI-99/4A here, which I still have. My mom had one two. Dragging home from the bars one night ~2:30 AM, I passed her place and noticed the blue-grey glow coming from her study and realized she wasn’t kidding about her devotion to Space Invaders. That realization allowed me the one time I was able to give her a meaningful birthday present. I got her a joystick - got one for myself, as well. My cassette player’s footage counter was faulty, so finding the program you wanted involved listening for gaps in the beeps and squeals on the tape. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yer-first-computer/120042.md?page=3)