Commodore 64 with a 300baud modem. Woooodiggety!
two?
sigh
Nobody’s mentioned the Royal Alphatronic, probably for good reason. Z80 processor, 64K RAM, CP/M, single 180(?)K floppy. 1985, I believe.
Later graduated to a Laser 128 (an Apple //e clone), then entered the Wintel world whan business mandated it.
Like Rico, I learned programming before owning a computer. Trained on an IBM System/3 using 8" floppies at first, then CCP (a cutdown version of CICS).
It had one great feature: you could set a timed backup of the current document.
First one ever touched: If the Wang word processor that my mom had in her office circa 1974 counts, that would be it. There would also be whatever-the-heck they had at my High School: some box that we interacted with by typing commands on typewriter-like terminals. There was no CRT screen, so the computer would type back and you’d read the output on the paper.
First one ever used in a meaningful / productive fashion: Macintosh 512Ke, newly able to read both sides of a 3.5" disk for a total of 800K per disk, half a meg of RAM (no expansion), 8 MHz 68K processor, System 3, MacWrite, MacPaint, LocalTalk network to print to the original Apple LaserWriter.
Bought a later model (Mac SE) used a couple years later, had a 40 MB hard drive and 2.5 MB RAM and a SCSI port. By the time I retired it, it ran a 40 MHz '030 chip, held 16 MB RAM*, a 160 MB HD, and a string of devices on the SCSI chain.
- geek note for old Mac-heads: the accelerator, from Applied Engineering, contained a kludge that got past the SE ROM’s 4MB limit. Not only did I have 16 MB, I had 16 MB under System 6. (No individual process could have more than 4 unto itself, though).
Man, AHunter, not sure I wanted to know about you touching a Wang. 
I think they eventually incorporated a bit of lewdness into their ad campaign.
The first I ever owned was an old bourroughs b-80, circa 1980. It was given to a co-worker as a christmas bonus in lieu of cash by the company we worked for…I bought it from him for 50 bucks cause I just wanted a computer… untill I saw the behemoth!!! I quickly traded it for a shotgun…
Not sure what the heck the kid finally did with the damn thing!! I still have the shotgun though!!
First one that I could actually use I reckon was the old commode-odor that we bought for I believe 300 dollars…
In the UK, in the early ‘80s, the main choices were between the Sinclair Spectrum, the Commodore 64, and the one I had, the BBC ‘B’. This latter computer had the benefit of a proper, full-sized keyboard, rather than the squelchy rubber effort which the Spectrum boasted. In addition, the BBC’s loading of programs (from tape) had the advantage that if you got a tape loading error, you only had to rewind the tape back a short way to the previous byte block, rather than the beginning. This was a real boon when loading one of those really big text adventure games like ‘Sphinx Adventure”, which took about fifteen minutes to get into RAM every time you wanted to play it.
On the downside, the BBC lost out big time in terms of memory, having half of the capacity of the others’ gargantuan 64 kilobytes of free RAM. Furthermore, 20k of that 32k was reserved for merely running programs in the graphical mode which promised sixteen colours (a huge cop-out: eight of those were merely flashing combinations of the actual eight which you got).
This resulted in the BBC being the ‘poor cousin’ when it came to games, as it was invariably the Spectrum which brought out classics like ‘Chucky Egg’ and ‘Manic Miner’, leaving the BBC to catch up some months later. However, one particular programmer (whose name escapes me) made quite a name for himself with a trio of incredibly realistic games which started with ‘Aviator’ (a themed Spitfire flight simulator), and later included ‘Revs’ (Formula One motor racing) and possibly the best game of the era, the space trader/combat game, ‘Elite’.
Another great thing about the BBC was that it was the computer of choice for nearly every school in the country. Thus those who’d studied the BBC’s BASIC had a natural advantage over other pupils when it came to writing programs in the classroom. A favourite was to include the command to disable the ‘Break’ key (equivalent to Ctrl-Alt-Del) after printing ‘So-and-so is a bonehead’, so that the offending message couldn’t be removed without turning off the computer.
Happily, the emulator I have on my computer at home runs ‘Arcadians’ (‘Galaxians’ to Spectrum users), so I can still keep pressing ‘Left, Right and Fire’ whenever I feel a wave of nostalgia for the good old days.
Late 1997. A used Packard Bell Pentium 75, which I paid too much for. It had a 1.2 GB HDD, 16 megs of RAM. I had a CD-ROM added a few weeks after buying it.
It came with Win 3.1, but I upgraded it to Win 95 a few weeks later too. (I was completely clueless!) I barely knew how to run the damned computer, but just did the big upgrade. My PC guru friend was a bit suprised that I did that, he was preparing to talk me through the whole process. (Looking back, I consider myself quite fortunate that the Win 95 upgrade went well. I had no clue what I was doing!)
It was good little computer. I gave it to some friends (who had been limping along with a 386 for way too long) about a year later, and they loved it. I then got a a few other Pentium machines, then eventually switched to primarily Macintoshes in late 1999/early 2000.
Early 1980s. Commodore VIC 20. We later bought the special 1.5k expansion cartridge and the turboload cassette player.
I had a “Basic 7” in the Mid 80s, I don’t know who made it , but it had 8k and worked last time I fired it up (1995).
Commie VIC-20. No datasette for the first few months, just like astroboy, and hooked up to a b/w TV as well. I would spend hours typing in programs, playing them, and then turning off the computer several hours later. I was in 4th or 5th grade when I got it, so it must have been 1985 or so. I was better with computers at that age than I am now. Hell, I even taught myself the basics of writing machine-language routines by writing them in assembly and translating the various "STA"s, "LDA"s to their decimal equivalents.
Then again, with only 5K of memory (3.5 on start-up. Somehow, 1.5k mysterious evaporates when you turn on the computer. I swear the packaging advertised 5K) it’s pretty easy to learn the computer inside-out. There’s only so many memory locations to worry. Now with gigs and gigs of space, I have no idea where anything is on my computer.
But it had the coolest games! Donkey Kong, Omega Race, Centipede, plus the Scot Adams text-adventure series (sort of like Zork-lite.) I always enjoyed putting the datasettes into a normal tape player to hear what they sounded like.
Ah, you were spoiled! Why, I had to type most of mine in, line by line. Then run it and get a “?SN ERROR”.
Atari 800XL.
I still wake up some nights reaching for Start and Select and the power switch at the back to load up a game…
First ones I did anything on were the punch-card one they had at the University my sister went to (it seemed mostly useful for playing this game where it said, “You are in the dungeon, do you want to go right or left?” and you’d type in left . . .) and the one at the same sister’s programming job where I did data entry one summer, I guess '82 or so, both were huge mainframes with remote terminals and amber screens. Both also had that “modem” where you stuck the telephone handle into a cradle after dialing and listening for the “beep.” I’m thinking they were Hewlitt Packards.
At school we had some cheap deals with DOS that we just learned BASIC on. I don’t think they did anything else.
First one I ever owned was dad’s old 8086 IBM-clone with 5 1/4"-floppies when he upgraded to I guess 8088 or whatever came next. It had WordStar and some checkbook program on it.
I remember dad had a Commodore 64 and he would get on BBSs and stuff. Luckily dad was (and is still, at 73) always fiddling with computers and he’d always give one of the kids his old one when he upgraded. That’s also how I got my IBM-clone (whatever brand) Pentium I which I had for a long time until I met my husband, who taught me what computers are really for, after all: games!
When we bought our current Pentium II three or so years ago, that was the first computer I ever bought.
Digital PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E, in high school, in 1980. The high school didn’t actually own it, they leased time on it from a central authority. We had about 4 or 6 1200 baud CRTs and two DECwriters running at 120CPS.
The first computer I actually owned was a 64K Apple //e, which I bought in 1982. This was the first version, with the Monitor /// and Disk ][ (they hadn’t yet come out with disk drive or monitor designed specifically for the //e line).
That Apple //e cost me more than any computer I have bought since.
Aw, that’s nothin’.
Why, when I was a kid, I had to crawl seventy miles through the snow just to boot up my 2 Hz processor with 3.5 bytes of memory. And forget about a screen of any kind… I had to strap electrodes to my nipples and receive coded electric zaps for output.
And data storage? Well, buddy, you’d better be ready to do some sit-ups.
Good times, good times.
Sit-ups?
You had it easy.
We had our DNA rearranged in hexadecimal to store data.
I still break out in a rash when I hear FORTRAN.
LET X = 2
LET Y = 2*X
PRINT Y
ARRRGHHH!
DNA rearranged in hexadecimal?
Bah! Before I bought a sit-up reader I had to drink six gallons of paint and vomit into a burlap bag for each bit of storage. Red paint was “1” and blue was “0”.