Commodore 64 group here. I’d say around 1983ish. Came with the super speedy <cough> 1541 disk drive.
Parents eventally bought a 1702 monitor for it. After that, I very rarely left my room. It was then complete with an MPS801 Matrix printer (the quality was horrible) and a 300baud modem.
I even had a very, very rare Spartan AppleII emulator for it. It basically was an Apple II that plugged into the entire back of the 64 and had a card for the 1541 that turned it into an Apple DD. I think that thing would be worth a few bucks today in Commodore collectors circles.
First computer I used: an Apple ][e at school in '82. I think we were the last school in the district to get computers.
First computer I used at home: Commodore 64 with everything but the tape drive, spring 1986. Even though he never admitted it, I think Dad intended it as a present for my high school graduation. He said it was for him to write résumés but he never used it as such. I still have my original 64 and 1541 somewhere, along with a 64C, a 1541 ][ (which was the first computer I bought myself), and a 128 and 1571 that somebody gave me.
My first “real” computer (second computer I bought myself): Tandy 1000 RL, circa 1991. I later upgraded to 768 Meg RAM, added a VGA card and a 40 Meg hard drive. Of course, that Tandy could only use half the storage space.
First one I programmed (I learned on it) was a Bendix G-15. This was 1962. It had vacuum tubes, drum memory- 2k words). Keyboard input was basically a typewriter. It had 5-channel paper tape, 2 7-channel tape drives and a CalComp plotter.
My first home computer was a Tandy Model 16 in 1981.
Trs-80 mod one with the tape recorder for program storage.
Later upgraded wit two external disk drives.
All of 48 k of memory.
Like someone said, those were the days.
The Kaypro 4.
It had a CP/M operating system, no hard drive, two 5-1/4" drives and a built-in 9" monochrome monitor. If it got turned on or off, became unplugged or if there was a power failure while a disk was in one of the drives, everything on that disk was gone forever.
Not exactly what you’d call “user friendly.” It did, however, make an excellent doorstop.
I was first hooked by working on a Heath Kit in the gifted-kid program back in the sixth grade ('79 or so).
The first computer I actually owned, though, was a Commodore VIC-20, back in '81 or '82. Initially, we bought it with just the cassette drive, and hooked it up to a TV with the RF modulator. Within a couple of months, we’d also convinced my long-suffering mom to get us the 300-baud modem. It didn’t have the handset cradle; you had to dial the phone, listen for the squeal, and then unplug the handset and plug the curly cord directly into the modem before the host computer gave up.
We spent lots of time online, mostly on one of four or five local BBS’s whose sysops we knew. We’d play ur-Diplomacy in groups, or one of those solo choose-your-adventure type text games (“What do you want to do now, bwana?”) in the weeks the sysops would deign to host them.
Eventually we got the floppy drive and the color monitor, and upgraded the machine to a Commodore-64. We also had a MPS801 dot-matrix printer. (Looking at your post above, bernse, I thought you might be my brother. ;)) We still kept the VIC-20 around, though, because we had a few plug-in cartridge games for it. (Gorf was our favorite.)
I won several programming contests on both machines during junior high and high school. I worked mostly in BASIC (though I had written a few things in Assembly by the time I left for college), and mostly I got attention because the stuff I did was out of left field. One little utility I wrote was intended for the local handmade-game group; it generated single-character graphics by randomly choosing one of a predefined set of “symmetrical bytes” (e.g. o1o11o1o or 11oooo11) and stacking eight of them to form an eight-by-eight graphic. The program would display a bunch of them at a time, and you could display the source numbers for any that you liked. Made creating creatures for video games a lot easier, because it’d show you stuff you might not have thought of yourself. It was rendered obsolete, of course, when “sprites” came in.
Who would ever have predicted that all that spare-time noodling would form the basis for my future breadwinning?
Got a paper route just so I could save up $600 (in 1979!) to buy a computer. Got a TRS-80 model 1 in 1980. No printer, no modem, no disk drives. Little B&W monitor (actually a Zenith TV) and an audio cassette player/recorder for storage. I didn’t play games much (I did have Dancing Demon of course!). I sat at it for months writing BASIC programs. I thought programming was the coolest thing I had ever seen!
Later I upgraded both the ROM to level 2 and the RAM to 16K (it came with 4K)! Did the upgrades myself (from instructions in ‘80 Computing’ magazine).
After about 3 years I became bored with computers. I was lucky and sold it before the big home computer boom went bust in the early 80s. I actually made money on it because I did the upgrades myself! Bought my first car with the money!
After 8 years (god, was it that long?!) I bought a Gateway 386DX/25 for $2000 in 1991 (set it up while listening to Guns n Roses Use Your Illusion CDs which came out that same day). Unfortunately this time my timing wasn’t so good, as 386s almost immediately became dinosaurs. So I got a Gateway 486SX/33 for $1700 only a year later (1992). Had that thing for a whopping 4½ years including adding an Intel Overdrive chip(remember them?)
By '97 I could build 'em myself and put together my first Pentium PC (well, a Cyrix/150). Finally, I could play Quake at home instead of just at work! Cost about $700. That one lasted about 4 years too! Maxed out at a Cyrix MII/300.
Built another one in 2001. AMD Athlon 950. Only cost about $400 by then! And its what I’m using now…
