My first computer was an Apple IIGS with two 3.5" floppy drives and one 5.25" floppy drive, a joystick, and a printer. Since my dad bought it for me when I was in the 1st grade, it had mostly educational software–Reader Rabbit, Writer Rabbit, etc. The word processor was called Bank Street Writer Plus. The financial software was Quicken. We had AppleWorks, but didn’t use it much because it was so slow. My only graphics software was 816 Paint. As far as games, I had Clue, several Snoopy adventure games, and about 12 5.25" double-sided floppy disks loaded with all sorts of games–mazes, puzzles, card games, etc. I also played with the Logo language program a lot.
For some reason, Apple quit supporting the IIGS line shortly after I got the machine. (I may be wrong about what exactly happened–does anyone remember anything about this?) In any case, my dad was so angry that he wrote a letter to Apple and vowed to never buy their products again.
Man this should help everyone to feel old. My first computer was a Pentium 166 mhz 2gig hard drive and 16mgs RAM Wow is all I can say to the old computer ya’ll had.
We got a handed down Mac Plus from the SIL. It has 1.24 whopping megs of RAM, no internal memory, and an external disk drive. It had a 9" greyscale monitor. It took me quite a while but I found a 20 meg SCSII hard drive for it.
It is in the basement in it’s original packaging from 1985, the display on the monitor needs a circuit repaired but other than that it works fine.
The cost of this baby when it was new was $3000.00 !
I miss her as I had a lot of fun using the Hypercard to create all kinds of interesting applications. I saw a SE30 at the flea market last week and think I’ll swing by and pick it up if it’s still there, plug in the hard drive and play a little. I was thinking that I might donate it to the home I work at so the clients can use it. For $60.00 it is a steal, especially so as it compes complete with a new keyboard, Imagewriter 2 printer, and a new mouse.
Jeep’s Phoenix, your dad and I should go bowling sometime. After my Commodores, I bought a Tandy 512 from Radio Shack. About a week later (it seems) they discontinued it and all of the drives, printers, modems, etc that went with it. Since then, I have yet to buy another thing from Radio Shack and don’t intend to ever again.
|:-) (or whatever your name is), Yes, the Pet was by Commodore. Hail Commodore!
Oh, I can beat all of you guys. My first computer was a Digicomp. You can check it out at: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/friendsofdigicomp
The Digicomp was a real computer constructed out of metal cams and cogs and rubber bands. You could perform real calculations in binary, and also run Turing Machine programs. I had one around the mid to late 1960s, I must have been around 7 or 8 years old. I bought it from Edmund Scientific for maybe about $6, I remember trading it to my best friend for a few packs of firecrackers. BIG mistake, they’re worth hundreds of dollars now.
My second computer was an IBM 360 I used in math club in jr. high school. We used to fill out cards with a #2 pencil instead of keypunches.
The first computer I ever owned was a Processor Technology Sol-20. I built it from a kit in 1975. At the time I bought it, I had narrowed down my choice between two models, the Sol and the Apple 1. I chose the Sol because it came with a video card and the Apple I required you to wire it to the inside of a TV. I was afraid of getting zapped by the TV, so I bought the Sol kit. Another big mistake. The last Apple 1 that came on the market sold for about $16k
I had (and still have) both a Sinclair ZX-81, and a Timex-Sinclair 1000. The ZX-81 had 1K and the TS1000 had 2K. I had the 32 K expansion, too, and I agree, it sucked for exactly the same reason.
Actually the problem was worse than that. The expansion module only worked on one of the computers (can’t remember which), and the cassette drive I had only worked on the other computer. So much for those 2 or 3 games I bought which were on tape and required 32K of RAM… :rolleyes:
I also have the 1500 (?) printer! Connected through the same port as the RAM expander, and used a little roll of thermal paper maybe about 4 inches wide.
I also had a Commodore Plus/4, which started my interest in programming (I mean, hell, you couldn’t buy any software for it, what else you gonna do?) I still remember having to convince my dad that there really wan’t much I could do with the thing if he didn’t also get me a disk drive to go along with it!
Anyone know if there’s a Commodore 128 emulator out there? Especially for the Mac?
I think I’ve done this on this board recently, but I’m not going to go look.
TI-99/4A with a cassette (with a faulty footage meter) for storage; I still have it - in fact it’s sitting a few feet from me. Next was an IBM AT w/6.77 MHz 286 followed by a Tandy 3000NL (10 MHz 286, 640K RAM and a 20 MB HDD - I later upped it to 2 MB (@$450/MB) and stripped down Windows/286 to run off the RAMDrive). As with Jophiel, my Tandy experience was, at best, frustrating. I bought, at the same time, a laser printer that never quite worked and the first EGA monitor delivered as new had Deskmate burned into it.
At work I was using a dumb terminal operating off a Prime 360.
A Tandy TRS-80. Neat machine for its time. It came with a BASIC programming book that allowed you to program very simple text games. I almost had an orgasm when we got LOGO.
I had that printer, along with the silvery paper. The ZX-81 was a great computer, considering it was only $100 (IIRC), and just as fast as my $2300 Apple IIe …
I had a catalog that had devices to expand the memory to over 1 MB, and attach a disk drive, and even a hard drive!
I started with a TI-99/4A. 16K of RAM. Came with an amazingly good version of BASIC with all kinds of handy subroutines built into it, it was the only computer I could ever program games with non-ASCII graphics on. Later bought a tape drive.
My next computer was a step down - Commodore Vic-20. 3.5K of RAM. Had to learn PEEK and POKE to program graphics, said screw it and went back to text-based games. Ran into my first Out Of Memory errors on homemade programs.
Then I got a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. 64K of RAM, wow!
Then I had a long spell where I didn’t have a computer, just assorted game consoles. I then got a 486SX/33 with 4MB of RAM and a 210MB hard-drive! WOW!
The first computer I ever had was an Apple IIplus that our family got for Christmas one year (1984?). I thought it was pretty advanced because it had one of them there newfangled external 5.25" floppy drives. I remember that it came with a cool text game (Apple Adventure I think? I never did finish it. What was I supposed to do in the room with the giant clam?)
It seems quaint now, but that Apple was a cadillac compared to the machines we were using in my high school computer class at the time: those classic Tandys with the cassette tape storage. “Mr. B? I’m ready to save my program. Can you magnetically erase a tape for me?”
The first computer I used was a Commodore Pet, back in elementary school. Cassette tape drive, green monochrome monitor, and 8k RAM. The computer lab in middle school had one Pet that had 32k RAM and a 5.25" disk drive, but the students couldn’t use that one. I used these from about 1st or 2nd grade to 6th or 7th grade, when they were replaced with Apples.
The first computer I had at home was an Apple IIe. 128K RAM, 80-column card, duo disk drive, color monitor, mouse, ImageWriter II color dot-matrix printer, that thing was loaded. I remember when we put in the 2400 baud modem. Everyone was telling us it was a waste of money and to get a 1200 baud instead because there was nobody to connect to at 2400. I still use this computer occasionally to play games.
Yay! I had an Atari XEGS as my first 'puter. Anyone else ever have one of these doodads? I spent a lot of time writing code for the damn thing (and rewriting code, seeing as the system didn’t “save” anything :)), usually resulting in a screen of swirling colors.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the BASIC cartridge that one could buy for the Atari 2600. I distinctly remember that it was $60.00 and that it required using a pair of (non-joystick) keypad controllers that couldn’t be used with many other cartridges, which added another $40.00 to the price. I guess this setup counts as my first computer… how sad. My first genuine computer was the Atari 800, which was ‘way ahead of it’s time, IMHO. JCThunder: you had an Atari 800 and envied your sister’s C64? Them’s fightin’ words! I also remember that I wrote to Timex requesting information on the Sinclair, which I desperately wanted but, as a child, could not afford ($100.00 – and my Christmas wad was blown on the 2600 BASIC cartridge above), but they never wrote back, the bastards! Not that I’m bitter…
My first computer was a CARDIAC. The first one that used electricity, however, was an Osborne I. 64k memory. 1 mhz CPU. Two (2!) floppy drives, each holding a whopping 92K. Wordstar, Dbase, Supercalc. Parallel & serial ports. External monitor port. All in a portable configuration that only weighed 95 pounds!
I still use this computer occasionally to play games.