There is a vintage computer section on eBay that has a lot of Commodore bits and pieces.
My family’s first computer was the TRS80 Model 1, purchased sometime between 1976 and 1978 (I just remember that it was while I was in college). We mostly played pong with it…or was the with the Timex Sinclair ZX80 that came later, about 1980 if I remember correctly? No, must have been the Tandy becuase I left home in 1978 and I don’t remember playing pong to any great extent while visiting.
My first computer was also a Tandy 8088, the 1000. No hard drive, but two floppies so I had no problem putting my WordStar (the greatest word-processing program ever written) disk into one drive and saving my data on the other. It was especially great because my dad had the computer first and before I got it he had already replaced one of the 5¼" drives with one of those nifty new 3½" drives! I used it mostly for homework when I went back to school in 1989. Somewhere around 1995 I lent it to my brother, who somehow thought I said “here, have it, it’s yours” and sold it in a garage sale!
I forgot all about the joy of a TRS-80 and putting basic (IIRC) programs onto cassette tapes and then waiting forever to load the program and god forbid if you ever wanted to do anything with entering data. My first hard drive cost me about $200 and it was a hard drive on a card (what were card slots at that time - 1988? - can’t remember) and had a whopping 20 MB.
Went through an Epson computer (got it for free as a good friend worked for them) that was clunky but their dot-matrix printers were the cream of the crop in those day.
My first computer was a Digi-Comp 1 that I purchased from Edmund Scientific Company. It was a kit composed of plastic and wire parts. It had three bits of memory.
Apple IIc here. It was the “little” version of the IIe.
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair/2068. I got this for Christmas in 1983. Disk drives were a luxury then, so like most home computer users, all I had for data storage and retrieval was a cassette tape recorder (very slow and unreliable). All my friends had Commodore 64 computers and I envied them as they could all buy cool games and other programs at the store. I was probably laughed at after I left asking if they had anything for the TS 2068. I managed to make it do a few cool things with the BASIC programming it used. The keyboard was very complex with all the BASIC commands and functions available at the press of a single key or with a combination of other keys (shift). It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I would have rather just typed out the command words manually as it was very cumbersome. If I had to do it all over again I would have asked for a C64 for Christmas instead.
My second computer was a Tandy Color Computer 3. (Coco 3 for short). I got this for my 18th birthday in 1988. I did a little better with this computer. I had a floppy disk drive (5¼" drive, about $500 optional), and while there was no software at the store other than Radio Shack, I could order software via mail order. The Coco 3 (and its predecessors) were supported by a magazine called The Rainbow. Each magazine contained dozens of BASIC program listings to type in. I spent countless hours late into the night typing those programs in and debugging them (argh). To save one’s time and patience, you could order the programs ready to go on disk or tape, but I didn’t have the money for this, unfortunately. As the computer became obsolete the magazine, retaining its $3.95 newsstand price, shrank in size and in the quality of its content as its user base was dwindling. At its peak, issues of The Rainbow weighed in at over 200 pages. The last issue I bought before giving up was in November 1991, a mere 50 pages thick. That was when I thought it was time to move into the PC world.
My first “real” computer, bought in November 1991, was a 386SX machine, 16 MHz processing speed and a whole 2 MB of RAM. For about $200 I upgraded it to 4MB. I also added a sound card, which was optional back then, along with a 2400 bps modem.
In 1993 I moved up to a 486 DX33. It started out with 4 MB RAM, 170 MB hard drive, 2400 bps modem, no sound card and no CD-ROM. I threw just about every upgrade into that thing. By the time I retired this machine it had been upgraded to 8 MB and then again to 16MB. I added a sound card, 14.4 modem, 2X CD-ROM drive and a 1.2 GB hard drive. I also upgraded the processor to 66 MHz. I put a lot of money into that thing.
In 1997 I upgraded to a 486 DX4/100 system, transferring the hardware from the old machine over to the new box. A few months later I finally got a Pentium 200 MHz system and used it until 2001, when I got a system with 1.2 GB, 40 GB hard drive and 256 RAM along with a CD burner. I was also up to using DSL by this time.
My current system has the same 256 MB RAM, but about a year ago I upgraded the motherboard and run at 2.6 GHz, plus I have added an 80 GB hard drive. Next upgrade will be the DVD burner and more memory.
The first family computer was a Commodore 64, but my first very own computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I loved that little thing.
My computer progression:
C64
Timex Sinclair 1000
More C64s
Tandy (286 with I think 10 meg harddrive)
AST (486 with a whopping 24 meg of RAM)
Gateway - this computer is still chugging along, and even running XP, which I figure isn’t too shabby for a computer that is now 6 years old.
And now my HP Pavilion laptop.
In 1983 I walked into an IBM store, plunked down over $3,000, and walked out with an IBM PC1 with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 chip, 64KB RAM, one floppy disk drive, no hard drive (what’s that?), monochrome monitor, keyboard. It came with DOS 2.1 and BASIC. And I had a blast with the machine, an absolute blast! Those were heady times indeed.
I was born in '82, and my family had a Commodore 64 for as long as I am able to remember. Better still, our neighbor must have been one of the first to go to college for computer science, so he used to copy and write all sorts of games for us. It was great until my second youngest sister stuck a silver dollar into the 5 1/2" floppy. Nothing worked after that.
We didn’t own a computer for a long time - but I had plenty of access to those of my dad’s school. Link 480Zs were the first ones: I still remember the excitement of discovering the dual text/graphics mode, where you could have colour graphics in three-quarters of the screen, and 80-column text in the remainder!!!
After that, it was a steady progression of PCs. The two 8088 machines were particularly special, because they had a printer that could produce sixteen colours. The 286s seemed almost magical in the way they could boot without a disc in the drive, loading this fancy program called ‘Windows’ (v3.0). 386s coincide with high school, and their first network - for several years the IT teacher either didn’t know or didn’t care that hardly a single member of staff had changed their password away from ‘password’, and that we could boot up File Manager even though we didn’t have an icon for it, as long as we knew the right path to type. Heh heh.
The first computer I ever actually touched was a Commodore PET, with 8k memory, in a university lab in 1979. (The lecturer had a 32k PET in his office, and it had an actual-like typewriter keyboard, instead of a QWERTY layout of flat square buttons).
The first home computer I ever saw was a Sinclair ZX81 that my older sister got as a Christmas present, which you programmed by touching keys on the QWERTY keboard that had BASIC keywords printed on them.
My first home computer was an Amstrad CPC464 which was an incredibly advanced package, in that the cassette drive was integral to the keyboard/CPU and the colour screen came as part of the deal. It had a nominal 64k of memory but the system hogged a quarter of that. I played Elite and Lords of Midnight and eventually Gauntlet on it for years. A week or so after I bought it (~April 1985) Amstrad brought out the CPC664, which had an integral 3" (sic) floppy drive.
My present 2.6GHz Pentium with a flat screen monitor cost me less, in real terms, than the Amstrad. :eek:
I started off with a Sinclair ZX81 (the same as the machine marketed as the Timex Sinclair 1000 in the USA, I think), a 16K rampack that suffered ‘wobble’, causing crashes; later, I added the ZX printer which worked by burning the aluminised layer off the top of a roll of special paper. I also added a module that would allow me to get user-definable graphics.
After that, I had a 48K ZX Spectrum (the one with the weird blue rubber keyboard), to which I added a Currah MicroSpeech synthesiser, an Opus Discovery floppy disk drive (180K on a 3.5" floppy! WooHoo!).
There followed about a decade with no computer, then I availed myself of the awesome might of an IBM PC clone - a 386DX40 with 4MB memory, TWO hard drives (one 40MB and one 80MB) and a Citizen colour dot-matrix printer.
The first computer I myself owned was a crappy old P100 that was enough to run Word and a few games to see me through about 3 years of uni’. It did its job until it died (mostly) and was cannibalised to help our old 486 run a bit quicker.
The first computer my family owned was an old Dragon 32 we got from an uncle on Mum’s side of the family. It played a few decent games, Kong (a Donkey Kong rip off) and a sort of two player Solitaire.
The first computer I used was an **Apple II+ **, which I used for inputting research data. It had two 5 1/2 floppy disks, and I remember switching floppies in and out as I ran Visicalc and saved the data. The biggest frustration I had was the size of the spreadsheet. Since it could only use 32K of memory, the spreadsheet was only 256 rows long and about 50 columns wide. It was pretty aggravating to be inputting data and suddenly have the 32K limit sign blinking at me from up in the corner, and have to start a whole new spreadsheet. Later when I moved on to bigger computers and Lotus 1-2-3, it was astounding to see spreadsheets that seemed to go on forever.
Sinclair Spectrum, with a Z80 processor, a mighty 16K {later upgraded to 48K}, the “dead flesh” keyboard, no soundchip, and a huge 8 colours {15 if you count the BRIGHT mode}: tape drive, natch, although I remember some giveaway progammes which came with magazines on record. Yup, you dubbed the record onto tape, and then hoped like hell it would load. Ah, the days of 8 minute loading times followed by the dread message TAPE LOADING ERROR.
My first computer was a Tandy Rainbow Color Computer (aka the CoCo)
I used a Black and White TV as a monitor. I used a regular tape recorder as a tape back up.
Atari 130. No hard drive, game cartridges that didn’t work. At least it was cheap. After that, Packard Bell 33 Mhz (I debated for weeks over whether I should get 25 Mhz or go all out for the 33), 4 MB and about 120 HD. In 98, I got my first laptop, and I’m still using it.
I had a Leading Edge Model ‘D’ (an XT clone). Dual 5.25" floppies (I couldn’t afford the $500 10Mb harddrive upgrade!).
I paid the same amount for it (about $1500) in 1988 as I did for my computer (Dell 8300 w/120Gb HD) last year.
1998: Sony VAIO microtower. P2, 266. 6 gig HD, 32 MB RAM, Win95. $1500. My wife is still using it, with a replaced power supply, RAM upgrade and Windows 2000.
That game kicked ass! I bought a CoCo 3 a couple of years ago so I could run an emulator to play that game 
My first computer was not the CoCo, but the MC-10. It came out at the same time as the Timex Sinclair, had 4K memory with a 16K expansion pack, I also got the tape deck for it. It’s one great advantage over the Timex was the chicklet keyboard. I did a lot of BASIC programming on that little sucker.