The first computer that I used was Utecom, back when I was in second-year mathematics at the University of New South Wales. It was huge – it used valves, not transistors – and was programmed in a reverse Polish language called George. Programming was on punched paper tape – no cards, no magetic tape, no cartridges. It was about as powerful as a prorammable calculator is these days.
Learned on a Mac 512Ke but the first one I owned (used) was a Mac SE with a 40 MB HD. Had a 2400 baud modem and an original StyleWriter to go with it. Around maybe 1990, it had fallen way behind what a modern computer could do, so I bought an Applied Engineering accelerator card for it and ended up with a 40 MHz '030 powered SE, which was very snappy, and the card supported four 4-MB chips (which was actually the expensive part) so I had a 16 MB 40 MHz SE. That was one sweet machine. I fried the accelerator card around 1996 and, having no use for an 8 MHz 2 MB SE, sold it for $30.
Meanwhile I’d bought my second Mac around 1995, a PowerMac 7100/80. That was my first color Mac and I ran two (later, three!) monitors on it. That one has been durable and dependable (it’s still doing auxiliary duty with a Sonnet G3/300 card in it and running MacOS 8.6) but I dont’ think I ever fell in love with it for some reason.
My third and current computer has been a total joy and delight to own: a beautiful WallStreet PowerBook (aka PowerBook G3 Series ‘98). This was my first laptop and I quickly got addicted to owning one computer and having it be wherever I was! I got it at a time when the G3 chip was an amazingly fast chip and this PowerBook was faster than most folks’ desktop computers. For a laptop, it’s been surprisingly expandable and upgradable and now runs a G4/500, 512 MB of RAM, add-on USB and FireWire, and a card to let me run an external monitor and use the built-in TFT as a second screen when I’m at the office. It also lets me run with two internal hard drives and I’ve got fast ones (7200 60 gig Hitachis).
But I’m on the verge of giving it its pension at last. I’m going to get one of these as soon as the price dips a bit.
First computer was an Apple II, in '79. With cassette tape for storage of programs. It was a Big Deal a few years later to add the (external) floppy disk drive - and play Zork for the first time!
A Smaky 6, made in Switzerland in the early 80s, the first computer to use windows, I believe. They are still being manufactured (but the keyboard is now separated from the main :rolleyes: ).
A Vendex 8088, DOS 3.1 with dual turbo speeds, from 4.77 Mhz to a blazing 8.0 Mhz! It came loaded with a 20 Mb hard drive! In the course of upgrading it, I added my own RAM expansion bank, giving it a total of 1.64 Mb of RAM! I installed my own modem, a blazing 1200 baud puppy, to connect me to compuserve (before compuserve connected with the internet).
Mid-70’s, my brother’s Trash-80, no color, no games that I can remember (pong maybe?). You needed to hook up a cassette recorder to it in order to write a program. I borrowed it for a day, learned BASIC on it, found out I liked programming, went on to get my second degree in Computer Science, became a COBOL programmer for GM/EDS in the 80’s: business programming, mainframes.
My first computer was a nice CBM PET 2001, complete with attached 9" monochrome monitor, built-in tape drive and chiclet keyboard. Mine was the second picture down… blue trim. Lovely 6502 CPU, running at a blazing 1Mhz, with a whole 4K of memory.
That was followed by an Apple IIe, also running a 6502 at 1Mhz, then a spiffy Apple IIGS (GS = graphics & sound, or as my mother thought - Granny Smith). This bad boy ran a 65C816 @ 2.8MHz, and I had upgraded it to a whopping 1M of memory. We had an external 5.25 floppy from the IIe and got a 3.5 floppy as well.
After that, I moved into PC world with a Leading Edge 386… [Leading Edge was the make, not a description. They were sold in department stores.]
Ahh… good games for those old Apples, and a few for the PET. Plus I used to have great times on my friend’s CBM 128/64.
Looks like I’m the only one that started on a TI-99/4a.
1982, good machine with only 16k but a great set of manuals that let me teach myself Basic.
Also acted a game console. So many hours lost to TI-Invaders. :Sigh
First computer: Commodore Vic20. 3 kb ram, expandable to an enormous 16kb with a cartridge, but you lost the ability to play the rocking Vic20 games while doing it (I wish someone would do a Windows clone of that haunted pinball/breakout game–that would be the bee’s knees). Had a cassette drive, but I never used it much because it was such a pain.
Second: Upgraded in '87 to an Apple IIc. 128 kb ram, pseudo-portable, classic green on black monitor, although I later got the widget as a present from my Mom which would allow me to output to a tv so I could finally play games in that full glorious apple color (8 at a time, some of which were repeats, or 16, take your pick). Spent a hell of a lot of time with it doing actual homework (on Appleworks), playing Pirates, Deathlord, Bard’s Tale I & II, Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Carmen Sandiego and dozens of other games. Hell, if I made a pie chart of my gaming experience over my life span, a huge wedge of it would still be labelled “Apple IIc”. 
Lasted me all the way through high school and my undergrad degree in college. Still have it in my closet and it still works great.
I feel more nostalgia for the Apple. Nothing like green on black text and sound effects that sound like “SKEE! SKEE! SKEE! BEEP” to make me all teary-eyed. 
Yep, that was mine too.
You had to use an ordinary cassette recorder to save and load programs, and if I remember correctly, the TV screen went all ziggy-zaggy while you did so because the poor little thing diddn’t have enough brainpower to refresh the screen at the same time.
I was doing some machine language programming on it (almost necessary because of how hopelessly slow it was in BASIC) before I graduated to a Commodore 64.
These were both “family” computers. The first computer I owned personally was a Tandy 1000 (IBM PC clone) with 2 floppy drives (no hard drive), 128K of RAM, and the advanced graphics capacities (16 color graphics!) that IBM only offered with its own PCjr. Its successor was a Packard Bell 486 PC running Windows 3.1, followed by the eMachines PC I’ve had now for about 3 years.
Another person checking in here who started with a Timex Sinclair 1000 with a 16Kb expansion pack and a tape casette recorder for loading and saving programs.
In 1987, my dad was assigned a Tandy 1400 Laptop. It had 2 HD disk drives and a 1200 bps modem. I ran MS-DOS 3.2. This was what I used to connect into the university’s mainframe system and also to dial out to the local BBS boards. I LOVED that machine.
Ahh, the Timex Sinclair 1000! That was my first computer, too - I got it when I was 10 years old. I never did have the 16K expansion module, though - by the time I’d saved enough allowance money to afford it (we’re talking months to save the $75 I needed), a friend of my mother’s offered to sell me her TI-99/4A for the same price. Obviously I jumped right on that - the Timex was fun, but it’d never be the machine that the TI-99/4A was.
So, while I was aware of the infamous problems with the 16K RAM expansion module working its way out of the back of the Timex, I never experienced it first-hand. What I did experience, though, was random heat-related crashes. In the summer, in our non-air-conditioned house, that machine would get so hot after a while that it would simply freeze up hard, destroying whatever BASIC program I was working on at the time. I spent hours programming in BASIC back then. Anyway, I came up with a solution - a plastic baggie filled with ice. I set it on the spot on the case that got hot and the crashes stopped happening. The membrane keyboard was fairly immune to the copious amount of condensation that dripped down the front of the machine.
My FIRST computer (well, my family’s first) was:
Franklin Ace 2200. It was an Apple II clone, and was actually a bit faster than a real Apple II, and looked nicer IMO. Here’s a picture of one
Then, in 7th grade we finally ditched the Franklin and had a local computer store build us a:
386sx/33MHz, 2MB RAM, 80MB hard drive with DOS / Win 3.1.
In high school, after MUCH prodding from me, my dad upgraded, and we ended up with a:
Packard Bell (yes, I know) Pentium 120MHz with 16MB of RAM and a 1GB hard drive.
Now MY first computer, as in the first computer that I alone owned, I bought with my HS graduation money, and I splurged big time, getting a custom built:
Pentium 166MHz with 16MB of RAM (which I later upgraded to 32), a 2GB HD, and an ATI 1MB video card. I later added an additional 6GB HD to it.
I then purchased a Gateway Pentium II 350MHz with 64MB of RAM (later upgraded to 384MB), 8GB total HD (later had 28GB) and an nVidia RivaTNT video card.
I then started building them myself, building an Athlon XP 1700+ which I overclocked 150Mhz, with 512MB of RAM and 100GB of HDs. Originally had a GeForceMX 2 in there.
My current computer is:
Athlon64 3000+ overclocked to 3500+ speeds
1GB RAM (dual channel)
520 GB of HDs (3 internal, 80, 80, 200, 1 external 160)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB
The computer I learned on in High School (1968) was an LGP-21. (Manual here. ) 4 K of rotating memory, 32 bit words, 16 instructions. No interrupts, text was not in ASCII, and they didn’t even use abc…f for hexadecimal. No assembler (and obviously no compilers) - the first assembly language programs I wrote for it I assembled using an assembler I wrote myself.
The first computer I owned was a C64, but I had used many, many ones by them, including the PDP1, PDP 11, DEC 10, Cyber 7600, IMB 360 and 370, GE645 running Multics, a Honeywell machine also running Multics, 3B2, 3B1, Data General Nova, and a bunch of others I’ve forgotten.
The first computer I used was in HS and it we programmed it in basic using punch tape (not cards). It connected via modem to a local university. The first computer I used at work was an IBM DisplayWrite (mostly a word processor) that used 11" floppies and a 300 baud cradle modem. The first computer I owned was an IBM PC knockoff with: a single 5 1/2" floppy, no hard drive and a Panasonic 9 pin dot matrix printer. You had to stick a DOS disk in to boot it up and then load each program as you needed it. Printer drivers were built into the individual program so you had to match hardware to software to print anything. The first Window’s operating system was booted up off of DOS and whenever new hardware or software was installed you had to manually update DOS to accept it. When I upgraded to a 386 it cost me $700 to put 16 mb of memory on it.
We were livin large at work when we upgraded our only computer to one with a hard drive (10 mb). When it died I took the hard drive out of it for posterity. To giver everyone an idea of the size of the hard drive it was as big as a rotary wall phone.
Ohhh, maybe a slight hijack…who else here has actually used Windows, version 1?
My school had a ZX80 - the predecessor to the ZX81/TS1000 - this machine also suffered from overheating and we found a solution printed in the troubleshooting section of some computing/electronics magazine - the suggestion was to balance a carton of frozen milk on the hot spot.
How far we have come.
What’s with this “CASSETTE TAPE!!!11”? I expected most people in this thread to wax lyrical about storage on cassettes.
The first computer I used was a friend’s Vic 20. My first computer was a Commodore 64 (Oh, the games! Oh, the learning BASIC!), then an Atari 520 ST (Dungeon Master!), then an Amiga 500, and then a 486 100 MHz.
Now, I own two Pentium Is, one Commodore 64, two Amiga 500 and the Atari (but it displays some very peculiar problems) and my main computer, a Pentium 3.
I cut my teeth on a Sinclair ZX81 - complete with wobbly RAM pack. At school, we had an RML 380Z - front panel and all. We later got an Apple ][+. The first computer I purchased for myself was a 80286-based PC clone.
And Windows? 1.03 here.
The computer I learned BASIC programming on was an HP2000 mainframe at the University of Lethbridge. We were connected to it from our school, and we had an ASR33 teletype as our interface. I believe it was 110 baud. We had no permanent storage space on the mainframe, so before we logged out we would have to save whatever program we were writing on the ASR-33’s paper tape punch/reader.
I remember finding a ‘Star Trek’ game* source code in a computer book (back then computer books and magazines would have full BASIC or assembly code printouts of the programs they were discussing, and you were expected to type them in to your computer yourself), and I spent hours and hours laboriously typing the game in by hand, then saving it out onto a huge roll of paper tape. When I walked out of the computer room, a kid smacked the paper tape roll out from under my arm, and it unravelled all the way down the hallway. Of course, the other kids immediately jumped on it and pulled it all apart with their feet. I just about cried.
Around this time, I also joined a homebrew computer club, and we used to have nights of extreme excitement when one of the members would actually have his computer WORKING. By ‘working’ I mean that an hour of laboriously hand-assembling code and typing machine instructions into a hex pad of a Rockwell SC/MP single board computer might get the words, “Hello World” to scroll across the single-line LED display. I still remember the party we threw when we managed to interface that little bugger to a used teletype machine. The computer I lusted after then was a COSMAC Elf, which was a single-board computer that had a hex pad for input, a single-line display, and 2K of RAM. But you could get relatively inexpensive add-on cards after you bought the backplane card, and you could actually build some pretty cool stuff. The Elf itself was $99, which was an amazing bargain in those days.
In high school, I got a part time job and saved my money for a long time, and eventually bought myself a TRS-80 Model I in Grade 11. 4K RAM and a tape drive for storage, which seemed like a huge advancement over the paper tape (and it was!). All this for only $1399, including black and white monitor with, as I recall, 128 X 192 graphics resolution.
That year, a friend and I wrote a game for the TRS-80 called “Wall Street 1929” (basically a ripoff of the board game ‘stock ticker’, with a few enhancements and some kick-ass animated graphics), and sold it to one of the largest game distributors at that time, “Instant Software”, which was formed by the same guy (Wayne Green) who founded BYTE magazine. Anyway, I thought I made it rich. As the game went through the various phases of production and packaging, I was told that the initial run would net us around $40,000, and if the game was one of their best sellers I could expect thousands of dollars a month in royalties.
Then the company went bankrupt just before releasing the game, and I got a settlement cheque for $250. This after waiting for over a year for my wealth to start rolling in.
After that, it was a Radio Shack color computer (with the same ‘solder the ram together’ trick to double the memory described above), then an Atari ST which I used in college. That was a cool machine. That was my last computer before entering the endless progression of IBM PC clones.
BTW, in high school and college I worked in various computer stores as a salesman. In Canada, the original Apple MacIntosh, which had a tiny monochrome screen, 384K of Ram, one floppy drive, and no hard drive, was $3495. The first IBM XT with a 5 MB hard drive and B&W monitor was $4999.
And back then, business software was expensive. Microsoft Word alone was almost $500. Lotus 1-2-3 was hundreds of dollars. Accounting packages could be thousands of dollars.
*That Star Trek game became a classic. You had a grid something like 16 X 16, written in text, which represented a ‘quadrant’. There was a special character for the Enterprise, one for the Klingons, etc. You’d enter a move by essentially giving an angle and thrust, and then you’d wait while the teletype chugged out a new 16 X 16 grid showing your new position and that of the enemy. Then you could fire a torpedo by typing in the angle in degrees, and the teletype would chug out a series of grids showing the progress of your torpedo until you either missed or hit your target. That was pretty much the game. The entire ‘galaxy’ was made up of a large grid of these smaller grids, and you basically just flew around and fired torpedoes.
It was unbelievably primitive, but I enjoyed that damned game then as much or more than I enjoy some of the incredibly sophisticated games we have now.
Other classic games from the time: “Colossal Cave” (“You are in a twisty little maze of passages, all alike”), and “Hunt the Wumpus” (“I smell a draft. Bats nearby!”)