What was your first computer

Apple //e ... I still run an emulator that helps me relive old days and play old apple games... A Mind Forever Voyaging and Karateka among them.

 

My first ever computer was a TI99/4a then I got a Commodore64 and really got into it.....

I was writing programs in basic and had alot of fun. I sitll have my commodore but The disk drive is stuck in a loop.....

When I turn it on it doesnt stop running so the computer doesnt recognise it..........

 

I worked at a company where they ordered 6 brand new MacIntosh 512K PCs in 1984. I never figured out why they rolled all the stuff into my office, but my MUCH-older boss asked me if I could get all the stuff up and running including an Ethernet switch, printers, external floppy drives, mouses, etc. Other than knowing vaguely what Ethernet is, I had no idea. I did not know what a mouse was. Once I got one of the PCs up the rest was easy. Boot up with one floppy and save files to the other floppy. There was essentially no manual, and definitely no internet to find stuff. There was a program on them named Multiplan -- the stone-age version of Excel.
They made weird noises and seemed hokey in a lot of ways - especially floppy disks -- but they were fun.

 

I still have it, though it went out of use many years ago. It's a TRS-80 Model 1, Z80. Originally it had no memory, none, had to type in EVERY program, no storage so when you shut it off, there went the program. No lower case, upper case only, pixels the size of a building. Eventually took the soldering gun to it, and some chips that added lower case. Then added the cassette tape program storage. Eventually 5 1/4' inch floppy disk drive, then a 3 1/2 mini disk drive. No shielding, so when you turn it on, the TV scrambles, so does the local airport radar! That's the big reason they had to stop selling it.

 

A Compaq with 32 mb RAM, Windows 3.1, and a 14.4 mbps dial-up modem.

 

It was an Osborne brand IBM compatible Intel 386 16 Mhz PC with 4 megs of RAM, later upped to 8 Mb. Pure VGA screen. By mid-90's it was already hopelessly outdated, when the 486 and Pentium-class processors made their entrance. But that rig nevertheless showed me the ropes. I learned to use the MS-DOS 6 command line with that thing, as well as the windowed, graphical UI of Windows for workgroups 3.11, and it's been a steady, upwards learning curve for me since then. First Windows 95, 98, XP, Vista and 7, and then graduating to Linux, after Microsoft's business practices started getting more and more intolerable.

PC gaming during that era was something truly magical. Games like Wolfenstein 3-D, Alone in the Dark, and the Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games really started to show what the PC can do, then and later. It's been exciting to follow the progress.

 

commodor 64 still have it and even get it out once in a while.

 

Commodore 16, wow this brings back a lot of fond memories

 

Commodore 64
first "PC" was a Wang. no lie. I had the scrolling marquee screen saver and had it say "please don't touch my wang"
Wang Laboratories - Wikipedia

 

The first 1 I owned was a Timex Sinclair 100 or something like that.Came as a kit. Early 80s .The first 1 I used was an itt term. that used a phone link to a very large remote computer in the mid 70s . It ran basic.

 

Some Gateway piece of trash. At the time I thought it was amazing, naturally, but looking back.. wow.

 

I first worked on a computer in 1962. It used soldered directly onto the circuit boards, with each board in a rack, like a giant chest of drawers. The whole thing was the size of a small house.
With more than 7.000 valves soldered directly, replacement was a nightmare, not to mention the 40kW of heat the machine developed.
It was decommissioned and scrapped after less than 3 years.
Being owned by the UK government, one drawer was sent to the science department of every school in London and computer studies were added to the curriculum.

 

the first one that was mine that worked was an ohio scientific c1p, the second was a vic 20.

the c1p was mem filled to 8k and expansion port hand wired to the osi back plane, left over from an attempt to build the osi 400 system.

the vic 20 was mem expanded to i think it was 28 or so 'k' with an expander bus the could manually switch between rom mondules as well.
drives were still too expensive for the osi, but for the vic-20 (the 'manrule' that came with it called it a vic-1001)
there was a unihammer printer and later a pen plotter, and finally a 5inch disk i could afford.
and i even had a modem, 300 baud, acoustical coupled. ma bell still wouldn't like you wire anything to their system, unless it was theirs for a big price.
both came with basic in rom and nothing in the way of an actual opperating system.

during the time i had the vic 20, i was also gifted with a coco-term which had its own modem. both used adopters to use a household tv as a monitor.
clunky character graphics and monotone.

local dial up boards and compuslurve. also dow. never got around to joining the well.

 

Mine was a used Kaypro laptop, one of the first laptops. The kaypro was also one of the first to use 3 1/2 inch floppies. I would first have to load programs from floppies into RAM for them to run each time. It had a docking station too!

I even have a picture of me on a Caribbean beach (probably Anguilla) sitting on the sand, using it, in 1996. That pic is probably one of the first digital nomad pics ever!!!

Of course we barely had the Web then, yet that was the start of Hippy.com and later Hip Forums which came out of that.

 

I had nothing to do with computers until 1995, when I was living with a woman twenty years older than me. She was much more interested in all kinds of stuff. Sounds silly but to stay with we picked up an old ZX Spectrum and a few games from a yard sale. Had fun with that for a while. Then moved on to a Commodore Amiga (500?) and finally met a nerdy guy locally who got us a Windows PC and internet access, back in the days of dialup !modems etc. Late starter but progressed fast, you could say..

 

celeron 1000 Mhz

 

It was a Gateway laptop

 

Gateway 386-16 with a math co-processor.

I had built a few for my department and had some available to me, but this was my first personal computer.