What was your first computer?
 

The facebook/myspace thread coupled with the old advice column email thread got me thinking.

What was your first computer, and when? What was it used for?



I had a few show up at around the same time. I think the first was a second hand Apple IIc, around 1992-93 or so -

http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~burkes/mac/a2c.jpg

I had the extra external floppy drive, a broken modem, and the 6" green tube screen. It was pretty tiny. It had a few games and apple demo disks that I played around with, also programmed a few things in BASIC, which was neat. I had all the original manual and boxes up until around 2000- I remember at some point I had given it to my mother because she wanted to give it to a teacher for use in a classroom. I don't know what happened to it, but it would probably all be worth something today considering I had all the original papers, boxes, and receipts.


My second computer shortly afterwards was a not-quite functioning IBM DOS machine. This guy:
http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/ibmpc.jpg
It was usually apart in pieces. It's what really got me into computers.

Anyone with anything older than that?
I think I got a modem and the internet around 1996 on my first windows computer- A 75mhz packard bell with windows 95. It only had a 610MB hard drive and it was always full...

First family computer was a Commodore 64 back in the early 80s. They'd just come out. When we bought it the floppy wasn't out yet, so for the first few months we used a tape deck. It was pretty much just a game machine at the time. My dad did some of the sample programs in basic, and I learned a few things.

That was it until my first year of college, 1988 when my parents bought me a Tandy 1000TX, Tandy 16 color graphics, 640K RAM, 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, 286 8 MHz. Within a year, I had added a 32MB hardcard hard drive. I think the first OS was DOS 3.2.3

I had a Timex-Sinclair 1000 and an Atari 400. I think they're both still in my parents' attic someplace.

I know that in the late 90's myself and a friend were really into computers- not top of the line stuff, but mid 80's early 90's stuff that was hitting the market cheap cheap cheap as people had loaded them up with junk software and getting rid of them in lieu of the faster, cheaper stuff that was coming out.

At any one point my basement had anywheres from 10-12 partially disassembled machines, none with any real purpose. I ended up collecting a lot of those crap HP's and compaqs that debuted in the late 90's with 300-500mhz pentiums- everyone had one of those computers, WalMart- $1000, it was yours. And then after installing bloatware and bloatware they would take 30 minutes to boot and people were literally giving us these machines after a while.




Now it's not so fun anymore. You can get a nice, slim, top of the line laptop for $400. There's no scrounging and swapping parts, no real DIY deal anymore.

My personal 1st was a Commodore Vic-16. I felt I would need the memory expansion so I upgraded the memory to 32 K. The memory module would get so hot it would almost burn skin. The cassette drive would take several minutes to load a 16k program.

At work we bought a 4.77 Mhz IBM PC with DOS 1.1. No hard drive, just monochrome monitor & two 360K floppies. It was over 5 grand. At home I evolved to a Commodore 64 and finally a Compaq "portable" that weighed something like 30 pounds. I converted the hard drive from MFM to RLL format and got it up to a whopping 32 Mb. running DOS 2.2. I still have the DOS 2.2 system floppies. That was just about the time DOS 3.0 came out.

I still have a Microsoft mouse that says Patent Pending. It has a steel roller ball and two big green buttons and the big wide serial connection.

Same here.

RCA Super ELF
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1251986508.jpg

We have a winner!

Commodore 64! I begged for it for xmas because of all the cool games it had. 3 months later Nintendo came out, lol.

And here LOL
I had the ram pack which plugged in the back....one bump and you'd have to start all over......

Once you spent a couple of nights soldering it all together, you could key in a hex program to make all of the LED segments spin....

Ibm 1401

Let's see.

First was an Apple Mac, this was in late 1980s I think. At the same time a Tandy PC clone. I recall installing the optional 20MB hard drive - woo hoo. Dot matrix printer. My office had some laptops from Zenith and Grid that we used too.

Got my first mobile phone around then. A Uniden mounted to the center console of my car. That was cool.

My first handheld was a HP200LX in roughly 1994. Used that until switched to Apple Newton.

Got on the Internet in 1995 I think. I've had the same email address with the same ISP for almost 15 years. Thank goodness for spam filters.

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

One of my friends had a Sinclair.

Apple 2e

Commodore 64 and shortly after that a 128. i still have all the floppy discs but the hardware is long gone.

TI 99-A: Cassette tape drive.

Games and I learned how to do some basic programing in DOS - I learned a lot on that thing.

My first was an IBM PC. 8086 processor and all!

My second was an IBM Portable PC. 7-inch built-in monochrome monitor.

1981, Heathkit Z-80 based CPM machine, with dual floppy disks. One disk drive in the machine one external. Built by me as a kit. Ran a word processor called "Magic Wand"
2 years before IBM's DOS.
I wrote a couple of company manuals on that machine.
Any glitch while writing and my work was lost.

Apple II

(very cool Jeff ;) )

The first computer I worked with was a PR1ME 300. We somehow made that a 23 1/2 user machine (the 1/2 was that one of the user interfaces never worked quite right, and we saved that one for the system console). This was owned by my high school, and I was a Student System Manager from 1979-1983.

First PC I worked on was an Apple II, also owned by the high school. These were 48K, had single floppy drives. If you didn't buy a floppy, you could use a cassete tape drive...The floppy drive was extra, as was the video to RF modulator. The story behind the RF modulator being separate, was that the computer failed its FCC radio interference test with the RF modulator installed. It was the owner's problem if it was sold separately.

1st PC I owned was a Commodore 64, circa 1984, and it worked quite well for lite programming and word processing. We bought it at Montgomery Wards and it came with dual floppy drives and a dot matrix printer, for about $800. Pretty darn inexpensive at the time.

The first computer I personally purchased was a Toshiba 1200HD. 10 MB Hard-drive, 640K RAM (upgraded to 2MB!), 1200 baud modem, MS-DOS. Great little machine. This combined with my electronic typewriter from college as a printer, served my while I worked in India and Pakistan in the late 1980's. I still have it and it still boots. The screen is cracked...I think I spent $2500-$3000 for everything including the modem/memory upgrade, and software.

A Tandy 1000 and we got it for home use.We got it in the late 70's or early 80's ...it was so long ago ...my how things have changed.

They HATED us at Radio Shack. We could actually program the computers and make them do stuff, something that the guys that worked there, could not. CPM-86. Wow, it has been a long time.

I had a Control System Graphical User Interface that used CPM-86, in the late 1980's. That was very antiquated for the time!

Another vote for the TI 99-4A

Me too (Timex Sinclair witn an extra 512k of ram!). Probably still have it stored under the house somewhere!

We had a Commodore Vic 20 at home too.

My dad had some kind of IBM microcomputer at home in the late 70's (he was and IBM salesman). It was NOT micro by today's standards!

Leading Edge with 8088 chip. 256kB RAM and the upgraded 40 MB hard drive. Monochrome monitor. Bought in 1985 I believe. $1496 sounds right. Dot matrix Panasonic printer. My brother and mother had similar ones. Managed a 'Big' alumni database of 1000 names and got $17,000 donated for our fraternity with 'personalized' letters before anyone would suspect they were automated on our small sc.ale

CDC & DEC, PDP... - then VAX when it came out

or did you mean something along the lines of the hp 41C? or hp 67?

Around the mid 80s our family got an Apple IIe.

I played a lot of California Games and Karateka on the green monitor!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1252006086.jpg

ME too, remember PARSEC, the space shooter ?

DOS ? didn't know it could, I learned BASIC on that though !

I still have my commodore 64. I try to play jumpman junior and kung Fu about once a month, just to remember where I came from.

As a little kid, I got "compute" magazine, and used to enter thousands of lines of code for the little games they would put in that magazine! What a boring little 12-year old kid.

I brought an old dot-matrix Panasonic printer from the 80's with me to college. I had to use a driver for a similar (but not quite right) model to get the thing to print.

I remember finishing a term paper at 2 a.m. and it took it six hours to print 25 pages (it was literally printing about a line of text a minute). That sucker was LOUD too. I dumped the thing in the trash and went out and bought a bubble jet the next day (right when printers dropped below $100 for the first time).

Franklin Ace. Apple clone.

Apple 2e, probably around 1979. borrowed from the school.
Then did programming on the first Mac, and worked on a windows interface for the IBM (before Windows 3.1 came out). also got to do some video editing with an Amiga 500. That was all in the summers of 85 and 86. all that was while working for the school district, so their computers.
Then I walked away from computers and programming for a while. Bought my first computer for grad school, 1995. Have owned 2 laptops and 1 desktop (and still have 2 of those 3) since then.

Only in the past year or so have I done anything at all with programing (my boss loves Fortran 77, so I'm learning that to keep him happy).

Jumpman for PCs

http://www.thehouseofgames.net/index.php?t=10&id=19

We had to take a Fortran class when I was in College. I HATED that class. But then, I apparently don't have the correct mentality to be a programmer. Blech!

Started working with computers during the steam years, on a IBM 360 with punch cards and so on.

Finally graduated to a Commodore then a Tandy. Oh the days when we got an external 10 meg hard drive instead of a 5.25 floppy!

There's a reason I actively walked away from programming for almost 20 years...

However, I find that being able to toss together something in 30 minutes that lets me manipulate a dataset exactly the way I want to, instead of spending 3 days trying to figure out how to have our pre-made software do what I want...it's kinda nice. Anything beyond about 100 lines of code though, and I'd be dead in the water, I have no skills for such things.

You just have to realize that when someone asks you to do something that they think is simple, there are really about six dozen undiscovered requirements that lie in situations they haven't thought about. You also have to realize that words like "always" and "never" are usually followed by a silent "except when..."

A good programmer anticipates these situations and brings them to light early.