What was your first computer?

[Schumi]

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 -



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:

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...

[masraum]

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

[Porsche-O-Phile]

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

[Schumi]

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.

[GH85Carrera]

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.

[equality72521]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

I had a Timex-Sinclair 1000

Same here.

[dhoward]

RCA Super ELF

[Schumi]

Originally Posted by dhoward

RCA Super ELF

We have a winner!

[TerryBPP]

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

[bell]

Originally Posted by equality72521

Same here.

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

[dhoward]

Originally Posted by Schumi

We have a winner!

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....

[boba]

Ibm 1401

[jyl]

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.

[emcon5]

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

One of my friends had a Sinclair.

[gr8fl4porsche]

Apple 2e

[ramonesfreak]

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

[LakeCleElum]

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.

[legion]

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

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

[2.70Racer]

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.

[Jeff Higgins]