First Computer you had

[jgrabham]

Looking for a CD on the shelf and I found a manual for the first computer I ever used. It was made in 1994 (I was born in 1992) It had DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 for workgroups. 4MB Ram (seems to have been upgraded as Ive found a reciept for 2X16mb modules) 250mb HDD and a 486DX intel proccessor. It had 1mb on board video. I know my mum had a computer before it, but she cant remember it (im guessing a 286). This computer was thrown out a couple of years ago. :(

Whats everyone elses first computer?

P.S. I have a C64 which I found in my Grandmas loft, but it doesnt work, turn it on and a bright purple screen appears instead of the blue command thingy

[laredo7mm]

The Vic20 way back when. :)

[darklemming54]

You used a computer when you were 2 years old?

[PartisanEntity]

Our first computer was a Highscreen, some Taiwanese box with a Pentium 133MHz I don't remember how much RAM it had :) It came with Windows 95

[jgrabham]

You used a computer when you were 2 years old?

4

[ComplexNumber]

mine was a sinclair zx81

[RandomJoe]

My first was a TI-99/4A. Even had the expansion box that gave me a whopping 48KB of RAM and two 5 1/4" single-sided floppy drives! :D And I probably did more programming on that thing than I have on PCs since...! Even did some assembly programming on it.

[twisted_steel]

I believe it was the AT&T PC 6300 (http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/att-6300/).

[sisco311]

hc 90 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_HC) + black & white tv + russian cassette recorder

[Sunflower1970]

My dad brought home a TRS-80 from work. back in 1983-84 or so. Couldn't really do much on it besides play a game..Westward Ho.
Although my brother did figure out how to create a program which made it snow on the screen...That was an exciting day...

[didijeeeke]

comodore 64 where is the time

[matthew]

TRS-80 Color Computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer) (version 1) in 1981

[rocknrolf77]

Commodore 64 with tape player. "press play on tape" :) Then moved over to amiga 500.

[mills]

amiga 500

my second is the one iam using now which i bought a few years ago

[revmc]

Mine was an Apple IIc.

[Quillz]

I remember having a computer that ran MS-DOS. We must have bought it before I was born, as by the early 90s, Windows 3.0 had been released. The first computer I have fond memories of, though, was a Packard Bell that ran Windows 95.

[daniel of sarnia]

286 with dos five on it, I think it was 1993 when I started playing with it. When I was in grade one we had Mac 512Ke http://content.techrepublic.com.com/2346-10877_11-6603-2.html at school which was the first time I used a GUI. God did it ever crash for no apparent reason, eww bad flash backs.

[yabbadabbadont]

TRS-80 Color Computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer) (version 1) in 1981

I had version 2. Unlike the first model, it had a more normal keyboard instead of "calculator keys". I don't like to remember how much I paid to expand it from 16 to 64KB of memory... :)

[askreet]

The first computer I owned was a Tandy 286 when I was roughly 8 years old. Some years later after it bit the dust I bought myself a used 386 that ran Window 3.1. I remember programming a password in QBASIC using a third-party compiler and adding it to my autoexec.bat file to keep my sister off the PC!

Thanks for bringing back the memories!

[matthew]

I had version 2. Unlike the first model, it had a more normal keyboard instead of "calculator keys". I don't like to remember how much I paid to expand it from 16 to 64KB of memory... :)I remember upgrading the ram...it was expensive. I went from 4 to 32KB.

I remember the day we bought the disk drive to replace the cassette storage. I was so excited! 180KB on ONE disk!!! Wow! I may never need more than one or two disks. :) By the time I moved on, in 1989, I had hundreds.

Aahhh. Great memories.

[zgornel]

Commodore vic20 - did not use it much
Commodore 64 and tape recorder. :D :D

[Somenoob]

I believe it was a 1994(or 95) machine, don't remember if it was from a particular company. Only used it form some games it came with and fooled around with the text editor. It had OS/2.

[TheMono]

I feel like such an amatuer here. The first computer I ever used had Win 95!

[AndyCooll]

An Amiga.

:cool:

[Hex_Mandos]

My dad brought an 8086 XT home when I was 4. I used it to play Prince of Persia. As soon as I learnt enough DOS commands to screw up his computers, I got my own: a 286 w/2 megs of ram, running DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 (Which I barely used, as I found it cumbersome when compared to the DOS shell).

[yabbadabbadont]

I remember upgrading the ram...it was expensive. I went from 4 to 32KB.

I remember the day we bought the disk drive to replace the cassette storage. I was so excited! 180KB on ONE disk!!! Wow! I may never need more than one or two disks. :) By the time I moved on, in 1989, I had hundreds.

Aahhh. Great memories.

You had to mention the disk drive.... yikes, talk about expensive. Still, it beat messing with the volume output of the cassette player all the time. :D (no, I couldn't leave it alone since I only had the one player and used it to listen to music as well)

Were you, like me, a master of the hole punch? ;)

[Boomy]

My dad bought a TRS-80 Color Computer when I was just a kid. I used to play the game "Journey to the Planets", it was pretty awesome, especially for 64K.

[mips]

Apple II clone with Z80 CP/M card, 2x Disk Drives & Colour Monitor.

I hated that PC, I wanted a Commodore64 !

I eventually sold it two years later and got myself a Amiga500 with 2x 3.5" drives, 1x 5.25" drive, 1MB RAM & Colour Monitor. Now this was a computer !!!

Later I got a A1200.

[mdsmedia]

Mine (other than a handheld computer that you could program in very basic basic) was an XT with single 5.25" floppy drive, 20MB HDD, with DOS (I seem to remember it was PC DOS rather than MS DOS...but that changed pretty soon after I think) v4.x.....and 64K RAM.

I remember the joy of being able to change the text color from green to amber...maybe I couldn't on that particular PC.

PCWrite was my first word processor on that PC. I later got an EGA monitor (the joys of Kings Quest etc. :))

[skwishybug]

First computer was a Texas Instrument TI99/4A as well, but without the floppy drive. Did have a tape recording system where programs were saved as audio files. And the collection of games that were unique to the TI: Munchman, TI Invaders, Parsec.

Second computer was a Commodore PC20-III (8088 ) with 640K of RAM. Learned a lot about DOS with that machine.

[y6FgBn)~v]

Amiga 500

[John.Michael.Kane]

Coleco Adam
http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/7619/adamzp6.th.jpg (http://img109.imageshack.us/my.php?image=adamzp6.jpg)
Coleco Adam Spec's (http://www.vintage-computer.com/adam.shtml)

[Stew2]

Commodore Vic-20 for me. Saved up for it myself and got the cassette drive for it. I spent many many hours on that thing :D. I actually still have it stored away in the basement. Dont think I have a TV that it would connect to anymore though :)

[AusIV4]

My first computer was an Apple II. It was a hand me down when my dad upgraded. I believe I was two or three. My dad has a commodore 64 in his basement, which he uses as a stand to hold up his modem and router - he can't bring himself to get rid of it.

When I was 17, my dad and stepmother had a daughter (my only sibling), and I built my sister a computer from partsI had lying around for her second birthday. By two and a half she's quite a wiz at her games. She can turn on her computer, click an icon, then go and complain to our dad when the CD for that game isn't in the tray and she can't reach the CD drive to put it in (not that she could figure out which CD she needed or put it in right side up if she could reach the tray). Right now it's running WIndows 98 (no internet connection, so no concern about viruses), but this summer I may see how many of her games will run on Wine, and consider putting Edubuntu on the computer for her.

[prixxie]

can't resist - original Mac Plus -- and it still works -- boots & can play Dark Castle!!!

[djsroknrol]

Mine was a Timex Sinclair ZX-80...followed by an Apple Lisa...that was too sweet a machine, but also too expensive...:)

[Mateo]

atari something.. one of the earlier ones. first computer "proper" was the Apple II GS

[Wartooth]

Another TI-994/A here as well. Man, I remember Munchman, Parsec and TI Invaders! That was a lifetime ago.

[Zuuswa]

I feel so young . . . I dont remember the exact year, or specs of the rig, but it was a packard bell with less than 100 mhz pentium. I played Descent on the thing till my eyes bled. When we first got it, it had windows 3.1 on it, and I hated it and never used it. Then my mom upgraded it to wondows 95 because the company she worked for finally got her a computer in her office and it had 95 on it. I remember she had me teach her how to program in visual basic, and let me use the companies liscence to install it on the home 'puter. Before that, I had learned Basic on an old V-tech toy. I was probably 4-5 years old when I started on that thing . . . good times.

[bwhite82]

TRS-80, with a couple game cartridges, hooked right to a television monitor, it was great.

[hardyn]

an 8086 based XT with 640kb of ram (with upgrade ram board, 384kb base) dual 360kb floppies and a 5mb hard-disk. one christmas we got a big upgrade, a 4 color CGA video card. it was running dos 2.2. my first game was space quest 2

(i was very young, this was my fathers machine)

[steven8]

I am old enough to have had all of the old computers listed here, but I did not get a computer until 1996. it was an Acer Aspire, 200 MHZ Pentium w/MMX 32 mbs EDO RAM, 2 mb ati Rage onboard video and a 4.2 gb HDD.

[Browser_ice]

First PC I had was a Commodor-64 which I later added a 256K extension + the GEOS O/S

Prior to that, I had touched a Vic-20 on several occasions

Also touched a TI-99/4 and an Apple-IIc

Later, I touched : Pet Commodor, PC, VT52 & 3270 (terminals), Amiga200HD.

The last PC I touched is the one I currently have

[NikoC]

First one was a 286 working at 8 Mhz, I think the harddrive was 20 mb... I was twelve... aah the good old 1991!

[JT673]

I'm not sure on my earliest one (I think I was made by Acer, that Taiwanese manufacturer), but my second one was an HP...

[justleen]

I had an Laser Turbo XT, 640kb RAM, 1"44 / 5"1/4 floppy drive and SuperVGA Monochrome!
It had this amazing button at the front which allowed me to switch between 6MHz and 10 MHz.. How cool is that?

I still have the origonal disks that came with it.. Official WP 1.0 on 5"1/4 disks!

I was twelve, so this was somewhere '88/'89

[devnulljp]

Ouch, mine was a BBC B micro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro) with 32 kib of RAM and a little green screen back in '82-ish. I wrote my own word processor on that thing, which I used on another BBC B I found at univerity that no-one else wanted to use -- so it saw me through undergrad too.
My jaw dropped first time I saw a Mac in action though.

[username132]

I feel like such an amatuer here. The first computer I ever used had Win 95!

Ditto! These kinds of posts, with everyone talking about their first punch cards and blinken lights when they were -3 always make me with my second hand Win95 computer feel a bit dense. To free up disk space, I went through folders double clicking on files to see if anything important happened - if not, I deleted them... what a dunce...

Edit: I had to pay for it myself mind (£300 for 16MB. 80 MHz, 0.5GB), none of this 'daddy brought it home'..!

[matthew]

You had to mention the disk drive.... yikes, talk about expensive. Still, it beat messing with the volume output of the cassette player all the time. :D (no, I couldn't leave it alone since I only had the one player and used it to listen to music as well)

Were you, like me, a master of the hole punch? ;)Once I learned that trick, I was never without one. :)

[karellen]

it was back in 1998: an amd k6 266 MHz, 32 mb ram, 2.1 gigs hdd and with 2 mb of video memoria. and the cherry on top: windows 98 :D. good times....I was discovering new things....well, here I am now, with an upgrade from edgy to feisty running in the background :)

[jariku]

My first computer was a Salora Manager (http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=1118) I got for Christmas in 1986 or 1987. My second computer was an IBM PS/1 286 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/1) I got in late 1990 or early 1991 when my brother switched to a 386. Around 1995 I got a Pentium computer and in 1997 an internet connection and it's all been downhill since!

The Salora Manager I had is still alive, but I don't have it anymore. It's mostly useless, since the external 5,25" floppy drive isn't working and it's suffered a few blows during the years (a pet ate it's power cord and a clumsy someone*COUGH*me*COUGH* dropped the computer once and it lost some keys). I don't know about the 286, though. It's 3,5" floppy drive broke and that rendered it mostly useless also. I gave it to my other brother, but I don't know what he did with it.

[Chilli Bob]

In 1982 I won a VZ200 (http://old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=979) in a school competition.8k of memory and saving onto a cassete player. I loved it. Looking at the photo in the link I can still remember what it smelled like. Is that perverse?

My first PC was a Sperry brand XT clone with no hard drive and twin 360k floppies and green screen. Those were the days! Actually I miss ascii word processors. I found them easier to look at for long periods than the modern day equivalent. Even when I got Win 3.1 (On a 386DX40 - the most powerfull computer of anyone I knew at the time.), I still used the shareware program PC-Write rather than the word processor in Works.

I'm showing my age.

[weekend warrior]

First computer I'd ever used was a Commodore PET (http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html) which was put in our school library in 1979 or 80 to catalog books among other things. Speed: 1MHz, Memory: 4K

http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/3025/pet20011afd1.th.jpg (http://img136.imageshack.us/my.php?image=pet20011afd1.jpg)

"The Commodore PET -- it's technology is so advanced; its concept, so remarkable; its ease of operation so simple...."

Ah the memories... guess that means I've been using computers over a quarter century now. It's been an interesting ride to say the least.

[Chilli Bob]

I still remember looking at the PET ads and knowing I would never be able to afford one. I was blown away when the Vic-20 came out. Surely computers had reached their peak!

[justinlb]

I was very young, maybe 4 or 5, but I remember my first computer experience was on a good ole Amstard with only a FDD (no HDD).

[richardjennings]

my first computer was also a BBC micro (BBC B micro). My father gave it to me when he upgraded to an amstrad 8212?? something like that. first pc was a 286 i found in a skip around 1995 or something. I remember begging my dad for a color monitor :p

[Compyx]

The first computer I owned was a C64 , but before that I did BASIC programming on a TI-99/4A and a Sinclair ZX81. I still have a C64 (well, 3 actually) and I'm still active with it (Demo scene) and mostly involved in building cross-development tools such as assemblers.

So I've been programming since 1981 (I was 6/7 years old at the time) and never stopped. Time flies when you're having fun :)

[weekend warrior]

I still remember looking at the PET ads and knowing I would never be able to afford one. I was blown away when the Vic-20 came out. Surely computers had reached their peak!
Yep, we were fortunate to get a PET at school. And then came the C-64 and blew them all away. 64K RAM? What would we do with all that!

LOAD"*",8,1
RUN

Exciting days back then eh? ;)

[king minger]

First comp I had access to was a Franklin ACE 1200 (an Apple ][ ripoff with 2 built in full height 5.25" disk drives - what a behemoth!) http://www.apple2clones.com/?q=node/view/116
it was my dad's machine which i got to use to play snake byte and one on one - on a green screen!

my first computer of my own was a C64 intially with a datasette from a Vic-20 and eventually a 1540 disk drive (man that was huge! - as big as the C64 itself....)
spent the first week of ownership saying i had it to learn to program (just watched wargames:popcorn: ) but that didn't last once my dad's friend came round with a huge box of disks full of various games...:roll:



Were you, like me, a master of the hole punch? ;)
Wow, I'd forgotten about that trick!
had one of those punches specifically made for the job with a guide to line it up in the right place :)

the C64 was followed eventually by an Amiga 500 which I had a 20 MEG HD and then by sucession of PC's, both bought whole and self built.

[DrOlaf]

The first computer I used was a Commodore PET. My school bought one right in the middle of my CSE Computer Studies course (now THERE is a useful qualification :) ). Before then we had to write out our BASIC code on sheets of paper, and one of the teachers would take them to the local Technical College, type them in, run them and give us the results printout. We had quite a long debug cycle :) .

The first computer I bought was a Sinclair QL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_QL) when I was at college. Gotta love those tape-based microdrives.

Now, my favorite computer of the ones I have bought was one I picked up from my current University's surplus office supply/junk depot. I spotted a NeXTstation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTstation), with its laser printer, sitting in the corner. The guy there had no idea what it was and let me have them both for $50. When I consider what my professor paid for his when I was a graduate student....

[mips]

The guy there had no idea what it was and let me have them both for $50. When I consider what my professor paid for his when I was a graduate student....

Yeah they were VERY pricey back in the day. I always salivated over them back in the day, and after that I was salivating over the SGI workstations. What model NeXT do you have ?

You can get the same desktop experience on Linux with AfterStep, GNUStep, OpenStep, WindowMaker for those that are nostalgic.

[gaspar]

My first was a CP500, a brazilian "version" of the TRS-80 Model III....

http://www.mci.org.br/micro/prologica/cp500_03.jpg

[DrOlaf]

Yeah they were VERY pricey back in the day. I always salivated over them back in the day, and after that I was salivating over the SGI workstations. What model NeXT do you have ?

The guy in the depot had no idea why I was so excited when I saw it. He had no idea what it was - it had been discarded by the Math department a few weeks before, and was just gathering dust on a shelf. At least he didn't use my excitement as an excuse to put up the price.

The model is a black-and-white NeXTStation (the "slab", not the "cube", for those that remember them). It has a 25MHz Motorola 68040, a 400MB internal SCSI hard drive, and the 2.88MB floppy that never took off with other machines. It was DOA when I got it home (probably why it was discarded) but I got a replacement PSU from eBay and now it boots up fine. The display is what you would expect from an 18-year old CRT, but is readable. I even got my old prof to give me his system disks so I could do a fresh install.

I used to love using these when I was a grad student. They were just so much cooler than the SparcStations that were available at the time (speaking of which, I have an SS10 lying around - I wonder if I should try putting Ubuntu on that?).


You can get the same desktop experience on Linux with AfterStep, GNUStep, OpenStep, WindowMaker for those that are nostalgic.

I tried that out myself on my Ubuntu desktop. It found it to be quite usable, and wicked fast.

In case anyone is wondering what the fuss is about, this is what they looked like:

[Cloudy]

This thread makes me feel young. <.<

The first PC I owned was this offbrand PC. Pentium II processor, 64MB of RAM, and a 6 gig HDD. Cost over $1000 at the time. I still have it in my closet. :P

[Steve H]

My first computer was the mighty "Commodore ViC20". oh! the heady days of youth. I even had a 16k RAM expansion cartridge......the raw computing power of it all. In fact I still have it and my Spectrum2+ (with built in tape drive) in the attic. I can't bear to throw them away.

[Rutabega]

My first computer was I believe five years ago-

Desktop

Pentium III
350MHZ
256MB RAM
8GB HD
Voodoo 3

[Drezliok]

The first my family had was a Commador Vic20, but my own personal was a Commador64

[ComplexNumber]

My first computer was the mighty "Commodore ViC20". oh! the heady days of youth. I even had a 16k RAM expansion cartridge......the raw computing power of it all. In fact I still have it and my Spectrum2+ (with built in tape drive) in the attic. I can't bear to throw them away.
if you'e interested, there is a zx spectrum metacity theme available here (http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/ZX+Speccy?content=39881). :D. i rememebr playing jet pack on the spectrum :D


i'm surprised so few people in this thread owned the BBC micro. almost everyone seemed to have one at one time.

[Steve H]

I used to play "Elite" on my friends BBC microB, them were the days. It seemed to me it was the kids of Teachers that got the BBC's. Once my family got the ViC20 i couldn't prize my Mom and Dad off Frogger or Bomber.

I may have to look in to the speccy theme........why don't we include loading sounds in Gutsy Gibbon, make it all retro?!?!

[zeny]

The first PC I had I custom built myself
Intel P4 2.8C, 1.5Gigs of ram 380gigs of hdd space (it is still the same PC I use today)
it came with XP :) Maybe 4 years ago?

Yepp I'm a total newb =\

Didn't really have computers at school do never really got any experience with them, but my brother had one at school so when I visted I used it, its what got me interested but that was on rare times.

[bullgr]

Commodore 64

[Detonate]

I didn't actually "own" my first computer. But it belonged to me on paper. FADAC. 1967.

My first personal computer was a TRS 80. 1979.

[macogw]

I had a Digital Rainbow 100 back in 1996 (though that model is from '82). Never actually got it working because by then the 5.25" floppies were being phased out and if you found one you didn't know if it was for Apple, DOS, CPM80, or what. Add to that the fact that no one in my family knew there was any difference between computers, OSes, and what disk to use...yeah that was a total bust.

[arsenic23]

My first computer was an Epson GWbasic programing station of some kind. I don't really remember it. After that it was an Apple SE/30. Then a generic 133 I bought the parts for at a trade show.

[Medieval_Creations]

Commodore 64

[rai4shu2]

My first computer experience was a pong machine. The first computer I ever programmed was a TRS-80.

[yabbadabbadont]

My first computer experience was a pong machine. The first computer I ever programmed was a TRS-80.

I remember standing in line at the bowling alley, waiting to pay my quarter to play pong. It was so cool... I mean, you spun the knob and the paddle on the tv screen actually moved! :lol:

[energiya]

I remember standing in line at the bowling alley, waiting to pay my quarter to play pong. It was so cool... I mean, you spun the knob and the paddle on the tv screen actually moved! :lol:

:lol:

Not my own computer but there was some kind of "keyboard" with a TV as a monitor... and no hdd and fancy things like that... it used cassetes. It was time consuming, but sooooo funny. I think it was named Phoenix or somethig like that. Can't really remember.

[futz]

TRS-80 Color Computer with 16K of RAM, using a TV for display and cassette tape storage. Bought it in 1981.

[drbob07]

IBM Aptiva PC
16mb RAM (maxed out)
133mhz Pentium 3 with MMX (omg)
And a cool little button that rolled down the front panel

*sigh* and Windows 95....

[futz]

You had to mention the disk drive.... yikes, talk about expensive.
Ha! I paid $850 Canadian for mine in (I think) 82 or 83. Ridiculous!


Were you, like me, a master of the hole punch? ;)
I remember making flippies. Had quite a collection. Actually still have all that stuff. Should drag it out and get it running again someday.

[yabbadabbadont]

Ha! I paid $850 Canadian for mine in (I think) 82 or 83. Ridiculous!


I remember making flippies. Had quite a collection. Actually still have all that stuff. Should drag it out and get it running again someday.

Mine wasn't quite that steep. I got it two or three years later though. I don't remember exactly when, but I do remember the price. $300 US.

[matthew]

I got it two or three years later though. I don't remember exactly when, but I do remember the price. $300 US.I got mine when I upgraded the ram, sometime in 1983, I think. Mine cost about what yours did.

I got my first dot matrix printer around that time. It had 7 pins...and couldn't make "true-descending" letters like "g" or "p" without shifting them up so they almost looked like capitals. LOL

[yabbadabbadont]

I got mine when I upgraded the ram, sometime in 1983, I think. Mine cost about what yours did.

I got my first dot matrix printer around that time. It had 7 pins...and couldn't make "true-descending" letters like "g" or "p" without shifting them up so they almost looked like capitals. LOL

It was many, many years later before I got a printer. Used, 9-pin, 132 column Canon. I used to use a DOS program called "Bradford" and "Bradfont" with it to produce "near letter quality" output. With a new ribbon and good heavy paper, it did a nice job on the first CV's I ever sent out.

[futz]

My first was a CP500, a brazilian "version" of the TRS-80 Model III....

http://www.mci.org.br/micro/prologica/cp500_03.jpg
That's an interesting machine. I still have my Model 3. It's in mint condition. I fire it up occasionally and play games.

[futz]

I got my first dot matrix printer around that time. It had 7 pins...and couldn't make "true-descending" letters like "g" or "p" without shifting them up so they almost looked like capitals. LOL
Hahahaha! Another DMP-100 owner! Now that was a crappy printer. :rolleyes:

[matthew]

Hahahaha! Another DMP-100 owner! Now that was a crappy printer. :rolleyes:That was the one!!! I upgraded a few years later to a Star Micronics (model # escapes me) that was "near letter quality" and got me all the way through the university.

[yabbadabbadont]

That was the one!!! I upgraded a few years later to a Star Micronics (model # escapes me) that was "near letter quality" and got me all the way through the university.

For some reason, "1024", is floating through my head. It was one of the first 24 pin printers wasn't it? I lusted after one of those for quite a while.

[matthew]

For some reason, "1024", is floating through my head. It was one of the first 24 pin printers wasn't it? I lusted after one of those for quite a while.This one was a 9 pin, but it had a setting that would make it go over a line up to four times, for the effect of a "36 pin" experience. I want to say something like nx-1000, but I can't find a picture to confirm it.

EDIT: Wait! That was right...here it is. This is the only picture I've found.
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n6/starnx1000.jpg

[KiwiNZ]

A Sinclair ZX81

[futz]

That was the one!!! I upgraded a few years later to a Star Micronics (model # escapes me) that was "near letter quality" and got me all the way through the university.
This is eery. Me too. Cmon memory... NLQ-10something. It sucked. It was slow. But at the time it was ok.

EDIT: Oh, I see someone else's post about it. Maybe it was NX-10 something. Maybe just NX-10? Too long ago. I chucked it long ago.

[futz]

A Sinclair ZX81
I still have one of those. Tinkered with it a bit back in the day. I never liked it tho.

[cypherzero]

A ZX Spectrum +2! It could play casette tapes and program in BASIC... that was about it. Oh, how I miss it. :cry:

[Compucore]

The first computer that I had was an actual add on for the intellivision with only 4 k of ram I beleive or something like that. With the audio cassette hotwired so you can save and load basic programs into it. Those were the good old days for programming.

:D

Compucore

[weedmonk]

IBM Aptiva M53.

100Mhz Pentium
8MB RAM
4x CDrom
2gig HD

Man those were the days....

[montgoej]

I don't remember exactly what kind of computer it was, but we had a computer that was given to us back when I was about 3 or 4 around 1994 and although it only worked a month, it got me hooked. The first computer that was ever actually mine was a custom built one with
450mhz processor
512 ram(that was crazy back then)
8 gig harddrive
and I still use it with Xubuntu :).
~Jordan Montgomery

[Kingsley]

My parents bought us a Y2K compliant desktop in 1999. My mom didn't buy me another computer until February of 2006.

Compaq Presario 5834
65 Mb Ram
599 Mhz
Windows 98 SE

[mikerduffy]

Macintosh 512K. Best gaming system ever. ;P

[%hMa@?b<C]

Macintosh 512K. Best gaming system ever. ;P

I was really young, it was like 1996 It was a compaq desktop with a 5gb hard drive 64 mb of ram and it ran my games (triple play '97 + nhl '97) without a hitch (but I had to reboot into MS DOS mode)!

[dr_d12]

Intel 8086
2 x 5.25" floppy drives
10MB hard drive
?RAM

green monochrome display
9-pin Okidata dot matrix printer

It ran wordstar in MS-DOS. I bought the setup in _1991_ from a "family friend" for $300. Ouch.


(I see you can still buy 9-pin okidata printers!)

[K.Mandla]

I think this might qualify as my first.

http://xs414.xs.to/xs414/07166/2001-9284.jpg.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs414&d=07166&f=2001-9284.jpg)

[Medieval_Creations]

Sweet... I loved my little Professor growing up...
:lolflag:

[forrestcupp]

Commodore 64 - 64Kb RAM, ~2 mhz processor
started with a tape drive and amber monitor
upgraded to 1540 disk drive and a color tv
later I was lucky enough to have a 1570 dual-side disk drive and an external 1200 baud modem. I used the modem to access various local BBS's and an online service for Commodores called Quantum Link.

I dreamed about being like the kids on the show The Whiz Kids.

I programmed and freelance marketed an adventure game called "Quest for Truth." If anyone actually has a copy of this, please let me know.

[wuzzerd]

It was a bread-board Z-80 development system. Had a 20 key keypad. Had to input hex code to make a program. Had a tape interface, and about 1k of ram.

It cost as much as this amd64 with 1gig of ram and (of course) a hard drive. :lolflag:

[DougieFresh4U]

Radio Shack Model 4 back in 1979 and at work I used an IBM 5252 (remember punch cards)?

[prizrak]

An IBM compatible 286 when I was 7. That was the first one I actually had as my own. The first ever I used was a network of Russian brand Elektronika machines I think I was like 5 or something.

[Compyx]

Commodore 64 - 64Kb RAM, ~2 mhz processor

You sure about 2 MHz? I think you're thinking about the C128, which could run at ~2MHz (by setting some bit in $d030), the C64's run at about 1MHz, 0.987Mhz for PAL systems and ~1.02MHz for NTSC systems.

I remember a guy telling me he might have found a way to make the CPU run at 2 or even 4 MHz: the next time I met him his C64 was fried, of course this had nothing to do with his little experiment, so he claimed :D

[steven8]

I think this might qualify as my first.

http://xs414.xs.to/xs414/07166/2001-9284.jpg.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs414&d=07166&f=2001-9284.jpg)

We found one of those recently at a Goodwill store. I hadn't seen one in years. My boys love it!

[twowheeler]

Heh, all you young whipper snappers ...

The first comp I ever used was the teletype machine at my high school that could dial in to the DEC PDP-11 at the school district building. The modem was the kind that had rubber cups so that you could set the telephone handset on it after you dialed the number. You could send characters at the blazing speed of 110 baud so if you typed fast enough you could overrun the buffer. It just ran Basic. If you wanted to save your program, you could print to the paper tape attachment, with holes punched for data recording. Now that was cool. :)

That would have been 1975 or so.

The first one I owned though was a 286 with 1 MB of ram. I paid extra to get the 10 mhz speed model. It was from PC's Limited, the company which later became Dell. A monochrome monitor in a kind of sick orange color. Dang, it was expensive too, at $2,000.

Beat that!

:popcorn:

[MrHorus]

I'm British - it was never going to anything other thana ZX Spectrum :D

[forrestcupp]

You sure about 2 MHz? I think you're thinking about the C128, which could run at ~2MHz (by setting some bit in $d030), the C64's run at about 1MHz, 0.987Mhz for PAL systems and ~1.02MHz for NTSC systems.

I remember a guy telling me he might have found a way to make the CPU run at 2 or even 4 MHz: the next time I met him his C64 was fried, of course this had nothing to do with his little experiment, so he claimed :D

Yeah, that sounds right. I remember 1.02 mhz on my NTSC system.

Also, for my C64 I ended up getting an Okimate color printer. That was an amazing thing in the commodore days. I think it had 3 colored heat transfer ribbons and it had to print each line 3 times. Slow, but cool. The things it printed looked better than what the C64 was able to display on the screen.

[catsgomoo]

I had an old Atari ST. I remember that thing had some amazing games on it. Barbarian (also known as Death Sword. It's one of the first 1on1 fighting games, and you could decapitate your opponent!) was one of my favorites, and a couple games by Psygnosis, too. Oh, and the old dungeon crawler "Dungeon Master!" That was a great game!

http://www.viewtouch.com/a130st.jpg

Later I got a 286 with a huge ol' 30mb hard drive and 1mb of ram. I remember when I first got Wolfenstein 3d. It game as a free demo when I orded a few games by Appogee. What a deal that was! I got the first three Commander Keen games, the original Duke Nukem side-scrolling game, and the Wolfenstein demo all for like $14. I remember the disks came in a really cheap looking box and plastic zip-lock bags.

[samjh]

First computer my family owned was a Macintosh LC II.

The first computer I used was an IBM-compatible clone, with the revolutionary Intel 8086 CPU. The place also had 8088 computers for general teaching, and some Ataris and Commodores for gaming. Ah... the days when floppy drives were really floppy, and hard drives belonged to mainframes. :D

[forrestcupp]

First computer my family owned was a Macintosh LC II.

The first computer I used was an IBM-compatible clone, with the revolutionary Intel 8086 CPU. The place also had 8088 computers for general teaching, and some Ataris and Commodores for gaming. Ah... the days when floppy drives were really floppy, and hard drives belonged to mainframes. :D

Remember when hard disks were what we call 3.5 inch floppies (which no one even uses anymore)? I dreamed about having one of those.

[mips]

i'm surprised so few people in this thread owned the BBC micro. almost everyone seemed to have one at one time.

I don't think they were that popular outside of the UK. You could get them here but somehow people weren't interested. My uncle had a Acorn though.

[mips]

I had a Digital Rainbow 100 back in 1996 (though that model is from '82). Never actually got it working because by then the 5.25" floppies were being phased out and if you found one you didn't know if it was for Apple, DOS, CPM80, or what.

It did not really matter what floppies you got as you could just format them. My apple floppies could be formatted in a PC and vice versa. The only thing you had to check for was the disk density.

[mips]

They were just so much cooler than the SparcStations that were available at the time (speaking of which, I have an SS10 lying around - I wonder if I should try putting Ubuntu on that?).


Why not, give it a bash ;)

[mips]

lol, maybe we should have an age restriction on this thread. x86 PCs are just not interesting :)

[m0r1arty]

Sinclair Spectrum ZX80 (rubber keys)

Learned Pascal and Comal on that :)

Atari STFM afterwards and yes catsgomoo Dungeon Master was brilliant!! you can download it for free at archive.org you know.

Then a lovely 386 and so on till now.

-m0r

[TechSys]

First computer = Tandy Model 1
Second = Tandy Model II
Third = Tandy Model III

Then a Ti99/4a and a Timex Sinclair (built the sinclair from a kit)

Ran a BBS (remember those?) on a Packard Bell 286

Have had 3 Radio Shack cocos, they actually still run.

[matthew]

Ran a BBS (remember those?) on a Packard Bell 286I was quite active on several. My first modem was a 300 baud! I remember stepping up to the 1200 baud and feeling like I was flying. :) Now I often wish my ADSL wasn't "only" 2mbps.


Have had 3 Radio Shack cocos, they actually still run.Wow!

[bonzodog]

My first Computer was also, like some others here, a Sinclair ZX-81, followed by a ZX-Spectrum 16k, followed by the 48k, followed by the Spectrum +, which had a proper keyboard, and a built in tape drive!. We then got a Commodore 16, followed by a Commodore Plus 4 (weird piece of kit, blew up on us one day), followed by a Commodore 128.

Then, came the first PC, and old Toshiba 8086 with 2 5.25" floppy drives, a monochrome monitor (orange), and wordperfect on DOS 3.0.

That one was owned by my grandparents, my grandmother was a secretary for the local council.
The first PC I got my hands on was a true Unix PC, a Hewlett-Packard in 1989, with a touch sensitive monitor and HP-UX on it.

I then had a break from owning PC's until 1997, when I got a Pentium 1 PC 133MHz, with 128MB of Ram, and windows 98se. Suffice to say, I used windows for about a week, tried to litestep it, (my experience with Linux and the net the previous year had opened my eyes, and found the windows UI unusable), accidentally removed shell.ini, and got a General Protection fault.

I had bought a Linux book the previous week, and it came with Caldera 1.3 (later taken over by SCO), so I installed that, and have never gone back. It has been Linux as a sole OS since then on all the home PC's.

[king minger]

EDIT: Wait! That was right...here it is. This is the only picture I've found.
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n6/starnx1000.jpg
definitely had one of those (and several model prior and after...) what i remember was the volume! and the smoked plastic lid cut the noise level in half, but..... they always broke after a couple of weeks.... good old star!

btw, i can't remember the model num either:(

also, just had a retro weekend with some friends (sadly not so much retro happened this time... some mame and that was about it... the weather was too good and BBQ and beer took over!) so tried firing up my GF's amstrad CPC6128.... it flew, BUT the disk drive let us down as the belt drive on it was shot.... :(:(

next time eh?

[freduardo]

When I was maybe 9 or 10, we got our first family computer. An IBM PS1 or 2.

http://www.system-cfg.com/photos/ibm_2011_1.jpg

Don't really remember much about it, except that it had 3 awesome games on it: Outrun, Wolfenstein 3d and Stunts.

We got rid of it after a few years because we didn't use it anymore, and we thought it was to old/slow...

Now I wish we had kept on to it, I would have loved to put linux on it and see what was possible.

[EdThaSlayer]

My first pc is still around. It does have a nice Pentium 4(1,5 ghz) and a Nvidia Geforce 2 card.

[matthew]

definitely had one of those (and several model prior and after...) what i remember was the volume! and the smoked plastic lid cut the noise level in half, but..... they always broke after a couple of weeks.... good old star!

btw, i can't remember the model num either:(:) I also remember the feed slot for the pin feed paper was in the bottom of the printer, so I had to buy special legs for the thing to stand on, up off the table a bit, so the paper could enter.

Aahh, good times.


also, just had a retro weekend with some friends (sadly not so much retro happened this time... some mame and that was about it... the weather was too good and BBQ and beer took over!) so tried firing up my GF's amstrad CPC6128.... it flew, BUT the disk drive let us down as the belt drive on it was shot.... :(:(

next time eh?
Call me up! :D

[hoagie]

My family got got our first pc In late 90's, and it was Pentium 2 Mx 300MHz and 64 MB of ram.
It's still in our office but for a long time now nobody used it. So I opened the case cleaned it up, and installed Ubuntu Server 6.10 on it.
Now it hosts my website!:guitar:

[muguwmp67]

My family's first pc was an Apple ][, my Dad had to have one shortly after they first came out. After that we moved to an IBM PC, IBM XT, IBM 286, Mac Plus (my college PC), IBM 386, and so on.

[roachk71]

My first was a Timex/Sinclair 1000, back in 1983...

Everybody would find me either watching Robotech, or trying to write a program for that computer (I was among those who absolutely despised its membrane keyboard!) It was tedious, to say the least. And its display routines were very slow.

The very first computer I've used, though, was a 32k Apple II Plus in grade school. Come to think of it, in the early '90s I owned two Apples: a II Plus, and //e, and had 'em networked through their serial cards...Memories indeed.

My favorite hack on the //e was writing programs that used the 80-column card's (undocumented) double-hires feature!

[yabbadabbadont]

Radio Shack Model 4 back in 1979 and at work I used an IBM 5252 (remember punch cards)?

My dad taught me how to read EBCDIC off of punch cards when I was in grade school. He was attending a local community college on the GI Bill and they only had one keypunch machine that printed what was punched onto the top of the cards. (and dad is a lousy typist...) He'd give the cards to me as he punched them and I would write what was punched on the top of the card. That way he could catch typo's while he was still at the machine. I also remember the cardboard clock face that only had an hour hand on it. It was beneath the sign that read, "The system will be down until..." Ahhh, the good old days. :lol:

[yabbadabbadont]

Ran a BBS (remember those?) on a Packard Bell 286

I've got a Packard Bell 486-50 sitting next to me... used to use it for old DOS games until DosBox matured.

[yabbadabbadont]

I was quite active on several. My first modem was a 300 baud! I remember stepping up to the 1200 baud and feeling like I was flying.

Me too. At 1200 baud you could watch it draw each line, then when I upgraded to 2400 baud, it would draw the whole screen at once! Woo Hoo! (a whole screen of text that is ;))

I've still got a Radio Shack 300 baud acoustic modem that is still in the original packaging. It is full/half duplex switchable (manually) and has soft rubber couplers so that it can comfortably fit any style of telephone handset... :lol:

(I wonder what I could get for it on E-Bay?)

[caish5]

Commodore 64
My dad got it for em when i was 8 in 1984.
Oh great now i feel ancient!!
After that i had an Amiga 500 (best computer ever!!!)

Then a collection of pc boxes starting with an Amstrad 286

[Trebuchet]

Commodore 64 for me too. Man, it's amazing how far computers have come since then.

[fistfullofroses]

The first computer I ever had was an 8088. It had 64kb ram, and a 2mb HD. 5 1/2 floppy. I eventually had a 14.4 kbps modem, and eventually had a 3 1/4 floppy drive but it was 720kb not 1.44mb. I used a braile display. I was running some form of unix at the time. I do not remember exactly what. I know in 93 I toyed with MINIX and then heard about Linux on a BB thus I switched, and shortly thereafter I built a new machine seeing as I was ceasing to be able to work well with others on my by then antiquated hardware. Seems such a far cry from what I am now running. That computer was around 2000 USD when I got it for my birth day. Now I can put together a machine for around a quarter of that price that usually has hundreds of times it's power.

[fistfullofroses]

My first was a TI-99/4A. Even had the expansion box that gave me a whopping 48KB of RAM and two 5 1/4" single-sided floppy drives! :D And I probably did more programming on that thing than I have on PCs since...! Even did some assembly programming on it.

You were f---ing 1337

[cantormath]

The Vic20 way back when. :)

4 color radioShack, two 5.25 drives, keyboard and screen one drive, Zork was the only game I had, and it had a orange reset button. I still wish I had that machine.

[Nimefurahi]

My very first hobby "computer" was one that I had built in 1965. It had a singular purpose, that of solving quadratic equations via truth tables. I had fun making flip-flops and counters, "and" gates and "or" gates all utilizing 6SN7 "valves" or vacuum tubes as they're called in the States. Ah yes, those were the days! Then came along transistors. Wow! My home built machines became much smaller in size.

But my very first "store bought" computer was the Scottish built Sinclair ZX-81. I quickly had to learn how to program assembly language for the Z80 processor where every byte had a purpose. (I sure wish today's young programmers could do the same ) Best thing I ever did with that ol' ZX-81 was to upgrade the RAM to 16kb and turn it into a spread-spectrum analyzer that could also control my 10 meter ham radio (homebrew).

I only share this as I've seen a few here on the thread who are near to me in age.

You'll excuse me now. I'm off for a nice bowl of stewed prunes.

[pseudonym]

Does a pocket calculator count? Or how about the handheld electronic game of "Battlestar Galactica" circa 1979? (beep..baddup..beep..beep..beep..beep :) )

In the 80s I wasn't big in to computers, but I used to play around sometimes on friends' Vic 20s and Apple IIs. But the first 'real' computer that I bought for myself was a 386 SX33 with 4MB RAM, an 80MB hard drive, some early 3D video card whose name I've long since forgotten, and an ISA Soundblaster. That was 1993 and I have fond memories of playing Wolfenstein 3D into the wee hours. I can't say I miss Windows 3.1, though. :)

[Pikestaff]

Commodore 64 for me!


You used a computer when you were 2 years old?

I did! I've got the pictures to prove it too, sitting there in diapers with a joystick in hand ;)

[seshomaru samma]

My first PC was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=223) - 16 Kb RAM
My second , however, was (/is) a Dell Dimension which I still have, with 1Gb RAM

[Unity]

hmm my first computer was an Oric Atmos with 48 k ram and ... 8 colors if i remember correctly :)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Oric_Atmos_01.jpg/300px-Oric_Atmos_01.jpg

[Kunstar]

my first comp back in the day was an amiga 500!

[forrestcupp]

my first comp back in the day was an amiga 500!

I used to dream about being able to have an amiga because the graphics were so much better than a commodore.

[futz]

I've still got a Radio Shack 300 baud acoustic modem that is still in the original packaging. It is full/half duplex switchable (manually) and has soft rubber couplers so that it can comfortably fit any style of telephone handset... :lol:

(I wonder what I could get for it on E-Bay?)
I still have one of those. Used it with my TRS-80 Coco and Model 3. That thing was terrible! Hadda be so quiet so you'd get a good download.

[jgrabham]

I can't say I miss Windows 3.1, though. :)

I do. I loved that OS!

(Is it me or was 3.1 more stable than 98 ever was)

[mips]

You were f---ing 1337

In those days you kinda had to be 1337 to use a computer. It struck me more as a hobbyist past time. Many people programmed, mostly in Basic but many of us also coded Assembly the way 'real men' did :)

Many people also did home brew electronics projects for their computers. Some people actually built their own computers, my uncle did a 6809 based system from Elektor Magazine that was suppose to run FlexOS

[yabbadabbadont]

many of us also coded Assembly the way 'real men' did :)

Bah! Real men flipped toggle switches on the front panel to enter the op-codes needed to boot the paper tape...

:lol:

[Swab]

Hmm, first computer I remember using was a Sinclair ZX81. The first computer that was "mine" was a BBC B.

[Steve H]

Thought some of you might like to the some reminders of the heady days of youth........Ah! the good ol'days......

25 years of Spectrum - BBC news (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6572711.stm) and the Original Commercial (http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/zx_spectrum_is_25_years_old.php)

[forrestcupp]

In those days you kinda had to be 1337 to use a computer. It struck me more as a hobbyist past time. Many people programmed, mostly in Basic but many of us also coded Assembly the way 'real men' did :)

Many people also did home brew electronics projects for their computers. Some people actually built their own computers, my uncle did a 6809 based system from Elektor Magazine that was suppose to run FlexOS

Yeah, I did some assembly on my C64. I knew what almost every memory location in the kernel ROM was used for. I started to learn some C and Pascal, but they were pretty worthless on a Commodore.

I remember once running to Radio Shack and Munier's Electronics to scrounge up the parts I needed to build an audio sampling expansion card/microphone for my C64. I was going to use a cassette tape case to house the electronics. That was an amazing thing back then. It wasn't a regular thing to get speech/audio samples on a computer at that time. When I was about halfway finished with the project, I saw in a magazine that I could just buy one for $15. So I scrapped my project and bought one.

[ComplexNumber]

i thought that this thread would be an appropriate place to put this (http://www.theregister.com/2007/04/23/spectrum_zx_25/) article. its about thezx spectrum being 25 years old today. happy brithday, zx spectrum ;).


Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum is a quarter of a century old today. The machine that really launched the UK IT industry hit the streets of a depressed Britain on 23 April, 1982.

The Falklands War was properly kicking off, skirt-bothering Europhiles Bucks Fizz were number one with their unforgettable hit My Camera Never Lies [no, us either], and new romantic coal miners were using yellowed ration books as makeshift lavatory paper while they waited in million-strong lines for their Giro - if they weren't being beaten up by skinheads.


Dark days, then. But lo, along came bespectacled Messiah Sir Clive Sinclair with the successor to his 1981 release, the black-and-white ZX-81 [see what he did there?]. The ZX Spectrum boasted a visual cortex-melting eight colours at 256 x 192 resolution, blistering 3.5MHz CPU, and crucially, a crisp-repelling vulcanised rubber keyboard.
It gave a nation of spods a good reason not to go outside, paving the way for a generation UK IT triumphs, like the National Programme for IT.

[orange2k]

C64 first only with a cassette player, then I upgraded with 1541 floppy drive...
I still have it in working condition to remember the good old days...

[kelvin spratt]

sinclair something was mine in the late 70s it only ever played 1 game

[happy-and-lost]

Acorn Archimedes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes) that the school was going to throw out. It had 3 playable games (My World 1 & 2, Geordie Racer), a text editor, calculator and paint software. All in 16 colours. Rock on.

[JerseyShoreComputer]

Apple ][+ in the mid 80's... boy I miss it, especially Ultima and Apple Adventure... Eventually has a //e and //gs after that, but that Apple ][+ was sure fun to mess with! I think it is in my parents attic, maybe it is time to dig it out!

Here is another good question - What was everyones first on-line expirience? Mine was with the old BBS systems back in the 80's Appel days... All text - what fun!

[matthew]

Sad news for my Amiga friends: Fred Fish is dead. http://spindazzle.org/greenblog/index.php?/archives/60-Fred-Fish.html

One of my close friends knew him personally.

[The Joe]

I don't remember too much about it but I still have it under my stairs! It has Win 95 on it and I would have been around 5 or 6. (Born 1993).
I remember it was one size below 800x600 or even that and the moniter was on top of the computer, which is a deign I think they should go back to. I guess it had around 64mb RAM and I also remember messing it up, I renamed things ^^

[ezphilosophy]

TRS-80 Color Computer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer) (version 1) in 1981

I just remember I had a Tandy 64K. I think it was this one (attached image).

Are you sure you had that computer in '81? I thought I got mine in about '87. Seems like yours would have been a bit "advanced" for '81. :)

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/2/27/320px-TRS-80_Color_Computer_2-64K.jpg

[matthew]

Are you sure you had that computer in '81? I thought I got mine in about '87. Seems like yours would have been a bit "advanced" for '81. :)Yeah, it was definitely 1981. The original Coco (silver, like mine) came out in 1980.

[ThinkBuntu]

Apple IISI

[futz]

I just remember I had a Tandy 64K. I think it was this one (attached image).

Are you sure you had that computer in '81? I thought I got mine in about '87. Seems like yours would have been a bit "advanced" for '81. :)
The first CoCo's were available in 1981. They were silver/grey with the crappy chiclet keyboard. I still have mine. I also have a couple of those newer models.

[jerrylamos]

In '82 as an IBM employee I got a chance on the original IBM PC. 64 mb, 5.25" diskettes. While waiting for my delivery I got a Radio Shack Color Computer. My wife and I've been into PC's ever since. She's a Comp Sci instructor; I used them as I worked on the largest IBM commercial computers. Today you'd class us as "ordinary desktop computer users" since we are into applications such as internet browsing, videos, LAN file sharing, digital picture processing, word processing, spreadsheets, internet mail (AOL & Yahoo), ...

Our three children have used computers as soon as they were old enough to run a keyboard & mouse. They all three use computers as a tool at work and home. None of us are into games and eye candy. All of us spend more time on computers than TV. I was heavy into Feisty Alpha and Beta (with bruises); all the rest are on XP.
Cheers, Jerry:)

[mips]

Sad news for my Amiga friends: Fred Fish is dead. http://spindazzle.org/greenblog/index.php?/archives/60-Fred-Fish.html

One of my close friends knew him personally.

Thats sad. The Fish Disks were very popular and Fred made great contributions to the Amiga community.

[mips]

Apple IISI

I was a bit confused by that as i never knew of a apple IIsi, I had to go google it to find out it was a Macintosh.

[koshimazaki]

Atari 130XE. Sometimes I wish I hadn't given it away...

[forrestcupp]

Does anyone remember the Intellivision computer? My uncle had one. It was a computer that you could hook up to your Intellivision game system. The main thing it was used for was to customize games. I think it could display 4 colors on the screen at a time.

[mips]

Does anyone remember the Intellivision computer? My uncle had one. It was a computer that you could hook up to your Intellivision game system. The main thing it was used for was to customize games. I think it could display 4 colors on the screen at a time.

Can be seen here:
http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/media/83catalog.html

[ephman]

commodore pet built by university of waterloo grad students.

[Eric Layne]

Texas Instruments TI99-4A. It was ridiculously easy to write BASIC programs on this computer, and it used cassettes as external data storage; turn up the volume on your cassette player and you could listen to your data being squirt to the computer... i get misty thinking of those early days...

[dpar]

Timex Sinclair. Then I did a massive uprade to a Commidor 64.

[talcite]

I'm not sure what was the oldest computer I had. I had several... the 486, the 386, the 286... and I think i called the oldest one the 086 =P ... hey I was 5 at the time. Either way, I remember it having lotus 123 and dos, that's about it =D.

[ablaze]

I would love to know the c.v. of your computer life.

Here's mine:

1986-1999: Commodore C128 D (using GEOS 128 since 1994)
1999-2002: iMac DV 400 (Mac OS 9)
2002-2005: iMac G4 (Mac OS X)
2005-2007: iMac G5 (Mac OS X) (+at work iMac Intel (Ubuntu 7.04 and Mac OS X))

[P4oL1n0]

2000-2007 Acer Aspire 1610 (Windows/Ubuntu 7.04)

My history is much short :D:D

[jviscosi]

Here's my progression:

Commodore VIC-20 --> Commodore 64 --> Commodore 128 --> i286 running DOS --> Various Wintel Pentiums up through Windows XP --> AMD64 Mandriva --> Ubuntu

I still somewhat regret going from the Commodore 128 to an i286 instead of an Amiga. Maybe that one purchase could have saved Commodore. :-P

[mips]

I still somewhat regret going from the Commodore 128 to an i286 instead of an Amiga. Maybe that one purchase could have saved Commodore. :-P

I would not blame myself as Commodore could not sell water in a desert. All the blame lies with commodore. I went the Amiga route and only got a PC when the PII came out and then I regretted it as the pc was a load of shite.

[smbm]

BBC Micro (Model B)

[Znupi]

From 1994 to 2006 I used this PC:
486 at 100Mhz (on Turbo, without Turbo: 66Mhz)
100Mb Hard Drive.
RAM -- can't remember, probably a few kb or maybe a meg.
Vdeo Card - absolutely no idea.

Which... in time... I upgraded to a staggering:
AMD K6/2 266Mhz
96Mb RAM
20GB Hard Drive
Ati Rage Pro 3D - 4Mb Video Card

Yup, this PC was running Win XP and... it felt like hell working on it. For one, I couldn't use Firefox, it locked the whole system up. Everything was soooooooo painfully slooooooooow..... And imagine, it's the PC on which I first learned how to code (I'm the whiz kid at school at informatics) -- I had a webserver installed on it, with PHP, MySQL, and all that stuff :D. I'm actually amazed it worked...

But now... now I have a mega monster! At least compared to my old PC:
Intel Pentium DualCore 2.80 Ghz :D
512Mb of RAM (it's the only thing that pisses me, it's too little!!)
160Gb of Hard Drive
An amazing Asus X550 Video card with 512 Megs of memory!!

It's a really nice, warm and fuzzy feeling when a window pops up in the same second you double click "My Computer".

[Matakoo]

I would not blame myself as Commodore could not sell water in a desert. All the blame lies with commodore. I went the Amiga route and only got a PC when the PII came out and then I regretted it as the pc was a load of shite.

Ain't that the truth, sadly enough. I still maintain that if Commodore had had a clue back then, it would be Apple that would be bankrupt and not them. Then again, I'm probably very biased since I have only fond memories of all the Amiga models I've had - which is pretty much all official versions ever released. Save the A1000 and CDTV. I still have a few that works...an A1200, an A500+ and an A2000. And the remains of an A3000T.

[Cows]

Lol wow im glad I found this thread :). Well lets see first computer I had..

I don't know the specs since I was like 8 years old back when I had my first computer, I do remember it was a Packard Bell computer that had the monitor and computer together . like the iMac G3. This was back in 98 99. The computer had Windows 95 LOL and my father got it for $25 bucks at a flee( if that is how u call it ) market.

[nerdman978]

I don't really remember that far back (born in 1992 too!) but I do remember this Pentium 2 thing that I always tried to unsuccessfully run games on.

[groggyboy]

My first computer (I bought it with my dad):

a macintosh quadra 605:
4MB RAM -- later upgraded to 132MB
25MHz Motorola 68040 Processor
External 28.8 kbps modem -- when the 56 k modems came out, we upgraded to that.
128MB Hard Drive -- I later purchased an external SCSI drive that held a whopping 1GB!
Mac System 7.1 -- I kept it upgraded to System 8.1, but by then PowerPCs were available and Apple stopped supporting the Motorola chip.

It died my first year of university (2001). Four years later I bought my next computer: a Dell Inspiron 6000. Five months after buying it, I switched from Windows to Linux.

Ahhh, the good old pre-OSX days! Ambrosia made the best shareware games ever. Escape Velocity, anyone?

[compmodder26]

First computer I had was the very first Aptiva from IBM.

Can't remember the specs but I remember it had 486DX2.

[daynah]

I remember the first family computer was a HP and I hated the games on it. So I'd say "Daaaddy! I wanna play Mario Teaches Typing!" (it had a cool theme song I'd dance to) and I'd go down stairs to the DOS computer and I'd think really hard and try to remember the commands to start it (it was like one of those huge floppies). Sometimes I'd forget, but my Daddy'd be there to help me remember ;) It was like an insanely easy command like run A:/whatever but I was also like four and had a hard time holding up that many fingers when people asked me my age.

That's hardcore. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Teaches_Typing)

[TheMatt]

Our old Gateway with Windows 3.1 was the first PC we had. It had an Intel 386DX @ 25 MHz and 16 MB of RAM with 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives. I can't remember the hard disk size, but I think it was a little less then 1 GB.

At my school, we have a working computer with a Pentium (1) MMX @ 100 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, a 4 GB hard disk, and CD and floppy drives.

[hobieone]

aaah the memories :) my first experience and computer i used was a radio shack tandy trs color compuer 3! the one where the compupter and keyboard was one and used a tape deck to save and load programs from along witha few games it had that pluged into a side cartridge port. and the whole thing hooke up to a regular tv screen. after that messed around with an old apple 2 e yay 5.25 inch disk drive vs a tape.

[S29K]

My first was a TRS-80 which I used for a few games and early programming. I remember working for hours and hours just to get the screen to display a message or a craptacular graphic that I dreamed up and make some noises that loosely resembled music.

I skipped Commodore's first two units and went for the C64 which I got to help me with my computer class at school. My first computer class was with punch-cards and my school was very excited to get funding for a new lab full of C64s for us to learn on. I enjoyed making 'sprites' move across the screen and playing the much better games that were available for it. 'Summer Games' anyone? I still have a Commodore branded metal desk that was designed with a small drawer to hold disks and a shelf that is the perfect size for the 5 1/4 floppy drive.

Ah, the memories... :p

[Znupi]

When we got our first PC, I didn't know how to use it and tried using it with the little wheels that controlled the screen's brightness and contrast... I didn't know what the keyboard was for, though :| :lolflag:

[moore.bryan]

ti-94/a (http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/stuurmn/ti94a.htm)

it was sweet.

[dsl]

Apple ][, with 8 bit 6502 processor. Wonderful!

[HumbleGod]

My first computer was like my first sexual experience--I don't remember it particularly well, but I know that it was important to me at the time. And also, in both cases I may have been drunk.

[g8m]

I remember working on a IBM PC at the university. It had 2 floppy 5 inch floppy drives, was is called an XT, am not sure. Os on one and files on the other. Around mid 80's I think. My first pc at home was 286. Early 90's. Had that machine for many years. I replaced it with a pentium 166 moved to a 733, to a 3Ghz, to a dual core 1.8 Ghz now.

[gila_monster]

First computer I ever USED was an IBM mainframe in the late 70s. I don't remember the exact one. The first computer I ever personally OWNED was a Commodore Amiga 1000, which at the time was a pretty impressive machine. (Sadly, fell by the wayside thanks to Commodore's typical marketing habits.) I've coded on TRS-80s, VAXen, PDPs, Suns, HP-UX, and a lot of other stuff, but I can't claim that they were mine.

[Happy_Man]

Uh.... my first computer? It's sitting in the other room....

Really old PIII processor, no video card, Win 98 (kicks the crap out of XP and Vista), and I don't know how much RAM. Maybe I'll ask my dad when he gets home. He'll know.

[n0dl]

An old IBM Aptiva Windows 95.PII 128 M of RAM (or was it 64?) crappy 28K modem, no name video and sound card, the works. I played around with floppix back then and almost tried out slackware if it werent for the winmodem compatibility problems. I think I was 6 or 7 years old when I got that thing.

[hard_i]

75MHz pentium, 24MB RAM, 640MB HDD etc.

[Bachstelze]

A Cyrix 486-DX2, 32 MiB of RAM, 3,2 GiB hard drive. I stil have it running and happily dual-booting MS-DOS and OpenBSD :)

[Matakoo]

First computer I ever USED was an IBM mainframe in the late 70s. I don't remember the exact one. The first computer I ever personally OWNED was a Commodore Amiga 1000, which at the time was a pretty impressive machine. (Sadly, fell by the wayside thanks to Commodore's typical marketing habits.) I've coded on TRS-80s, VAXen, PDPs, Suns, HP-UX, and a lot of other stuff, but I can't claim that they were mine.

You mean you didn't own a VAX...how weird.

[IgnorantGuru]

Commodore Vic-20 - connected to the TV set in the living room. 3.5K RAM. To this day I still write some mighty tight code having learned on that machine - bloatware goes against every nerve in my body. Stored my programs on cassette tapes - reading/writing a 1 or 2K file to tape took minutes! I remember sitting there waiting for the tape to load (during which time nothing else could be done). Back then if I wanted a program I had to write it! (or type it in line-by-line from a magazine, then try to debug my typos). I also had a screaming 300 baud modem (I could type faster than it could transmit). I could also get on the phone and whistle to its carrier tone and it would connect to me and start displaying random text.

Then a few years later I upgraded to an Apple //e with 64K RAM, monochrome monitor and a DISK DRIVE!!!! (5 1/4 floppy that stored an amazing 180K I think)

Then an IBM model at some point, and I got this neat program called Multi-DOS that let you run several programs at once! I was in the butter zone then!

[IgnorantGuru]

The first computer I ever personally OWNED was a Commodore Amiga 1000, which at the time was a pretty impressive machine. (Sadly, fell by the wayside thanks to Commodore's typical marketing habits.)

I had a roommate in college with an Amiga, and he was downright religious about that machine.

[IgnorantGuru]

Were you, like me, a master of the hole punch? ;)

I had to think for a moment what the hole punch was for! That was the ultimate hack - 2 for 1.

[Noah0504]

Well, my first computer was built by my uncle from spare parts he had. I can only tell you that the processor was a 75MHz Pentium. We originally had it so we could email my father when he was doing a tour in Korea. Eventually it turned into a brick. (My uncle broke a pin off of the processor, and he did his best to shove it back in... it eventually gave out.)

[IgnorantGuru]

Wow, I'd forgotten about that trick!
had one of those punches specifically made for the job with a guide to line it up in the right place :)

Oh so you were one of THOSE people - I remember seeing those in a magazine. I did it the hardcore way, sometimes missing and having to take another chomp... the disk would look like something took a bite out of it.

(For those who don't know what we're talking about, the 5 1/4 floppies had a write-allow notch cut in the side, which you could tape over to make it read-only. But it you cut (or hole-punched) a notch in the other side, you could turn the disk over and write on the back as well as the front, doubling the capacity!)

[CautionaryX]

My first computer was bought in 1998. It was an HP Pavilion 6343 with an AMD K6-2 300MHz processor. It's still in good shape and I plan on putting ubuntu on it at some point for my mom to use for her word processing and email checking.

[IgnorantGuru]

I think this might qualify as my first.

http://xs414.xs.to/xs414/07166/2001-9284.jpg.xs.jpg (http://xs.to/xs.php?h=xs414&d=07166&f=2001-9284.jpg)

OMG - between that and the Star Micronics pic this thread is freaking me out. I don't know when I had a Little Professor but I definitely did.

[Ateo]

A Vic 20 back in the early 80s. =) Miner49 was a rocking game. It was played from a tape drive. hehe

[Xappe]

A Zenith DOS laptop made in 1989 that I got from my dad's cousin. No hdd, but two 3,5" floppy drives one for the DOS boot floppy, and one for the floppy with the programs. Had one game, MicroGolf. I also had works for DOS and the demo version of AutoRoute for DOS :P

As a side note I can tell you that the computer melted on the side when I had the ac plugged in at the same time as the battery ack was connected :P Still works though...

Here's a picture I found on google:

http://www.histoireinform.com/Histoire/+infos6/Zenith1.jpg

[jperez]

The first computer I can rememer (vaguely) was an old Epson with ONE 5.25" drive with JUST a prompt screen and one tank type game. VERY heavy, very old and I can't even remember what the model was.

My first memorable PC was the Packard Bell Legend 10CD Multimedia Computer. Specs:

CPU: Intel 486SX2 50Mhz
RAM: 4MB (Integrated - No Sticks)
HDD: 800MB (Might have been less)
OS: MS Windows 3.11 Windows for Workgroups (I still have the restore CD with the install files LOL)
CD-ROM: 4x Unknown Brand
Audio: Aztech Audio 16bit (I still have that card too)

Came preinstalled with:

Windows 3.11 WFW Basic Essential Software & Games
Voyetra Orchestrator
Ski-Free :>
Packard Bell Backup Image Software (w/ Funky Music while it created IMG files)

Yeah. I had that system for about 4-5 years, if not more, before the power supply gave out on me. Then we upgraded to a newer Packard Bell w/ Win95 :P

Still, I was the first one that most techs down in South Texas to be the first person ( I was 11 at the time) to install Windows 95 on my Packard Ball Legend 10CD and bypass the 8MB RAM requirement, installing it with only 4MB RAM using an old DOS memory extender.

Anyway, there you go! :D

Jesse~

[owise1]

I must be really old as the first computer I had I built from a kit in 1977. I had a sinclare 2650 up running at 1 Mhz with 4k of ram. All communication was via a dumb serial terminal (which I also had to build) that "talked" via sense and flag pins on the processor chip. Crap to program but I was able to get a terminal version of "life" running on it - at 300 baud.

First PC - 386XS clone running DOS

Cheers

Dave

[blackspyder]

Atari (forget which model) but it had the built in keyboard and the cartrige slot in one unit. Also had the Tape recorder thingy. I learned BASIC on that thing. man that was 20 years ago. Also used my grandmother's C64 (the first desktop style computer I ever used)

[Spr0k3t]

My first computer was a PET. The first computer I purchased new was an Amiga500.

[mmikee66]

First computer for me was a Timex Sinclair ZX81 :popcorn:

Cassette tape for a mass storage device
black and white TV for a monitor
the chicklet keyboard

Parents purchased that for me instead of the atari game console

Used a PET and Apple II in school
Upgraded the ZX81 to a TRS-80 then a C64


I think the machine I really liked the best form that time would have to be the C64 because you could really program on it

[tehkain]

I couldnt even venture to guess what the first PC that I ever had was. My first PC that was soley mine tho i remember. It was an old 286 I got on my 7th or 8th birth day. It was a handme down but I learned how to program on it.

[gradedcheese]

The Macintosh TV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_tv), and I am not making this up :oops: 32MHz, and I did upgrade the RAM from 4MB to a whole 8MB, the maximum that the motherboard supported.

[Cappy]

E-machines 400mhz. It ran Windows REALLY REALLY slow. 20 seconds to render a normal webpage on Windows XP. Probably would have run Linux fine .. except linux wasn't noob friendly then (imho).

[ramjet_1953]

Exidy Sorcerer II

64K RAM
8K ROM Basic
FDS Floppy Disk Sub-system
CP/M 2.2 Operating System
64 Character monochrome screen with limited graphics.
RAM Pack
Zardax Word Processor Pack
Development Pack

In it's day, it was awesome!

Regards,
Roger :cool:

[orb9220]

May 19, 1976 recieved my first computer a Altair 8080 it was 2mhz with 64k and you could use tape or CASSETTE Tape! In fact Bill Gates sold them MITS DOS. And it had CP/M, Altair Disk BASIC Ohhhh Ahhhh!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

Yes I am a Dinosaur. I Paid $200 for my Sharp Scientific Calculator with Hip Holster. And saw the first LED watch (Huge) for $300 in Japan.

[gnomeuser]

First computer I bought myself was an Amiga500.. my family has basically always had computers so I don't remember the first one I ever used but that one was the first I owned myself and I absolutely loved it.

[xpod]

I`m sure theres another of these threads somewhere...??

Anyway,my first pc was also the commodore 64 away back in 80 something.....it was also my last pc until about 14 months ago now though.

That dont mean i used the bloody thing for all those years of course it just means i lost all interest in computers about 6 months after getting the thing.
I`m still sure that joystick and the Track & Field game i used to play was the cause of my Carpals Tunnel Syndrome all those years later:D

[mcurtiss1970]

Franklin Ace 100

[roger99]

My first computer was a commodore vic20, it was great until I took it apart to see how it worked and it never worked again!.... It's still up in the loft somewhere I believe.

[scrooge_74]

Atari computer, dont remember the model, latter added an external floppy drive which used those 5 1/4" floopies, it could only read them on one side so I had to make cuts to make the other side write enable.

[SonicSteve]

It's so great to hear about all these old machines again, it really takes me back.
I was quite young, 1987 and it was an AT IBM clone (thats what they were called then if they weren't true IBM's ;))
8mhz, or 12mhz if you pressed the turbo button. What was that thing for anyway? Who wanted to make slow even slower?
640k ram
20megabyte HDD,
5.25 floppy drive
I used to play superstar ice hockey (still have the disk), test drive, sopwith, football, hardball etc. Oh and Star Control.

[hakimaki]

Some 286 that was donated to us by a family friend. It came with DOS and thats about it. I remember installing windows 3.1 onto it and later upgrading to 3.11. I dont remember the specs however I do remember the 9600 baud modem it had which I had a great time connecting to a friends computer down the block via hyper terminal which often froze my computer. I later found a DOS based program which made it easier. The days when gaming was fun with Wolfenstein and DOOM....
My first brand new machine was a Packard Bell (Pentium 120mhz, 8mb RAM, 10gig HD) The fastest computer on the block in those days!

[yabbadabbadont]

8mhz, or 12mhz if you pressed the turbo button. What was that thing for anyway? Who wanted to make slow even slower?

Those turbo switches, when not enabled, usually slowed the machine down to 4.77MHz as that was the speed of the original IBM PC. (I'm not claiming that your's did though) The switch was there for those who had games, or other applications, that used timing loops and that assumed that the clock speed was 4.77MHz. I used to have a game called (I think) Popcorn (kind of like Breakout if I remember correctly) that was unplayably fast with the tubo switch enabled. My old Packard Bell 486 even has a turbo switch, although I haven't run any testing software to see how much it slows down the processor when not enabled. Since I have DosBox on my current machine, I don't even use the old clunker any more. :D

[tszanon]

My first computer was a MSX...it didn't have a monitor, I had to use the TV!!! It was limited to 16 colors, but it was cool. If I recall correctly, it was around 1987, 1988.

[LoTech242]

Commodore 128, with a separet 1741 floppy drive. I still love my C128.

[gusjones]

I was a bit late in getting a computer, it was a ZX Speccy +2 (with built in tape drive, but with no volume control! - AAAARRRGH). Oh I do miss my colour clash :sad: ... I just had a thought... the zx Spectrum was pretty much a UK phenomenon, invented by our very own Clive Sinclair, perhaps those in the US etc. will have no idea of the joys of the Spectrum...

Next I graduated on to the Commodore Amiga - that beast was way ahead of its time. For those who don't know what I'm 'on' about, I think I would compare it to Ubuntu running Gnome and the lesser (IMHO) Atari ST to SUSE running KDE.

Those were the days... :popcorn:

[icechen1]

It's so great to hear about all these old machines again, it really takes me back.
I was quite young, 1987 and it was an AT IBM clone (thats what they were called then if they weren't true IBM's ;))
8mhz, or 12mhz if you pressed the turbo button. What was that thing for anyway? Who wanted to make slow even slower?
640k ram
20megabyte HDD,
5.25 floppy drive
I used to play superstar ice hockey (still have the disk), test drive, sopwith, football, hardball etc. Oh and Star Control.

Here is some info for the Turbo button: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button

[regomodo]

never could afford my own pc til i went to uni and that wasn't till i was 19

Can't remember exactly what it had as it was a built to spec thing from savastore.com for about £500

sempron 2800 (i think)
512mb ram
120GB maxtor (a complete pile of crap)
nVidia 5200 silentpioneer dvdrw

The only things left are the case and the dvd drive, and i'm thinking of changing both.

Before that, i used a family PC
Tiny computer
1Ghz celeron
128mb ram
30gb hdd
XP

what a bag of crap that was with xp on it. Family still use it but i put a ati 128mb PCI card on it along with 256mb of sdram

[regomodo]

Those turbo switches, when not enabled, usually slowed the machine down to 4.77MHz as that was the speed of the original IBM PC. (I'm not claiming that your's did though) The switch was there for those who had games, or other applications, that used timing loops and that assumed that the clock speed was 4.77MHz. I used to have a game called (I think) Popcorn (kind of like Breakout if I remember correctly) that was unplayably fast with the tubo switch enabled. My old Packard Bell 486 even has a turbo switch, although I haven't run any testing software to see how much it slows down the processor when not enabled. Since I have DosBox on my current machine, I don't even use the old clunker any more. :D

Doesn't the turbo switch reduce the refresh rate of the dram? thus allowing more cycles per refresh.
It makes it a little less reliable but improves speed significantly. At least that what i was taught whilst doing a course about 6502's and 68000 serie proccesors

[Matakoo]

Next I graduated on to the Commodore Amiga - that beast was way ahead of its time. For those who don't know what I'm 'on' about, I think I would compare it to Ubuntu running Gnome and the lesser (IMHO) Atari ST to SUSE running KDE.

Since KDE is better than Gnome, I think you have that backwards...*hides from the Gnome-users*

[ticopelp]

The first computer I ever had was a Commodore VIC 20. 3583 bytes of memory. Enough said.

I purchased my first PC from a local dealer... I think it was a Pentium 100. I never owned a 386 or 486. I was also the first person in my group of peers to have Windows 95 (hooray for me).

What's really amusing is that the guys who put it together never bothered to boot it to see if it worked, which it didn't. After a lot of head-scratching and trying to make it boot, I and a friend finally found the culprit: a single line of text that said MAKE SURE TO CHANGE THIS LINE BEFORE SHIPPING TO THE CUSTOMER. The people I paid $2,000 to for the computer hadn't bothered to change it. I fixed it, and it booted fine.

That's the first, last, and only time I've ever bought a machine off the shelf. I custom-build all my machines these days, because, apparently, I'm the only person I can trust.

[Pugwash]

My first PC if I remember correctly was a pentium 66mhz with 8 mb ram and 512 mb hard disk. It was a beast back in 1994!

[Footissimo]

First computer was a Sinclair ZX80 - 0.5k of memory if I remember correctly. Was the precursor to the ZX81 and the Spectrum. Plugged it into the TV and you could do some basic BASIC IRC, then had ZX81, Spectrum, Atari 800xl..before getting into consoles and then going back to PCs with a 286 in 1990 (or so) - been PCs since.

[OsakaWilson]

My first computer was a Commodore Pet. It was 1978 and it had a cassette tape drive. However, I loved it in the sense that people love ferrets.

[yabbadabbadont]

Doesn't the turbo switch reduce the refresh rate of the dram? thus allowing more cycles per refresh.
It makes it a little less reliable but improves speed significantly. At least that what i was taught whilst doing a course about 6502's and 68000 serie proccesors

No clue what it did on Motorola processors, or even if they had such a switch. We were talking about 8088 and 8086 based systems.

[Matakoo]

No clue what it did on Motorola processors, or even if they had such a switch. We were talking about 8088 and 8086 based systems.

If anyone's ever seen a computer based on a Motorola CPU that came with a turbo switch, I'd like to know which one (and no, DIY hardware hacks does not count)!

[FerhatBingol]

And Acer 88x86 (formerly known as Multitech) Green-Black monochrome screen, Dos 6 without hard disk. Comes with GWBasic.

[mips]

If anyone's ever seen a computer based on a Motorola CPU that came with a turbo switch, I'd like to know which one (and no, DIY hardware hacks does not count)!

Never seen one in my life. I did do a hardware hack though but that required an entirely new oscilator.

the turbo buttom on the 8088 cpus doubled the cpu clock speed in most instances.

[gusjones]

Since KDE is better than Gnome, I think you have that backwards...*hides from the Gnome-users*

It's OK, some people prefered the Atari ST to the Commodore Amiga-- it's all down to personal choice ...( and good taste ;) ).

[runningwithscissors]

An 486DX2 with 66 Mhz clock speed. Bought in June 1995. Had 7808 KB of memory, storage space of 512MB and DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.1. Was sold/given (don't remember) to someone two years later.

[bigken]

Amiga 1200 bloody nightmare swappings all the time (it didnt have a hdd) I used of games like monkey island 1 2 & 3 beneath a steel sky and fight of the amazon queen the good old days lol

[bigken]

Amiga 1200 bloody nightmare swapping discs all the time (it didnt have a hdd) I usedit for games like monkey island 1 2 & 3 beneath a steel sky and flight of the amazon queen the good old days lol

[Matakoo]

Amiga 1200 bloody nightmare swapping discs all the time (it didnt have a hdd) I usedit for games like monkey island 1 2 & 3 beneath a steel sky and flight of the amazon queen the good old days lol

If you want to relive them, download Amazon queen and Beneath the steel sky from the repos :)

[Matakoo]

It's OK, some people prefered the Atari ST to the Commodore Amiga-- it's all down to personal choice ...( and good taste ;) ).

Heh, I've always been complimented on my good taste ;) I guess that explains why I used the Amiga and is now using KDE...the Atari was good for midi, but otherwise it felt too restrictive to me. Rather like windows actually...

[Elijah]

my first is a regular pentium 3 pc .. I sold it a few years ago , now I use an MSI S425 laptop (ubuntu works perfectly) :P

[Bavo]

Mine was an IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX if I remember correctly
http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/computer/ps2/8555sx.htm

[mips]

Atari was good for midi

Thats the only thing Atari had going for it, built in midi ports. You could buy external midi for the amiga that plugged into the rs-232 port or simply build your own in/out/thru midi wich was very simple.

[regomodo]

If anyone's ever seen a computer based on a Motorola CPU that came with a turbo switch, I'd like to know which one (and no, DIY hardware hacks does not count)!

I think i may have confused the turbo switch with manually adjusting the refresh frequency in bios or via a hardware hack. Saying that i have an inkling my lecturer did talk about such a thing, and i trust him, he has a big beard!

Also, it was probably not 6502's he was referring to but he does have an issue with staying on topic