What was your first computer?

[toolady]

Comodore 64 then an IBM XT with dos I don't remember what version it was my second computer after the Xt I had Windows 3.1

[makntraks]

Circa 1989 - Zippy Epson 286 w/ TURBO, 640k non expanable, 40meg hd, 5/14 floppy, 2400 baud modem running Windows3.1 and a 14" crt monitor. Total cost ~$2500.00. When the 40meg drive crapped out I replaced it w/ a 130meg drive that cost a whopping $300.00.

You can almost buy a new machine just for what the replacement drive cost me....

Moved on to a various 386, 486 machines. Had a blast w/ my dual Pentium Pro's, then I moved to AMD...

makntraks

[FulciLives]

... As it became more and more apparent that the IBM PC architecture was going to emerge the ultimately dominant hardware platform, I purchased an 80286-based system from a mail-order place in Texas (after going through hundreds of ads in Computer Shopper).

Remember the days when COMPUTER SHOPPER was a huge oversized book the size of a phone book with tons of ads all printed on cheap gray colored paper?

The first time I saw the "new" version my heart sank

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[toolady]

Circa 1989 - Zippy Epson 286 w/ TURBO, 640k non expanable, 40meg hd, 5/14 floppy, 2400 baud modem running Windows3.1 and a 14" crt monitor. Total cost ~$2500.00. When the 40meg drive crapped out I replaced it w/ a 130meg drive that cost a whopping $300.00.

You can almost buy a new machine just for what the replacement drive cost me....

Moved on to a various 386, 486 machines. Had a blast w/ my dual Pentium Pro's, then I moved to AMD...

makntraks

I paid $400 for a CD rom when DVD Writers came out I bought one of those for $400 now I wait till the technology is ancient and get it cheap

[hech54]

I got started late with computers. My first computer
was an IBM....and it had a 1GB hard drive.

[budz]

I got started late with computers. My first computer
was an IBM....and it had a 1GB hard drive.

I too started late with computers. I got my first computer 10 years ago a Micron Pentium II 3.00ghz with a little 4gb hd. My first cdrw burner was a Yamaha drive that cost me $450.00!

[hech54]

I got started late with computers. My first computer
was an IBM....and it had a 1GB hard drive.

I too started late with computers. I got my first computer 10 years ago a Micron Pentium II 3.00ghz with a little 4gb hd. My first cdrw burner was a Yamaha drive that cost me $450.00!

I remember backing up DVDs(I only had a few at the time)....but didn't have/couldn't afford a DVD burner yet.....so I'd watch the files in DVDShrink....because computer players(at least mine) didn't recognize folders on the HDD yet.

[stiltman]

Anyone remember Digital's Rainbow series?

I remember them because I still had my TRS-80 and got a summer job installing some heatshrink tubing on about 10,000 Rainbow boxes. No I wasn't by myself There was about 50 of us unboxing/shrinking/boxing all day long for a whole summer.

[edDV]

Anyone remember Digital's Rainbow series?

I remember them because I still had my TRS-80 and got a summer job installing some heatshrink tubing on about 10,000 Rainbow boxes. No I wasn't by myself There was about 50 of us unboxing/shrinking/boxing all day long for a whole summer.

Yes, my employer's IT department tried to stem demand for Apple II and IBM PC at the department level by issuing CP/M Z80 DEC rainbows as terminals to the VAX. This they thought would maintain their control of information.

I and others brought our own IBM PC + Lotus 123 (~$6000) to work. This eventually led to the decentralization of the corp IT dept. with them reporting to the division.

DEC Rainbow 100

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/rainbow.html

[Schmendrick]

My first programming I did using punched paper card decks for an IBM 360 or 370 system at the computer centre of my university in 1973. Then in the same year a CDC (Control Data Corporation) system with CRT terminals was introduced. From 1976 I used Digital Equipments PDP 11 series computers first with RT11 operating system then later with RSX11/M a multi user multi tasking system.

My first own compter was a KIM 1 single board micro computer manufactured by MOS Technology which soon was purchased by Commodore:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=149
First I fixed TTL-shift register chips to it to extend the number of parallel I/O-lines to be able to connect the 4 1/2 digit BCD TTL-output of a digital voltmeter to it which was connected to a photometer in which the change of absorption of UV-light was measured in order to determine the kinetics of a biocatalyst (an enzyme).
I wrote a small machine language programme to control the external shift register chips in order to be able to read the BCD singnal of the ditital voltmeter into the microcomputer. Then the read data was sent padded with some required control ccharacters (carriage return, line feed and hex FF) to a teletype which had a paper tape puncher attached to it on which this data was punched. This way every 1-2 second a reading of the digital voltmeter could be punched on the paper tape.

This paper tape then was fed to paper tape reader connected to one of the PDP 11-computers to produce an ASCII-data file which then was processed with a data evaluation programme calculating a reaction rate of the enzyme used. This programme was a compiled Fortran programme.

Later I extended the memory of this microcomputer to about 32 kByte memory, attached a faster papar tape puncher and reader to it, attached two digital to analog 12Bit-converters and an XY-PLotter to it. Also connected a Commodore produced 5 1/4 inch floppy disc drive to it which was connected via an IEEE-interface. To be able to connect it I wrote the required drivers and a boot driver to load a basic interpreter which had been sold by a brand new company back then in 1978 Microsoft. It first was sold on an analog audio cassette. Finally using this basic interpreter I programmed the whole data evaluation with data input from the digital voltmeter to the output on the XY-Plotter plotting the reaction rate of the enzyme versus its substrate concentration in order to use this data to develop a kinetic model to describe the reaction properties of the investigated enzyme.

Later in 1983 I bought on of the first IBM PC's with a 8088 processor and only 16 kByte RAM soldered on its main board and additional 48 kByte in soccets, without a hard disc drive first and only a 320 kByte 5 1/4 inch floppy disc drive. Later I added memory and a 5 1/4 inch full hight 10 MByte disc drive to it. This PC was used until about 10 years ago for data acquisition with an analog I/O-card.

Later I bought other PC's: a Toshiba 286-Laptop, a 386SX-PC, a 33 MHZ 486 PC, a Pentium 120 MHz Acer-Laptop,
a Maxdata PentiumIII-700 MHz-Laptop, a Shuttle XPC with Pentium4-2.67GHZ processor, a Panasonic CF-R3-Centrino 12,2 Ghz-Laptop, a Sony Vaio SZ-3HP/B-Core2Duo1,8GHz-Laptop and finally this year directly bought in Japan custom ordered at Sonystyle a Sony Vaio-G2-Core2DuoU7600-1,2 GHZ-laptop with a 64GB SSD-drive:
http://www.jp.sonystyle.com/Business/Vaio/Product/G/index.html

Schmendrick

[Webster]

1. TRS-80 model I with 16K expansion interface + 2 floppy drives upgrading continuously starting from 1979 to 1981 (final total cost >$7,000.00 using money I made with my waiter job after school for 2 years) I can not believe I actually spent that much on a computer system way back then... as a side note, does anyone remember a company named Shugart?
2. Atari famous 520ST computer Motorola 68000 @ 8 MHz with 512 KB of RAM and and 3½" floppy disks plus an Epson dot matrix printer total cost ~$1,200.00 (1985-1986) At this time I'd actually got a real paying job @ $5.00/hour working in a company partially own by a friend of the family.
3. Apple Macintosh LC II with a 68030 professor (1991)
4. Apple Macintosh Performa 6300 with PowerPC professor.
5. Pentium 150-->pentium 200--> pentium 200 MMX-->AMD K6-II 300-->Pentium II 300-->AMD K7 Thunderbird-->Pentium III 1GhZ-->AMD Athlon XP 1800, 2000, 2600, 2800-->AMD 64 bit 3200+,3400+-->AMD Athlon X2 3800, 4600, 6000 (all self built)
6. Pentium D 820, 930, Athlon X2 3800, core dual E2140, Q6600 (Dell built. At this time I figure it was more easier and cheaper to buy a Dell refurbished and upgrade them rather than build it from scratch by myself.)

Man,! looking back, I'd spent a freaking lots of money on computers over the years. And most of them are sitting in the garage collecting dust.... And I'm not even working in the computer field.....

[Billf2099]

C64. I did lust after the Amiga for awhile, and my next computer was a 486SX (soldered to the board) with an expansion slot that was perfect for the regular 486 I wedged into it a year later. Things were a lot quicker those last 486's were faster then the first pentiums. Ahhh the days of 30 pin sims. I think the last OS I had in that bad boy was windows 98, something that was supposed to be impossible....

I still have my C64 and the 1541 drive, and about 5 years of compute magazine. Peek this and Poke that.

[DereX888]

I'm cleaning basement... any nostalgic buyers around?

[SingSing]

My was an ohio scientific SBC with 8KB of RAM. A gift from the distributor.



Who is keeping track of these vintage ? Or else Verify is going to win it all

1st Owned: Microkit 8/16 development system (S100 bus box with various plug-in microprocessor boards, 16KB RAM, Memory mapped video (16x64) and two tape cassettes (which worked really well). 1st built 1975

Developed the software for a torque monitor for a 1000HP electric motor on it (8080 Assembler). (Also designed the hardware which included an embedded 8080 with 2K of EPROM plus the signal conditioning bits.)

[serega]

Mine was Atari 1040 STE

[disturbed1]

The first computer I owned was a Laser 128. It's an Apple II clone. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=13 http://www.retrothing.com/2007/12/vtech-laser-128.html Also an older Atari ST computer. The Atari wasn't bought brand new, it was given to me as a present when I was ~14 years old. I had the Laser when I was ~10. Luckily my school district started computer education when I was in 1st grade (26 years ago ) I believe they were either Tandy's or IBMs. Through middle school everything was Apple. High School was split between IBM PC compatible and Apple. Mostly IBM PC's for the programing classes in high school (Pascal, Basic, and Fortran). Now that I look back, computer education was actually decent in the early 90's. I can only imagine what kids have available to them today.

The first PC I bought was a self built 486/100 with 16mb RAM, 1gig hard drive, and super fast state of the art 33.6K modem. This was back when you could build them cheaper than you could buy them.

I've only bought 2 manufactured PCs, a Sony Vaio with a Pentium 233mmx and an HP Pavilion with a P4 1500. All of my other PCs have been self built.

[ChickenMan]

Well I got my very first computer in 1982, it was a Microbee 32, an Aussie made computer with a Z80 running at 3.75Mhz and 32kb of memory. It used a tape drive to load games in and out and I had an amber coloured monochrome screen. Had a Basic, Wordprocessor & Telcom programs in ROM as well. I upgraded to a Microbee CIAB which had a 3 1/2" drive and ran CP/M. That upgraded to a Microbee 128 Premium which I still have and operational. I eventually upgraded its floppy drives to a 3 1/2" DSDD, a 5 1/4" DSDD and an 8" DSDD so I could read and right just about any floppy format.

They went by the way for daily use and I purchased my first IBM XT clone, running in turbo mode at 10mhz, woo hoo !!! It even had a colour CGA screen with 4 colours, Black, White, Pink and Blue and a 3 1/2" all for $1600 aussie dollars. I eventually added a 12 MEG hard drive and ran that fancy menu system called Windows 3.11. I then bypassed the 286 & 386 and went straight to a 486 33, a power machine at the time That was 16 years ago and have had 20 or so different (all hand built) PC's till now.

Microbee info is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee

[MeDiCo_BrUjO]

My first computer was an Atari 800 XL, with a 5 1/4 drive and a printer loud enough to earn some complaints from the neighbors late at night.

Then I changed it for an Atari 1300 XE and got another 5 1/4 Drive... I was the man!, the only guy in my city with 2 drives!.

Then I switched to a Commodore 64C, a great improvement at the time. I will never forget:

load "barbarian" ,8 ,1

Huge loading times... swapping multiple floppies for a single load... low pixels and high prices... 800 baud modems... oh the memories!

My first "PC" was an IBM aptiva 486 DX2 66 Mhz with 2 MB ram and a CD ROM!. I won a few bets with friends at that time... "Yeah, my computer has a CD drive installed.... wanna bet something?"

[Chopmeister]

Mine was an Apple 2e clone from Hong Kong that I got secondhand. The case was identical to the Apple 2+, except that it had a blue CV777 logo where the apple logo went on the real ones. It was a straight copy, and even came up with the "APPLE ][" screen on startup. Originally had no disc drives or Monitor - hooked up a tape recorder to store programmes, and it had a PAL modulator card in one of the slots which I used to hook it up to the colour TV. Later on I added a disc drive, then another, a 15" green screen monitor and a 9 pin dot matrix printer. Interestingly, when I hooked up the Monitor the PAL feed still worked as well so I could (and did!) run it in a dual monitor configuration - except both screens of course showed an identical picture (one in colour, one in green). Great for gaming sessions with friends. I used to give it a real thrashing, and it soldiered on for years. Eventially I gave it to my sister when I got a pc (IBM XT clone, dual floppy drives, no HD, 512K ram and an amber screen).

Interestingly, I recently discovered the Applewin emulator. My shiny new dual-core vista box now runs Apple Dos circa 1979 just fine! Castle Wolfenstein (the 2D version with speech samples from 1984) anyone? Ahhh ..... nostalgia.

[SingSing]

My kid's first computer is a dell 12" laptop. Does that count ?

Kids has it easy now a day. They get scared or start giggling when they saw any Win98 logo.

[DereX888]

Kids has it easy now a day. They get scared or start giggling when they saw any Win98 logo.

So were you when you saw Win 3.1 or DOS...
so were our parents with calculators when they saw grandparents' abacus...

[wtsinnc]

Looks as though this topic is so popular, someone decided to start one just like it on another website.

http://www.techspot.com/news/32195-weekend-open-forum-what-was-your-first-computer.html

[freebird73717]

Looks like we got way more replies though. I guess there are more nostalgic people at videohelp than there are at techspot.

[ricoman]

Apple IIC. This was the first portable computer, the mother to todays laptops. It came with 128k ram that couldn't be upgraded and at the time I remember thinking that I would never need more than that! It had no HD and all software ran from a 5 1/4" floppy. You got a 9" (think) green screen cathode ray monitor and a nylon carrying bag. I remember playing this Battle of Britain game that you had to type in all the instructions for an attack then wait about 20 min. to find out what happened. AND WE THOUGHT IT WAS GREAT! Unbelievable how far we've come.
Oh, and by the way, it cost me $1150+ in the early 80's when that was real money.

[edDV]

Apple IIC. ...

I got one of those for my teacher girlfriend at the time. I still have the box up on the top shelf in my computer room.

[ViRaL1]

Commodore64, then an Osborne One, then eventually an XT.

[SingSing]

Apple IIC. ...

I got one of those for my teacher girlfriend at the time. I still have the box up on the top shelf in my computer room.

What happened to "the teacher girlfriend" ?

[jagabo]

What happened to "the teacher girlfriend" ?

Is this the start of a new poll? "What was your first girlfriend?"

[gadgetguy]

Is this the start of a new poll? "What was your first girlfriend?"

Female.

[rumplestiltskin]

Commodore 64 with tape drive (replaced with floppy drive), Star DMP, green-screen monitor.

Why did you have to remind me? *grin*