What was your first computer?

[Eterion]

Mine was a Tandy 1000... it had 2MB of ram, the OS was a graphical version of DOS.
My family won it at a sweepstakes at Radio Shack.

[grandpa]

Mine was a govt. issue and installed on a submarine. Pretty cool, but it didn't have DVD/CDR drive.

[snowman]

Mine was the grey matter between my ears.

The first silicon based external computer I ever touched was a school computer in 8th grade, an old Commodore PET.

I couldn't understand why the teacher was so upset when I, the last student to use it on a demo, shut it off (and erased the program consequently).

:)

[jbinbpt]

Timex Sinclair 1000. It's still around here somewhere...

[olwen]

Not mine, but my employer's. A Burrough B2500. They also had, but I didn't work on, an English Electric Leo Marconi KDF6

[techrealm]

The first computer I actually "owned" was a ti-94a.

first computer I "ow3d" was connected to 300baud moden from that computer.

oldest computer I used daily was a missile fire control system on boomer submarine... think 20meg hard drives controlled by hydraulics and the "mother board" being in 6 racks similiar to server racks now commonly used.

Oldest computer I ever used a few times, was another missile fire control bugger for a (poseidon missile)submarine that was run by light bulbs, servos, synchros and punch cards... a few thousand tubes as well... gotta love that...

As for get the first computer I ever used... I think it was a tandy, a silver box with builtin screen.. but that seems wrong on further thought...

[Eterion]

oooo! Those TI's bring back good high school memories... I remember playing Tetris on a Ti-83 I had.

[Crush]

commodore vic 20 apart from my brother played with it more than I did.

[Essex_boy]

ZX81 only had one 'cos a mate of mine was getting a computer, didnt know why or what they could do but at 12 you have to keep up with the jone's.

Many years later I was sitting around talking about comupters slating the ZX81 really letting rip about how crap it was etc etc etc.

Only to have it slid off of a wardrobe and hit me on the head at the moment I stopped talking about it, all very spooky I can assure you.

Grandpa: I assume the submarine attached to the computer was a special offer?

[lammert]

My first was a Aster CT-80. A Dutch TRS-80 clone running newdos-80. How happy I was in those early days, sigh.

Two floppy drives with 720 kbyte per floppy, much more than those commodore guys could store.

It had password protection per file. A feature I am still waiting for in Windows to appear...

[twist]

When I was about 5 my dad bought a Atari 800 with a cassette drive. He used to get magazines with game code in them and my mom used to spend evenings typing in programs while we watched new episodes of Night Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard or the A-Team. Then she would back them up to cassette which almost never would load back properly. So she was constantly re-typing in programs. If I recall it had a cartidge with Basic and an open slot for another cartridge.

[jimmymc]

IBM PC..64k initial, upgraded to 640K. Paid $2200 for it in 1980. I still have it and it still works, but it has been dedicated to the attic.

jimmymc

[vkaryl]

Xerox branded PC - 8086, $1200 new in 1984 (already an antique actually). First computer I'd ever touched. Worked great for a few years, until I couldn't do any more uptweaks (like the hard drive - was it 20 mb? - and Windows 3.0, then 3.1 with a mouse of course.... you wouldn't believe how hard it was for me to figure out using a mouse....) and couldn't find a printer that would work with it. I got really good with dos and WP 2.0 batch files....

[Eterion]

Heehee. I almost forgot to mention the DOT-MATRIX printer that came with my Tandy 1000. And the paper that it used-it had holes on the side of it... *sigh* I miss the old days... when a ribbon of ink was merely $4 or $5 and lasted almost forever.
I remembered the first graphical computer game I ever played... Super Solver's Treasure Mountain. Ohhh memories. =p

[bears5122]

Don't remember the specs, but it was a Tandy 1000. That thing lasted forever if I'm correct. Great computer.

[Hawkgirl]

Apple ][e ... I just loved that machine.

[MoneyMan]

Atari 800, then a TRS-80. The 800 was so much better than the Atari 400 as the 800 had two slots for cartridges (As Twist noted).

Remember loading up games on a cassette tape. Pop a tape in, go get some dinner, come back and play Joust. sweeeeet.

Then the floppy's came out and it was a copying frenzy with other people who had Ataris.

[Debbie_King]

Oh God, Olwen - I forgot about good old Burroughs! :-)

Mine was also my employers (NO-ONE had home PCs in those days) and it was an IBM 29 card-punch.

We then moved to the IBM 3742 (hey! with magnetic media!) which used 8" floppy disks that held 72K of data :-)

[webnerd]

A IBM 1440 with 8K of memory
with typewriter printer for a terminal
using punch cards as a data input output.
The year was 1966.
This was a company's computer where I work as a programmer.
Personal computers did not exist.
Every one thought you were a genius if you programmed computers back than.
Jobs were plentiful and wages were good.

[monkeythumpa]

My first one was a Nintendo Game and Watch, but the first "real" computer was a BBC. No connection to the broadcast company, I think.

5 Start
10 print "insert your favorite dirty word"
20 Go to 5
30 End

Then I would move to another computer and wait for the teacher to walk by. Those were the days.

[Milamber]

5 Start
10 print "insert your favorite dirty word"
20 Go to 5
30 End

A fun one in qbasic was the beep command, just remember to put in a bit of a delay so you can move to the other side of the room before the loop kicks in.

[nonstop]

first "real" computer was a BBC. No connection to the broadcast company, I think.

The BBC micros were manufactured by Acorn Computers for the BBC to be used in conjunction with a training course and in schools. The BBC name lent some extra credibility to the computers.

first one I used was the ZX81, my dad used to bring it home from school at weekends, it was the schools first computer.

first one I owned, Sinclair Spectrum 48k.

did they have spectrums in America?

[PhraSEOlogy]

Nonstop,

It was called a Timex Sinclair in the States.

I had a ZX81 which I managed to program in Z80 assembler and got my first version of space invaders running on it after countless late nights.

I used to write computer games for the sinclair computers and got published a couple of times.

AH! those were the days...

[nonstop]

I remember trying to program mine too, loads and loads of hex lines and then at the end it wouldn't work or it would do something weird (sometimes this was better) and I'd have to check each line. hehe.

[George Cooper]

A Nimrod XT (8086?) with 640K ram, a 5.25" floppy disk drive and a 20MB hard disk. The fun I used to have messing with Epson GW-BASIC, until eventually the hard disk developed 11mb of bad sectors and I beat it to death with a really big spanner :-)

What are the oldest computers that people STILL OWN? I have a Sun Sparcstation 2 stashed away somewhere with a couple of old Sun and SGI boxes I haven't touched for years. The Sparcstation 2 must be coming close to 15 years old now. I wonder when computers gain vintage status.

[menton]

Vic 20 with a Space Invaders cartridge I had just got for my birthday...

[thegreatpretender]

..laptop compaq armada bought in 1997 for $2200, 16mb ram, 1ghd. my nephew is still using it now.

[bruhaha]

A PC clone --can't even remember the [long-dead] mail-order company I used) -- 8086 processor, 640K RAM, 5.25" floppy, 20MB hard disk (really "cutting edge" at the time!). In 1987 that, with a Brother printer and MS Word (installed with umpteen floppies!), it cost me about $1800.

The HD was very unreliable -- totally stopped working after about 18 mos, but I limped along with the floppy (papers to write, and no money to replace it!) We moved in early 1990...when I set it up again, I discovered that the jostling had somehow fixed it, and I managed to keep it going through 1994, when I was ready to get something I could add a modem to. . . .

In retrospect it didn't too a whole lot besides word processing (but THAT was a big step up for me!) Best thing. . . NO viruses!

[foxtunes]

"....first one I used was the ZX81..."

I remember a computer magazine in the early 80's doing a review of the ZX81 and it's 1k of ram....it went something like this:

Q: What's the difference between a shoebox and a ZX81

A: ZX81 has wires in it.

Ahhhh the glory gaming days of Spectrum 48k ownership.

Lords of Midnight, Knightlore, The Hobbit, Jet Pac, Elite....Programmers must have been geniuses to milk all that playability out of 48k.

[Edwin]

Owned: ZX Spectrum
Used: ZX80 (the one which made the ZX81 look fast)