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What was your first computer?

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DoctorPepper

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With the 25th anniversary of the PC looming up on us, I thought this might be a good time to reflect some on the past.

What was your first computer, when did you get it, and how old were you?

Mine was a Commodore VIC-20. I got it in mid-1982, and I was 22 years old at the time. I was in the U.S. Navy, on my second tour of duty, teaching the F-14 Tomcat Avionics to new "Tweaks" as we were called. Several of us decided to buy the VIC-20, and for a while, we had a nice little user group there.
 
The first one I owned was a Tandy Model 1000a with 2 floppies and 256k RAM. Around 1986 or 1987. This was not the first computer experience I had (by a long shot), just the first computer I owned.
 
The first computer I USED was a Pentium 1 Packard Bell, & I think it ran Windows 3.1. I can remember the countless hours I spent playing games on it when I was 5-9...
 
That's cool, the first "PC-compatible" (well, almost) I owned was a Tandy 1000. The original unit with the black floppy drive bezels. I bought it in 1985, and my "career" with computers started.

kb2syd said:
The first one I owned was a Tandy Model 1000a with 2 floppies and 256k RAM. Around 1986 or 1987. This was not the first computer experience I had (by a long shot), just the first computer I owned.
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My first machine was an IBM PC, in fact. It arrived at my house around Christmas of 1981. :)
 
First I used was a BBC Micro, in reception at primary school, around 1994 when I was 3-4.
First I owned personally, was an Time AMD machine, no idea which one, with around 60mb RAM runnning windows 98 in 2002, when I was 12.
 
The first one I ever used was an IBM PS/2 something. The all in one 386.
My first on that I owned was an AST Advantage Adventure! 575. (socket 7 Win 95. I loved it and miss it.)
 
My father's first computer was 286 with amber monitor that I have now.
It was used at first by him and me :p. I was 3-4 (!).
It has propably 20 or 40 MB MFM disk and HD 1.2 MB FDD.

I played games. I remmember O&X, Prince of Persia and game that was the best for me at the time... I don't remember the title.
Maybe someone here know game where you are a robot and you are killing monsters.
Dad said, that it had 'cyborg' in title, but I couldn't fing such game...
It was working with hercules card and as my dad said it was working slow on that 286.

First my own computer was I think 800 MHz Celeron when I was 12 or 13.
 
So, I guess you're really going to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the PC, huh?

Erik said:
My first machine was an IBM PC, in fact. It arrived at my house around Christmas of 1981. :)
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I think my next aquisition will be a 486 computer. I have a Packard Bell Legend 316-SX 386-16 system, but it is quite limited (4 MB of RAM is it's max), and I'd like to run Windows 3.11 on it. Yeah, I know you can run Windows in 4 MB of RAM, it just isn't pleasant! Sort of like running Linux on a 16 MB system. It can be done, but you'd better give up any thoughts of running X.
 
First micro I programmed on was an ITT 2020 (apple ][ clone) bought to replace the teletype at school. yummy, graphics!

My first computer was a ZX80 bought as a kit in 1980 for £80, used for a while on an old TV with much eye strain, till the keyboard(?) started dying. Modified with relays etc to do bits & bats on train set, and finally given up on.
 
I was born in 1981, so I'm about the same age as the IBM PC ;)

The first computer I used was an Atari 2600, which was given to my Grandfather by his company supplier, and he then gave it to me :D I was very young, so my father used to play it frequently. The first game (and indeed the first computer software) I ever bought was Laser Blast!

After that, my Grandfather's supplier then gave him a VIC-20, and that was also passed to my family! My Grandfather (from the other side of the family) used to write me educational programs to play. The VIC-20 was the first computer I really learnt to use and program on.

I am pretty sure these where around 1983-1984ish.

The first "real" computer that I actually did anything productive was a Commodore Amiga 500, which my parents purchased at Christmas 1988! It had a Philips RGB monitor, second disk drive and a Citizen 9-pin colour printer. It also came with a memory expansion that upped the 512kB memory to 1MB, and also had a RTC. I think the only upgrade after that was a secondary disk drive.

At the time, a full Amiga setup like that cost £750, which was about a third of the cost of a PC.

That Amiga lasted until 1996, when it was replaced by a Pentium 1, 166MHz!

I still have all of the above computers, along with complete documentation, original packaging and software :)

At school, the computers we used where BBC Micro, and later Acorn Archimedes. My middle school had a room of old IBM PC's which I can remember completing my business studies coursework on.

Interspersed in amongst the home computers where a 486, a 286 (might have been 386) which I never got running right and a couple of other oddities. I never did much with them due to lack of software - all of my friends had Amiga's!
 
Mine was a Spectrum 48k....Early eighties,I was only 10 or 11,Oh the countless hours waiting for the tape to load,to find out at the end that it stopped loading or there is a syntax error:rolleyes:

The Good Old Days:D
 
DoctorPepper said:
I think my next aquisition will be a 486 computer. I have a Packard Bell Legend 316-SX 386-16 system, but it is quite limited (4 MB of RAM is it's max), and I'd like to run Windows 3.11 on it. Yeah, I know you can run Windows in 4 MB of RAM, it just isn't pleasant! Sort of like running Linux on a 16 MB system. It can be done, but you'd better give up any thoughts of running X.
Click to expand...

My 486 has 4MB of RAM. Windows 3.11 work reasonably okay, but as soon as you add something complicated like a sound card, then it complains and refuses to boot. I did up the processor from the original SX 25 to a DX 33 I had to hand, but it hasn't made the slightest of difference :rolleyes:
 
NUTTY said:
Mine was a Spectrum 48k....Early eighties,I was only 10 or 11,Oh the countless hours waiting for the tape to load,to find out at the end that it stopped loading or there is a syntax error:rolleyes:

The Good Old Days:D
Click to expand...

Hehehe. That's why I got rid of my VIC-20 and bought the Commodore 64 with the 1541 disk drive. I was at home (my apartment) one Saturday, trying to load a game from tape. It took (what seemed like) forever! Just as it was almost done, some nit-whit from another apartment drove by and keyed-down his CB, which must have had an amplifier on it, and it reset my VIC-20! I turned it off, disconnected it and put it away. When payday came around again, my friend and I went out and each purchased the aforementioned C-64.
 
dongfeng said:
My 486 has 4MB of RAM. Windows 3.11 work reasonably okay, but as soon as you add something complicated like a sound card, then it complains and refuses to boot. I did up the processor from the original SX 25 to a DX 33 I had to hand, but it hasn't made the slightest of difference :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

My first 486-33 came with 4 MB of RAM. It was fine for pretty much everything else, except for Windows 3.1. It would run, but sloowwwlllyyyyy. After upgrading to 8 MB (and after replacing the crappy graphics card with a Diamond SpeedStar card), it ran quite a bit snappier.

I remember when I wanted 16 MB of RAM. I had to replace all the system RAM I already had on-board, and the whole thing cost me almost $1,000! It still amazes me at how cheap RAM is today, compared with the early 90's.
 
sinclair zx81 I was 23 when I first got it. lol it had a membrane keyboard! that pissed me off when I had to type files :mad:
 
Let's see, I'm 33 now, so that puts me in the somewhat "old" category. In the late 70's my parents had a Sears branded Pong system that I got to play with sometimes. When I was around 8 or 9, I purchased an Atari VCS with my Communion money. Not too long after that, my parents got me a Commodore Vic-20, my first computer. Not too long after that, it was sold and I got a Commodore 64. And not too long after that, I got the 1541 disk drive with money collected and burgled from a paper route I had, kickstarting real computing for me (since I could finally save/copy stuff). I never looked back and have been doing a combination of procuring and collecting computers and videogames ever since... (just an FYI, the first system I ever specifically had in mind to "collect" was a Coleco Adam in the mid-80's, bought from an ad in the newspaper)
 
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