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What was your first computer?

Macintosh IIcx. My dad brought it home one day in 1992, when I was a mere seven years old, and I fell in love with computing. Once he obtained a bootleg copy of Mac BASIC (the real, unreleased one, not the Microsoft one,) I knew that I was going to be a programmer when I grew up. A lot of time passed, I learned that doing any real programming on the Mac required buying expensive tools, and we moved on to other computers (and I learned that doing any real programming on the PC required buying almost as expensive tools, at least at the time,) but I still have a special place in my heart for that machine.
 
i duno what my first computer was prolly a 286 that i clamed as my own when i was a kid i have memories of using the heathkit h89 when i was a todler and playng around with the raimbow 100 we had i was born in 87
 
A clone 286/16 with 1 meg of ram, 3.5" fdd, 5.25" fdd, VGA and 40meg hdd. Came without an OS. Promptly had a friend install Compaq Dos 3.32 I think it was. Then promptly deleted command.com-OOPs. Had it quite a numbers of years. Installed DrDos 6 and GeoWorks upgraded the ram to 4megs of SIPPs and hdd to a 240meg one. Ended its life as a Pentium 133 or thereabouts using bits other folk had replaced during their upgrading cycles. Recycling you know. Kids had great fun with the C64s I bought them. Owned an XT class machine at one point too. Don't really know what happened to that. It just seemed to dissappear.
 
Hmmm, no individual "owned" a computer when I started using them. Most were leased and all belonged to organizations (corporations/universities/government) who could afford to run them. The first system I spent any time programming was an IBM 1620...then follows a long string of other big iron, some really big iron and finally my first computer that I owned--a MITS Altair 8800. I used a CDC 6600 to assemble programs for it using my own assembler.
 
Mine was what my Dad always called a "586" (it was home built). When I was old enough to ponder that, I figured he just meant a Pentium, but with my greater knowledge of now-vintage machines than then, I'm thinking it was likely an Am5x86 or a non-Intel Pentium variety. I should ask him.. I do remember that it ran StarCraft in it's later days, so if it was an Am5x86 it was probably OC'd to 160Mhz - I don't think my Dad did OCing, so more likely it's some obscure chip.. The rest of the system was your typical 72-pin SIMM/SB16/etc. of the time. We had a 2GB HDD though - we were pretty badass. :)

This is the first machine that I, as a member of the family, had a stake in. Prior to that I was too young to hardly talk, but I recall us having a machine that ran Win3x, and before that we borrowed a dual 3.5" FDD laptop (very similar if not identical to the Zenith SuperSport) from a friend for at least one day on which I played my first computer game ever - either ZZT or Kroz, I haven't quite deciphered my memories and matched them up, yet. This was LONG before I could communicate properly, one of my earliest memories.. I've been on PCs since I was barely able to articulate my hands.

Oh, and when I was young we also had a C64 - but I didn't really use it. I was too young and it was too complex, but my Dad and brother would load up games and I played it at least once or twice..
 
The first family computer was an Apple //c with a color TV set.

My first computer was some generic 386, received a little before the 486 below.

The second family computer was an IBM PS/1 486. We lived in Alamogordo, NM at the time, so we had to make the 2 hour drive one way to El Paso, TX to buy it. It was the closest computer store. Then we made another trip later to buy the sound card/cd-rom drive upgrade that came with my all time favorite game, Sim City 2000. :D
 
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I came to this hobby later than most, my first was a surplus 5150 my sister brought home from work when they were clearing out the last of their XT class stuff. (1987?) I still have it. :)
 
The first computer I used was an Apple //c at school..After that I was using a friend's CoCo 2 16k but the first computer I owned was a HC-91 (a Romanian ZX-Spectrum clone)-it's the computer in my avatar
 
My first computer was was a Gateway back in 1996. I remember using Internet Explorer 2.0 on a slow dial-up connection. It had Windows 95 and (I think) 32mb of RAM. We got rid of it a while back, but I managed to save the hard drive. And the sound of that Canon BJC-250 printing, it brings back memories.

My first vintage computer I got was a Macintosh SE. I remember getting it because at that time (I was young and didn't know better) I didn't believe that computers had black and white screens.:) Sure enough, when I got it, the screen was black and white!
 
Let's see - Turing-complete & belonged to me... That would've been a
TI-58C, in 1976. Lost a segment in the display after a few months, and
the shop I bought it from let me have a demo TI-59 - They were'nt on
the retail market yet, IIRC... Still have it.

Jack
 
Compaq Presario 5202. Going to sound bad, me saying this in all, but it's the slowest computer I've ever used with a 350 MHz AMD K6-II, 96 megs of ram and a 4 gig IDE hard drive running Windows 98 FE.
 
My first computer was a rev2 IBM 5170 PC AT. 640Kb RAM, 30MB harddrive (3MB in bad sectors), Hercules graphics card (Capable of doing CGA with a switch on the card) in 1992. This machine was sacrificed to my brother who gutted the machine and transformed it to a 486SX-25.
I moved on to a IBM PS/2 Model 30, later a model 70; Finally I bought my first computer with my own money in 1995... 2000 guilders for a 486DX2-66 :D (What a shit machine that was!) A year later I spent 400 guilders (~200USD) on a Gravis Ultrasound Max and another 400 guilders on a Mitsumi Quad Speed IDE CD-ROM drive.
 
IBM PS/2 Model 25 was the first computer I paid for with my own $$. Although I used computers growing up whenever I got the chance, I never had one in my home as a kid.
 
Dell l733r as a going to college thing. Ended up upgrading the ram to 394meg. Put a dvdrom drive in, had an external cd burner, and had a crummy vanta in before I upgraded to an ATI 9250.

Then my brother borrowed it and a month later it was ded from a warped motherboard. I'd cleaned it, inside and out and did all sorts of maintenance as a way of being nice to him. Month or so after he gets it. It's dead. Not just 'dead but i can fix it', which happened many many times before. I mean Dead GONE.

It'd almost made it to the ten year mark. Just another sixteen months.
 
Difficult question.
I bought myself a Nascom 1 kit when they were introduced, but I never got around to build it. "building" was really just putting chips into sockets, but you also had to provide your own power supply and that turned out to be a difficult snag. +12, -12v, +5v at least, and maybe also -5v - not sure about the last one. And also had to be able to put out a couple of amps IIRC. Couldn't build one, couldn't buy one, summer came, school started again and we had AIM-65 computers to work with at school. But I also used the school's minicomputer (with core memory). And then 2KB of RAM was kind of obsolete so the Nascom stayed in its box, unassembled. So, it was the first computer I bought and owned, but I never actually used it. At least I still own it.

Then over the years I worked with lots of different computers, mini and micro. Apple II, Norsk Data mini, CP/M boxes.. 6809, VAX/VMS. At one point I bought a British-made almost-clone of an IBM PC (I remember I had to call the import company about why I couldn't get it to work with a harddisk - turned out that some interrupt vectors were different in the BIOS. The guy on the phone told me what those differences were, so I just burned a changed version into a new EPROM and it worked).

The next computer I bought was after the AT was introduced, it was a Taiwan-made AT clone with 1MB of RAM and 40MB harddisk. Good computer, and I wish I still had it.. now. I paid an absolute fortune for it. After just a few months the disk was full and I had run into the limit for what it could do. Gave it away to someone in Russia at one point (after it became legal to do so, of course. Wow, all those regulations.. Norsk Data made a 32-bit mini which was modified for export purposes.. some of the address lines were cut so that it couldn't address as much memory).

Edit: Well, I also bought a programmable TI calculator in 1975.. don't know if that counts! :)

-Tor
 
First computer, My parents bought brand new in 1987 a Macintosh SE with 2.5MB RAM.. Been a Mac user for life.. First system I bought with my own money was a 486/33 so I could play dos games.. I also got an original Macintosh when I was in middle school at a yard sale.. Windows is scary now a days.. very scary. Ive since became an Apple hoarder, I have over 50 machines here.
 
Mine was a full-tower 486DX-33 clone with 4MB RAM that my family bought in 1991 (I was 13 years old). My father used it mostly for AutoCAD (which is also how I learned the basic principles of 3D computer graphics) and I used it for word processing and games. I have fond memories of playing Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and X-Wing with my ThrustMaster FCS and dialing into my friend's BBS late at night with our 14.4k modem. Also made quite a few pics using Windows Paintbrush - I've kept them to this day. Back then there was a local store where you could actually rent software - we got our first copy of Microsoft Word (version 1.1 for Windows) that way.

We had a 14" NEC MultiSync 3D monitor hooked up to it (not actually 3D, just the model number). It was a decent CRT but I ruined the casing by placing a desk lamp too close to it - melted a hole right through the top! Thankfully we replaced it pretty quickly. The system originally came with a crappy Trident video card that we upgraded with a somewhat less-crappy video card that could do 256 colors at 1024x768.

Over the years the system was further upgraded (8MB RAM, Sound Blaster, HDD, etc.) and eventually it was replaced by a Micron Millennia P-133 system in 1995. A few years ago I essentially re-created the old 486 out of vintage components and stuffed it to the gills with all the hardware that I never had back in the day (ThrustMaster game card, Roland GM card, CD-ROM).

I have a feeling that a lot of us are satisfying our old unfulfilled childhood wishes now that we've got money and the parts are cheap :) In another 10 years we'll probably be doing it with cars - can't wait to finally get that Ferrari 512TR!
 
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Hi All,

My first computer was called a 'Nascom 1', it was a kit form computer that was available in the UK. it was a single board Z80 system that was upgradeable with an expansion bus and many peripheral add on's. Mine came from a shop called 'Henry's' in Tottenham Court Road (a famous shop for may years for electronics components, and many things of interest).
I gave my whole set up away to a work friend about 25 years ago (and really wish i had'nt !!)
From there i went onto a Sinclair Spectrum 48K, which gave many hour of fun.

Cheers,
Alan.
 
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