Weekend Open Forum: Your very first computer

[Guest]

First pc I bought my kids was a 486dx,don,t know the specs .
before that they had a zx spectrum and an amiga 500,
they were happy days for me,one speccy mag had programs
to input and I sat there for about 5 hours inputting a simple game.
still got it on cassette somewhere!?
Still got the amiga under the stairs,and bought a black zx spectrum
a few years after they stopped making them.

 

[SirGCal]

All these kids with 486's and pentiums.. ugg... Wippersnappers...

TRS 80 and a TI 994A were my first... Then I moved up to the 8088 and 8086 and then the 286 to follow.

 

[andy falkner]

Tandy 1000 TL/2 - 1987

 

[andy falkner]

All these kids with 486's and pentiums.. ugg... Wippersnappers...

TRS 80 and a TI 994A were my first... Then I moved up to the 8088 and 8086 and then the 286 to follow.

Those "Trash80"s had a cassette tape drive and no mouse.LOL.

 

[Guest]

IBM IMS-88 - I think it was around the mid 80's.

No hard drive, 5 1/4 floppy drive built in to run it all. I believe it had 16MB RAM that ran the MS-DOS OS. Was a 12Mhz but had a turbo mode that took it to 66Mhz.

I remember playing wheel of fortune on it; you'd put the disc in to load, go have dinner and when you came back it might be ready to play.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

1966 - teletype 110 baud
1969 - IBM 7094 - hollerith cards
1981- Kaypro CPM
1982 - IBM PC (at work)
1984 - XT clone

 

[Guest]

Well my first pc in the house was 286. Somewhere around 1990 I reckon. 40meg hdd. Which sucked cause not long after that the 386 came out and I am sure they did a MegaPC, megadrive PC hybrid. Would of loved that.
I used to play Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest. Prince of Persia.
I bought games the never worked. And always thought I had just bought duff games, but probably just couldnt handle it.
My first build was a P4 though which still worked until I through it in a skip. As I had built 2 newer machines since then one of which died.

But people have mentioned commodore 64's and Spectrum ZX1's which while they had keyboards they just ran games from tapes, and were basically consoles as far as I am concerned, I never saw them used for anything other than bad football games, or Spy vs Spy. And we had a 70's mattel which trumps them. With its cartridges and curly wurly telephone cable connected controllers. Even had a soundblaster add on for really bad speech.

 

[Guest]

HP-85 in 1980

 

[Guest]

Commodore 64 as a teen and then later on an IBM aptiva

 

[ypsylon]

First PC: 386DX/40 with 600 MB (!) SCSI HDD. Early '90 it was monster, with HDD like that I was keeping data for pretty much everybody that had PC. LOL Those were the days.... Still have this drive (seagate st4702) working from time to time, weight ~8kg and size of small UPS. When it powers up it sounds like jumbo jet taking-off and when powering down like a half dead turbocharger. Fun stuff

Computer as a computer: A65 and C64 with tape of course.

 

[SirGCal]

All these kids with 486's and pentiums.. ugg... Wippersnappers...

TRS 80 and a TI 994A were my first... Then I moved up to the 8088 and 8086 and then the 286 to follow.

Those "Trash80"s had a cassette tape drive and no mouse.LOL.

Yup, I learned how to code 'Donkey Kong' from the back of a computer magazine in the day. That was gaming at it's hard-core. Code in your game, save it to cassette, then you can play... Hehe.

 

[pacav69]

I had a an apple ii plus clone with 2 floppy disk drives, a CPM card, a green screen monitor. Later I purchased a dot matrix printer. It was a great learning tool for 6502 assembly language. I learned to use wordstar, Dbase ii, lotus 123, multiplan and others. My first database was a christmas card list.

 

[TS-56336]

Damn, I forgot every single specs of that Windows98. I might just quote what Bill Gates described the computer where he played Tic-tac-toe in his book "The Road Ahead". It was "huge and cumbersome and slow and absolutely compelling."

 

[Squid]

Late 70's
ASR 33
S100 bus Z80 running CPM

1981
paid 3K for IBM PC from SEARS!
mono card & CGA Card
64K and one 128K 5.25 Floppy
IBM DOS 1

 

[CrisisDog]

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A back in 1980. Anyone up for a game of Parsec?

 

[tonylukac]

The first computer I had was a mechanical one involving rolling balls and and and or gates. Then I had a ti programmable calculator. The first electronic computer was an ibm 370 mainframe in the garage.

 

[LanceJZ]

My first computer was a Commodore 64 in 1983. My next was an Amiga 500 in 1990. I made my first Windows PC in 1994 using an AMD K5 75 with a 500MB HDD, and CD-ROM and I forget the rest.

 

[LanceJZ]

My first computer was a Commodore 64 in 1983. My next was an Amiga 500 in 1990. I made my first Windows PC in 1994 using an AMD K5 75 with a 500MB HDD, and CD-ROM and I forget the rest.

Oh yeah, I had a 3.5 and 5.25 inch floppies and yeah I was poor, so I put it together on the cheap. I wish this had edit, because I'm old and forgetful. I don't remember what it had for video, but I had a SB-16 for audio. I had got lots of DOS games for cheap too. I still have my working Amiga 500 too. I test it about once a year.

 

[Aaron Springer]

Sinclair ZX-81, 1kB of memory, 3.25 MHz processor.

TV for a monitor.

 

[pmcardle]

1990; Used Commodore 64 and then a 286 with 20Mb HD.
1994 (first and only store bought PC); IBM 486DX2 50MHz, 4 MB Ram, 80 MB HD, 3.5" FD - No sound card or CD drive. First upgrade was a second 4 MB stick of Ram, it cost $204 with tax - OUCH!

 

[Cocolio]

In 1985 was a Timex Sinclair after that an Atari 65XE and then in 1996 was a custom built Cyrix 486DLC with 4 Mb RAM, 256 Kb video RAM and 250 Mb HDD with monochromatic monitor, it really sucked.

 

[Steve]

Must have been around 1999 when I got/built my first PC.
Celeron 300A (overclocked to 450MHz)
Abit BH6 motherboard (Intel 440BX chipset)
64MB PC100 SDRAM
Creative Banshee 16MB
Sound Blaster compatible sound card
15” Screen
Standard beige PC case with ATX PSU

That’s about all I can remember - took me months of working part time to save up

 

[fimbles]

Either an acorn electron or commodore 64. Cant remember which, I'm a poor old man, my back is bent, my ears are grizzled, my eyes are old and bented.

 

[VitalyT]

1989, ZX Spectrum.

 

[The Chad]

TRS-80Color Computer. Got it when I was 9. I spent hours programing simple games for it, because my parents wouldn't let me have a game console. Ah the days of using a tape recorder to save programs Good times Good times.