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Weekend Open Forum: What was your first computer?
And there's probably no better way to get you started than by telling my own story...
If memory serves me well, my first hands-on experience with computers started with an Atari 800XL at home and a HDD-less IBM PC at school. With the former I basically just played games, and with the latter I was taught how to browse through DOS directories, in other words, so much for hands-on computing!
Eventually we got an actual PC at home which was a clone powered by an Intel 386SX CPU running at 33MHz, 2MB of RAM and a whooping 80MB of hard drive space. The machine served me well for a while until it got upgraded to 4MB of RAM, a 486SX CPU (40MHz) and a multimedia bundle from Creative Labs that was comprised of a soundcard, a pair of speakers and a CD-ROM drive. I ran Windows 3.1 along with DOS which I didn't drop completely until I was forced to do so in later Windows releases. The use for this computer was very basic as you can imagine. I always played whatever games were available at the time using the keyboard, but word processing and overall tinkering with the machine was the most typical use this computer would get. With the faster processor and optical drive a whole new world opened, there was Wolfenstein 3d, Doom and a plethora of shareware applications from which I remember one of the earlier versions of Paint Shop Pro, which got me started with graphics editing. Of course, the first digital encyclopedias were all the rage at the time as well.
I don't quite recall how much the original machine cost but I believe it was somewhere in the $2,000 ballpark, only to be sold years later for a fraction of that. My next step up was a big one to a Compaq Presario 9240 mid-tower, a Pentium 133 MHz machine of which I also have a dozen tales to share, but I won't bother you with that :).
So, what's your story? Discuss.
User Comments: 70
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My first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48k in 1980ish. Tape deck not included hehe. There was a brief love affair with an Amiga 1000 (needed an memory upgrade to match the popular Amiga 500) but it was just to play games back then, nothing else (but i told the parents it was for schoolwork obviously). After that I had a few consoles until i bought my pc..My first PC was in 1997 - a 200mhz Pentium (without mmx) running on a HX motherboard made by gigabyte with 32mb of ram and a 4 megabyte matrox mystique gfx card that i added a 4mg voodoo 3dfx card to. I had a 2Gig hard drive in it and also a creative awe64 value soundcard. I could play the 3dfx versions of hexen 2 and quake with details on max at 640*480 on my 14inch crt. some games allowed 800*600 if you disabled the z-buffer. awesome.it costs £1514 which translates to over $3k
on a side note, installing the 3dfx card got me into the maintainence side of PCs and thats what I do for a living.[Edited by yukka on 2008-10-24 06:33:33][Edited by yukka on 2008-10-24 06:36:42] -
I had a TRS80 Model 4. We Paid like $3500 for it. I remember it was the first time I saw a 3.5 floppy drive and I thought that was the "Hard" Disk
Ahhh good ol basic programming. I did love playing Frogger and Sierra games on it...Like Zork. -
First computer to actually play with was an IBM 8086; as I remember I had to actually load the OS from a 5 1/4" 'disk' and such. I liked DOS so much I played for a long time with a Commodore 64 - pixel-based graphics and basic system language with 39 Kb of actual free programming space - what a treat!
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I started on a Tandy T400 with a 5 1/4 and 3 1/2, with a built in 8GB hard drive. It was about 7 years old at the time so i dont think we paid the full 1,500 for it. I didn't necessarily learn MS-DOS, however i did learn Tandy Popcorn-DOS out of habit, sadly it has been retired for quite a while now. The only game i remember working was wheel of fortune. After that we progressively upgraded to a Compaq Presario with NEW! Pentium Technology! which of course, looking back makes me chuckle. We got in a bad habit of buying new editions of the presario every 5 - 6 years until i just built a family pc for everyone.
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[b]Originally posted by midlorollin:[/b][quote]I started on a Tandy T400 with a 5 1/4 and 3 1/2, with a built in 8GB hard drive. It was about 7 years old at the time so i dont think we paid the full 1,500 for it. .[/quote]8GB?My first "computer" was a Coleco Adam. [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleco_Adam[/url]Came complete with Donkey Kong (cartridge) and Buck Rogers (on tape). Was mostly a word processor though it did have BASIC (on tape). 3.58Mhz CPU64kb of memory256x192 res on tv screenBad ass computer.
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TRS-80 Model I, with 48K and 2 floppy drives. Worked until I accidentally plugged the power cord into the cassette input/output (both were identical), and it went up in smoke (literally). Replaced it with a TRS-80 Model III (also with 48K and 2 floppy drives). I still have the Model III and the Epson MX-80 printer. Of course, I get my fill of TRS-80 these days through emulators and www.trs-80.com
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My first computer was an Apple IIc, quite state of the art at the time. We even had an external 5¼-inch floppy drive for it. I believe it had a 1.0MHz processor and 128KB of RAM. Great for playing games.My first PC was a clone computer with an Intel 200MHz MMX processor and integrated graphics by an unknown company (it had a cat in the settings tab). Julio was actually the person who advised my mom what to buy. It had a 33.6K modem, 64MB of RAM, and a 5GB hard drive. We bought it the beginning of '98 and cost over $2000, quite a lot of money at the time. First adopters had to pay a premium back then and still do, especially here in Ecuador where computers are more of a luxury than a necessity.
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I joined the computer game a little late. I got my first computer back in the early 90's. It was a Compaq 75 Pentium, 10 gig hard drive, and 64k Ram. I also got a 15" Monitor. Not soon there after, the 120 Pentium's came out. I paid about $1,700 for the whole setup.
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My first computer was an Intel Pentium 150 MHz. It had 32 MB of RAM, a 28.8k modem, a creative sound blaster card, and a VooDoo Banshee Video Card. It had a 4x cd-rom drive, and a 2 GB hard drive.I had a 15" CRT monitor to go with it, and a headset with mic and headphones.It cost about $1500 Canadian in 1995 or 1996.
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Mine was a Commodore Vic-20 with 2k of built-in RAM and a cassette drive for storage.I had a 16k RAM expander and a 16k game called Sword of Fargoal, which at the time I loved, took 15 mins to load! I had it hooked up to a TV and it's RF modulator was terrible.I did learn basic programming on it and played a lot of games, cartridge based and SoF were pretty good back in the day.The Vic-20 was $247 and the cassette drive was another $99, I think.Games were about $15-$30 range if I recall, I got my Vic-20 in 1980.This was an all in one keyboard, no mouse system, with a large cartridge slot in front.
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First computer: A Commodore Plus 4. Dos with four applications in ROM, don't recall any other specs. I learned a little programming, it didn't come with much in the way of manuals or instructions, never learned the apps, brought it back ("Satisfaction Guaranteed!"). Second: A 386SX 16 Mhz with Windows something-or-other (2.0?) Teensy specs which I updated each time I upgraded to a new version of Windows. Windows was a revelation to me, I could DO things with THIS computer! And this one came with a waist-high stack of books, which I dutifully read cover-to-cover (not really understanding it all, but it often "stuck" anyway). Thanks to those I become quite proficient in DOS and Windows and for the longest time was the computer guru for friends and family. Hard to believe but I'm still using the computer that replaced that one, a PIII 750 Mhz.
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Dragon32.I was only about 7 or 8. I came home one day from school to find my parents had bought it and set it up. It was wonderful. I wrote code on it and everything. My gran also did. She wrote a program that made all of these vector graphics do things with suns, moons, space rockets, etc. As soon as she showed me it, she deleted it. Then she said "tomorrow you will write your own." I did with her help. That's what started me off.[url]http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=
17[/url][img]http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/dr
gondata_dragon-32_1.jpg[/img] -
...then, we got a BBC Master Compact. Now I did some SERIOUS stuff on that aged 11+[url]http://www.houseofmabel.com/puters/BBCMasterCompact/
ndex.html[/url][img]http://www.houseofmabel.com/puters/BBC
asterCompact/Small/MasterCompact.jpeg[/img] -
i had a pentium II @ 200mhz, 32mb ram, 2gb harddrive, came with windows 95. dont remember the make tho.looking back know what Used to be my harddrive space is now my RAM. haha.
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Well my first real computer in college was a 286DX with 1MB ram and 40MB hard drive. Yes thats right MB not GB! I wanted to play doom when it first came out so I had to upgrade to 4MB ram. That ran me $179..WOW I also wanted to run a BBS in the background in windows but it wouldn't do multiple things on a 286. You had to have a 386 to do that. Ahhh and the old mem managers and drivespace hard drive compressor. Made it damn slower but you had alot more room..HAHA
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i was one of the lucky ones that had a comadore 64 and then moved onto the apple II gs playing where in the world is carmen san diego..lmao that was more than just a few yrs ago..my buddy actually has an old k pro that still works and we goof around wih it every once in awhile..
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The first computer i ever used was a texas instrument portable with daul 5.25 floppy drives in high school.This pic is of an IBM that looks the same except for color the T.I. had a blue housing and black face[url]http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~hl/c.ibm.portable.html[/ur
]Next was a Comadore 64 followed by a 8086, 8088,286SX,386DX think i still have this motherboard and cpu/fan floating around here some where. Don't ask me why.Its really funny to think back and remeber how we use to think that 2mb of memory was huge. Downloading a 1mb file would take the better part of the afternoon. If you could go make a sandwhich and a cup of coffee and when you got back if your system was booted up, man that thing was just smoking fast. [Edited by intrepid_3 on 2008-10-24 14:43:22][Edited by intrepid_3 on 2008-10-24 14:45:10][Edited by intrepid_3 on 2008-10-24 14:53:56] -
The first computer I've ever seen was a Altair 8800, I couldn't afford it but my friend had it.
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On that first PC of mine... I just recalled we bought a state of the art color VGA monitor to go with it. We were going to buy monochromatic initially but then we thought long term and decided to buy the more expensive color monitor.Eventually SVGA appeared and dominated for quite some time, but that (Goldstar?) monitor was good for running Windows 95 when it came out many years later. Win 95 I think was the first OS I installed and reinstalled on my own. That's when clean hard drive formats started to become hip I guess. Due to the lack of Internet at the time, I think I got Win95 from a trial CD on PC Magazine, imagine that.
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today...[img]http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/26177.jpg[/
mg][img]http://dailydigital.us/uploads/tablet-pc-hp-tx2000
jpg[/img][img]http://www.infiltrated.net/spx/botnet.jpg[/i
g] -
Well, my first computer was actually a Dell Demension 2400. We've never been real "well off", so I was in the 7th grade before I got my first.A whopping 256Mb of ram (compared to some others listed, anyway... lol), and a 34GB hard drive. W00t. Barely run Morrowind, but now it has 1GB ram and a Geforce FX5200, not it runs Morrowind at about... oh... 25fps... XD
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Omega 1000 Booted with a 3 1/2 ran programs from a 3 1/2 Great computer! Darn Lightening! Wish I would have kept it. Kramer
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I was to young to have some of those really old ones xD My first computer was a AMD Sempron 1.4 Ghz, 512 MB with a 40 GB HD :P
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compaq presario 7232 w 16megs ram (had to install 8 meg stick) 120mhz w/win95 installed. had a scanner keyboard, anyone remember that? still have win 98 & 98se cd's that i bought for it
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My first PC was a Commodore 64...had some word processing applications, on the giant floppy disks, of course. And had a shitload of games. Fun times...and the kicker is, the thing still works, and never had a part fail. More than I can say about many machines nowadays.Then, I got a Mac Classic...then an Apple II...then a Macintosh PowerPC..then a Mac G3...then a Mac G4 in 1999...then a 1.2 Ghz AMD Athlon in January of 2000, along with broadband DSL. Then, in 2006, I got a 1.83GHz dual core centrino laptop...then in the summer of 2007, a Mac Pro desktop (2.66GHz quad core xeon)...then this past august I built a 3GHz quad intel (q6850)
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