Gawd, they know how to make me feel old...

[VSpike]

In the "not counted" range I had a ZX81 and two rubber key ZX Spectrum 48k (an issue 1 with the hand mods on the board, and an issue 2 when that broke). Then I had a couple of ACT Sirius computers (early PC clones, called Victor 9000 in the USA) that were cast-offs from my dad's office. The first had twin 5.25" floppy, the second had a 5MB hard drive! Both ran MSDOS 1.0 (although I think I later got my hands on 3.0). We then had an Acorn Archimedes A440, followed by an Acorn Risc PC - those were some of the best computers I ever owned to this day. When the Sirius died we broke it for parts and used the HDD and the PSU on the table attached the A440, for extra storage. Since then, I succumbed the x86 hegemony and ran a series of cheap boring PCs. At school I used some fun machines too. An RM 380Z running CPM, many BBC Model B machines, an Amstrad thing that ran CPM and had Logo, and a CBM 4032 which was like a Commodore PET but with a better keyboard.

[Daniel Pfeffer]

Move over, parvenus! My first computer was a Commodore PET 2001 with 8KB (that's KILO-bytes)! My dad bought it in 1977, and it was one of the first five of its kind in Israel. The Commodore PET 2001 had a built-in cassette recorder/player, which could be used to store/load programs and data. Given that many (most?) mainframes of the time still used tape for mass storage (a disk drive might be used for the O/S and for commonly-run programs), I take exception to the assertion that a computer with a cassette tape was not a computer. I used it for many things, from calculating e and pi (to about 10,000 digits - all that I could do in-memory) to learning 6502 assembly language to game playing (I purchased an incredibly slow version of chess that ran in those 8KB). Those were the days! :)

[Mike Winiberg]

You lot are mere babes 8( This is the first computer I actually owned (though by no means the first that I used), and I built it myself from a kit... [^]

[Joan M]

I'm sure that if I would press strong enough that $%&#@ NVIDIA card it's giving me problems would work here... :laugh:

[www.tamautomation.com] | Robots, CNC and PLC machines for grinding and polishing. [YouTube channel]

[unshavenbastard]

C64, at first with NO storage, as I got it from a school buddy at 12..13 years or so, but his FDD was broken. So I learned BASIC from the manual and wrote little programs, each day a new one :D Until I got a floppy drive from someone else weeks later. Interestingly it came with a mouse. So I learned a bit asm and wrote a IRQ based "mouse driver" moving a HW sprite arrow around, something I'd seen on a PC at a buddy's house ^^ As for PCs, it was a Tandon PC XT, 5MHz, 640KB RAM, no hdd, dual 5.25" floppy, monochrome orange monitor, MSDOS 3.2 or so. With GWBASIC, ugh ^^ The school had dumped it, so I thought, let's try a real PC.

[FortyEightK]

If the Spectrum doesn't count (guess which one from my username) then the Atari STFM - 8Mhz CPU and 512KB of RAM. First PC? 486 with a 25Mhx CPU overclocked to 33Mhz, 4Mb RAM, 170Mb HDD - that thing cost me nearly a grand in 1994. I still have the CPU :-)

[Fran Porretto]

My first "real" computer? Are we counting only computers we've owned personally, or should we include computers we've used that belonged to others (e.g., employers)? The first computer I ever owned was a laboratory-surplus ADDS MultiVision prototype: an Intel 8085-based machine that ran a CP/M-80-compatible O/S that I designed. It had 64 KiloBytes of RAM, two 5.25-inch floppy disk drives, interfaced to an external RS-232 terminal, and was patched together with clip wires and faith. I managed to snarf a 30 MegaByte Seagate Winchester disk drive prototype for it, but as the thing required more electrical power than my home could supply it -- it weighed 60 pounds and had 14 inch platters -- I never got it to work properly. The first computer I ever worked on was an IBM 1800 "minicomputer" that took up a room the size of a small cafeteria. It had 6.2 KiloWords of 16-bit-wide core memory, 256 KiloBytes of disk storage, and a single 9-track tape drive. It was originally intended for the control of laboratory equipment, but was never used for that purpose...possibly because it would crash at a harsh look and took approximately 20 minutes to bootstrap. Feeling a little younger now?

(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)

[Member 10625528]

I wrote FastBack! (really) Yeah... it was a major pain, hdd to floppy! Lloyd

[Magrat]

Transam Triton. Practical Electronics Magazine project from 1978. Built from components based around an 8080 processor and running Tiny Basic with a character based screen. After building it I was hooked! I re-designed it around an 8085 processor adding a 'fancy' video around a new Texas Instruments chip and writing a load of machine code graphics routines. Eventually went BBC Computer then PC. Great fun!

[Lost User]

Really? Than congratulation! For me it was a really great tool. Especially the possibilities for include/exclude I liked _very very very_ much! :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup: Bruno

[DHL JDParker]

IBM PC Convertable with Intel 8088 processor (4.77 mhz), 512k ram, no HDD, but twin 3.5" DS floppy (not DSDD, mind you), monochrome nonback-lit graphics with a 4 color CGA monitor added on. :-) (16 color EGA blew my mind when I first saw it...) wrote my first Basica programs on this beauty! wish I still had it...

[Member 10119140]

Yup. IBM 1620 with hydraulic disk drive that always leaked hydraulic oil on the floor! An I think it had 40K of 6-bit Binary Coded Decimal "digits". Pretty quickly learned how to cold-start it by using the bit switches mounted on the front of the selectric typewriter that was the operator's consol. Punch cards and a 60 lines per MINUTE line printer (upper case only). Those were the good old days.

Roy Williams

[Member 10625528]

I should be clear that FASTBACK was one of those tools MS 'borrowed' from the CP/M arena (without any compensation back then. :laugh: ) In its original incarnation, it was called "FastCOPY", and had most - but not all - of the features that showed in the FASTBACK version. I think I sold all of about 500 copies... :zzz: In all, it was a fairly trivial utility to write, and having it 'promoted' to officialdom was sort of an honor, back then. Lloyd

[JustShootMe2]

In university, Xerox Sigma 6. My first was an Apple IIe with dual 360k floppies I bought before float in the Marines. You should have seen the admin guys look at me: "Here's that report sorted by serial number, here it is sorted by last name, here it is sorted by rank and date of rank." In the off hours the troops would play NFL football on it.

[Jim Wilkie]

My first "real" computer was the True-Blue PC AT 8mhz with 640K and the 384K add-on board for TSR programs, 32 MB HDD and 2 1.2MB HD floppies and EGA video. Second hand at a "must-sell all" sale for only $1,100. Although if moving up from cassette is the only criteria, then it's an Atari 800XL. (Great programming system)

[MikeTheFid]

1978 - My first true [digital] love. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor#mediaviewer/File:PDP-12-Update-Uppsala.jpeg[^] I used it to do my thesis on speech recognition by computer. I actually had a functional zero-crossing detector interface module (c/w directional microphone) and the software written. If I'd only stuck with it after my paper was written.... one of the few regrets of my life. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. :^) (P.S. Ok, I didn't own it. More like it's owned me all these years.)

Cheers, Mike Fidler "I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright "I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright

[Peter Grogono]

Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1, Z80 processor, S100 motherboard, 64K RAM + 64K hard-to-access memory, 2 x 720K 8" disk drives in a separate cabinet. Computer + disks weighed > 80lbs together. Text-only monitor was connected by RS-232. I also had a 512 x 512 graphics monitor and a primitive dot-matrix printer. I programmed in assembler, Pascal, an muLISP.

[Al Chak]

IBM360

[Ravi Bhavnani]

I bought my first PC in 1984 (had been using university and work hardware before that):

• IBM-AT 80286 processor @ 8MHz, 512KB RAM
• Hercules EGA Graphics
• 20 MB Seagate hard disk
• 5¼" 360K floppy drive
• 5¼" 1.2M floppy drive
• Princeton Graphics Color Monitor
• Okidata Microline 192 dot matrix printer
• Hayes 1200 Modem

Software:

• MS-DOS 3.1
• PC Write (editor)
• Lattice C compiler
• Vitamin C GUI SDK for DOS

The hardware set me back $4500.  I think the compiler was $300, Vitamin C was $50 and PC Write was $30.  The box came with MS-DOS. I misread your question as "What was your first PC?"  My first computer was a Honeywell Multics system with the world's most awesome terminals I'd ever seen.  Circa 1980. /ravi

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[Ravi Bhavnani]

Peter, are you THE Peter Grogono who wrote "Programming in Pascal" (circa 1980) - the book that changed my life (for the better) forever? /ravi

My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com