What was your First Computer? :)

[Mike Dimmick]

Ah. Mine were both Issue 4A I think. Yes, I had two Spectrums. We got the second one free with an Interface 1! The previous owner had installed a 3rd-party keyboard on the second one, which was actually not much better than the standard rubber-key job. The reason for buying the Interface 1 second hand was because ours had failed - due to an overheating EPROM - and it looked like the cost of having it fixed would exceed the cost of the second-hand hardware. This wasn't the first time it had failed, I think we got through about ten ROM chips on both Interface 1s (yup, the second-hand one failed too). I wouldn't have been bothered but my dad - at the time a local councillor - had built a planning applications database based on the Microdrives; this was a family computer, not just mine. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder

[El Corazon]

brianwelsch wrote: TRS-80. I can still hear the screeching of programs loading from the cassette tapes. I grew addicted to that.... and it wasn't even my computer. :) _________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

[Gary Kirkham]

Vic 20 I had a amber monochrome monitor and a tape drive. woooohhhhooo I replaced it with a Tandy 1000 in 1984, with 2 floppies and 640K memory. I later installed a 40MB hard disk and thought to my self...this is more disk space than I will ever need...and until the advent of Windows, it was. :) Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read

[corretge]

Wow, my first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 with 16KB ampliation. I keep it in like an amulet ;-) fins aviat... Àlex Corretgé

[Levi Rosol]

Tandy (Radio Shack brand) 486 25mHz with 4mb of ram and 240mb of hd space if my memory serves me correctly. It was running windows 3.1, however, i mostly used DOS. Levi Rosol NTeam Project[^] Blog By Levi[^]

[Roger Wright]

Altair 8800.:) "...putting all your eggs in one basket along with your bowling ball and gym clothes only gets you scrambled eggs and an extra laundry day... " - Jeffry J. Brickley

[NTense]

1985, Timex Sinclair 1000.. Now hold on to your seat :) It had a whopping 2K of onboard memory, and I had the tape drive to go with it :) .... Man those were good days.

[gelcoman]

Hi, I still remember the first computer my father brought home, I was nearly 4, I remember that uge greeny screen with the two nobs, one for the contrast and one to turn it on hahahah that keyboard that for my little hands....at that time......was never ending, every click a sweet sound of technology .... What a Ferranti 40 could do for a kid with it's first game " Frog " and " Drive " with its 8 or 16 coloure option and its 5" floppy drive .......... :omg: My parents told me we had even a Commodore but i cant really remember it that well :(( Now I am the happy owner of a 3.6 Pentium 4 custome made with 2 Gb RAM and double DVD +- R-Writer double layer :rolleyes: and an ultra slip Sharp 1111 with 1.1 GHz Pentium 3 with external DVD +- R-Writer and floppy hahahaha, shes great to travel arround with it's 1.2 Kg of weight!!!!:cool:

[BadJerry]

1982: Oric 1 - still have it - does not start anymore. The reason I chose it is that it had the BASIC keyword "Bang" which was great for programming (dreadful) games that no-one (but me) ever saw.

[Douglas Troy]

Atari 400 (bought from a friend when he got an 800) Then an Atari 800 (bought from same friend, when he got a 600 XL) Then an 800 XL, that I bought myself, which I later purchased a 1010 Tape drive, then the 1050 Disk Drive, a Tablet drawing board and a 300 baud SmartCom modem; I also purchased a panasonic dot matrix printer, but my memory is failing me and I cannot recall the model. Later I purchased a PC Brand 80286/20 via Mail Order, with two 5½HD drives because I couldn't afford a HD; but since the Pascal and MASM compilers ran off floppy disks, I didn't care. I later upgraded that monster from it's standard Mono to VGA and added a 40mg seagate MFM HD. ... First program written was an address book, written in Atari BASIC when I was 12 years of age. Almost all of it had spelling errors, but it worked; it even had security as you had to enter a password to "log in" ... I watched War Games WAY too much.

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:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Fold with us|Development Blogging|viksoe.dk's site

[Matt Newman]

It was some Tandy POS, 33mhz came with Windows 3.1 (not 3.0, but 3.1! :rolleyes: silly salesman). I remember getting Win95 on CD the day it came out... now I have a system that is 100 times faster Matt Newman
Even the very best tools in the hands of an idiot will produce something of little or no value. - Chris Meech on Idiots

[Jesse Evans]

Starting in 1980: Atari 800 Apple IIe Apple Mac+ after that, misc. home built PCs... 'til next we type... HAVE FUN!! -- Jesse

[Bruce Duncan]

Mine was a Spectravideo SVI 728[^], running Microsoft MSX Basic. Those were the days, writing apps in assembler just to get them to run at any decent sort of speed. :) Or spending ages typing in a program from a magazine, only to have it lock up the machine when I excitedly hit F5 to run it, and me being dumb enough not to first save it to cassette. I still have it stashed away somewhere.

Searching the web without Google is like straining sewage with your teeth.
Userfriendly, 2003/06/07

[stephen hazel]

zx81/z80 asm => c64/6510 asm => amiga/C => win95..XP/C++ => and here i sit. http://shazware.com/me/pcPast.html[^]

[FlyingTinman]

My first computer was also a life changing aquisition: a Z80 based Spectravideo 328 which I bought at the Pick 'n Pay Hypermarket (the "Walmart" of South Africa) in 1985 when I was an electrician on a chicken farm. I was going to get the more popular Commodore 64 (just to play games and do "computer art" but I was wooed by the extra 16k of graphics memory on the SV328. Unfortunately no one ever wrote any decent software for the SV 328 so I signed up for a basic computer course with UNISA (the SA distance learning university) to learn a bit of programming and write my own games and basic graphics package. I eventually conmpleted a BSc and got into a career of military simulation which led to my emmigration to the USA. If I'd bought the C64 I'd probably still be wading around up to my ankles in chicken-shit in SA (or more likely unemployed due to affirmative action) and just playing computer games in my spare time. ;) Steve T

[Lost User]

1980. TRS-80 Model I with the Expansion Interface (total 48K RAM). Also the original Line Printer that you could get for these machines. I remember having Scripsit (word processing) and VisiCalc at some point as well as the Macro Assembler package. I'm still amazed at some of the stuff I was able to do with that machine: I made a 8 bit greyscale scanner with an infrared diode/transister pair mounted on the top of the printer's print head and attached to an A/D converter I connected to the Expansion Interface. It worked great! Some of the Ascii art articles of late brought back memories - I had written an Ascii art package for printing out frames from the 3D graphics engine I developed in Z80 assembler. It was the only way to get greyscale prints at the time. I even made an auto-routing PC board designer that really sped up the process of making my own boards. Ahhh, those were the days! Cheers, Drew.

[Jeremy Falcon]

TANDY 1000 HX Ah, the old days. :) Jeremy Falcon

[Gary R Wheeler]

First 'computer' I ever programmed: A Texas Instruments TI-59 programmable calculator. Even though it's called a calculator, I included it, since it taught me one of the fundamentals of programming: Keep a backup. The TI-59 could save programs on magnetic cards. I spent an entire day working on a program once, and failed to keep my backup up to date. The battery died just before I was ready to save it. First computer I ever purchased myself: The TRS-80 Model 100[^], a predecessor to the modern laptop. I eventually bought expansion RAM to fill mine out to a whopping 32K. I also bought an external floppy drive for it (it passed data to/from the computer via a 19.2K serial interface). One of the coolest things about the Model 100 was that it supposedly contains some of the last published code ever written by Bill Gates. There's an apocryphal story going around that, less than a week before the Model 100 was released to manufacturing, Bill was trying one out. Supposedly he hated the text editor so much he took the thing home and wrote a new editor for it. The editor is remarkably capable for being so small.

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