This Was My First Computer...

[arwalden]

Apple //e

What was your first computer?

[alarcojon]

1. The Commodore Vic 20

[alphafemale]

8. Commodore 64 here. A whopping 64K of memory!

And remember recording data on cassette tapes?

[billyskank]

68. LOAD ""

If I recall correctly, the C64 had a fucked-up bootloader which made it take far longer to load games than it did on other machines. For this reason, and also because of its powerful SID sound chip, the C64 games scene featured extremely good music. This was because the programmers often gave you some music to listen to while the game was loading!

Cybernoid II had particularly good music.

[trackfan]

18. I forget the first - the one I am on now is the second - a Compaq Presario

5340 from 1998 or 1999. Obviously I'm overdue for my third.


I was trying to reply to the OP, by the way, but am a bit tipsy, sorry...

[Cyndee_Lou_Who]

58. Mine, too!! And I had this cool peripheral

[Deja Q]

2. Atari 600XL...

Soon upgraded to an Atari 800XL. :9



Even today they still look cool.

[qnr]

25. I'd still love to have one of these:

The 1450XLD

[targetpractice]

32. Is that the never released Atari 1450 XLD?

Who has more fun than us?

[qnr]

46. yup! n/t

[Fenris]

3. A late-80s IBM clone called a CompuAdd.

[Dave Reynolds]

4. TI99-4A.

Still have it somewhere, too.

[lpbk2713]

29. Mine is out in the garage

Still have it in the original box. Have a bunch of cartridges and books for it too. I'm an inveterate packrat.

[Dave Reynolds]

34. Yeah, I have the whole setup,

the voice module, the old cassette player I used, the old color TV I hooked it up to, and a bunch of games.

[ChoralScholar]

47. TI-99/4A

Great machine. 16-bit, too.

I tell ya though, I'm eyeballin' the 8 1/2" disk drives next to that computer. Those were the days, man.

[kid a]

5. apple IIc

[Az]

6. Atari 400

[klook]

79. Me too!

One of the attractions for me was the sealed keyboard, protecting it from kids' soft-drink spills (and grownups' beer spills!). Programs and data were stored on cassettes, and it had a whopping 16K of RAM!! Sheesh. It sure was fun at the time, though.

Later on I had a 1040ST--great machine. I used it a lot for MIDI, writing, and games.

(edited to add 1040ST)

[Rabrrrrrr]

7. Atari 800, but with 48K

Bought in 1984; traded it in in 1989 for an Atarti 1040ST, which I still have

[CanuckAmok]

12. The 1040 is still used professionally...

It's what TV productions often still do graphics on... the 1040 and the Amiga.

You know, the low-key text/graphic, like this:

[qnr]

13. My original 400 is still being used professionally, in a photo lab

over in Italy :)

I still use my STs and TTs all the time.

[Rabrrrrrr]

14. They were incredible MIDI machines, too

If Bushnell had had his fucking act together, and actually advertised and pushed the 1040 like he should have, the world of computers would be very different right now.

We could have skipped over those 5 years of DOS based bullshit, and shitty IBM computers.

And Bushnell would be one of the richest men in the world right now. He truly had the superior product, and totally blew it.

[qnr]

16. Tramiel actually, Nolan Bushnell was a co-founder of Atari, but he sold

it to Warner Communications before the STs.

[Rabrrrrrr]

19. Ah, so this is Jack's fault!

I hadn't realized that. I thought Bushnell sold after the ST didn't sell as much as it should have.

[qnr]

21. Yeah, the Amiga was an Atari project, Commodore bought it out from

under them, the Tramiels came over and Shiraz developed the STs for them.

Nolan was off developing things like Teddy Ruxpin and Chuck E. Cheeses Pizza-Time Theater (or whatever it was called).

[Rabrrrrrr]

23. Evil lookin' sonofabitch

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n10/JackTramiel.html

Interesting article!

[qnr]

24. Ugh... Just seeing him brings back bad memories :/ n/t

[qnr]

9. Mine (1979):

Followed about 2 months later by:


Edit: added year to subject line.

[targetpractice]

33. Jay Miner rox0rz!

Star Raiders was the best game ever!

[qnr]

45. My opinion also :) n/t

[SnohoDem]

10. TS 1000

[no name no slogan]

55. That was the first one I owned, too

but I learned how to program on an Apple II and on a mainframe (connected thru a dumb terminal) via timeshare.

[RoyGBiv]

11. The COCO ...

I laugh at your dual disk drives. Ha! I had a tape drive (cassette tape) and was darn glad to have it! (And I had to walk in the snow, during the summer, uphill, both ways, to turn it on.)

[WeRQ4U]

15. Tandy 1000 SX with 384K of hard drive space.

It had a bunch of great floppy disk games that I played on it. Frogger, Space Aliens, Football, basketball etc.

Good system. LOL

[Rabrrrrrr]

20. Pffft. A right Johnny-come-lately, you are

[WeRQ4U]

60. I confess, I am young.

At least I didn't say a Dell.

[mainegreen]

61. I had a 1000 also

With glorious TGA graphics and the revolutionary TANDY 3-Voice sound. 3 voices SIMULTANIOUSLY! The games released for TGA/3-Voice are still better than some games made today (Starflight, Sentinel Worlds..)

[WeRQ4U]

64. You know what's hilarious about that system....

My parents recently told me that they paid over 2 grand for it. LOL. I didn't pay 2 grand for my 60g, 1gig RAM laptop. Plus, they bought it at Radio Shack. WTF?

[asthmaticeog]

17. Funnily enough, the Apple IIe was my first as well.

:toast:

[obxhead]

22. Kaypro 16

[swag]

26. .

[Hand]

27. Eagle II...

[BigMcLargehuge]

28. I had a TI-99 FA as a kid

but that doesn't count as I never did anything with it but play Star Trek (and program Mr. Bojangles, once).

This is the first computer I actually owned and used for something productive.

Compaq CDTV

[Digit]

30. I ran a BBS in the early 80's on an Atari 800 w/2 Percom dbl sided drives

I was mentioned in the Washington Post and also featured on the local news in DC. I still have the tape.
That is how I met my husband now an ex.
Talk about an ancient hookup!

Damn, I'm old!

[hunter]

81. Wow, that's hot.

"I ran a BBS in the early 80's on an Atari 800 w/2 Percom dbl sided drives."

That's the sexiest thing I've ever read on DU!

[Digit]

82. If you only knew....

:blush:

[pinniped]

31. Two variants of the Commodore 64.

First the orignal brown shaded case, then the slimmer, white/beige colored C-64, the C 64C. Maybe it was a C 128, can't remember.

We were always supposed to get an IBM PC Jr., but I think there was a wait or something.

[LeftyMom]

35. The Commedore 64

I had the dual floppy drives though, not the tape drives pretty much everybody else had. That thing rocked. :)

edit: I still have it at my Dad's house, it's in the Museum of Obsolete Technology (aka the hall closet) next to the beta VCR with the corded remote and a big stack of old vinyl records.

[yowzayowzayowza]

36. TRS 80 Model III

http://oldcomputers.net/trs80iii.html

16k memory with only cassette storage.

On edit: model memory error 3.

[Throckmorton]

39. Trash-80, model I

No built in spaces for floppy drives.

[kick-ass-bob]

52. I had the same.

I didn't know what to do with it though - I mainly played a baseball game that I loaded up from a tape.

:D

[Spirochete]

37. A Commodore VIC-20

with a tape drive. About 4K of memory. Then I graduated to a Commodore 64 with a 1541 floppy drive and a 300 baud modem. Thought I was really hi-tech then. hehe

[cajones_II]

38. a Univac 1610E

here's the keyboard:

and this is the CPU

[ChoralScholar]

48. And the vacuum-tubed trump card has been played

that's going way back there...

[TrogL]

73. But was it yours?

I did some work on an IBM1130 but it belonged to the University.

[Clintmax]

40. I learned on one of the Apple //e's...

But the first one I purchased and used at home as a Compaq Presario. It was in 1993 I think. I had that thing forever!

[RebelOne]

41. Apple 2e was my first computer also.

Boy, I thought that was really something. But I made a lot of money with it doing freelance work. This was before every household had a computer.

[bicentennial_baby]

42. Apple IIc

[billyskank]

43. Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K

with rubber keys :bounce:

[madinmaryland]

44. DEC PDP-11/70

Learned assembly language, fortran, and basic on this thing.

[Kellanved]

49. Amiga 1000

Today it is an exhibit in the Berlin Museum of Computer Gaming (currently lacking a permanent exhibition)

But I had lots of training on an IBM XT before that:

[ChoralScholar]

50. The year was 1983.

My rural Arkansas school bought TI-99/4A computers for each classroom, and I was in heaven.

Sooo, I asked for a computer for Christmas. My dad comes back and asks me how would I like a 'Color Computer', because that's the kind Santa Claus Brings (some corporate sponsorship thing, I'm guessing). I say OK.

He brings me the manual for the computer, and BASIC programming book about a month in advance, and I absorb.

Christmas morning comes and I get this:


My dad then tells me that he will not buy me any games, that I would have to learn to program them on my own. Who knew my truck-driver dad would be so smart? (he is a Democrat after all)

Fast-forward 20+ years, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Little did I know that my little CoCo would be a part of computer history.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

66. The CoCo is the best fucking 8-bit machine in the goddamn universe!

Did you have the "Basic Unravelled" series of books? I used to hack new commands into its BASIC and use bank-switching to get them running (the upper 32 of the 64 KB). And -- get this -- that was my JOB! I got PAID to do that!

The 6809 was a seriously powerful processor.

Oh, and your Dad rocks. With extreme prejudice.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

67. WHOA! Prepare to have your socks blown off!

http://www.coco3.com/unravalled/color-basic-unravelled.pdf
http://www.coco3.com/unravalled/extended-basic-unravelled.pdf
http://www.coco3.com/unravalled/disk-basic-unravelled.pdf

[atomic-fly]

51. 1998 e-machine 266 and crappy monitor.

I drove to dc to buy it. I got a late start.
At work I now have.
Mac G4(soon to be replaced with g5) 24" flat Plasma monitor
12" I-book
Dell PC w/ 17 flat monitor
Dell Notebook (for ColdFusion development)

At home:
an old Compaq w/amd chip. 500 mh

[CBGLuthier]

53. You folks all had it so easy

Here is mine, had to build it myself. Had a two digit display it did.



It was part of something like this, but I only had two cabinets.

[DS1]

54. Apple ][ +

Skipped the 'e', when right to C, then a GS "Woz Edition" and then after Doom came out made the switch to PC and have never looked back.

[Solon]

56. Got you all beat...

My first computer...



:)

[atomic-fly]

57. Those are coming back! nt

[Quetzal]

59. Anybody remember this sucka?

The Osbourne

No, I didn't have one - I wasn't even born yet. However, I did find one while cleaning my mother's basement one day.

[billyskank]

70. Looks like the sort of computer a marine would have to lug around

Definitely has a "field" look to it! :D

[Mr. McD]

62. Epson

I don't recall the model but it was the 8086 processor with a 40 meg hard drive.

[NV Whino]

63. Macintosh 512 KE

Ah, the nostalgic days of playing the Mac Shuffle.

Geez. My flash card for my camera has as much memory as my first computer.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

65. Dismac D8001 (TRS-80 Model I Brazilian clone)

This is a D8000. The D8001's monitor was a bit bigger. EDIT: it didn't have an embedded cassette either -- I used an external tape recorder. Floppies were utopia.

[TrogL]

69. Homebrew breadboard Z80

When people these days say they "built their own computer" it means they took a pre-manufactured chassis, motherboard and other components and assembled it.

Not me. I designed and hand-wired the motherboard, wrote the operating system and hand-wired the boot PROM using diodes. I had it up to the point where it could do simple multiplication then it blew a power supply and fried most of the components so I went out and bought a VIC-20.

[Dukkha]

71. I still have this and it still works

Original Mac model #00001

has Job's and Wozniak's Signatures engraved on the inside.

[Catherine Vincent]

72. The Wang...but it was a word processor

http://www.arteyelectricidad.net/espanol/hipertextos/marzo/fotos%20fireworks/pc%20+%20screen/1976%20wang.jpg

[Squatch]

74. I had an Eniac

Not really, but I've always wanted to say that.

[Rob H.]

75. Timex/Sinclair ZX81

It ran at a whopping 3.5MHz, loaded programs into memory via a tape recorder (took forever!), and if you jarred the machine at all while the memory module was attached, it would dump everything in memory and you'd have to start all over.

[hunter]

76. A variation of the COSMAC ELF.

http://www.cosmacelf.com

I still have the second COSMAC I built. I also have several models of Sinclair Z-80 based computers.

My favorite computer is the Atari 800 family. I wrote a lot of software for that.

When I was a kid I built my first computer out of old surplus telephone relays. It didn't do much, but it could be configured to play tic-tac-toe or count.

[satireV]

77. Altair 8800 first REAL PC (1975)

It was a kit. 395.00 USD

[TheMightyFavog]

78. Amstrad 1512

2 5.25 floppy drives, no hard drive, 512K of ram (later upgraded to 640k), CGA monitor.

[huskerlaw]

80. The first one I ever actually owned

that was mine, and mine alone? The Dell 8200. My god, what a piece of shit that thing was.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

83. The first one I ever USED was a terminal on Yale University's mainframe

I was briefly in possession of an Osborne, lent to me as part of a computer literacy project.



Just imagine, it was portable!


The first computer I ever owned was a Macintosh LC III.



Since then, I have owned a Performa 475, an iMac SE-DVD, a clamshell iBook, and a current 12" iBook.