Your First Computer Was?

[SYZ]

Mine was a 1982 Sinclair ZX Spectrum.



•  Firmware: 3.54 MHz Zilog Z80A CPU,  16K RAM (16,384 bytes of read/write storage);
•  Display: 32 x 22 character text display,  256 x 192 pixel resolution, 8 colours;
•  Sound: 1 channel, 5 octaves, inbuilt speaker;
•  I/O: Z80 bus, tape, RF television;
•  Storage: External tape recorder or micro-drive.

I coupled it with a little Sony 3" reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a 12" portable TV.
The soft rubber keyboard was a bastard to use, with most keys having multiple
functions—which made programming a true pain.




Sinclair BASIC looked like this...


The Sinclair's games were pretty... uh... unexciting LOL.


The screen scrolls vertically, and the skier has to avoid the trees and slalom poles.   

[c172]

Commodore 64, but I'm not sure what year. I loved doing things in BASIC, though. I was way too amused by that language.

[Dom]

TRS80 Model 1

I think I got it in 1977, it was the newest tech one could have, a computer you can have at home. Not in the picture is a cradle for the phone receiver. There was no internet per se, but you could call other computers and converse. There was also Compuserve that would connect you to a variety of "bulletin boards".

[Fireball]

I never had a personal computer until about 1988. That was a generic 8086 machine. I did, however, program an Olivetti-Underwood Programma 101 in High School.

[Minimalist]

Commodore 64 w monochrome monitor.

[Thumpalumpacus]

The first computer I worked on was a Commodore PET in high school. Learned BASIC programming on it, 4K of RAM, I/O was a cassette drive. The next few years saw upgrading up to a Commodore 8032, same OS/BASIC loaded in.

First computer I owned was a C64. The familiarity with BASIC helped, and I was very happy to now have a floppy drive; I could now store 370k. This was 1989. By 1991 I'd gotten a 286 with two-by-twenty-meg hard drives, and could clock 14 Mhz processing speed.

I still laugh at how my 4G phone which is six years old kills anything I owned before 2013 or so. My son doesn't even get how we old'uns could get along without quad-cores and such.

[Tres Leches]

A Dell desktop I bought in 2000 and used with dial up internet.  


My elementary school in the early 1980s had a few Apple IIe computers that we wheeled around on carts from classroom to classroom.

-Teresa

[jerry mcmasters]

Atari 400.  Worked at Chick Fil A and saved up and got an Atari 800 with disk drive and dot matrix printer.  I was big-timing, no cassette tape memory for me, lol.  Amazing how expensive that stuff was.

[Alan V]

Apple IIe

[Dānu]

My first computer that I used was a CDC Cyber 6600 mainframe, using stolen passwords, to play Star Trek after my math for gifted children class at the university.

The first computer that I owned was a Corona PC IBM PC clone in 1984. I forget how much memory it had, but no hard disk, and two floppies which eased things considerably.

[jerry mcmasters]

Commodore 64, but I'm not sure what year. I loved doing things in BASIC, though. I was way too amused by that language.

I remember messing around with BASIC too, you could make little games and stuff, little "IF - THEN" computations.  Never occurred to me in the slightest to pursue it as a career option or that it even was a career option, but I wonder how that would have changed my life, getting into that field at that time (mid 80s).  That must have been peak computing for me, I can barely turn on a computer now.  Something about a button.

[GenesisNemesis]

If my mother's computer counts, I guess it was a Gateway 2000. We still have it and it still works. First computer I had to myself was a Dell laptop my brother gave me. No, I didn't find anything illegal on it (that was after the cops had already taken a look at it).

[Minimalist]

The first computer I worked on was a Commodore PET in high school. Learned BASIC programming on it, 4K of RAM, I/O was a cassette drive. The next few years saw upgrading up to a Commodore 8032, same OS/BASIC loaded in.

First computer I owned was a C64. The familiarity with BASIC helped, and I was very happy to now have a floppy drive; I could now store 370k. This was 1989. By 1991 I'd gotten a 286 with two-by-twenty-meg hard drives, and could clock 14 Mhz processing speed.

I still laugh at how my 4G phone which is six years old kills anything I owned before 2013 or so. My son doesn't even get how we old'uns could get along without quad-cores and such.

[Tres Leches]

I remember messing around with BASIC too, you could make little games and stuff, little "IF - THEN" computations.  Never occurred to me in the slightest to pursue it as a career option or that it even was a career option, but I wonder how that would have changed my life, getting into that field at that time (mid 80s).  That must have been peak computing for me, I can barely turn on a computer now.  Something about a button.

Oh boy, I remember being in a computer lab in college in the 90s and thinking "where the f is the on button on this thing?" And thinking everybody sitting around me was so much more technically savvy than me (they weren't, I came to realize   ).

Fun fact: Computer coding and software programming used to be "women's work" and women led the way in those fields until circa mid-1980s when those cultural views switched to "computers are for boys and men".

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magaz...sContainer

-Teresa

[Minimalist]

That must be when they figured out that men will waste hours playing silly games!

[Dom]

That must be when they figured out that men will waste hours playing silly games!

So do women....

[Thumpalumpacus]

The first computer I worked on was a Commodore PET in high school. Learned BASIC programming on it, 4K of RAM, I/O was a cassette drive. The next few years saw upgrading up to a Commodore 8032, same OS/BASIC loaded in.

First computer I owned was a C64. The familiarity with BASIC helped, and I was very happy to now have a floppy drive; I could now store 370k. This was 1989. By 1991 I'd gotten a 286 with two-by-twenty-meg hard drives, and could clock 14 Mhz processing speed.

I still laugh at how my 4G phone which is six years old kills anything I owned before 2013 or so. My son doesn't even get how we old'uns could get along without quad-cores and such.

Dude, you've got no goddamned room to talk, your first computer was a fucking abacus.

ETA: Just wonderin', do rotary phones even work any more with modern telephone infra?

[Dom]

The first computer I worked on was a Commodore PET in high school. Learned BASIC programming on it, 4K of RAM, I/O was a cassette drive. The next few years saw upgrading up to a Commodore 8032, same OS/BASIC loaded in.

First computer I owned was a C64. The familiarity with BASIC helped, and I was very happy to now have a floppy drive; I could now store 370k. This was 1989. By 1991 I'd gotten a 286 with two-by-twenty-meg hard drives, and could clock 14 Mhz processing speed.

I still laugh at how my 4G phone which is six years old kills anything I owned before 2013 or so. My son doesn't even get how we old'uns could get along without quad-cores and such.

Dude, you've got no goddamned room to talk, your first computer was a fucking abacus.

ETA: Just wonderin', do rotary phones even work any more with modern telephone infra?

I don't know, maybe with normal old fashioned landlines. I have a model like that but with push buttons, it works fine. I have the cell for when the phoneline is out, and the phone line for when the electricity (and router) are out. We get outages here. Drunken trees running into cars and such.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I have a model like that but with push buttons, it works fine.

So they still work on touchtones; that makes sense, given all the switchboarding we all have to wade through. It'd be cool to find out.

Interesting read on it at Wiki, here. I'd imagine they could process the contacts.

[abaris]

Apple macintosh plus. Still have it stored in my brother's garage.

[Gwaithmir]

I can't remember the make and model of my first computer, but it didn't have a hard drive. It operated with a pair of 5¼" floppy discs. One held the program and the other collected data. The screen was a 12" mono-colored TV monitor.

[PopeyesPappy]

The first computer I ever worked on was the Nike Hercules analog computer. It consisted of four cabinets the size of refridgerators and had the computing power of an early flip phone.



It did five things.

1. tracked a target
2. tracked a missile
3. computed and intercept point for the 2
4. sent guidance information to the missile
5. sent a detonation command to the missile

It received analog voltages and frequencies that represent the range, azimuth, and elevation data of the target and missile from the target and missile tracking radars. It did this using vacuum tube op amps and analog servos.

This simple computer was able to successfully guide a missile to intercept an ICBM on reentry back in the 1960s. Something we are still having a hard time doing with more modern technology today.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

...coal_fired.

[Dancefortwo]

Tandy 1000.  You could barely call it a computer.    I remember playing Tetrus on it but wasn't too interested in computers.  I'm still not.     

[TheGentlemanBastard]

The first PCs I used were Apple IIs of variouse vintages, and the competing IBM PCs of the day. My first home PC was a monster of a machine. It had a Pentium 120 processor, 64Meg of RAM, an 8X CD ROM, and a 1.2 Gigabyte HD that I'd never be able to fill up!

For the time, it was a beast. Today it would be, at best, a door stop.