What was your first computer?

[greggish]

Mine was the Atari 800 (great machine for it's time).

http://oldcomputers.net/atari800.html

It played great games, although it would take about 20 minutes to load each game from the cassette data recorder. I used that computer for years till it literally went on fire one day when I switched it on in my dorm room.

I guess I'm dating myself by saying that. I'm 35, probably older than most on this board. I remember wanting to buy many of those computers.... http://oldcomputers.net

Well it was fun taking a trip down Memory Lane.

 

[gariben]

mine was XT or AT, forgot (x286).

i still remember the Atari....... Atari 2600!!!!

 

[greggish]

Atari made such great stuff. After my Atari 800 blew up I bought an Atari 600XL. I remember it was pretty cheap... less than $200 I think.

 

[Sharpy]

Commodore VIC-20. Still have it.

www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=252

 

[mastmnds]

ohh damn dont even remember its in the dump now lol

 

[Anthony Ng]

Apple IIe.

 

[unclewilco]

slave snap.

Apple IIe with dual disk drives.. and apple DOS.

then zx81, then spectrum 16k(with a 48k upgrade!!)

or was it the other way round??!

 

[DeCal]

mine was an Amstrad 1640 286!

 

[system0]

Originally posted by sharpboy
Commodore VIC-20. Still have it.

www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=252

yeah - the old commodore 16

 

[Ciqala]

Commodore Vic 20 here...

I was writing out the code for the games from a book when i was about 7 or 8. i only ever got one game working properly and it was crap.

I also had a fruit machine add on cartridge that slotted in the back (almost instant loading and more importantly NO TAPES!!! ) i think thats why i cant walk past a fruit machine now without putting all my spare change in.

 

[StockDoctor]

Back in the late 70s I was the proud owner of a Radio Shack TRS-80, an Apple 11, and had to also buy an Atari when they were first commercially available.

I remember the excitement when color was introduced. Another exciting time (that seems to stick in my memory) a few years later was buying an external 2400 baud U S Robotics modem. The speed improvement was fantastic.

When you could reg a .com for free I remember my partner telling me all this "new graphics stuff" was just going to slow everything down. The idea of a "web" was considered "commercial" and not very popular.

You know, I don't think I'm old until I start reading threads like this one, or when I go to the PC museum in Boston and look at some of the stuff I used to work on. Where did the time go?

 

[CrucialDom]

In the early eighties when the other guys were doing the Basic stuff on their ZX81s I used Forth to program my shiny white Jupiter Ace. I remember I created a mean little game where you had to defend yourself against skulls coming after you. Never seen anything like it since...

CrucialDom

 

[DotComster]

Apple II - still have it to and 3 large cartons of 5.25 floppies, games mostly- but also have the 1st version of VisiCalc

Had lots of fun with the ZX81s, when it accepted the tapes that is!

Forth - still have the unopened manuals for over 17 years, talk about procrastination!

 

[Anthony Ng]

>>unclewilco: ... Apple IIe with dual disk drives.. and apple DOS.

Oh boy! Mine was actually a Taiwan or Japanese clone (I was in Hong Kong then) and it used audio cassette tapes to store files!!

I remember writing Black Jack games with BASIC and the bouncing ping-pong on screen ...

It's the summer of '83 (or 84?) ... those were the days.

 

[Zoobar]

First computer I owned was a Texas Instruments TI-99.
First game console I owned was Pong

 

[DeCal]

The Amstrad i had (detailed above) i still actually have at home. Games machine was Commodor 16 followed by the Commodor 64!

 

[GeorgeK]

I first used a Commodore Pet, in an enriched math class in grade 7 (1980 or so). We had to go to a nearby college for the class, as not many junior highschools had a computer back then for use by students. That college even had a "Super Pet", which had 64K of RAM, I think, compared to the 4K of the normal Pet. The Pet had tape drives (an audio cassette would work), although the *good* ones had floppy drives, and a few had hard disks (i.e. for the entire lab, usually). We'd program in BASIC back then, produced by Microsoft.

My first computer at home was a Coleco Adam, although we had it for under a month. When Coleco stopped producing them, we swapped it for a Commodore 64, which I still own (collecting dust somewhere!). Then came an IBM XT clone, AT, 486, and so on.

I remember we'd spend hours typing in the programs from "Compute!" magazine for the Commodore 64 -- that was a lot of work, as not many had modems. Then, my first modem was a 1200 baud. First BBS was "Canada Remote Systems", which had maybe 20,000 members at its peak, using dialup lines.

First use of the internet was at university, in 4th year I think (1990). This was before the first web browsers, when most people used pure text for everything, on terminals. As the internet and web became popular, many of the BBS systems failed to adapt, and collapsed.

How times have changed! We're all spoiled now.

 

[devolution]

I had a *really* ancient computer in the 80s - called 'Video Genie System'. It was based on a Z80 chip and was a kind of TRS clone. It had 16K of RAM and mono graphics. The tape drive was not very good. Ahh... memories...

Apparently, these Video Genies are really rare now, worth maybe a few hundred readies. Wish I kept mine rather than take it apart

I too had an Amstrad 1640 - gawd almighty, got in 1990 - with two 360K 5 1/4" floppy discs (yep - no hard disc folks), 640K RAM, EGA screen - all for the princely sum of £700. Just look at what £700 gets you now!

Picture of the Video Genie System:
<img src="http://home.online.no/~kr-lund/genie1.JPG">

 

[com]

First a Texas Instruments, followed by a Commodore 64, IBM PC Junior, a 386 clone, a Packard Bell (They should be shot) PI, a self-assembled PII, a Compaq PIII, a self-assembled PIV with a few laptops on the side.

 

[DNS Kidd]

First system actually was a dial-up connection (300 bps) with an acoustic coupler to a large system at a university to work on COBOL projects.

Connection was from a DEC LA100 hardcopy terminal.

Actual first system was a Digital Equipment Corp, DEC PDP-11, PDT (programmable data terminal) 64k memory, program in DIBOL (Digital Business Oriented Language), dual 740 k drives.

First Intel system was a PC/XT, 1982? Did a lot with the available BBS people, newsletter, personal BBS. ANSI graphics, PKZIP, 1200 BPS was considered fast.

Next system was PC/AT (Advanced Technology, 1 MIP system). Amazing for its time, lots of fun, passed hundreds of hours on the dial up BBS systems. Still have logs and programs on diskettes.