Poll: Your first personal computer?

[MacRumors]

Vote: Poll: Your first personal computer? (http://www.macpolls.com/?poll_id=376)

[blakespot]

TI-99/4A was my first. $399 for 32K memory module alone. Good stuff. Back, Christmas '82. I've recent assembled another one (http://www.blakespot.com/images/ti99.jpg).

http://www.blakespot.com/list



blakespot

[bousozoku]

It was an Atari 800 with 16K RAM at Christmas 1981. I got the thing for $690 compared to the $1080 it cost at retail stores. Still, it had no external data storage of any kind, but it had a graphics co-processor and a 6502 and that was enough to get me started.

[Mr. Anderson]

A roommate had a Commodore Vic20 back in college in the early 80s and I use to play/program with that. But the first computer I bought myself was a Power Computing Power Tower Pro....150 MHz machine, 20 inch CRT, 4 Gig Harddrive, 256 Megs of ram (about $2k for that alone). Still have it, but not using it.

Accepting offers on it, though :D

D

[mms]

Performa 6400/180. Still have it, and use it occasionally, running 8.6.

[edesignuk]

An Amiga 500+, and at the time I thought itr rawked!

[machan]

i seem to recall playing Oregon Trail on my Commodore 64 when i was a kid. it's all so foggy....

[Trowaman]

well there was a mac as a computer but there was this otherone that hooked up through our TV and all I remember is it had this awsome cookie monster and Oscar the grouch game. Man that was a fun game . . . . . . . . . when I was 2. Geez, I wish I knew what that computer was called. I want to say Tandy but I'm not sure.

BTW, I can still apreciate cookie monster and Oscar the grouch.

[wordmunger]

Commodore 64. The first thing I did with it was program a very primitive MacPaint-type program in BASIC. It took about 15 seconds to draw a 1-inch long line.

[Mudbug]

I vividly remember having a chocolate popsicle melt on a stack of my father's 5 1/4" TRS-80 disks and having him get more than a little mad about it. That's the earliest machine I remember, with a IIe not too long after that (if memory serves).

[pyrotoaster]

Mac Classic II. And always Macs since then.

[wdlove]

My first computer was an Apple IIE, purchased in 1983. The only program that I remember using frequently was Home Accountant.

[Les Kern]

Original 1984 Mac that I put a 1MB of ram in for $900.00. Had to send it to Philadelphia. I was SMOKIN' after that. First one I bought new-in-box was an LCII with 16MB of ram and no monitor for $1,000.00 from a college computer store in Chicago. COLOR!!

[eric_n_dfw]

Originally posted by edesignuk
An Amiga 500+, and at the time I thought itr rawked! It did!

[TomSmithMacEd]

I am 16 years old right now and my parents bought and still own an APple IIgs. I loved that machine. IT sitll works, but the monitor doesn't. DOes anyone have an old monitor that works? I would pay money for it. erikmyxter@yahoo.com

Then after that we went to the Performa 575. My father still uses that as his main computer. And after a scary stage of going through custom build M$ machines, I finally bought myself an eMac. :)

[evil_santa]

got through a few Atari 520/1040 st 1986-1992 , I think i still have one somewhere in the attic. Also had a Spectum ZX81, wish i had kept that.

First mac 1996: ppc7600 132mhz

[717]

Sinclair ZX Spectrum, 48Kb

[Awimoway]

Originally posted by blakespot
TI-99/4A was my first. $399 for 32K memory module alone. Good stuff. Back, Christmas '82. I've recent assembled another one (http://www.blakespot.com/images/ti99.jpg).

http://www.blakespot.com/list



blakespot

Mine too, although really it was my parents'. I even remember when my parents played computer games--Zork-type stuff. And I have fond memories of the lousy voice synthesizer and playing Parsec. That was a long time ago.

Our next computer was a IIc. Then, around 91 we got a 386. And then there was a string of cheapo PCs during the 90s.

I came back to Apple in 2002.

[Oirectine]

Umm... *cough* Pentium 75 MHz... Hewlett Packard I think...

Yes, I am young, and you are all OLD!!

:)

[slightly]

Hello? Where's the Spectrum? The BBC Micro B? The Acorn Electron, for crying out loud?

If you've never tried to load "Horace Goes Skiing" from a motor-driven cassette tape (or even, god help you, a manually-driven one) you've never lived.

[latergator116]

Mac classic. Got it at Salvation Army for $30... came with a bag too!:p

About the same time I got an LC III.

[Stella]

Amstrad CPC

I voted CP/M because it could also run CP/M

[Stella]

These Voting thing is heavily north american baised, so you obvioulsy won't see these computers as an option.

Spectrum was not popular on this side of the pond, neither was the BBC or its siblings, I suspect.



Originally posted by slightly
Hello? Where's the Spectrum? The BBC Micro B? The Acorn Electron, for crying out loud?

If you've never tried to load "Horace Goes Skiing" from a motor-driven cassette tape (or even, god help you, a manually-driven one) you've never lived.

[Fender2112]

The first one I actually owned was Mac II ci or cx or c something, that I aquired as a used used computer. It came with a 20 MB hard drive, 2 or 4 MB of RAM, and a B&W portrait monitor.

Next, I aquired a Quadra 700 with a 40 MB hard drive, 4 MB RAM upgraded to 20 MB, and a 13" color CRT.

My next computer was a Mac clone in 1997 or '98. A Power Computing Power Center 240 with a 17" ViewSonic monitor. This was a nice machine that had many upgrades until I sold it a few months ago.

Now I have a PowerMac G5 2x2.0 with 1.5 GB RAM, 250 GB hard drive and Apple 17" flat panel display. And I am having a blast with it. :D And I have an eMac 1.0 or 1.25 for the wife and kids to use.

The first programs I ever wrote were in BASIC on a TSR-80 back 1982-83, my junior year in high school. Yep, I even had running water back then :D

And for the record, so I won't be accused of hiding information if I ever run for president. I also own a Dell Dimension 4400 that I purchased for my office in October 2001.

Ya'll have a nice day.:)

[elephanttrainer]

Our first computer was a Franklin Ace 2200 from Sears. It could run all the Apple II programs we used at school. And with two disk drives it was pretty rockin' when you were using programs that required two floppy disks (you didn't have to swap!)

Here is a picture I found online:

http://oldcomputers.net/ace2100.html

There was a game we used to play, Wings of Fury, that I have tried to find recently with no success. Anyone remember this game, and know if it has been emulated for OSX?

[Powerbook G5]

My family's first computer was a Packard Bell 286. As far as my first computer, I think it was a 200 MHz Toshiba which actually burnt out after 3 weeks so I ended up returning it and getting a 266 MHz PII Gateway, which also burnt out 3 times until I got a Compaq AMD Athlon laptop which fried its video chip in a week and after that I got a PowerBook G3, which was the first computer I owned that didn't break within a month. Now I have a PowerBook G4 and I still have my G3 which still works wonderfully.

[szark]

Atari 800, 48K RAM with a cassette drive, purchased as a gift for me by my parents sometime around 82-83.

Still have it, still works -- last time I checked, anyway.

I also still have programs on cassette for it! :)

[eric_n_dfw]

Timex/Sinclair 1000
4K ROM, 2K RAM

FWIW - My 'puter history (feel free to skip, more for my own nostalgia than anthing else!)

My parents got the TS1000 for me when I was in 6th grade for Christmas in '82 to see if I would "stick with it". Soon after, I got the 16K RAM upgrade and then the chicklet keyboard went south on me from typing in all those programs from "Sync" magazine.

The next Christmas, I begged for a TI 99/4A but my dad refused to buy a manchine that TI had already basically end-of-lifed. I was afraid we was going to get me a Vic-20 but he splurged and got me a C-64!!

I burned through 5 of those, 3 due to heat from sitting them on the carpet in front of the TV for hours on end, 1 due to a power surge and the last one stolen when our house was robbed.

With the insurance money I got an Amiga 500 (which I quickly upgraded to 1MB RAM) which lasted me 'till 1992. The Amiga was definately my favorite computer of all time - the only one I really was attached to in an "evangelistic" way.

I had a variety of hand-me-down 286 and 486 PC's running DOS and Win 3.11 and a couple of home-build Pentium (586) machines on Win95, Linux and OS/2.

My first Mac was an old, used Quadra 650 I was given in '98. It was fairly slow, but I was so sick of re-installing Windows 95 that I didn't care that much. Plus, the NeXT merger had me looking at the future of Mac OS as I was a big fan of OPENSTEP.

[eric_n_dfw]

...might be, "What was the first computer you actually used, played with" Qualifier - game cosoles don't count unless you had the keyboard and programming language cartridge/cassette attached to it!


I think mine was a Vic-20 at a friends house - although I got to play with (and color on) IBM punch cards when I was a toddler in the early 70's! (My dad was a programmer from way back)

[CrackedButter]

My first computer was a Pentium (no MMX) with 120Mhz of processing power, 32megs of ram and a 3GB Hard disk running windows95 on a 1meg videocard.

My first game was Command and Conquer.

My first touch of a computer was actually a mac, some weird beige thing that had the best keyboard ever and at that time windows 3.11 was in my school. I seem to remember some sort of powerbook being available to play with as well, it had a rollerball and that was the first laptop i touched as well.

[Sir_Giggles]

1. Radio Shack TRS-80 with 8/16KB rom

2. 386SX 16Mhz Intel with 1MB ram

3. 486 DX2-66Mhz Intel with 8MB ram

4. Pentium Pro 150Mhz Intel with 96MB ram

5. Apple G4 400Mhz (Yikes) with 256MB ram

6. Apple G4 867Mhz (Quicksilver) with 1.5GB ram


7. Will be getting either a 15" PowerBook or Dual 2+GHz G5 in the next 6 months. (hopefully loaded with 4GB ram)

[brhmac]

My first computer was a Commodore 64 with the disk drive. Took it to college with me in 1985 and relied on it until I discovered the Macintosh three years later.

At the time, a roommate and I would buy this Commodore 64 magazine every month and tag-team on keying in the code for software. Don't know how many papers I wrote for classes during those years, but they were all done on a program I'd bought for the $2 cost of the magazine.

At the time, thought I'd never need anything more than 64 kb and my trusty disk drive.

[ALoLA]

TI-99/4A was my first. I still have it, in fact (stored away in the garage). But it's been Apple ever since. Apple IIe (recently given away), Mac 512ke (loaned to a friend, and never returned--he must've liked it :) ), Mac IIcx (also in the garage, but with a dead power supply--soon to be donated), Powerbook 5300cs (still works, but no working battery), tangerine iMac 266 MHz (upgraded to 500 MHz w/Firewire :) -- using at work in a PC-only environment), and my flat panel iMac at home.

[Makosuke]

Man, so much nostalgia in this thread. I'm one of the apparently many in the TI99/4A crowd. I was 6 years old, and boy, did I love that machine. Speaking of which...

Originally posted by eric_n_dfw
...might be, "What was the first computer you actually used, played with" Qualifier - game cosoles don't count unless you had the keyboard and programming language cartridge/cassette attached to it! The TI99/4A rocked because of the selection of cartridge-based games (oh, the vivid memories I have of Anteater), but of course it had the built-in keyboard that you could program some BASIC with (I remember how cool it was to make the computer do something I told it to on the living room TV), and you could even save stuff to an audio cassette drive, as frustrating as that was (I don't remember clearly whether I ever got that to work).

Anybody remember trying to play that text adventure pirate game from an audio casette? Talk about load times--that even made the great Voodo dance of C64 game loading look speedy.

My Apple //c was the first computer I really got into, though--so many BASIC programs.

[danbirchall]

Motorola 6800 CPU (and no that's NOT missing a zero). Backplane. 48KB of RAM on 3 16KB boards. Dual floppies. "All-in-one" design. Serial number was all zeros except for a "6" at the end.

[matthew24]

Couldn't afford the original Mac so I had to go for a Atari 520ST+ (1 meg), in my opinion it was a better system then the original Mac anyway.:D

[arn]

Originally posted by Stella
These Voting thing is heavily north american baised, so you obvioulsy won't see these computers as an option.


yep.... because I (the maker of the polls) live in.... North America! :)

if you wish the polls had better options, you are free to submit your own suggestions for polls AND potential answers. (don't bother submitting more options for this particular poll as it won't get run again for a while).

arn

[macFanDave]

but even with my student discount, the Mac I was looking at was more than twice as expensive as a "comparable" PC clone. As a poor grad student, I really had no choice. Of course, if you count up the hours wasted doing things like getting a modem to work reliably (I had to try six different ones (meaning six trips to the comptuer stores) to find one -- thank God they hadn't started their parasitic "restocking fee" practice then), I'm sure the Mac would have paid for itself witihin that first year.

I had been using Macs in college and it was a real drag to get stuck on the dark side. Fortunately, things starting looking up and by 1997 I could afford a Mac (even though it cost more) and have purchased 4 since that time. And even though my daily work requires me to use PC's at the office, I still believe the Mac is a better value.

[shamino]

Originally posted by TomSmithMacEd
I am 16 years old right now and my parents bought and still own an APple IIgs. I loved that machine. IT sitll works, but the monitor doesn't. DOes anyone have an old monitor that works? I would pay money for it.
I've got one, but I'm still using it. Sorry. Thanks to the internet and abandonware, I've been downloading disk images, and transferring them to diskette (using a Mac with an 800K-compatible floppy drive) for use with the GS.

Look around eBay. That's probably the best way to find something like this.

Also, if you are near New Jersey, the flea market at the Trenton Computer Festival (http://www.tcf-nj.org/) always seems to have a few people selling them. (That's where I got my IIgs system a few years ago.)

If you can't get the IIgs's RGB monitor, you can use a composite monitor (or the video-in of a VCR or TV), but you won't be able to get all of the IIgs's graphics capabilities.

BTW, if anybody has a SCSI card for a IIgs for sale, I'd be interested. They're really hard to find and end up going for far too much money when they show up on eBay. I've got an old 80M hard drive that would be perfect with the GS, but I've no way to attach it.

[TheArchpadre]

First computer I ever played with was a Tandy 1000, belonging to my parents. I may not be old enough to have experience with cassette drives, but I do have fond memories of having to dig around for the 5.25" boot disk since it had no hard drive.

In the long run I probably got more use out of it than my parents did. When I was really young I'd play Reader Rabbit, Zork, some baseball game on it. A few years later we upgraded and I got to have the old Tandy in my room and started writing all sorts of things in BASIC. This eventually led to me moving on to C, C++, Perl, LISP, Prolog, brainf*ck, and basically anything else I could get my hands on.

I'd do my chronology for you, but a) it gets kind of confused at some points and b) it's entirely PC-based until I got my PowerBook in 2002. Now I'm trying to restrain the instinct to continually upgrade that I developed in my PC years. ("But the new 15" PBs are so shiny . . . ." "But you're poor, fool!")

[pivo6]

I remember when my father bought his Compaq 286 with CGA graphics. Who would have known that 4 colors sucked so much.

First one I bought was a CompuAdd 286 with VGA graphics. It was good enough to run Windows 286. :o :o :p

[shamino]

If you mean the first I used, that would be a TTY attached via accoustic coupler to a corporate mainframe. (My uncle used to let me play some games on his work computer.)

Then there would be a TRS-80 model III and an Apple II+.

If you mean the first I owned, that would be a Timex/Sinclair 1000. But that's not quite fair - the membrane keyboard jammed after only a few hours of ownership and I returned it back to the store. :rolleyes:

The first computer I owned for real was a TRS-80 Color Computer. 16K RAM, television output and audio-cassette for storage. After a year of ownership, I bought an extended BASIC ROM for $80 mail-order and installed it myself. I wrote a lot of software for that machine back in its day. Unfortunately, the tapes have either degraded to being unusable or have gotten lost over the years. :(

[idea_hamster]

In 1987, my dad bought a nameless beige box that had two 5.25" drives. Ran on DOS 2.1 which resided on one of the two floppies.

Monochrome amber monitor.

I remember writing papers for junior high social studies and English classes on that. I had WordStar.

What a boat anchor that set up was!

[pimentoLoaf]

Apple IIe w/128k: they had run out of ordinary 80-column cards, so they gave me (at cost) what they had in stock (an 80-column 64k board -- stuck, as you might recall, in that oddball Auxilliary Connector Slot). Otherwise, it was the standard packaged deal of 1983 of CPU, monitor stand, Apple III green-screen monitor, floppy controller card, one 5.25" (quarter-pounder drives, we used to call 'em) floppy drive, and two free software titles (I got AppleWriter and Logo).

:D :p :D Funny story dept: didn't have a printer, so I used AppleWriter for letters and such, and laid a manual typewriter in my lap and...

Added the AppleMouse II (or whatever it was called), a Grappler parallel printer card, Panasonic 9-pin printer, VisiCalc Advanced Version, and eventually swapped in a REV-B motherboard so that those two li'l pins on the Extended 80-column Card could be wired together allowing for 560x192 double-high resolution graphics.

I still have the system, but not that SCREE SCREE SCREE SCREECHY dot-matrix printer. Don't use it much, though.

[Rower_CPU]

$50 hand-me-down PC running Win 95 :eek:

[eric_n_dfw]

Originally posted by shamino
If you mean the first I used, that would be a TTY attached via accoustic coupler to a corporate mainframe. (My uncle used to let me play some games on his work computer.) My brother used to play Dungeon (or something) on one of those that my dad would occasionally bring home. Apparently he and a friend knew of a way to dial into the local university's VAX or something. I was about 7 years old or something so I didn't get to play, but I remember the piles of curly, thermal printouts. Not CRT's here baby!

[ITR 81]

First computer I used at school was a Apple IIe and then a TRS-80.

First one I owned was a Tandy 1000 SL/2 with 512k of RAM and 4/8Mhz processor.
The desktop with the Tandy RGB CRT monitor and dot matrix printer ended up costing my parents around 4 grand.

The printer never worked right. I only got it to print twice in the time I owned it.

I still remember wanting to try out first windows from MS and the RS rep telling me I need 1 meg of ram to run it and mouse and both would cost me close to a grand. So I never got it. I would never use Windows until 96' when I bought a IBM Cyrix 266Mhz computer with 64 meg of RAM. Then I bought a Compaq with 128 meg of RAM and a AMD 650Mhz Athlon. Then a yr ago I bought my PB with 1Ghz processor and 512 meg of RAM.


My next computer will be a PM G5 and possibly a PB G5.

[edenwaith]

Originally posted by machan
i seem to recall playing Oregon Trail on my Commodore 64 when i was a kid. it's all so foggy....

I remember playing that on an Apple II in 5th grade. My family died because I was an awful hunter.

But as for my first personal computer (or the family's computer) was a Tandy 1000 HX, baby! The thing still worked the last time I checked. My brother and I played a rousing game of King's Quest I (original EGA) on it. They just don't make PC hardware like that. The PC I got in 1996...well, pretty much every part on it died within two or three years. The 'P' on that PC stood for POS. My Macs have been much more reliable, though.

The first Mac I owned was a Mac SE, with an original iMac soon following.

[HenMaster6000]

I was a little late to the party, but my first was a Performa 550 with CD loading Cartrage at 75mhz. I ran Mac OS 7. I learned to hate "The Bomb" almost as much as the blue screen of death. Do any of you Mac OS 9 users still get that?

[Awimoway]

Originally posted by Makosuke
Anybody remember trying to play that text adventure pirate game from an audio casette? Talk about load times--that even made the great Voodo dance of C64 game loading look speedy.

I remember it, but I don't particularly remember the slow load times--probably because I had nothing to compare it to! :D

[Powerbook G5]

In the 4 years I used OS 8.6 through 9.2, I maybe got a system bomb all of two times. Both were caused by AOL taking down the system from what I recall. Come to think of it, the only time I have ever seen a kernal panic under OS X has been when my girlfriend has tried to use AOL, too.

[winmacguy]

I voted PC because I MY first computer puchase in 1998 was a Win PC running 98 which has since been upgraded to the win XP that I am currently on running a 40GB Hard drive with CD burner DVD 19inch studio monitor, canon scanner, canon bjc 3000 printer as well as recent aditions of multimedia speakers. My familys frist computer back in 1980 or so was a Macintosh although I cant remember which one. That got upgrded and changed in the mid 90s to a PC running win 95 and subsequently upgraded to win 98se.
My next purchase will most likely be a PB (hopefully G5 since it will be a way of yet)

[Foxer]

Originally posted by Awimoway
Mine too, although really it was my parents'. I even remember when my parents played computer games--Zork-type stuff. And I have fond memories of the lousy voice synthesizer and playing Parsec. That was a long time ago.

Our next computer was a IIc. Then, around 91 we got a 386. And then there was a string of cheapo PCs during the 90s.

I came back to Apple in 2002.

Very similiar career paths.:
TI 99/4A in 1982 (christmas) - Most used program Personal Record keeper, on which I kept a database of my Star Wars figures and took about 10 minutes to load off of the audio tape.

Went to Apple //c on the release day in 1984. Loved that thing.

IBM 286 running about 30 MhZ with windows 2.0 when I went to college (1989).

No-Name 386 running 66mhz in 1992.

Something called a Midwest Micro pentium at 120 MhZ in 1995.

Dell PentII running about 300 mhz in 1998

Dell Pent III (I think) in 2000. Ran like crap

IBM P4 in 2001. Best available then. Maybe 1.6 GhZ. Also problem prone.

Finally, G4 PowerMac in May 2002. Whole series of Macs since then.

[edenwaith]

Originally posted by TheArchpadre
First computer I ever played with was a Tandy 1000, belonging to my parents. I may not be old enough to have experience with cassette drives, but I do have fond memories of having to dig around for the 5.25" boot disk since it had no hard drive.


Same here. My first introduction to computers was through my friend, who had a Tandy 1000 SX. Two 5.25" drives, autotime (to remember the time), 286 processor, 16 color RGB monitor, and probably around 512 or 640 KB of RAM. That baby probably cost around $5000 back in the mid-80s. I remember having to boot up DOS with a disk. How cool it was when my parents got the Tandy 1000 HX several years later in 1987 which had autoboot. I think it had large enough of a hard drive to store the OS, and that was about it.

It is also interesting to get a feel for the ages of the people on this board by seeing which computers they first used. Anyone start out with a DEC PDP? The Eniac? C'mon...anyone?

[Sir_Giggles]

Originally posted by edenwaith
The Eniac? C'mon...anyone?

LOL. Aren't Eniac users already dead?

[steadyeddie]

My story:

- (1981?) Sinclair ZX81 (my brother's actually)
- (1984) Commodore 64 (yay!)
- (1991?) 2nd hand, Original IBM PC-XT 4.77MHz with 512k RAM and 10MB HDD, CGA graphics!
- (1995?) 2nd hand Tandon 286 10MHz with 20MB HDD, 1MB RAM, Hercules amber screen
- (1996?) 2nd hand Epson 386DX 16MHz
- (1997) 2nd hand Compaq Contura Aero 486sx Notebook
- (1997) 2nd hand Dell 486sx 66MHz thingy
- (1999) 2nd hand Toshiba Pentium 100 notebook
- (2001) Brand new (!) iMac 600MHz G3 (I finally got a job!)

[killmoms]

Oh yeah, VIC-20 baby, quickly replaced by a more capable Commodore 64 with the floppy drive! That thing was the hotness.

After that, a summary is in order:

33MHz 386 PC, 8MB RAM Win 3.11 - we added a CD-ROM, SoundBlaster, and a MB of video RAM so we could play MYST/use Encarta
100MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM Win 95 - pre-retail build of '95, received right at the beginning of August of 1995; I was really into computers at this point, so I actually did research for this. I investigated different brands, compared prices and features, and we settled on a Dell (back when their machines were still GOOD, for PCs)

(technically these were my 'rents computers and I just used them, the rest of these noted I bought/built myself)

200MHz Cyrix 586, 64MB RAM Win 95 - S3 ViRGE card for (crappy) 3D acceleration, my first step into the graphics world
400MHz AMD K6-III, 96MB RAM Win 98 - had a Riva TNT2 with 32MB of RAM, so I thought I was hot stuff - played Q3Test on this box
500MHz Celeron, 256MB RAM Win 98/Win XP - an upgrade gone extra large—bought a GeForce2 MX, wouldn't work w/ the K6-III's mobo, so a friend gave me the Celeron and mobo, but wouldn't fit in the case I had
1.66GHz AthlonXP 2000+, 512MB RAM Win XP - first truly modern setup I had, built at the end of the summer of 2002 for college, GeForce 4 Ti4400, still plays games pretty well

and finally...

1.25GHz Motorola G4, 512MB RAM (15" AluBook) OS X 10.2.8 > 10.3.3

I know I know, took long enough. I'm an OS X kid!

Just to note, I do want a G5, but will be upgrading my PC a bit and getting an HDTV + some software for my Mac this summer, so it'll have to wait. Planning on getting an Athlon64 3000+ and a Radeon 9700 Pro! Have to gear up for Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, doncha know?

--Cless

[nagromme]

Most of my computing hostory is still hooked up:

Commodore 64
Amiga 3000
PowerTower Pro
eMachines eTower
PowerBook G3
eMac
AlBook 15


But my place is not crowded:
The C64 is in my stereo cabinet out of sight, hooked up to the TV, and my Amiga and BOTH towers are all crammed into a little cabinet sharing one monitor on top. Laptops stow away, and my eMac is in my bedroom doubling as a spare TV (for DVD movies).

[rickvanr]

Performa 580 CD

yeah baby, those were the days

[neoelectronaut]

Packard Bell 486SX 25mhz. 4MB RAM (Later upgraded to 8MB) 200MB HD. 4x CD-Rom Drive....

That's about it. This was in the early days of Multimedia. The "golden era" of computing. (in my humble opinion)

[ant_s]

I put PC - but the first PC I used was my dad's Amstrad (dunno what model, but from the 80s)


Then in 97 I got a Gateway 2000 P5-166 - their first MMX computer! 32Mb RAM, 2.5Gb HDD and 2Mb graphics.

Then in 99 I got a Gateway Solo Celeron 366 laptop (now acting as my Internet server and web server, reliably, too, I might add!)

Then in 2001 the screen broke on the laptop so I got a Time (booo) laptop AMD K6-2 500.

Later on in 2001 I built an Athlon 1400 (after debating whether to get a PowerMac Quicksilver 733, but came to the conclusion it was too expensive and incompatible with the software we were using at school)

Then in December I gave in and got a PowerBook G4 15" Alu SuperDrive...ohh yes!

[Earendil]

I'm only 19 right now, so my first computer is different from the first ones I used.

Macintosh 512K was the first computer to grace my family. I remember wanting to see the trash can get big and empty again like I would see Dad do. problem was I needed something to put into the trash...woops :D

second computer was a Powerbook with an 80mb HD, dunno what the mhz was, but we could use an external monitor, and it was color, so that was the bomb and killed an entire summer for me as a kid playing spectre :)

Next was the oldest living Computer in the house, a 7600 PowerMac 120mhz 32mb RAM, and a wopping 1.2GIGABYTES of memory!! I was astounded as a kid, that, and the idea of "burning a CD" back in 1996 :)
That good guy is still running 8.6 and is quite happy.

Next up for the family was a brand new Bondi blue iMac that was given to the kids so that we'd lay off the 7600, fine by us :)

In the last year my parents got sick of the 7600 and so my mom got an 867 SP G4 PowerMac, and a few months later my Dad aquired an 867PB 15".

As for MY first computer? well, last september my hard working summer paid off, and I'm now the proud father of the fastest computer in the house, a 1.25ghz PB 15" :D

Tyler
Earendil

[blakespot]

Originally posted by Makosuke
The TI99/4A rocked because of the selection of cartridge-based games (oh, the vivid memories I have of Anteater), but of course it had the built-in keyboard that you could program some BASIC with (I remember how cool it was to make the computer do something I told it to on the living room TV), and you could even save stuff to an audio cassette drive, as frustrating as that was (I don't remember clearly whether I ever got that to work).

Anybody remember trying to play that text adventure pirate game from an audio casette?

Scott Adam's "Pirate Adventure." I remember it well.


blakespot

[tyson12zoll]

LC II

[blakespot]

Originally posted by arn
yep.... because I (the maker of the polls) live in.... North America! :)

if you wish the polls had better options, you are free to submit your own suggestions for polls AND potential answers. (don't bother submitting more options for this particular poll as it won't get run again for a while).

arn

Yes, I think many European users began using a standard known as MSX, which was interestingly enough set by Microsoft.

Some MSX machines here (http://www.old-computers.com/search/default.asp)


blakespot

[Roger1]

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair. I even had the memory module for it. :D You had to plug it into your TV in order to use it. <sigh> Thinking about it makes me wish I would 've stayed with programming.

[Nermal]

My first was a Commodore 64. I haven't voted though, because it says I've already voted :confused: :(

[whocares]

Originally posted by slightly
Hello? Where's the Spectrum? The BBC Micro B? The Acorn Electron, for crying out loud?

Hip Hip Hourray for the BBC B. That was the first computer I seriously got my hands on. It was my father's. IIRC he also had an Apple II something at work that I played with, but that's a bit foggy... (I may have used the Apple II before the BBC :D )

MY first computer purchased with my own funds was a Rev. D 333MHz Strawberry iMac. Yum. Still have it and it still works fine.

Since then, I'm on my second iBook.

[edit: and the BBC was still working just fine the last time I powered it up. That was about a year ago.]

[Photorun]

Originally posted by eric_n_dfw
Timex/Sinclair 1000
4K ROM, 2K RAM


ALRIGHT! I'm not the only one with that destined to be doorstop machine. All the keys were preprogrammed with Basic language commands (like and, gosub, goto, etc.) I guess because they figured you couldn't type them yourself, the keyboard itself was, uh, weird, like calculator-esqe. It came with this bizarre thermal printer as wide as register tape and you ahd to buy your own tape recorder... to, well, load the programs (ah, those were the days!). Actually had this one game I played until I literally broke the joystick that I bought later, a flight sim, don't remember it's name, maybe Eric will remember. You had two airports, large and small, and there was three lakes... round, square, and oblong. Everything was flat and there was almost no points of reference if you flew off the map. None-the-less it was kinda vaguely almost fun.

[Centris 650]

I mooched off of people! The first computer I used was a Com.64. It belonged to my sister but I logged a many hours on it. When I went to college my roommate had an Apple IIGS. I was blown away with the GUI and feel in love with Apple. After that our graphics lab had a Mac II, SE & SEII. The first mac I BOUGHT was a Centris 650.

[virividox]

the original macintosh

[mms]

I'm lucky enough to have been a Mac user all my life. Our first computer that I can remember was a Mac SE. Messed around with KidPix and Tetris. My first personal one was a Performa 6400, which my dad had used until he got his G3 PowerBook. Oregon Trail was a great game IMO, and I could spent hours playing it.

[johnnyjibbs]

Amiga 500 in either 1989 or 1990. Only really played games on it until I discovered AMOS in 1993... Deluxe Paint was a brilliant paint program too. It had 512k RAM (which I later upgraded to 1MB for about £30), just a 3.5" floppy and no hard drive. It was pretty unreliable but a nice computer.

Since then, we've had a Pentium 75MHz/Windows 95/8MB RAM/1GB hard drive in 1995, Pentium III 500MHz/Windows 98/128MB RAM/20GB hard drive/Voodoo 3 in 1999, and just recently a Dell P4 2.4GHz/Win XP/512MB RAM/80GB hard drive/integrated extreme graphics.

The first computer that I bought and owned myself is this PowerBook, which I bought just after the updates, last September. Life is good. :)

[eyelikeart]

I'm later than a lot of u guys around here.

My first computer was a PowerMac clone, the Motorola StarMax. It was the equivalent of a PM 4400 really. :)

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by blakespot
Yes, I think many European users began using a standard known as MSX, which was interestingly enough set by Microsoft.

Some MSX machines here (http://www.old-computers.com/search/default.asp)


blakespot

ASCII--Microsoft Japan picked up on MSX from a company called Spectravideo. 26 manufacturers actually agreed on it. I have a Sony HB-210 MSX machine and 1DD diskette drive. It wasn't bad stuff but it also wasn't great stuff. MSX2 and MSX3 turned out much better, though.

[blakespot]

Originally posted by bousozoku
ASCII--Microsoft Japan picked up on MSX from a company called Spectravideo. 26 manufacturers actually agreed on it. I have a Sony HB-210 MSX machine and 1DD diskette drive. It wasn't bad stuff but it also wasn't great stuff. MSX2 and MSX3 turned out much better, though.

Yes, I am familiar with the SV-328 and SV-318. The 328 seemed like a nice machine. Linkis to these can be seen in the orig link, above. MSX enjoyed more popularity than MSX-2 or MSX-3, though, correct?



blakespot

[Stewie]

TRS-80 Model III 4kb of RAM. I eventually upgraded it up to 48kb of RAM and 2 5 1/4" Disk Drivers, added the RS-232 card so I could hook up my 1200 baud modem.

[gotohamish]

Originally posted by Macrumors
Vote: Poll: Your first personal computer? (http://www.macpolls.com/?poll_id=376)

Amstrad CPC 464

I used to know code to make the text change colour!!!!!!

[TyWahn]

Timex Sinclair 1000 complete with tape drive. I could make your name flash black and white like nobody's business.
Then I got an "ADAM" with a HIGH-SPEED cassette drive, favorite game was Buck Rogers. . This computer had a built-in ColecoVision. Kicked Atari 2500's a$$

[Nermal]

Originally posted by gotohamish
Amstrad CPC 464

I used to know code to make the text change colour!!!!!!

Was that the one with the tape drive integrated into the keyboard? One of my friends had (still has?) one of those.

Speaking of Amstrad, my first computer was a Commodore 64, and my second was an Amstrad PC20. It had an 8 MHz 8086 processor, half a meg of memory, and a 720k floppy drive. We also bought the optional 360k floppy drive (and still have it somewhere - dad modded it to allow it to be used in a standard PC).

[biw314]

what about the Adam?

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by blakespot
Yes, I am familiar with the SV-328 and SV-318. The 328 seemed like a nice machine. Linkis to these can be seen in the orig link, above. MSX enjoyed more popularity than MSX-2 or MSX-3, though, correct?



blakespot

Right. MSX2 machines were quite good with 640x480 resolution, but were always quite a bit more expensive than they should have been. The trouble is that most machines coming from Europe or the U.S.A. didn't display Japanese very well and didn't cater to the market, whereas MSX definitely did. It really ignited the computer craze in Japan.

[Fitzcaraldo]

1) TRS-80 Mk1 3k with Radioshack TapeRecorder.
2) PET 30
3) Uk 101 Home build Overclocked...
3) BBC B & Co processor
5) Research Machines 380Z (4MHz)
4) Superbrain II, a Way cool CPM Machine used to control Satellites.
5) Macintosh Plus
6) Toshiba T-1200
7) Macintosh Quadra 840AV
8) PowerMac 6100/66AV
9) PowerMac 7600/120 AVish
10) Powermac DP 1.25 MDD

Still own 1,3,4,5,9, and 10

Oh the days of PCW Magazine with printed program listings ;)

[Nermal]

OK, Fitzcaraldo has inspired me into "list mode". Here are all the computers we have owned, in order of purchase. I have listed the oldest OS we installed on each computer, along with the newest.

1. Commodore 64, Basic 2.0 (Family)
2. Amstrad PC20, DOS 3.3 (Family)
3. 486SX/25, 4 MB, 105 MB, DOS 5.0-6.0 (Family)
4. 486SX/25, 8 MB, 540 MB, DOS 6.0-6.22 (Dad)
5. Pentium 90, 16 MB, 540 MB, DOS 6.2-6.22 (Dad)
6. IBM 686/120, 16 MB, 1.2 GB, Win 95-98 (Family)
7. Dell P2/300, 128 MB, 6.4 GB, Win 98-XP (Dad)*
8. Celeron 400, 64 MB, 20 GB, Win 98-98 SE (Family)
9. IBM Celeron 633, 320 MB, 20 GB, Win 98 SE-2003 (Mum)*
10. Duron 850, 256 MB, 40 GB, Win 98 SE-XP (Me)
11. Athlon 2000, 512 MB, 40 GB, Win XP (Me)
12. Athlon 1700, Win XP (Dad)*
13. Classic II, 4 MB, 40 MB, 7.1-7.5.5 (Brother)^
14. Colour Classic, 4 MB, 40 MB, 7.1-7.5.5 (Brother)^
15. iBook 800, 640 MB, 30 GB, 10.2.1-10.2.8 (Me)
16. LC III, 8 MB, 80 MB, 7.1-7.6.1 (Me)^
17. Dell Celeron 1600, 512 MB, 30 GB, Win XP (Mum)*
18. Power Mac G4 1250, 1280 MB, 80 GB, 10.3-10.3.2 (Me)*

* Indicates a computer still in use.
^ Indicates a computer we still own, but don't use.

[whocares]

Originally posted by Fitzcaraldo
1) TRS-80 Mk1 3k with Radioshack TapeRecorder.
3) BBC B & Co processor

Hey! Another BBC B user. Cool!

[Photorun]

Originally posted by TyWahn
Timex Sinclair 1000 complete with tape drive. I could make your name flash black and white like nobody's business.

That's HYSTERICAL! I did that and some other colors, well a color and black anyways.

[eric_n_dfw]

Originally posted by TyWahn
...I got an "ADAM" with a HIGH-SPEED cassette drive, favorite game was Buck Rogers. . This computer had a built-in ColecoVision. Kicked Atari 2500's a$$ Yeah and the 2600's too :rolleyes:

:D

[eric_n_dfw]

Originally posted by Photorun
ALRIGHT! I'm not the only one with that destined to be doorstop machine. All the keys were preprogrammed with Basic language commands (like and, gosub, goto, etc.) I guess because they figured you couldn't type them yourself, the keyboard itself was, uh, weird, like calculator-esqe.
I presume it was to save memory - only storing one byte for each "token" - it probably also simplified the BASIC syntax checker as only valid commands could be added.


Originally posted by Photorun
It came with this bizarre thermal printer as wide as register tape and you ahd to buy your own tape recorder... to, well, load the programs (ah, those were the days!). Actually had this one game I played until I literally broke the joystick that I bought later, a flight sim, don't remember it's name, maybe Eric will remember. You had two airports, large and small, and there was three lakes... round, square, and oblong. Everything was flat and there was almost no points of reference if you flew off the map. None-the-less it was kinda vaguely almost fun. If it's the one I had, I believe it was oh-so-creatively named, "Flight Simulator" or something. I played it all of twice - although I tried to play it about a thousand bleepin' times! (Damn 15 minute tape load that failed 99% of the time!)
I do remember it being oddly fun - probably more-so because I was so happy that I finally got it to load!

BTW: For a quick nostalgia fix (and to remove any desire to buy an old TS 1000 off eBay - like I did a couple of years ago :rolleyes: ), check this out: http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/ts1000/

[eric_n_dfw]

Remember these old standby's:

sys 64738

and the holy land of ML programs: sys 49152

:D :D :D

(boy am I a geek!)

[Nermal]

Don't forget peek and poke! :)

[gotohamish]

Originally posted by Nermal
Was that the one with the tape drive integrated into the keyboard? One of my friends had (still has?) one of those.

Speaking of Amstrad, my first computer was a Commodore 64, and my second was an Amstrad PC20. It had an 8 MHz 8086 processor, half a meg of memory, and a 720k floppy drive. We also bought the optional 360k floppy drive (and still have it somewhere - dad modded it to allow it to be used in a standard PC).

It certainly was!

[lind0834]

My first was an Apple II+, that I dug out of the trash at the local elementary school. They were getting all thier fancy new LC 5xx installed.

[discoforce]

Based on other posting I think my computer history falls somewhere in the middle:

1) Apple II+
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=571

2) Laser 128 by VTech (an Apple IIc Clone!)
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=13

3) Macintosh Classic II
http://www.apple-history.com/noframes/body.php?page=gallery&model=classic_II

4) Macintosh LC 520 (Color!!!)
http://www.apple-history.com/noframes/body.php?page=gallery&model=lc520

5) Been using a Gateway for the past 5 years (I know, I know...)

Next computer? Powerbook 1.25 Ghz 15.2" - I'm coming home!

[~Shard~]

The first that I actually owned/purchased myself, or the first I used? The first one I ever used was my older brother's "brand new" Apple ][e at the time, and that was the machine I learned everything on. (Including how to play Wasteland, one of my all-time favorite games EVER!) After that, he purchased a Mac SE30, and then eventually our family purchased a Pentium II 200 MHz. The first computer I actually purchased myself was in 1999, and was a dual 466 MHz Celeron (BP6 mobo) overclocked to 560 MHz per chip - pretty sweet (and inexpensive!) at the time! I built that one from scratch myself.

But now I recently purchased my brand new computer, my first one in 4 years - a beautiful 17" 1.25 GHz G4 iMac - and I love it! I'll only buy Apple from now on. I think my next computer will be a Rev B G7 in 3 years or so... ;) :cool:

[Dahl]

Originally posted by 717
Sinclair ZX Spectrum, 48Kb
Me too.
It didn't leave me wanting more computers, so my next one were a PowerMac 7500 many years later.

[mrsebastian]

my good ol' com 64. couldn't do crap on it an pretty much just played games.

[sgtlmj]

Glad to see I'm not the only old guy here.

I remember borrowing a neighbor's Timex Sinclair, and I got hooked.

Parents then bought me a TI-99/4A the day before Texas Instruments announced that it would no longer support it. (No wonder it had that $99 rebate.) Miner 2049'er or Tunnels of Doom anyone? It also had the best damn coffee warmer of any computer to date.

Anybody remember the Commodore 16? I had one of those.

Many Commodore 64's. I used to take them out of the cases, solder led's to the main board and write 6502 machine code to make them blink. Took a step back to understand how the thing worked.

Ever see an Educator 64? Had one of those. Basically a C=64 in a Pet case w/ a green monitor attached.

I always lusted after the SX-64, which was a "portable" C=64 in a case w/ a 5" color monitor and dual disk drives. Man, I wanted one of those!

Had an Amiga 500 for a while also.

[Mord]

amstrad cpw still works and has never crashed dont use it though

i even got a printer/scanner/mouse for it

theres a paint program on it that looks incredibly mac like gui and all

[ntg]

I used to play with my dad's computer when I was a Kid - it took up the whole of the ground floor of the Calor Gas offices in the UK, and was used for vehicle scheduling.

I then (aged 11) started to use an old Monroe mainframe (I'm sure that's the correct spelling, but I don't know who made it).

I use the term 'use' loosely, since all we used to do was send off for paper tapes that you could run through it and get the golfball printer to use different characters to produce images of the Mona Lisa and Leonardo Da Vinci!!

Then I made a coice between this new Apple II machine and the new Vic20 that was just released - I bought the Vic and a CP/M language pack!! (I then saved up and spent as much again on a 16K expansion pack for it!!)


I then had a C64 (actually, I helped design graphics for cross-platform games, so I was loaned a ZX Spectrum, A Beeb B and an electron!)

Then I saw the light, finally got a II+ 2nd hand, and have had a IIc, EuroPlus, IIGS, followed by a selection of Centris, Quadra, B&W and G4 since.

I am, however, a sad geek (according to my wife) because the only one I don't still own is a Vic20 which I wired up to become a burglar alarm for our school's computer lab.

[i]Originally posted by sgtlmj
Ever see an Educator 64? Had one of those. Basically a C=64 in a Pet case w/ a green monitor attached.

I always lusted after the SX-64, which was a "portable" C=64 in a case w/ a 5" color monitor and dual disk drives. Man, I wanted one of those!


I actually put a II+ card vertically behind the CRT of a knackered PET once, just to get a monochrome all-in-one that was easier to lug around!

Nig

Edited because I spelled 'spelling' wrong!!
- what more can i say!

[Vanilla]

Amstrad CPC464, I used to play "Elite", wireframe space trading game on it, God I'm old......!
Vanilla

[ssamani]

-TI-99/4A - Hated it, almost never used it
-Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K - fantastic machine
-IBM PS/2 386SX-20 hand me down, but was a great machine, except for the OS (Windows 3.11). Fell in love with the Dock back then, with WinDock
-Apple rev A beige PowerMac G3 Tower. Loved that machine. Poverty forced sale to fund purchase of:
-Apple rev A PowerBook G4 500. Fantastic machine, spent a year travelling with my wife and before being replaced under warranty for:
-Apple rev B/C PowerBook G4 667
-iMac 17" 1.25GHz and classic iMac 400MHz (swapped for my wife's Dell) now added to the family, all happily wirelessly networed around the house.

Thank god I never had a Commodore PET.

Sanj

[ntg]

Originally posted by ssamani


Thank god I never had a Commodore PET.

Sanj

Nothing wrong with PETs - you could write a one-line program to move a pixel around the screen using the four arrow keys, and still save it to cassette in less than 10 seconds (and the cassette was built in!)

Nig.

[IndyGopher]

The first two computers I had were kits.. a Heathkit CPM monstrosity, and the original Sinclair ZX80. Since then, I have had computers of nearly every description.. a DECwriter terminal would be the most archaic of them.

[rt_brained]

HAL 9000

Friggen piece of crap is holding me hostage in m...

_error

_

...

All functions normal.

Welcome.

[ph8te]

I remember it clearly...

A sunny Christmas day in South Africa, and my father giving me this box... In it, a Vic20. I got it hooked up as soon as I could and then asked my pa where the games were...

His reply: "If you want to play games, you can program them yourself" and that was how I got into computers...

[shamino]

Originally posted by biw314
what about the Adam?
Did anyone ever use this as a computer? Everyone I know who had one (which is only one person) simply used it as a ColecoVision with some better games on tape.

I considered getting it when it came out, but it was outdated and overpriced from the moment of its release. No disk drives available for any price, and no programming languages other than BASIC. And more expensive than better offerings from Tandy, Atari and Commodore.

[whocares]

Originally posted by Vanilla
I used to play "Elite", wireframe space trading game on it, God I'm old......!
Vanilla

Been there, done that!
You're not that old... ;)

[shamino]

Since people are posting there history as a list, here goes. This list is a bit weird because I've a bunch of home-built PCs. These weren't so much bought as "evolved" as I replaced various parts over many years.
Timex/Sinclair 1000. Which broke after an hour or two of usage and was subsequently returned
TRS-80 Color Computer. 16K, cassette I/O. Later expanded to Extended Basic (my first do-it-yourself hardware upgrade.)
Apple //c. With green monitor, two floppies and Apple Scribe printer
A generic 8MHz 8088 PC running MS-DOS. Loaned to me by my college. CGA monochrome graphics. I remember writing my own MS-Word printer driver to allow me to use my Apple Scribe printer with it.
An even more generic 10MHz 286 PC (still running DOS). Hand-built by replacing parts of the 8088 that the college was loaning me. I eventually ended up with two computers, so I could give the loaner machine back to the school.
Upgraded the 286 to a 33MHz 386. Got my first hard drive somewhere around here.
Upgraded the 386 to a 80MHz 486. Later started running OS/2 in addition to DOS. Later upgraded to WinNT before retiring it.
Mac SE (bought used)
Micron dual-200MHz Pentium Pro (bought used) running WinNT, then Win95, then Win98. May soon upgrade to 2000 if I don't retire it first.
Mac Quadra 840av (bought used)
Mac G4 QuickSilver-2002. The first machine I bought as a new system in a very long time.
Pulled the 486 out of mothballs and upgraded to 120MHz. Don't ask why. I had a spare motherboard lying around and decided to reassemble the machine so I could play my old DOS games. (They aren't stable under Win95/98) I'm hoping they'll work on Virtual PC on the Mac.
Then if we count the machines I used a lot but didn't own:
TRS-80 model III
Apple ][+
Franklin Ace 1000
A huge variety of assorted PCs running a huge variety of different operating systems (including all versions of DOS, all versions of Windows, most versions of OS/2, and several different Unixes.)
A huge variety of 68K Macs running Systems 6 through 8.1.
All kinds of big-iron machines running various UNIXes, VMS, MVS, etc.

[eric_n_dfw]

Did anyone here actually have the Intellivision keyboard attachment? I lusted after that thing, but my family had an Atari VCS (later called the 2600) and my dad wasn't about to drop any more money on an Intellivision. :-/

[edenwaith]

Originally posted by Earendil

Macintosh 512K was the first computer to grace my family. I remember wanting to see the trash can get big and empty again like I would see Dad do. problem was I needed something to put into the trash...woops :D


I have an LC II which has a program where Oscar the grouch comes out of the trash can when you empty it and sings "I love trash". Cute program, but dangerous with kids, especially if they want to see Oscar come out.

[edenwaith]

Originally posted by TyWahn
Timex Sinclair 1000 complete with tape drive. I could make your name flash black and white like nobody's business.
Then I got an "ADAM" with a HIGH-SPEED cassette drive, favorite game was Buck Rogers. . This computer had a built-in ColecoVision. Kicked Atari 2500's a$$

The Adam computer was another of the early computers I used at my friend's house. He also had a Coleco game system. Space Fury was my favorite game off of that. There was a great controller for Spy Hunter, also. I'm just waiting for a Coleco system game pack to come out as either a game or one of those all-in-one controllers.

[sgtlmj]

Anybody remember running GeOS on their C=64? Felt like I was Mac-ing way back then.

What was the first thing you made your speech synthesizer say on your TI-99/4A? Bet it was: "Shall we play a game?"

[KershMan]

First home computer - Atari 400
First school computer - Apple II (we had up to IIe)
First work computer - Zenith 8080 with 2 5 1/4" floppy drives, no hard drive

The Zenith was a big piece of junk. I was in the Army at the time (1988) and we used Wordstar, Multimate, and Enable as our main programs. You had to run the program on one floppy while saving your data to the other. Never failed, it would crash, or the floppy would get hosed, just a terrible experience.

[encro]

Originally posted by edenwaith
I have an LC II which has a program where Oscar the grouch comes out of the trash can when you empty it and sings "I love trash". Cute program, but dangerous with kids, especially if they want to see Oscar come out.

:) That was one of the most memorable things from the classic days.

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by ntg
Nothing wrong with PETs - you could write a one-line program to move a pixel around the screen using the four arrow keys, and still save it to cassette in less than 10 seconds (and the cassette was built in!)

Nig.

Indeed, the SuperPET was quite a machine with 6502, Z-80, and 6809 processors all in one big box just like one of those fancy Ohio Scientific computers which sold for $10,000+.

[encro]

1. Amiga 500 - 2meg w/ Amiga 570 CDTV
+ Dual Boot Roms

A brillant system, got me into graphics and animation.

suffered from the equivalent of system bomb/kernel panic called Guru Meditation quite a lot.

2. Amiga 600 - 1meg RAM

Got this one given to me, has almost no screws in it, broken floppy drive and damages but still works. Used it during a few gigs to play some sound samples a few years back.

3. Amiga 1200 - 2meg RAM 200meg HD

Top machine, really fast and had 256 colors! (*excluding ham and ham8)

Still use it for a bash in OctaMed SoundStudio every now and then. There is still not a program on the Mac that comes as close as a tracker as this killer app sadly. Who would have thought programming music in hexadecimal could be so much fun!

4. iMac G4-800 768Meg 60Gig

I'm an OS X kid! (maybe I'm too old now)

I still regard AmigaOS/Workbench to have been lightyears ahead of MacOS Classic. That said OS X has been by far the best (and newest) experience so far. It feels like the continuation of the Amiga.

We used to have remotely similar system directories:
dev/ (/dev)
libs/ (/Library)
l/ (??? Never was real sure on what l abbreviated)
c/ (/bin Commands)
s/ (/System)

[Mudbug]

Originally posted by edenwaith
The Adam computer was another of the early computers I used at my friend's house. He also had a Coleco game system. Space Fury was my favorite game off of that. There was a great controller for Spy Hunter, also. I'm just waiting for a Coleco system game pack to come out as either a game or one of those all-in-one controllers.

I had a Coleco growing up too - Spy Hunter really was the best game for that. Funny shaped controller too - had a keypad like a phone, and a roller wheel at the top sticking out front, with buttons on the sides. Pretty uncomfortable, now that I think about it :)

And as for the all-in-one game things, my wife gave me two of them for Xmas this year. Best. Game. System. EVAR. :D

[eric_n_dfw]

What gaming console came with the worst / best controlers! ;)

My votes:
Best: Atari baby!!! If they just didn't break so easy. (Actually, Wico 3-Way was best, but they didn't come *with* a machine)

Worst: Tie between Coleco and Intelivision

Most interesting: Bally Arcade pistol grip with joystick/paddle thingie on top.

[pdgnyc85]

Hmm

First used
School:
Commodore Pet
Best Friend:
VIC 20 (with modem put the handset in, call BBS)

My own
Commodore 64. Looking back I couldn;t even tell you... I just loved that machine.

College:
Original Mac

Post College
Performa forgot the model (stolen out of my place in NYC)

Two crappy Gateway Laptops in succession (one stolen the other had hard drive and screen go at the same time)

Beige G3

Current
G3 450

I will crawl til I can get a G5 powerbook (I swear)

[CalfCanuck]

Original Mac - 128 KB with single 400 KB floppy. I remember (not so fondly) the the disk swap hell one used to get into due to the limited RAM - when I reached 100 swaps (please insert Disk 1, please insert Disk 2, please insert Disk 1, please insert Disk 2) I'd just shut the computer off and restart! Thankfully the 512 KB upgrades came out (those were soldered on!!)

Once lent the Mac to a friend who had only used DOS boxes. He told me that he couldn't figure out how to eject the floppy, so he hanked it out with a pair of pliers!:eek:

But the floppy still worked after that.

[mmmbop]

Originally posted by slightly
If you've never tried to load "Horace Goes Skiing" from a motor-driven cassette tape (or even, god help you, a manually-driven one) you've never lived.

Ahhh, happy days.

[stylum]

Timex/Sinclair 1000
with extra ram

at $10.00 it was the find of that day in 1980

it still works, for my students amazement

[Sedulous]

Royal Computer (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=241)

I had one of these Royal Computer things... OMG it was terrible... The printer actually was nothing more than an automated typewriter. As a kid, I thought it was great because it sounded like a machine gun. Ah, the good old days.

[edenwaith]

Originally posted by eric_n_dfw
What gaming console came with the worst / best controlers! ;)


Or what about the best console with worst controllers? Or worst console with the best controllers.

If one looks at 'current' consoles, I'd say the "best console/worst controllers" would go either to the N64 or the XBox. I never liked the N64 controller, the GameCube's controllers are much better. And the XBox's original controllers were way too large, which did not make them so great for people with small hands.

The best controller I've used is for the PS2. It works pretty well, and the buttons and knobs are in good places without straining the hands. The GC controllers are pretty decent, but there are a few buttons which are somewhat awkward.

I was just remembering what the original Coleco controllers were like...a joystick with a phone pad. I originally was thinking of the larger one I used for Spy Hunter which was more like a grip with four buttons at each finger (guns, oil slick, missiles, etc.).

[Nermal]

Originally posted by sgtlmj
Anybody remember running GeOS on their C=64? Felt like I was Mac-ing way back then.

On the topic of GeOS, the current copyright holder (http://www.cmdrkey.com/) has recently (within the last couple of weeks) decided to make GeOS available for free download (http://www.cmdrkey.com/cbm/geos/geos1.html). Fire up those emulators :)

[ForumGhost]

Future:
PB/Dual-G5-17"x8Gb laptop ;-)

Current:
PB/G4-17"x1Gb laptop (OSX-10.3.2 server)
z800 (zVM/zOS/SUSE in an LPAR)

Pre-PC era:
Tandy Model 102 8k w/ 110-baud modem
Burroughs ICON 4Mb (QNX)
Commodore 64SX Portable (& CP/M)
DEC uVAX (VMS)
TRS-80 Model 4P (LDOS)
TRS-80 Model 16 (XENIX)
TRS-80 Model III & Vid-80 (NewDOS)
Commodore SuperPET & Galdalf Muppet
Timex Sinclair TI-99A (embarrasing)
Coleco ADAM (embarrasing)
Commodore PET 4040 chicklet
Apple II

Non-PC era:
Sun Ultra Quad V880
Sun Dual Ultra 60
Sun Sparc 2
DEC AlphaServer Dual-333
IBM P390 mini-mainframe
IBM MultiPrise 3000 mainframe

PC-era (reverse chrono):
Dell 8200 laptop 512Mb
Dell 8000 laptop 512Mb
IBM Thinkpad 600 256Mb
Gateway Solo 7200 laptop 384Mb
Compaq Armada 500 laptop 256Mb
Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop 256Mb
Dell Latitude 200MHz laptop 192Mb
Micron dual P2-400 desktop 64Mb
Acer dual PentiumPro-233 desktop 32Mb
Toshiba Satellite 220 laptop 8Mb
Generic Pentium-75 desktop 4Mb
Generic 486-DX2-75 desktop 2Mb
Generic 386DX-66 desktop 512k
Generic 286-16 desktop 256k
Tandy 2000 186-12 desktop 128k
Amstrad NEC8086-8MHz desktop 128k
Compaq Desqpro 8088-6MHz 64k
Original IBM PC-XT 32k

[Alex Wrege]

Commodore 128 d - the c64's big brother.

With orange monitor. . . and tapecorder.

[TyWahn]

Originally posted by shamino
Did anyone ever use this as a computer? Everyone I know who had one (which is only one person) simply used it as a ColecoVision with some better games on tape.

I considered getting it when it came out, but it was outdated and overpriced from the moment of its release. No disk drives available for any price, and no programming languages other than BASIC. And more expensive than better offerings from Tandy, Atari and Commodore.

We used it primarily for the word processor, with a super sweet DaisyWheel printer. We had several games on casette as well.
I was able to track down a modem, screaming along at 300 bps. All I could ever do was chat with a friend of mine, who had a Tandy, and log onto a couple of local Bulletin boards.
As far as anything else, mainly used it for the ColecVision.

[mattmack]

Originally posted by wdlove
My first computer was an Apple IIE, purchased in 1983. The only program that I remember using frequently was Home Accountant.
My first computer was an Apple IIE as well. All I remember is Lode runner and Cranston Manor. Oh and Oregon Trail. Those were the Days

[Gyroscope]

Commodore 64/128

I got this baby way back in 85 (fuzzy memory) and it really kicked some serious ass back then. Even bought 1571 floppy drive that was 2x more expensive than c128 itself.

[bousozoku]

Originally posted by shamino
Did anyone ever use this as a computer? Everyone I know who had one (which is only one person) simply used it as a ColecoVision with some better games on tape.

I considered getting it when it came out, but it was outdated and overpriced from the moment of its release. No disk drives available for any price, and no programming languages other than BASIC. And more expensive than better offerings from Tandy, Atari and Commodore.

I remember a few articles on Adam, but there just weren't enough customers interested in programming it. The tape drive was quite ambitious, but I think it all ended up overpriced and underwhelmed everyone.

[whocares]

Originally posted by ForumGhost
Future:
PB/Dual-G5-17"x8Gb laptop ;-)

Current:
PB/G4-17"x1Gb laptop (OSX-10.3.2 server)
z800 (zVM/zOS/SUSE in an LPAR)

Pre-PC era:
Tandy Model 102 8k w/ 110-baud modem
Burroughs ICON 4Mb (QNX)
Commodore 64SX Portable (& CP/M)
DEC uVAX (VMS)
TRS-80 Model 4P (LDOS)
TRS-80 Model 16 (XENIX)
TRS-80 Model III & Vid-80 (NewDOS)
Commodore SuperPET & Galdalf Muppet
Timex Sinclair TI-99A (embarrasing)
Coleco ADAM (embarrasing)
Commodore PET 4040 chicklet
Apple II

Non-PC era:
Sun Ultra Quad V880
Sun Dual Ultra 60
Sun Sparc 2
DEC AlphaServer Dual-333
IBM P390 mini-mainframe
IBM MultiPrise 3000 mainframe

PC-era (reverse chrono):
Dell 8200 laptop 512Mb
Dell 8000 laptop 512Mb
IBM Thinkpad 600 256Mb
Gateway Solo 7200 laptop 384Mb
Compaq Armada 500 laptop 256Mb
Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop 256Mb
Dell Latitude 200MHz laptop 192Mb
Micron dual P2-400 desktop 64Mb
Acer dual PentiumPro-233 desktop 32Mb
Toshiba Satellite 220 laptop 8Mb
Generic Pentium-75 desktop 4Mb
Generic 486-DX2-75 desktop 2Mb
Generic 386DX-66 desktop 512k
Generic 286-16 desktop 256k
Tandy 2000 186-12 desktop 128k
Amstrad NEC8086-8MHz desktop 128k
Compaq Desqpro 8088-6MHz 64k
Original IBM PC-XT 32k

Boy did you do a lot of soul searching before you found happiness :eek: :p :p

[-hh]

Well, you can put me down for an Apple ][+


And the first PC I used "In Industry" was a ][e.


-hh

[wdlove]

Originally posted by mattmack
My first computer was an Apple IIE as well. All I remember is Lode runner and Cranston Manor. Oh and Oregon Trail. Those were the Days

Yes, memory lane and those were the days is always great. I don't remember the other two programs. All that I remember about Oregon Trail was the nifty box. I've never really had a great interest in games.

[mattmack]

Originally posted by wdlove
Yes, memory lane and those were the days is always great. I don't remember the other two programs. All that I remember about Oregon Trail was the nifty box. I've never really had a great interest in games. Just FYI
Lode Runner was a little stick figure man running around a tier like level trying to collect packages and not to be detroyed by monsters. Think of it as a green and white donkey Kong.
Cranston Manor was one of those first clue type mystery games e.g. you are facing east (the computer would print out) and you would type in commands like face west and examine and such. I never got very far on it it was confusing for a 10 yr old:)

[StuPid QPid]

Wow. Memories. Memories...
I still remember the Christmas when I got my Sinclair ZX81 with 16K Rampack. I seem to recall a 3D maze game where you had to avoid a T-Rex. Probably one of the first 3D games, and it fitted into 1K of memory!
At School, my first experience was with a Research Machines 380Z. A cool black box...
I then migrated to a BBC Micro B. I think I used the command CHAIN "Chuckie_Egg" alot...

[pimentoLoaf]

Borrowed someone's Timex Sinclair for about a week and found it too tedious when inputting programs. If a program line got too long, I had to wait for the computer to catch up with my typing -- and that's saying something as there was only a membrane keyboard.

Then again, I was spoiled by my Apple IIe.

[womencantsail]

First PC: Apple II

[WinDoze9t8]

The Spectrum ZX81, Amstrad 464, my fav was the Amiga 500, 500+, 600, 1200

[iChan]

P100, 16MB Ram, 1.2GB HD. CD-Rom. Packard Bell.. what a POS

[iChan]

actually, it was a commodore 64, then an amiga 500. then a period of consoles only, then the Packard Bell

[nickvansmack]

That was my first. The external power supply was about the height (or width) of a 50 spindle CDR pack.

5K of total memory. I was too poor to get a disk drive, much less a tape drive!

programmed a game in COMPUTE! magazine, took all day, used "?" instead of "PRINT" to save memory and left computer on all day since i couldn't store my program off to tape!

Then got a Commodore 64, played "Tooth Invaders" on that. Fun game.

Then made the mistake of getting the Coleco ADAM for my Colecovision. $599! Next year it was going for $99 at Sears outlet!

I then went Mac and got a IICX!

now I run a G4 Quicksilver after going to the Dark Side for awhile (Win95-XP era), but XP has made me switch. OS X baby!

[sonyrules]

what about the Adam?

I was thinking about the same thing. The first computer i owned was an adam, no floopie drive, used tapes... I thought it was a rocking computer.. Then I boutght an apple IIe. Then i got smart and bought a Perfomra. I still have that thing in the closet still, Sitting next to the Adam...

Jr

[TheMacOS.com]

Mac color classic, new, about $800

[JamesDPS]

ForumGhost: the real question is, how many of those machines do you still have? Do you have a personal museum, you should! (a professor at my school has a collection of similar scope, including an Apple I, which he has never plugged in due to its value)... you should at least set up a "virtual tour" for people if you already haven't!

As for me, I'm young --- first personal computer was my family's Macintosh II. First computer of my own was a Color Classic, followed by a Performa 6110CD, PowerComputing PowerCenter Pro, PowerMac 8500A/V, PowerMac 9500 (upgraded with a G3 proc, which I actually still use! mmmm PCI slots...), and Powerbook G3 (Firewire, aka "Pismo"). There have been a couple winblows boxes in there too, pretty much for games. Future: whatever the middle-of-the-ground rev. B G5 PM is.... unless my school succeeds in tempting me with the dual 1.8's they're selling for 1,999, but I shall be patient!

[jsw]

TRS-80 Model III (well, technically, my parents bought it for us).
IIci (that one I bought on my own...).

[iindigo]

Performa 6400/200. 2GB HD and 16MB memory with optional 28k modem and Apple Multiple Scan 15" monitor. Ahhh the memories....

[Mac-Xpert]

The first computer I used was the Commodore Vic-20 (somewhere around '84 to '86) that I borrowed from my cousin. He had bought the Sinclair ZX-spectrum. The first computer I bought myself was the Commodore Amiga 500. This was back in 1987. At the same time I got to use the first mac's at school (in dutch: Het grafisch lyceum, Utrecht :)) Those where the 128k and 512k mac's. At home I kept the Amiga in active use till 1999! mostly for midi-sequencing with Music-X. Then the G4 came out and I finally upgraded to a G4-450 at home. This is still my current machine at home.

At work I've used the following mac's from 1993 to right now:
Macintosh IICi, Macintosh IIfx, Quadra 800, Powermac 8100-80 Mhz, Powermac 7600-120 Mhz, Powermac 9500-132 Mhz, Powermac G3-266 Mhz, Powermac G3-300 Mhz, Powermac G4-450 Mhz, Powermac dual G4-450 Mhz, Powermac G4-Dual 867 mhz.

And in a few week I hope to order a G5 Rev B; 2.? Ghz. :p

[musicpyrite]

Umm... *cough* Pentium 75 MHz... Hewlett Packard I think...

Yes, I am young, and you are all OLD!!

:)



Same here, but mine was 90 MHz :p

[slooksterPSV]

My first computer was a 386 33Mhz, 4MB RAM, Win 3.1, 80MB HDD got it in 94 from the DI.

[o1b2]

Commodore 64. where those the good old days. We did get a mac, thanks to mother when I was a kid in 1984, because her work gave it to her so she could work at home, but I remember I was the one that ruled that machine, I remember making simple animations with hyper cards, that was a fun little app.I remeber having a dos machine for a while but can not remeber when that was.

[puckhead193]

A Mac LC with the style writer printer and then added the cd rom drive later on... wow those were the days.....
on a side note, why did they change from the multi color apple to the blue/aqua color apple?... :rolleyes:

[yellow]

Apple IIe, Christmas 1983. Yes, my parents got it cheap. I was 12. I played the HELL out of some Wizardy and Bard's Tale.

[Ari_0]

Philips Atari (the one with the touch buttons)
Full of mind-numbing gaming goodness!!
The perfect present for a 10 year old :D

http://server6.uploadit.org/files/media78-Atari.jpg

[Savage Henry]

Sinclair ZX81 - and the first thing run on it was a basic written game where three block-graphics trains would race agains eachother ....

Turns out it did little more than that.

[~Shard~]

Apple IIe, Christmas 1983. Yes, my parents got it cheap. I was 12. I played the HELL out of some Wizardy and Bard's Tale.

Pretty much in the same boat - my brother's Apple //e saw a lot of awesome gaming on it back in '83. Wizardry was awesome (I loved the kick-ass spells like tiltowait and the super-classes like ninja and samurai), AutoDuel was another classic game, who can forget Ultima II, II and IV (still have the original cloth world map that came with it!) and my favorite game back then, which still ranks as one of my favorite games of all-time, Wasteland! :cool:

[yellow]

Oh, the Ultimas! How could I have forgotten that?? Thanks for reminding me!

[emw]

TRS-80. Decked out with a tape drive for loading/saving programs. Sweet.

[~Shard~]

Oh, the Ultimas! How could I have forgotten that?? Thanks for reminding me!

I still remember how "huge" Ultima IV was at the time. Having to time those damn moongates, those "large" maps... And killing Lord British required a little more work (relatively!) to figure out than in the previous versions. I still like how you could lure him out of his chambers in Ultima III and shoot him with a pirate ship cannon... :cool:

[yellow]

I still remember how "huge" Ultima IV was at the time. Having to time those damn moongates, those "large" maps...

That brings back so many young memories. Thank you! I bet I still have the 5.25" floppies someplace. I think my parents still have the IIe someplace. This makes me wonder, is Ultima IV available for Mac OS X as one of those nostalgia builds? To Google!!

EDIT: Awesome!! http://xu4.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
Just finished a sweet game beta, so it's time for some old school
gaming. Thanks again for the reminder Shard!

[jsw]

TRS-80. Decked out with a tape drive for loading/saving programs. Sweet.Ditto.

Model III. 16K RAM, baby!

[~Shard~]

That brings back so many young memories. Thank you! I bet I still have the 5.25" floppies someplace. I think my parents still have the IIe someplace. This makes me wonder, is Ultima IV available for Mac OS X as one of those nostalgia builds? To Google!!

EDIT: Awesome!! http://xu4.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
Just finished a sweet game beta, so it's time for some old school
gaming. Thanks again for the reminder Shard!

You bet, my pleasure yellow! And I do have the original boxes, discs and everything stored away - who knows, maybe someday they'll be worth something!

[jane doe]

Atari 600XL that we sold and got an 800XL. I kept that computer until I got an IBM clone (using macs in school). Traded it and got an SE/30. Later I added a NeXT Station.

[kronos2611]

Commodore 64 was the first machine I can remember getting - oh soo long ago!

Got into PeeCee's in the early to mid 90's (486 was my first, followed by a few Pentiums) and switched to Mac around 4 years ago when I bought an old PowerMac 7600 from eBay which was quickly followed up by an iBook then later on the Flat Panel iMac that I type this on now.

I did starting collecting a few things but alas my apartment is limited on space so at the moment I've only got:

Mac Plus and external 30Mb HD
Mac Classic with the full 4Mb RAM :-)
Performa 475 with dodgy ethernet card
PowerMac 7600 upgraded with a 180Mhz 604e and 512Mb RAM running Yellow Dog Linux
Clamshell iBook - 300Mhz but still working well in Mac OS X.3.5
White iBook - currently dead pending logic board replacement
iMac G4 800Mhz (yes I was one of those who ordered the day it was announced - and waited months for it to arrive)
Sun Sparc Classic
Home Built AMD 1500+ cube thing running Linux
A small console collection

Unfortunately as I've run out of room I've had to stop my collection for now :-(

[~Shard~]

Still have my brother's old Apple //e kicking around - that machine screamed with it's 6502 processor running @ 1 MHz and 64k of RAM. Ah, the good old days... :cool:

[iLikeMyiMac]

I think the first computer I used was a Macintosh Plus when I was a kid.

[Capt Underpants]

You people are old. My first computer was a HP somethin' or other, 233 MHz Processor, 3 GB HD, and 32 MB RAM.

[~Shard~]

You people are old. My first computer was a HP somethin' or other, 233 MHz Processor, 3 GB HD, and 32 MB RAM.

And you're an inexperienced youngin'! :p ;) Just wait, eventually you'll become wise like us and then some young know-nothing will call you a fossil as well, no doubt asking you what the hell a "Megahertz" or a "Megabyte" of anything is, along with having amusement that you actually used one of those archaic "DVD players"... :eek: ;) :cool:

[18thTomorrow]

My dad bought my family's first computer when I was in second grade. It was a Gateway 2000 running DOS 5.0(?) and Windows 3.1--probably about 50 Mhz, 4MB ram. You know, I haven't seen a working machine running Win3.1 for a long time...I'd love to take one of those for a spin. That would bring back some fond memories.

I also used an Apple //e at school. Anybody remember Super Munchers, or Clock Works?

The first computer that I could actually call my own isn't nearly as archaic--a Blue & White G3 that I picked up from a college for $150. Beige apple monitor included. I love that machine.

Great thread.

[link92]

My current computer - PowerBook G4 15" Titanium 550MHz... Well current until my G5 arrives :).

[Capt Underpants]

And you're an inexperienced youngin'! :p ;) Just wait, eventually you'll become wise like us and then some young know-nothing will call you a fossil as well, no doubt asking you what the hell a "Megahertz" or a "Megabyte" of anything is, along with having amusement that you actually used one of those archaic "DVD players"... :eek: ;) :cool:

Don't make me think about a time like that... ;)
Megahertz are already starting to go down the drain. Soon It'll all be in gigahertz.

[macsrus]

Comodore Vic 20

[~Shard~]

Don't make me think about a time like that... ;)
Megahertz are already starting to go down the drain. Soon It'll all be in gigahertz.

Yes, megahertz/bytes will soon be a thing of the past - I remember dealing with kilobytes not too long ago, and thinking "Why would you ever need a 1 GB hard drive?!" Scary thing is, that wasn't much more than maybe 6-7 years ago... not that long in the grand scheme of things, yet when it comes to the computer world, eons! I sometimes still wonder how the hell I coped without the Internet - it just seems unfathomable to me now!

[wdlove]

Apple IIe, Christmas 1983. Yes, my parents got it cheap. I was 12. I played the HELL out of some Wizardy and Bard's Tale.

You were a very lucky 12 year old. I purchased one also because it was affordable at the time. The Mac Classic was out of my price range.

[macsrus]

I really loved the old Ultima games... They were awesome

[yellow]

You were a very lucky 12 year old.

I was. I had a blast programming in some whack-@$$ looking ninjas. :)

[~Shard~]

I really loved the old Ultima games... They were awesome

And you know, graphics aside, I liked the original Ultima games better than the latter, personally. I've always put gameplay and story above graphics though, another reason Wasteland is one of my all-time favorite games. :cool: I don't care how good the graphics are if the story, gameplay, etc. sucks, quite honestly...

[yellow]

I don't care how good the graphics are if the story, gameplay, etc. sucks, quite honestly...

Right on.. Halo, I'm looking at you.

[~Shard~]

Right on.. Halo, I'm looking at you.

Good to see there's a few of us out there who believe that, at least! A lot of people seem to judge a game on its ability to require them to purchase a new video card in order to adequately play it. :cool:

[macsrus]

And you know, graphics aside, I liked the original Ultima games better than the latter, personally. I've always put gameplay and story above graphics though, another reason Wasteland is one of my all-time favorite games. :cool: I don't care how good the graphics are if the story, gameplay, etc. sucks, quite honestly...

Oh my... Thats why I loved my apple 2c so much... because i had Ultima and Ultima 2 for it...
Lol i loved running from littl green blips on my display.... hehe

[~Shard~]

Oh my... Thats why I loved my apple 2c so much... because i had Ultima and Ultima 2 for it...
Lol i loved running from littl green blips on my display.... hehe

Now you've got me thinking... man, this is going back... Was it Ultima II or Ultima III in which you had to enter "LOVE" to destroy that computer thing at the end? Was that Exodus? Minax was the villain at the end of Ultima II, wasn't it? Man, my brain hurts now, that's really going back... ;) :cool:

[Vader]

The good ole' Apple IIe for me.

[chanoc]

Please don't laugh. :o

P3, 64MB SD-RAM, CD-RW, Winblows ME

Although because of that crappy computer, I bought my first Mac! Woke up one morning and overheard my roommate telling somebody over the phone that Apple made good laptops. The rest is history! :D

[wowser]

Commodore 64 - superb machine!

http://www.vassmer.com/computermuseum/images/c64.jpg

[Jovian9]

Commodore 64.....but I only played games on it. Man I loved Impossible Mission and World Games.

The first personal computer that I used for more modern computing functions was a Packard Bell......do not remember any specs. It died in about 13 months.

[brap]

Commodore 64.....but I only played games on it.
You need to look here (http://www.welle-e.de/) for what a C64 can really do!

Back on topic, mine was an Amstrad CPC in 1992. 64k memory, tape drive. Woo.

[liketom]

First machine i had was a Commodore 64 back in 1989 , i had the crappy tape drive that made that groovy sqeelling noise lol all them fantastic games o yeah and i spent hours on end programming the dam thing , i could of spent a little less time on it though if they would'nt have show War Games on TV and me trying to mimic it lol (if only i had a phone line ? i could of changed the world hehe)

[wowser]

Only a few C64 games squealed when u loaded em - i think the squealing was more of a Spectrum thing. I still find the c64 colour palette very comforting and nostalgic. (Cyan ;) )

[rtdgoldfish]

My first computer was a Commodore 64 in like 1990. I knew nothing about it and neither did my parents when it came in the mail. We had to get a neighbor to come over and put it together. it was a hand me down from my cousin. It had a piano keyboard that you put over the regular keyboard and could play music on it as well as that moon patrol game. Lots of good times with all that stuff. I guess it was great for someone who was five years old at the time.

[millar876]

my first personal computer was a mac Performa 400/LCII w a 68030 proc and 8mb ram. WOW.

[combatcolin]

Spectrum 128K, Dad bought it for me on my birthday in 1987 and it still works now.

Those were the days!!! :)

[quackattack]

The Mac Plus, with 1 mb of RAM!

http://www.apple-history.com/frames/body.php?page=gallery&model=plus

Amazing computer in the day, I still miss it sometimes. :D :D

-quack

[risc]

Sinclair ZX81 with huge 16K expansion module!

[Noiseboy]

The first houshold computer was a Sinclair ZX but my first real computer was my Mac 5300c which bizarrely never spontaneously combusted. It did however manifest two other known faults, namely just opening the lid broke the hinges and the power supply input socket was mounted directly onto the circuit board and subsequently dropped to bits on a regular basis. I still have it and it still works fine if I can be bothered to jam the power cable in in just the right spot :p

[wdlove]

The good ole' Apple IIe for me.

We are in good company, both starting with an Apple IIe. It seems that we are in a minority though. The Commodore 64 seems to have been a very popular machine.

[MACDragan]

Apple IIc :cool:

[~Shard~]

We are in good company, both starting with an Apple IIe. It seems that we are in a minority though. The Commodore 64 seems to have been a very popular machine.

You're not alone wdlove, count another vote for the good old Apple //e! Mine is still sitting in my parents' basement. :cool:

[nef919]

My first was a commadore pet, got it from a teacher at school who couldn't and I quote "Get this stupid thing to do anything".
Goes to prove "It's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you have."

[~Shard~]

My first was a commadore pet, got it from a teacher at school who couldn't and I quote "Get this stupid thing to do anything".
Goes to prove "It's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you have."

My brother used those in school as well, along with PC Juniors. Wow, that's going back... ;)

[wdlove]

You're not alone wdlove, count another vote for the good old Apple //e! Mine is still sitting in my parents' basement. :cool:

My Apple IIe is long since gone. Was able to do a trade-in on my new machine. I wish that Apple would still allow trade-ins.

[Lord Blackadder]

Wow, I'm coming to this thread late.

First computer: Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 2, with both tape and floppy drives, RAM expansion cartrige and 300(!)bps modem. Yeah, Baby! Pitfall, Shamus, and Hitchiker's guide to the Galaxy.

Soon after I graduated to an Apple IIe - My favorite game was Arctic Fox, a 3D Tank battle game. my disks went bad so I can't play it anymore, and haven't found a copy anywhere yet...but someday I'll get it and play it on my G4 again. I also played Flight Simulator 2 and, of course Apple Works. I still have the IIe (3 of 'em actually), and 1 each of the green, amber and white CRTs. Oh yea.

[ftaok]

I didn't go through all of the posts, but I didn't see the Atari 400 (16KB). That's the first real computer that our family got. Loved that "membrane" keyboard. We even got the cassette drive a little later.

My dad wanted to get us the Atari 800 (with it's huge 48KB memory), but he couldn't afford it.

I think the Atari 400 was $500 and the 800 was $1000. Back in the early 80's, $1000 was a lot of money.

Just found a great webpage (http://www.oldcomputers.net/atari800.html) . Sure brings back great memories.

[slooksterPSV]

First PC was... well its was a 386 from the DI (a place where olds things are given to) and it was 33MHz, 8MB RAM, and it had Dos 3.0 on it, and then we went to Win 3.1. Wow it cost us...hmm... 200 total?

[Psychic Shopper]

It did!
Multitasking since 1986

[~Shard~]

My Apple IIe is long since gone. Was able to do a trade-in on my new machine. I wish that Apple would still allow trade-ins.

You learn something new everyday - I didn't even realize Apple did do trade-ins at one point!

Yep, still have mine sitting around, along with the joystick and its original box - who knows, maybe someday it'll be worth something! ;)

[slooksterPSV]

You learn something new everyday - I didn't even realize Apple did do trade-ins at one point!

Yep, still have mine sitting around, along with the joystick and its original box - who knows, maybe someday it'll be worth something! ;)


Joystick???

[~Shard~]

Joystick???

Don't worry, you're only 16 years old, that was well before your time... :p :cool:

[bryanc]

My first PC was a Comadore PET in 1976:

http://www.cyberstreet.com/hcs/museum/pet.jpg

but the first computer I used was a PDP-11 in 1968.

Ah, the good'ole days, eh?

Cheers

[~Shard~]

My first PC was a Comadore PET in 1976:

http://www.cyberstreet.com/hcs/museum/pet.jpg

but the first computer I used was a PDP-11 in 1968.

Ah, the good'ole days, eh?

Cheers

Yep that's exactly what my brother used in school, those and the PC Juniors - man, that picture brings back memories - how times change...

And greetings from Regina! (And sorry about the football game on Sunday... :p ;))

[stubeeef]

1988? a mac classic, then spent a fortune on a zero footprint "macbottom" hd that was maybe 40mb? I had it till 1997!

[lost_mobius]

Apple IIc, a great little machine
lots of disk swapping fun :p

[nfocus design]

Mine was the Commodore 64. I remember playing some game where I was in a cave lookig for diamonds. I think it asked you to spell words here and there. If you were idle for very long, the guy would sit down and start reading a book. Then I remember my first color printer. It was kind of lame. It was color, but didn't print anything like the screen. It just printed random color.

[n5vtd]

TRS-80 Model 100 upgraded ram from 8K? to 32k
next computer Atari 520 ST sill have it
now Sony PVC-204E PII mmx 333hz 256Ram 120GB HD ati 9200 os Winxp Pro sp2

[kiwi_the_iwik]

My first computer was a ZX81 with a 16K ram pack and thermal printer, purchased for the princely sum of $537 NZD - way back in 1981!!!

The next one was an Apple ][e with a CP/M card and stacks of software - circa 1985.

Then, in 1987, I bought a Mac 512KE with 2x 800KB drives for $3000 NZD - mainly for University. The thing still fires up after all this time. It says a lot for Apple's build quality.

1993 was when I graduated to the LCII - 8/80. The famous pizza box. Finally, I had a colour Mac.

When I'd eventually moved over to the UK, I bought a G4 Cube in 2000. The best single purchase I ever made. Still works a treat - and I'm about to get a 1.2GHz processor upgrade for its aging 450MHz. THAT should give it an extra boost - and a bit more life - until Apple release the NEXT version of the iMac G5 with a +2GHz processor, 8x SuperDrive, Bluetooth as standard, a FireWire 800 connection, and a built-in EyeTV unit...

(I don't ask for much, do I?)

:rolleyes:

[acdninjapan]

Vote: Poll: Your first personal computer? (http://www.macpolls.com/?poll_id=376)

OH GOD!!! That was back in the 70's–an original Apple! I had to use a tape recorder for the drive and a B&W TV for the monitor. Apple Basic was a real pain to work with back in those days and there were no real commercial programs such as there are today.

[neilrobinson]

i remember, 486DX2 66, 8meg ram, 200mb hard drive, no cd-rom, 15" shamrock monitor (still kinda working mums using with a P3 450), i upgraded it a few years ago its now a P1 233, 128meg ram ect ect. still working, not used much these days. oh those days... good memories,

[~Shard~]

i remember, 486DX2 66, 8meg ram, 200mb hard drive, no cd-rom, 15" shamrock monitor (still kinda working mums using with a P3 450), i upgraded it a few years ago its now a P1 233, 128meg ram ect ect. still working, not used much these days. oh those days... good memories,

80486s, those aren't old at all! I remember doing assembly coding on the 8088/8086! ;)

[kaimuse]

So first that I could afford (in '83-'84) as a penniless musician was a Commodore 64, with a MIDI I/O cartridge.

(Quick! What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?
Homeless....)

My mom (former programmer/tutor) had a TI-99 and so did a housemate at the time, so I fiddled with those around the same time. (Step-inputted Soft Machine's "Kings and Queens" into a primitive sequencer cartridge on the TI. Minimalist version of course.)

Another housemate had an original 128k Mac she'd gotten through school discount, but only available to me for band flyers etc.

Later upgraded to an Atari ST running C-Lab Notator (from the guys who later became Emagic/made Logic.)

First Mac was a Mac II, first Mac for music was a Quadra 700 with an Audiomedia II card and MOTU MIDI Express, running Logic Audio Platinum... Ten Macs later I'm typing this on an iBook G4.

[wdlove]

So first that I could afford (in '83-'84) as a penniless musician was a Commodore 64, with a MIDI I/O cartridge.

(Quick! What do you call a musician without a girlfriend?
Homeless....)

My mom (former programmer/tutor) had a TI-99 and so did a housemate at the time, so I fiddled with those around the same time. (Step-inputted Soft Machine's "Kings and Queens" into a primitive sequencer cartridge on the TI. Minimalist version of course.)

Another housemate had an original 128k Mac she'd gotten through school discount, but only available to me for band flyers etc.

Later upgraded to an Atari ST running C-Lab Notator (from the guys who later became Emagic/made Logic.)

First Mac was a Mac II, first Mac for music was a Quadra 700 with an Audiomedia II card and MOTU MIDI Express, running Logic Audio Platinum... Ten Macs later I'm typing this on an iBook G4.

I hope that by now you have become a successful musician. Do you have a permanent significant other now? Welcome to MacRumors. Hope that you will be a frequent visitor and poster. ;)

[ASP272]

I started with an Atari, Commodore 64 and then a 128. My older brother was a gifted programmer and wrote some very fun games for the Commodore. My first Mac was a Powerbook 145b, which I still own, then a Performa 6320CD, which I loved and still have some pieces to. In my college fraternity house I had a very small room, so my Performa was my TV as well as computer (it had a decent tuner card installed). I kept the 6320CD for at least 6 years, which is a good computer life in my book.

[JLS]

The first computer I shared was my sisters, it had a green screen with dos on it. My first pc was an olivetti something or other, I honestly can't remember much about it. A year later I got a packard bell with windows 3.1 on it, it had a 500MB hdd - top of the range, and cost £2000 ($3800) which was a darn lot back then.

[bousozoku]

I didn't go through all of the posts, but I didn't see the Atari 400 (16KB). That's the first real computer that our family got. Loved that "membrane" keyboard. We even got the cassette drive a little later.

My dad wanted to get us the Atari 800 (with it's huge 48KB memory), but he couldn't afford it.

I think the Atari 400 was $500 and the 800 was $1000. Back in the early 80's, $1000 was a lot of money.

Just found a great webpage (http://www.oldcomputers.net/atari800.html) . Sure brings back great memories.

I believe that was $1080 for the 800 in November 1981 when I got mine, but I only paid the $690 dealer price as I was working for an electronics distributor at the time. I have the whole price list, if you're interested.

[iriejedi]

A touch sensitive keyboard on an atari 400!

:-)

AND A TAPE DRIVE! Wooo Hoo I was high end!


Vote: Poll: Your first personal computer? (http://www.macpolls.com/?poll_id=376)

[StarbucksSam]

My baby, Macky, was a Performa 575 with a 33mhz 68040, 32?MB of RAM, and a 250 MB hard drive.

[Westside guy]

80486s, those aren't old at all! I remember doing assembly coding on the 8088/8086! ;)

Oh, you young'uns and your fancy-smancy computin' machines. In high school (something like 1976 or 1977) I remember my first go at programming. It was some Motorola processor of forgotten type - I just remember programming it with 2-digit octal values. :p My crowning achievement was getting that thing to save my program on a cassette tape.

Back in those days we used to joke about finding the "HCF" code.

[~Shard~]

Back in those days we used to joke about finding the "HCF" code.

Hahaha... .... I don't get it.... ;)

Yeah, my brother used PC Juniors and Commodore PETs in high school, so that definitely tops me. The first computer I used was my brother's good old Apple //e. :cool:

[Westside guy]

Hahaha... .... I don't get it.... ;)

Well, it requires thinking in terms of old-school assembly code (as opposed to macro-assembler, which is much nicer). You have a rather limited instruction set with mnemonics like NOP (no operation), INC (increment), DEC (decrement), POP (pop topmost item off the stack), etc. In practice you'd write out your program on paper using those easy-to-understand (relative to the alternative at the time!) mnemonic codes, and then convert it to octal and punch it into the, er, computer or whatever you want to call it.

Anyway, there were widely-circulated rumors of a real built-in code whose mnemonic was "HCF" (halt and catch fire). :D

[Mechcozmo]

Anyway, there were widely-circulated rumors of a real built-in code whose mnemonic was "HCF" (halt and catch fire). :D

Some Wintel's have the feature built-in! Sheesh, catch up Apple!

[Les Kern]

The first computer I actually touched was a hand-held calculator. That baby could add, subtract, multiply AND DIVIDE! My friends dad got a fantastic deal on it at $400.00. That same capability today is given away in Cracker Jack.

[eRondeau]

My first "real" computer was a 32K Commodore PET 4032, circa 1981. I got it because my father was a teacher and CBM offered a 33%-off deal to teachers. I was disappointed at first because I expected the "classic" PET 2001 with the 9" screen. Mine arrived with a HUGE 12" green screen, and a built-in speaker that scared the heck out of me when I first turned it on. It arrived with an outboard cassette tape drive which I used daily for about two years before I saved up enough to buy a 170K floppy disc drive (ROM Rabbit anyone?). I learned 6502 machine language programming (not just Assembler -- I could eventually write games using 8-bit hex code!). I sold some games for next-to-nothing too. Man that takes me back... like the time I installed a machine language "virus" (way before that word was ever defined) to change the "READY." prompt to "IDIOT." on all my high school's computers. Also, I became the first "case modder" I'd ever heard of when I installed a switch on the side of my PET to disable the little piezzo speaker, so I could turn it on at night without waking my mother. I still have my PET, too, out in the garage. I bought a half-dozen more PET's once at a school auction many years later for $25 each. I turned one into an aquarium and the rest eventually went into a dumpster somewhere.

Then came a Commodore-64 for a few years, then an Atari 400, then an Amiga 500, then a souped-up Amiga 2000, and then my iBook G4 one year ago. Whoever started this thread -- Thanks for the memories!

BKF

PS to all the old PET users out there: WAIT 6502,16

[YoYoMac]

Gateway Desktop. Man was I stupid

[fistful]

First computer I ever owned personally back in 1996-97 was an Acer 486, 100mhz, 800mb HD, 64mb sdram. Something like that.

Still had it sitting in the basement collecting dust up until a few weeks ago when I gave it away.

[~Shard~]

Gateway Desktop. Man was I stupid

Gateway?!? :eek: How could you do it man, that's the dark side of the force.... :cool:

[dvdh]

Atari 65XE.

Hooked it up to a B&W TV. I also had a 5.25 floppy drive to go with it. Use to program code written in Antic Mag into the machine. I think the best this I entered was a game called Rebound (J.D. Casten). Took forever to enter all that code and then find all the errors. Got to the end the code, hit enter and got "error at line 346" or what ever for hours before I got it working right.

[doctor pangloss]

pre windows 296 PC with 2 megs of ram and a 40 meg hardrive. Operated out of DOS. Not much good for anything other than running word perfect.
12" G4 powerbook is my first mac. What a nifty little rig it is!

[~Shard~]

pre windows 296 PC with 2 megs of ram and a 40 meg hardrive. Operated out of DOS. Not much good for anything other than running word perfect.
12" G4 powerbook is my first mac. What a nifty little rig it is!

Do you mean an 80286?

[JeffTL]

The first I used was an Epson Equity+. I think it was an XT compatible or something like that -- had a Hercules graphics card, ran MS-DOS 3.2, and could run WordStar, NewsMaster, WordPerfect, &c. No Windows due to the lack of a mouse and hard drive -- DOS and all apps had to be run off either a 5.25 or 3.5 floppy. On this computer I got my first taste of the Internet, via a PROCOMM connection (9600 baud) to a university dialup system that had Lynx web browser or something like that, and ELM email that was later replaced with PINE. I remember something like "ftped" that came before pico for UNIX text editing but I may have that wrong. Yeah, I've been using Unix that long -- "ls -la" is forever ingrained in my head. I had my first website on either this computer or the next one, made as always in raw HTML. This could run the old pre-web LexisNexis too. Regrettably we didn't keep the keyboard when we gave the computer to Goodwill -- I think it was a Model M or something close.
Milestones for Epson Equity+

First computer
First Internet access
First website
First UNIX usage
First word processing
Clicky keyboard
5.25" floppy
PRINTER (Dot Matrix): EPSON FX-80


That was replaced by a Packard Bell Axcel 43CD on January 1 1995, which was returned and replaced with a Packard Bell 48CD in February as my dad needed a 14.4kbps rather than 9600bps. 486dx/66 and 8MB RAM, I think 4x CD-ROM and an 800 MB hard drive. Down to one floppy here, wich was a bit painful. Windows for Workgroups 3.11, but no network card or I'd still have it hooked up for Internet and stuff. DOS 6.2 which I still use for gaming. My mom wanted HyperCard, but we didn't have the sense to get a Mac -- though we may have given a bit of consideration to one of those DOS card 68ks in only a vague sense before getting the Packard Bell. The 48CD is currently hooked up on a KVM with a later PC. Here our Internet got a bit more refined, going first over pcAnywhere to a university connection, meaning graphical Internet from home, but also slooooooow. So in 1996 or so we finally got AOL, although we tried some Nebraska Onramp bunch at some time and went back to pcAnywhere (Trumpet Winsock was really painful -- we called it Trumpet Top after a villain du jour in season two of the Power Rangers). This game was the first location for my large collection of Trail games from MECC, which now find themselves quite at home on my iMac. God, Packard Bell Navigator was stupid.
Milestones for Packard Bell Axcel 48CD

GUI
Microsoft Windows
Hard drive
Proper ISP
Oregon Trail
Printer (Ink Jet): A black and white Epson, I don't remember the number. Crappy printer, but at least it didn't have to tractor feed.


Okay, so in a couple years (ca. Summer 1997) Windows 95 was out, the 486 was feeling slow, and the modem was outmoded. Time for the Packard Bell Platinum Supreme 1665, a Pentium 166 with MMX. 64 MB RAM, 3.2 GB hard drive. In 1998 we upgraded it to 80 MB RAM and put in another 12 gigs of hard drive or so, and for so doing (Best Buy promotion) we got Windows 98 for free, so I got up and stood in line the first day to get it. You know 95 was stinky when you stand in line for Windows 98...first edition. Roundabouts 1999 we got a cable modem, the 16x CD had to be replaced with a 40x CD. In early 2003 we donated this computer to a school, after I messed with Linux a bit on a partition thereof. I think it's still be used at the school.

Milestones for Packard Bell Platinum Supreme 1665

32-bit Windows
Linux (Mandrake 9)
Last computer bought in a store
Printer (Ink jet, color): Epson Stylus Color 600, still hooked up to the Gateway below but never used


Obviously by February 2000 this thing was in a sorry shape -- so we ordered a Gateway Essential 500, maxed out with 256 MB RAM, a 30 GB hard drive, and a 500 MHz Pentium III. Oh, and a DVD player that never was good at actually playing DVDs -- but just great for Baldur's Gate, which came with this computer. Still Windows 98SE. Built in Zip drive since the old parallel one (gotten with the second Packard Bell) was none too fast. This is now my dad's game machine, no longer networked. However when we decided in 2002 or so to hook this, the second Packard Bell, and a couple Gateway laptops to the cable modem, we installed an Ethernet and 802.11a network.

Milestones for Gateway Essential 500

DVD-ROM
Local area network
Printer in 2001 or 2002: hp LaserJet 1000 (now donated to university honors program)


So by December 2002 the Gateway was too problematic for my purposes -- almost too slow for Neverwinter Nights -- and we got a Dell Dimension 8250 (2.4 GHz P4, 512 MB RAM, 120 GB hard drive, DVD-ROM, CD-RW). Here I got serious with Linux due to the irritations of XP Home Edition, and found that the SoundBlaster Live sold to me by Dell was not compatible with the regular ones -- and I went and bought an Audigy 2 to replace it. ATI Radeon 9700 makes this a great computer for gaming but apart from that I never have liked it very much due to overly cheap construction for aa high-end box...

Milestones for Dell Dimension 8250

CD-RW
Windows NT
Flat panel display
Last Windows PC, God willing


...and so when I needed a college laptop that May 2004, I was in a bind. Gateway's cheapo laptops were crappy in the battery department, and Dell had just ripped me off. Anger, ennui, disgust, confusion, Macintosh. In a fugue, I went to the Apple website to show myself that a decent Gateway was still cheaper than a Mac. It wasn't, and I got an iBook G3/800, the first Mac I had owned (though I had used others briefly). This is still my main computer. 256 MB RAM, and Jaguar later upgraded to Panther. Sadly I didn't have the sense to get the combo drive. Radeon 7500 isn't great graphics-wise, but I'm basically running Word, iTunes, and Lotus Notes on the iBook.

Milestones for Apple iBook G3/800

Portable
Wi-Fi (added January 2004)
First Mac


By November of this year nobody wanted to do anything serious on the Gateway anymore, due to its frequent crashes. So we got the iMac G5/1.6 with combo drive and a gig of RAM. 80 GB hard drive. This is the best we've had -- I'm using it as I type this.

Milestones for Apple iMac G5

64-bit.
Whole family now Switched.




Before I was born there were a couple Timex-Sinclair 1000s (one of which I once briefly used) and a TI 99/4a (which I have seen but never bothered to hook up).

[Sir_Giggles]

My First computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer. I wrote Karaoke programs and my first song I karaoked to was Madonna's La Isla Bonita. I will never forget that moment.

Second computer was a 386 SX 12Mhz computer.

3rd was 486DX-2 66Mhz computer. First computer I used for Animation.

4th was Pentium Pro 150Mhz. I dabbled in video with this machine.

5th was PowerMac G4 400Mhz. Truly the first computer I loved

6th was PowerMac G4 867Mhz. Video editing became my passion. Made me lots of money this computer.

7th was PowerBook 12" 1.33Ghz. Bought because I could afford it, thanks to previous computer.

8th was PowerMac Dual G5 1.8Ghz. Ahh presently typing it now.

[Macaddicttt]

Macintosh Classic. This must have been when I was in kindergarten or something like that. My uncle did a lot with Macs (he wrote the game Moriarity's Revenge if anyone remembers that), so my parents got a Mac. My mom for years would tell the story about when it first arrived. At first she thought she should wait until my dad got home to set it up since it was computer and those things are complicated. But then she decided to try it herself and was pleasantly surprised when all she had to do was plug it in and plug in the keyboard and mouse. We've been using Macs ever since...

[Sir_Giggles]

The first Mac i ever used was a Mac Plus. I used that to write the next great american novel, but never quite finished.

[Cabrini715]

All I know is that I had a very old Mac with the best game known to mankind...SPECTRE CHALLENGER!

[Apple //e]

please get it straight:

apple ][
apple ][+
apple //e (said "apple ][" on boot until enhanced version)
apple //c
apple ///

[Cabrini715]

Spectre came with the 7.5.0 (I think) Macintoshes my family got in summer of 1995...

[Eastend]

Worked on a Mainframe at work for over 12 years, do not remember the manufactures name, it was slow and filled one whole floor of an office building. Moved from Mainframe to an SE30 then a LC630 I think it was.
The screen on the SE30 went bad after about 8 years but other than that it still works, has OS 7.5 something on it. LC630 the screen went black after about 7 years (I forgot there was a Pink Floyd CD still in the drive when they gave it away). First Mac I bought was in 1999 a iMac 333, still works, they use it in our offices. Next a 2001 G4 PowerBook Rev A. Last year was the treat, got a G5 2.5 Dual with a new 20 in Apple display, so fast. Have been Apple crazy since the SE30. I once heard someone here say that the SE30 looked so cute, that's probably why I like Apple, design and simplicity. Now when is the G5 PowerBook coming?

Brian

[iAlan]

Eastend, welcome to the forums....and how is Nara? I was down in Kyoto for the New year, but did not get to Nara this year.

And the SE30 was a very stylish machine for it's time.

[pubwvj]

Poll: Your first personal computer?

Kim-1 microprocessor board followed by an
Apple I followed by an
Exidy Sorcer followed by a
Compact luggable (CP/M OS) followed by an
Apple Macintosh 128K (#402? of the line?)
MacPlus to which I later added a Radius accellerator (7 of these machines)
Outbound Notebook Systems MacPlus Notebook computers (7)
PowerMac Quadra 800
PowerMac Quadra 950
Dec PDP 11/70 (imagine my attic...!)
PowerMax Mac Compatible
PowerBook 1400 (5 of these)
iBook Tangerine & Blueberry Clamshell (2)
PowerMac G4 APG
PowerBook G3 (struck by lightning)
PowerBook G3 Lombard (Ethernet blown by lightning)
PowerBook G3 Pismo (current machine)
iTablet G5 DP DC (next machine) :)

-Walter
Dreaming in Vermont

[carlos700]

My PCs go as follows

Compaq 33 MHz Pentium
Compaq 120 MHz Pentium
Self-Built 167 MHz AMD AMx586
Self-Built 700 MHz AMD Athlon
Self-Built 1533 MHz AMD Athlon XP
Power Mac G3 "Blue and White" 1GHz
iBook G4 1.2 GHz

[TheGimp]

1. Sinclair 2000 with 2000 bytes ram (1981-82)
2. Atari 400
3. IBM PC 8086 w/ 64KB ram upgrade for 128K total + 2 floppies&Dos 2.0
4. Amiga 2000 w/ 1MB ram and 2 floppy drives (1988)
5. 80386 based computer w/ VGA and my first (20MB) HD (1991)
6. MAC SE 68000 ! (Midi was still better on a Mac)
7. IMac G4 (2003)
8. PowerMac G5 DP 1.8

[hcuar]

First computer was a Tandy 1000... ;) (80286)

[N10248]

Mine was a Compaq Presario 4506: 200mhz pentium mmx, 16mb ram 3.2gb hd. It was expensive as hell at £1600, but it lasted for years.