Your first computer

rrl said:

Atari 800XL

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I had one of those as well. I had looked at the IBM-PC (what a joke at the time), Tandy (didn't impress me) and C-64 (Nice sound, but the Atari had better graphics and OS imo) and decided on the Atari 1450 XLD. When that was cancelled I bought the 800XL w/1050 Disk Drive. I hand wired a 256 memory board from directions in Byte Magazine for it and modded the disk drive with a Happy board. I had a lot of fun with that thing.

PowerMac G3 Beige Desktop 266 MHz (1998 - 2004)
PowerMac G5 Dual 1.8 GHz (2004 - 2012)

ZX81.

we had to build it, too! There I was, soldering at age 8. I burn myself now, yet didn't back then.

packard bell

This takes me back.

First was an Atari VCS in 1978. I can hear most of you thinking "that's not a computer!" but you could get a BASIC programming cartridge for it and a controller keyboard. The BASIC was REALLY basic and there was very little you could do with it; I recall programs were a maximum 64 bytes (yes I did type that correctly!)

I did write a game for it which I called Intergalactic space blockade! which was one block travelling from one side of the screen to another and the other block had to stop it by moving up and down - no collision detection, scoring etc, due to ram constraints

My first real computer was a BBC Model B and I still have fond memories of this thoroughly well designed machine. The BASIC language in particular was ahead of its time with local variables, procedure calls etc.

Started work in 1983 as a Programmer and was given an Apple II and a task to produce a program to convert co-ordinates into CNC codes and output to paper tape.

What a fantastic thread! My first computer was when I was about 5-6 I believe, and it was a custom built box running Windows 98 Special Edition, and used it to look up BB Guns online and play Ed, Edd, n Eddy games on Cartoon Networks website back in the day


Later on we moved and the computer I used for a year or two was a custom built beige box running Windows 2000, Pentium 3 1Ghz I believe, and served us well for the time being.

My introduction to and beginning of my fascination with Macs started in grade school when our design class had a PowerMac G3 B&W Yosemite, and I just OOGLED at the design and just had to have one for my self. My brother, owner of Avatar Labs (Google it, awesome work) is run by all Macs and hooked me up with my own B&W G3 running Panther.


Later one I got my own dual processor G5 2.0GHz 1GB RAM, and then my own Core 2 Duo Mac Mini running Snow Leopard then Lion, and then I had a 2006 Mac Pro quad core Xeon 10GB RAM -

And NOW, CURRENTLY, looking to sell my gaming computer and get an iMac and Bose Companion 5's

Commodore Vic 20 - We later added a cassette drive. That was happenin let me tell you. I did my first basic programing on that thing.

my first computer, lol Timex Sinclair 1000...

my first real computer was a heathkit zenith z100... wow it even had floppy drives

A used 600MHz G3 iBook...I'm 19.

Drewski said:

TRS-80 model 1, a whopping 4k RAM and a cassette tape "drive". I scraped and saved to get that thing back in 8th grade. Yeah, I'm old.

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I had one of those, together with my brother,

favorite game one it: Cosmic Fighter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdXlOTj9RZQ

Some Tandy PC. All I can remember is playing the Red Baron and King's Quest on it. Around the same time ('86) my parents got a Mac Plus and I was hooked on Mac Paint.

Renzatic said:

Thanks for making me feel old, man.

You know what portable entertainment device I had when I was 15?

I'll tell you.

It was a stick. That stick could be anything I wanted it to be. A gun. A sword. A magic staff. A grappling hook. One of those things the guys in Tron stuck out in front of them to turn into a light cycles. That stick was an amazing thing.

Kids these days don't have it as good as we did. Sure, you've all got the flash and bang and whizz now and high resamolution retina displays now, but it lacks the soul, the quality of the things we had back then. Your fancy tablet could never be a pirate sabre no matter how hard you tried.

Also I had one of these...

Image

This was what we 80's-90's kids had to use for our portable electronic entertainment, and it was awesome. Green monochrome screen, 4 AA batteries, and all. Had a whole bunch of cartridges for it, too.

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Same here, had every version of Gameboy up to the Advance SP. Still have my grey/black and yellow/black original gameboys. My first computer was a 300Mhz PIII with Win 95. Man I feel old. Back in the day ,my iMac G4 would have made me the coolest kid on the block. BTW, I have fought many great battles with my sticks.

Take it back, I remember my families first computer had DOS,I remember having to type commands to play Comanche.

Lil Chillbil said:

Post a pic and tell a story about your first computer. And how it shaped you to be the Mac fan you are today

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No pic; it was a TK 3000//e, a Brazilian Apple //e Enhanced clone...of course I had to begin with an Apple-compatible computer

More info here:

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/TK3000_IIe

iMacFarlane said:

My first real computer was the Commodore 64, with 1541 disk drive and an old 13" color TV as a monitor. The day I played Bard's Tale on it was pretty much the last day I ever played my Atari.

The first computery type thing I had, though, was this thing. You could play a few matching games, music, and memory type stuff on it. Anybody remember what it was called? I do, just seeing if you recognize it or if you think it's some weird cell phone.
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Gosh, good stuff i remember playing with one of these at a cousin's house in Brazil...ah, the good times...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuxKqybDe14

Dear Santa...

My first was a Mac Classic II. Boring beige, but you couldn't kill the dang thing. It ran like the Energizer bunny. Although packed inside it's padded case (before portables were around), it stood tall at almost half my height. It was a bugger to carry from home to work, but I loved it 'til the day I sold it to buy a powerbook 540c.

Some gigundo mainframe with punchcards (remember fortran?) but the first one I owned was a TI 99A.

Mochi Hana said:

My first computer was a Compaq that my dad got from work. Unfortunately I was little so I don't remember the specs, but I do remember using it taught me a lot about computers and how they work.

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Same except mine was a compucon

Pentium Pro 133MHz
8MB of EDO RAM (I upgraded to 48MB!)
1.2GB hard disk

I learned so much from that computer

bluespider said:

...Timex Sinclair 1000...

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wow. talk about a trip down amnesia lane.

had a couple kits/family computers that got me going, but the 1000 was the first i bought with my own money. saved up paper route money like mad to get the thing. kept seeing ads in popular science and such, and even saved one to tape on the wall. just found it. yeah, i have a 'collecting' problem it would seem.

replaced it with a vic20 which was way more better,8,1. and stuff. like real keys...

mine was some beige PC running windows 95. All i used it for was to play Gearhead Garage, but i HATED it, bluescreens 2x a week minimum.

my first PC was an IBM 80486 66Mhz, 8MB of RAM. 100MB of Hard drive space and it was running DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.2 (Chinese Version). It also came with a 3.5" disk drive with a 14" CRT monitor. My Parents bought it in 1993. No Cable no modem

Commodore Vic 20 for me. I remember typing lines for hours and then running the program that would do something for a few seconds. Of course this was my favorite:

10 Print "Orchidkid Rules"
20 Goto 10

Run.

My brothers and I saved up for a zx Spectrum when I was about 12 years old. It was the 16kb version, but we later upgraded to a massive 48kb.

Later my parents got a 386 with windows 3.1 and that was the start of the windows years, sparking a career in IT. I have built my own windows computers ever since.

Last week I ordered my first Mac for my 40th birthday. It's a Mac mini with i7 2.6 and fusion drive. I'll upgrade it to 16Gb myself when it arrives.

4JNA said:

wow. talk about a trip down amnesia lane.

had a couple kits/family computers that got me going, but the 1000 was the first i bought with my own money. saved up paper route money like mad to get the thing. kept seeing ads in popular science and such, and even saved one to tape on the wall. just found it. yeah, i have a 'collecting' problem it would seem.

replaced it with a vic20 which was way more better,8,1. and stuff. like real keys...

View attachment 381759

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Love the ad! Great memories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron

Ah the memories!

My first computer was a Tandy 1000 SL that had a 720K 3.5" floppy drive and a 20MB hard drive.

I remember killing it 3 months after I got it. I was 6 at the time and I wanted to use 1.4MB floppies in it, so I tried to put a 1.4MB floppy drive into it from a spare PC. Needless to say, that didn't work out in my favor...

Afterwards I had a 386DX I built from spare parts my father got from work that they were junking (he was a teacher and they were junking a ton of 286/386 PCs). When I was 8 during the summer months I worked with him to build 30 computers with Word Perfect to replace the typewriters, since he taught keyboarding.

Currently I have a custom-built PC (actually all my desktops have been custom-built). 1st Generation Core i7 920 CPU running at 4GHz, with dual Radeon 6970 2GB cards and 12GB of memory. It drives 3 Dell U2312HM displays turned into portrait mode, giving me a resolution of 3240x1920. There is a 4th 1440x900 19" monitor on the side for web browsing while gaming.

My laptop is an ASUS G73JH, with a Core i7 720QM and 12GB of memory, with a Radeon 5870m GPU.

I used to own some PowerPC macs but I sold them to fund the Core i7 desktop build back in early 2009. (I got 500 dollars for a Dual 1GHz Quicksilver G4 on Craigslist. ) Now I use OSX in VMware.