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What was your first computer?

E

egy195

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 28, 2014
113
1
hi guys,
i got the inspiration of this topic after i read 'What was your first cell phone?' and i thought about doing this topic as a way of nostalgia :rolleyes:
mine was back in 2002, a family friend built it for me and loaded it with all kinds of games and songs and these stuff, i was really young to use it for things other than that.
so, what about your first computer ?
 
TI 99-4A..ran TI Basic. Around 1981 or so, IIRC...used a TV set for your monitor.
Those old TI games were a lot of fun...

Then a Tandy 1000TX...80286 processor...3.5" floppy for booting into DOS 3.1. Came with Deskmate installed in ROM.
I saved up $500.00 to buy a 20MB hard disk for her :eek:
Learned WordPerfect and Lotus 123 on her...
 

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Yester5 said:
TI 99-4A..ran TI Basic. Around 1981 or so, IIRC...used a TV set for your monitor.
Those old TI games were a lot of fun...

Then a Tandy 1000TX...80286 processor...3.5" floppy for booting into DOS 3.1. Came with Deskmate installed in ROM.
I saved up $500.00 to buy a 20MB hard disk for her :eek:
Learned WordPerfect and Lotus 123 on her...
Click to expand...

wow you've seen it all then, i didn't know these computers before i read your post, very nice :)
 
My Atari 800 system. Around 1983. Eventually bought the Atari 850 Interface Module, Modem, Dual Percom 5" Drives, and Epson printer.
 

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Commadore Vic 20. It was quite frustrating. My parents new nothing about computers, but bought it so we could learn about them. I never really had much of an interest except playing games. The ones we had on cartridge were okay, but a lot of the tape ones would never load.
 

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Apple fanboy said:
Commadore Vic 20. It was quite frustrating. My parents new nothing about computers, but bought it so we could learn about them. I never really had much of an interest except playing games. The ones we had on cartridge were okay, but a lot of the tape ones would never load.
Click to expand...

i remember watching chris pirillo talking about this being his first computer too
 
mreg376 said:
The Atari 800. Around 1979. Eventually bought the Atari 850 Interface Module, Modem, Dual Percom 5" Drives, and Juki 6100 printer.
Click to expand...

Nice. I had the later version Atari 800XL, released around '84 or so.

atari800xl.jpg


It was the first computer I owned. Well, I wouldn't say owned exactly. I was only 5 or so at the time, and it was officially my mom and dad's, but I did get to play with it quite a bit.
 
Renzatic said:
Nice. I had the later version Atari 800XL, released around '84 or so.

Image

It was the first computer I owned. Well, I wouldn't say owned exactly. I was only 5 or so at the time, and it was officially my mom and dad's, but I did get to play with it quite a bit.
Click to expand...

I'm a bit older than you. I was going back and forth between the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64, but the 64 was more expensive. Radio Shack's TRS-80 was also too expensive. I really wanted the Apple II of course, but that was way out of my financial league. I was happy with the 800 however for quite a while.
 
Custom made AT286. I opted for the fancy amber monitor, and an extra 2MB of RAM. I was late to the PC revolution, so I started with a system with an internal HDD. The OS was DOS of course - IBM's DOS if memory serves.

But it had a wireless mouse, believe it or not... infrared so I needed to keep an open space between the top of the mouse and the receiver dongle thingy. WordPerfect of course.... in the days when the printed manual weighed more than laptops weigh today. This would have been about 1987, iirc.
 
northernmunky said:
They did! It was all part of an initiative to get kids interested in computing back in the 80's.

Image

And just like the Mac, this is the sound it made when you turned it on...
http://www.8bs.com/sounds/bbc.wav

It was also the gaming platform of the era... behold 'Repton'... the best game ever made for the BBC:

Image
Click to expand...

My cousin had the BBC. I remember it only having green text not colour.
 
ZX81 with a whopping 16kb expansion pack :D

Also owned a Acorn Electron (BBC Micro's baby brother) and a ZX Spectrum 48 (with brilliant rubber keys for playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon)

In my 1st year of University I was the very proud owner of a Amstrad 1512 with twin 5.25" floppy drives (no hard disk drive). By my final year I'd managed to upgrade to a x286 with a 20MB hard drive.

Have worked in and around IT ever since so have been reasonably up-to-date with x386, x486, Pentium, etc. PCs before moving across to Apple when moved to Intel.

Crazy to think I have a mobile phone now more powerful than all of that!
 
First computer I used - BBC Micro.
First computer I bought - iMac G4. Still screaming today.
 
Home built S100 bus computer with a Z80 processor and 4kb (KB!) of memory and 8" Shugart floppy drive. Similar (same electrical bus) as the MITS Altair 8800 and the IMSAI 8080 computers, but I was too broke (or too cheap) to buy the kits. Many years later I had an Osborne "luggable" for a short while.
 
mreg376 said:
I'm a bit older than you. I was going back and forth between the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64, but the 64 was more expensive. Radio Shack's TRS-80 was also too expensive. I really wanted the Apple II of course, but that was way out of my financial league. I was happy with the 800 however for quite a while.
Click to expand...

I'd say the tag team of an 800 and the Commodore 64 gave you a far better experience than the old Apple II's would have. My friend next door had a IIe at the same time, and even when he got a color monitor to compensate, the old 800XL still had the better games and programs.

...though he had Mystery House, and I didn't. Which did hurt a bit.

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Brazzan said:
Same here. With a very dodgy tape deck plugged in to allow me to play The Hobbit and Elite.
Click to expand...

You'll get a kick out of this...

 
My dad brought home a BBC Model B when I was 4. We kept that until 1991, when we got an Acorn A5000 - an amazing machine at the time! In 1996, when they stopped making computers in order to focus on microchips for low-powered embedded solutions (yep, I had an ARM processor before it was cool!), we went to the dark side and got a Windows 95 machine - which didn't seem any more advanced than RiscOS, 5 years earlier. Since then I've used most, if not all, the versions of Windows. At work I'm on 8.1.

I didn't go Apple until 2009, when I bought a smartphone that was better than an iPhone on paper. The built in navigation was so bad I had to ask a passer-by for directions! When I finally made it home, to find my friend going on and on about his magical iPhone, in that smug way Apple fans do, I grabbed it off him and said, see if it can do this! ...it immediately, intuitively, smoothly, perfectly did what my smartphone couldn't. I had Vista at home, and thought, if Apple makes phones so much better, what about computers?
 
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