What was your first computer?
 

I thought that this forum was getting more use than most so here is another topic.

This is probably going to date me but --

My first computer was called a "Miniscamp".
It had switches for the data and address bus and 8 LED's to show the data bus and display output. It had a massive 2K of memory and no storage devices. :(

I programmed the first computerised "Coke" sign in Australia with it while I was in high school.

Any other interesting "First computers"?

HalfaBee

Although it's not very "interesting", the first computer I really used was a Commodore 64.

how about the good old micro-bee at least you could save the programs you wrote even if it was only out to a tape recorder

Radio Shack 386 :)

Hi Trigger,

I was invlovled in making the original MicroBee.

Good old "Applied Technology".


HalfaBee

HalfaBee,
so You were the one responsible! Just kidding they were fun and helped me kill a lot of time.

But then we got the Apple IIe with a real floppy drive although the disks did self destruct after a while.

At least when you turned them on they went "BEEP" and were ready to use.
Not like todays super computers that take a week to boot up and a day to shutdown.

HalfaBee

The good & the bad...
 

My First. Commodore PET 2001 As soon as I saw it in Popular Electronics mag. cover (mid 70s) I placed and paid for in advance an order that took 9 months to get (1 month earlier than I was told). Had to drive into midtown NYC to pick it up & while placing it in the car a guy fell off a scaffold 10 stories up & missed me by 2 feet so I’ll never forget my 1st.

Boy it had 8k of memory was made of a steel frame with the monitor, keyboard & tape built in. The unit opened like the hood of a car along with the bar to hold it open. There were no programs made for it then & everyone said “What are you going to do with that thing?” We’ll the 1st week I rigged an amplifier & made it beep while drawing pictures. “WOW”… Made my 1st checking accounting program with it, but boy what a wait for the tape to read the data in series. How things have changed Huh…

P.S. Still have it wrapped up & packed away

For me it was Zx Spectrum+

Commadore 128 baby. I was very l337. :)

My first was also the Commodore 128. Also got me the 512K memory extension and a second 1571 diskdrive. Worked allright for me!

I used it to setup my first real music database, in it's CP/M mode with dBaseII. (Had tried the cbm basic first, but that took much work, when extending the program's options).

Genuine IBM PC with with an 8088, dual floppies, 512kb ram, a Quadram color video card (didn't have the 'snow' that the original IBM color cards had), a Hayes 2400 modem, an Epson printer, Lotus 123, and some other software. Fortunately, my employer was supplementing purchases in order to encourage us to buy our own PCs so I only paid $5000 for this deluxe package. :)

My first was an Atari 400 that I modified to be a pseudo-Atari 800!

Yup... replaced the crummy membrane keyboard with a "real" one and upped the memory from a measely 8K to a whopping 48K!

I still have it in its original boxes -- computer, external floppy drive, cartridge tape (!) drive, etc. -- out in the garage! <snicker>

Ahhhh... the memories of playing Star Raiders and Shamus until my thumbs hurt!!! :D

Roger

I was introduced to computers with the Apple IIc, the IIc+, the IIe, etc. I remember when the first Mac came out and what a big deal it was, lol.

First PC was a Packard Bell 386sx. :)

Hmmm... The first one I *owned* was a Commodore 64. I still have a couple on blocks out in the backyard. Then I went thru a succession of Apple IIs, IBM-PC-AT, 386, 486 & Pentium boxes.

I can't remember the model of the first "minicomputer" I ever programmed. It was an IBM with 16K RAM, tape storage, no CRT & teletype-style printer. It did have keyboard terminals instead of card readers, though. About the size of 2 refrigerators. When they rebooted, the lights on that floor would dim.

Anybody else around here remember keypunch? It builds CHARACTER :D

My "First" computer was a CoCo. Which was the nickname for a Radio Shack Color Computer.

It had a whopping 16k of memory and no floppies or even a tape drive and ran at a blazing 2Mhz speed.

I later upgraded it to the max with 64k of memory, of which 32k was set aside for graphics. Then I modified it to use a CRT and added twp 5.25 floppies (160k drives). Then added two 3 inch (yes 3 in. not 3.5's) drives as well.

I had that thing until I finally replaced it with my first super computer... an IBM clone XT running at 4.7Mhz, with a huge 20 Meg hard drive and 2 360k floppy drives.

Wow. My first computer doesn't quite match up to yalls history here. The first computer I ever used was no where close to as old.

Yeah, but I bet you don't have near as many gray hairs as we do either ;)

Actually, I'd be happy if I had gray hair.... any color hair would be better than nothing LOL

Now you know why my avatar has to wear that cowboy hat ;)

haha

And let's not get into dental work, either. Please.

The nice thing about my "hair" style is that I can comb it with a sponge :-D

Man, I hadn't thought of CoCo's in a while. Had a friend who used one to run his ham repeater. Then he switched to a C-64 & believe it or not, just upgraded from that about a year ago...

But you know, I can remember not long ago feeling GREAT because I had an IBM-AT running at 16 MHz with 2 MB RAM & a 20 MB HDD with a monochrome monitor. My current PalmPilot (m505) has a 33 MHz processor (overclocked to 54 MHz), 8 MB RAM & a 28 MB SD card in the slot with a color screen...

Revisiting my post almost immediately, and well, it WAS that long ago that I had that AT...

Bally Basic
 

Bally came out with a small handheld unit (almost like a game boy of today) and I think it had about 2K of memory.
It had cartridges that you could slide in to play the same games they created for the arcades and game rooms.
They also had a cartridge with "Bally" basic. My son and I would spend hours typing in one letter at a time and then the refrigerator would turn on, causing a power dip, and blow our program.
So we would type it all over again and then run whatever silly program we entered. There was no way to save anything so we had to start from scratch the next time we wanted to use it.
Bally promised us bigger and better things in the future but they decided to go into the casino business and changed their company over to making slot machines.

It was a good learning experience for us. From that we graduated to the Trash 80 (radio shack TRS-80).
And so on and so forth.........

Back to Basics
 

<!--begin trip "down memory lane"-->

Ahhh yes, basic language... spending hours typing in a program, then spending more hours finding all the "Syntax Errors" that occurred.

My CoCo came with MS Basic built into ROM and I spent many an hour learning how to use it. Sure was nice when I got my first cassette interface so I could save the programs instead of having to type it in every time I wanted to use it.

I remember writing many programs to help my kids in their school work, and a few just for fun. There was a magazine out at the time called Hot CoCo, and they had an ongoing contest called "One Liners". The idea was to program the most complex program possible, using only one line of code. I must admit, that I kind of miss doing those types of things.

<!--end trip-->

Comodore 64....

First "real" computer

Gateway 33 celeron...<=HAH

My first computer was an Atari 800XL, with an Indus GT floppy drive and a 9 Pin dot matrix printer. With a whopping 64 K of memory. All for the low low price of $800

:cool:

Brought this thread back from the dead.. :D

Since I'm here, my first computer was a Commodore 128.

I apoligize..I mis-spoke...
My Actual First computer was a Commodore 64.

After that..many years later I got a "real" computer, a Gateway with 64MB ram and a 333 Celeron...screamin!

1st - Timex Sinclair 1000 (won it at a carnival!)

2nd - Atari 800 XL - Just had cartrdidges, then broke down and bought the 5 1/4 ext. floppy and got into Zork, Planetfall, etc.. , After a year went and got a tape drive (battle of midway)

3rd - Tandy 1000 HX, EX, and TX - All 8088's, it was like 2 mhz, 2mhz, 10 mhz, no hard drives and tandy 16 color res.

4th - 486-DX2 66 - When it was affordable to build a clone

5th - Gateway G6- Dual 266's - When you buy a piece of junk, go Gateway!

6th - P3 900 Clone - Gigabyte - Worked until I put it on 210v

7th - Compaq Presario - Next higher level on the junk platform. Bad, just not as bad as Gateway.

8th - Nothing but self built AMD Athlon's fully loaded. (AMD can be built for half the price of Intel and is faster for gaming, but not video presenting).

My first computer in the 70's was an Apple II with 28K of memory. I then "upgraded" to an Apple IIe with a whopping 56K of memory. Remember those days? Floppy disks, virtually no software, alien green lettering on a black screen, trying to do what you want by programming in Apple Basic? Whew, we've come a long way.

I had various "kit" computers leading up to it, but the first computer I owned was a TRS-80, just like the one pictured here; http://oldcomputers.net/trs80iii.html. It had 48k of memory an a tape drive for storage, but I quickly upgraded it to the two internal floppy drive configuration. It didn't have a hard drive, but it did have the "Orch-90", an external sound "card" that plugged into the expansion port in the back and produced polyphonic sounds that made the midi files of today sound like mp3's ;)

I remember thinking that it was more computer than anyone could EVER need... The worst part is that I learned how to program for that damn Z-80 processor and it's still stuck in my head! :( I still have the computer and from time to time, still power it up and play with some of the software I wrote way back when.

Zork ruled! "You are about to be eaten by a Grue!" hehehehhehe

Wow! What year was that?

------------

Remember the Osborne 1 Portable Computer with a tiny 40 column screen.

That was back in the days when we could go to Barnes and Noble, and they had the Osborne series of books that had BASIC code you could key in for General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Payroll, etc.

I still have a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 v1.2(?). It runs like a scalded dog on today's PCs! :)

I remember in the early days of the Las Vegas Comdexes when people would crowd on to airplanes carrying suitcase size Compac Portables. It's funny to think about.

I first worked with an HP3000 in 1977 using a DecWriter Printer (with a keyboard!) that printed out green screens on greenbar paper. I believe that there were two terminals for those who were lucky enough to get access.

In 1980 I bought a Radio Shack Model II and a 120 cps Line Printer III for $6000. Later Radio Shack came out with phonograph size 8.4 MB harddisk enclosure. I don't even remember how much it cost.

I had the Commodore Vic-20 -- 3.5k of memory. I soon maxed it out and had to go for the tape drive and the 16K expansion cartridge -- I was unstoppable at that point. ;)

My first was a Commodore PET with a massive 8k of memory, mono-green screen and an external tape deck. I later purchased a twin 5 1/4" floppy drive for about the same price.

Eventually, I moved on to a BBC Model B computer with 32k of memory - upgraded it a lot from the original twin 800k floppy drives to a 10Mb hard disc.

On the way the school where I worked had variously: Commodore PET computers (for serious programming), Vic-20 with 3.5k memory and cartridges (games after school) and a Sinclair ZX-81 (sold as Timex 1000 in the states) with 1k Memory, and 16k expansion memory and a tape deck.

Moving on, school had a network of BBC Model A's and B's with various expansions and upgrades and then a nework of Research Machines 80186's running a proprietary version of MS-DOS and Windows 2.

Later school has moved on to a network of Celeron or Pentium 4's with 40-80Gb drives, colour monitors etc.

Personally I have gone from the BBC model B to a BBC Master 128. Purchased 'second processors' of a 80186 for it and extra 6502A second processor.

First IBM compatible was a 80386 with 1Mb of memory (later upgraded to 4Mb) and a 100Mb hard drive partitioned into 32Mb virtual drives because the MS-DOS of the day couldn't address more than 32Mb.

Later went through 486's, AMD's and now on a network at home including Pentium 4 1.7GHz, 2.0GHz and 2.4Ghz machines (self build) and 2 laptops.

Memory on current machines is 1Gb with other specs to match :D

(And I'm thinking of getting a newwer and better machine!)

Ast P 133
 

I built my first PC when I was kiddy.
Got my hands on a barebones for cheap after I made some money selling my TY bennie babies on Ebay! lol

I got my hands on a AST Ascentia Pentium 1 133Mhz
12X CD-ROM
Got 64 MB of ram from Santa :) Wo We!
And saved up my money for a 5GB Western Digital HD
Integreated Video :cool:
15 inch monitor

I was the coolest geek on the block :D

Those were the days...

-Lucas