# What was your first computer?



## mechman

Let's start showing our age - I'll start.

I cannot remember the model number but the manufacturer was Amstrad (A german company). It had a 8086 processor which ran at 4mhz. 512KB of internal RAM. Dual 5 1/4 floppies and no hard drive. I booted up off of either a DOS Disk or GEM disks - depending upon what I wanted to do. 


mech


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## lcaillo

At home it was a Mac, the original 128K. At work it was NEC with a Z80 processor, IIRC. Started programming at LSU on a IBM 360 mainframe using punch cards for data entry.


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## bobgpsr

Homebrew handwired 6502 running at 1.0 MHz with 2K bytes of RAM. Did use a support chip, TIM, which had a terminal monitor (debugger & serial I/O) program in ROM. Used an ASR-35 Teletype for I/O @ 110 baud (keyboard, printer & paper tape). Circa 1976.


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## jvc

The first one was actually a Commadore VIC 20, but we only had it for one day. We took it back and upgraded to the Commadore 64. It was amazing what you could do with just 64k of memory. After about 6-8 months, it quit working. We had it repaired. About two months later it quit again. We put it in a closet, and it's still there.

The first one that most people would call a *real* computer, was a Macintosh Performa 575. That was about 1994. We just gave it away a few months ago, and it was still working fine.


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## wbassett

First experience with them was in high school on a teletype style terminal (it had a roll of paper instead of a monitor and round keys instead of a standard typewriter style layout). You had to call the local college on a regular phone, and when you heard the modem kick in, you put the hand set in a modem cradle. This was in the day that Cobol was still done on punch cards and FORTRAN was one of the great languages!

A couple years later I got a Commodore 128, quickly followed by an Amiga 1000. I also have a very rare Commodore SX-64 (still have the Amiga too!). I remember when I was a senior in high school IBM announced their blazing fast 4.77Mhz computer and said "It will be years before anyone ever comes up with something faster or more powerful for home use." 

Now I have multiple computers and the video cards have more ram than the size hard drive I had for the Amiga, and that 40MB (yes you read that correctly... MB not GB) hard drive set me back well over $200!


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## Bob_99

My first 'system' was an Ohio Scientific motherboard where you had to load everything with tape. My first real system was an Ithaca Intersystems S-100 with Z80 CPU, 64K of main memory, two 8.5" (1.2 Mb) floppies and CPM for an operating system. It was advanced for the time with 256Kb of buffer memory. I still have it and boot it up periodically.

Bob


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## nova

Hmm,... don't recall for sure. I remember an Amiga, an Osborne and an 8088 something or other. The first real computer i bought was a PC Partner 486DX/33 w/math co-processor and an additional 4 meg of ram (foe a grand total of 8), a 2400 baud modem, and an upgraded Oak video card,.... just got rid of that system about 4 years ago :bigsmile: it was still running. I also remember buying Wing Commander and the system was so fast it made the game unplayable, there was no turbo button to slow things down.


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## eugovector

Commodore Vic 20, and some portable thing from Tandy that people refered to as Rambo. My first windows machine running 95 on a 75mhz intel from Packard Bell. Man that thing flew when we updated it from 16mb of RAM to 32, which cost about $80 if I recall.


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## eddthompson

mechman said:


> Let's start showing our age - I'll start.
> 
> I cannot remember the model number but the manufacturer was Amstrad (A german company). It had a 8086 processor which ran at 4mhz. 512KB of internal RAM. Dual 5 1/4 floppies and no hard drive. I booted up off of either a DOS Disk or GEM disks - depending upon what I wanted to do.
> 
> 
> mech


I think you will find Amstrad was British, it was short for Alan Michael Sugar Trading, an interesting fellow, was the the Donald Trump on the UK aprentice.

My first computer was a commodore 64, with floppy disk :bigsmile:

Then i think it was a 286, an amstrad :bigsmile: with incredible cga graphics.

Edd


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## mechman

Edd,

Really?!?! I always thought they were german. Learn something new everyday I guess! Thanks! And for that I give you the dance banana:

:dancebanana:

mech


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## Sonnie

As best I can remember in the early 90's we purchased our first computer. It was a 386DX (or SX) with I believe 4 or 8MB of RAM and maybe a 200MB HD... with a 13 or 14" monitor. It cost us ~$1400... and we had no clue as to what to do with it.

Anyone remember some of the first computers every made?









The public got its first glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.Start of project: 1943 
Completed: 1946 
Programmed: plug board and switches 
Speed: 5,000 operations per second 
Input/output: cards, lights, switches, plugs 
Floor space: *1,000 square feet * 










The UNIVAC I was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.
Speed: 1,905 operations per second 
Input/output: magnetic tape, unityper, printer 
Memory size: 1,000 12-digit words in delay lines 
Memory type: delay lines, magnetic tape 
Technology: serial vacuum tubes, delay lines, magnetic tape 
Floor space: *943 cubic feet * 
Cost: F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer 











Data General Corp., started by a group of engineers that had left Digital Equipment Corp., introduced the Nova, with 32 kilobytes of memory, for $8,000.










The Kenbak-1, the first personal computer, advertised for $750 in Scientific American. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-scale and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973, after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corp. closed its doors.









Scelbi advertised its 8H computer, the first commercially advertised U.S. computer based on a microprocessor, Intel´s 8008. Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. It had 4 kilobytes of internal memory and a cassette tape, with both teletype and oscilloscope interfaces. In 1975, Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 kilobytes of memory for the business market. The company sold about 200 machines, losing $500 per unit.









In the first month after its release, Tandy Radio Shack´s first desktop computer — the TRS-80 — sold 10,000 units, well more than the company´s projected sales of 3,000 units for one year. Priced at $599.95, the machine included a Z80 based microprocessor, a video display, 4 kilobytes of memory, BASIC, cassette storage, and easy-to-understand manuals that assumed no prior knowledge on the part of the consumer.









Adam Osborne completed the first portable computer, the Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. The price made the machine especially attractive, as it included software worth about $1,500. The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.


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## Bob_99

Brings back some memories. Here's a picture of the Ithaca S-100:










The S-100 bus was suppose to be THE bus and would last forever since you could exchange everything in the system, including the CPU card. Just goes to show that you can't trust in anything.

Bob


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## eddthompson

Seeing those big valve computers always makes me think of Asimov stories. 

edd


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## Kal Rubinson

My first was a DEC PDP-11 in the form of a MINC (lab computer). Had 2 8" floppies, 64K RAM and it cost me $3500 to add a 5meg hard disc. Ran MINC-Basic. Quickly upgraded to a series of more mainline PDP-11s running RT-11 before chucking them all for a slew of PCs.

Kal Rubinson


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## SLAYER

Hi guys 
my computer was a Apple macintosh plus 2
i dont know anything about it eccept it the floppy was on the monitor and the monitor was in black and white. also harddrive was scsi , it had keyboard and a 1 button mouse and you had to use a startup floppy othewise it would not boot 
my mother bought it from a friend of my brother when i was 14 .
even though i dont use it . its still in mint condition around somewhere lol
ill try to take some pics.


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## Mitch G

The first computer I used was a DEC PDP something - probably an 8. Hehe that was in highschool. I had to cheat off the smart girl to figure out how to program the darned thing. I just couldn't get it. Two years later I'm majoring in Math and Computer Science - go figure. And then end up in as an engineer for a Telecom company.

But, the first computer I bought and owned myself was an Acer desktop - in the mid-90s, iirc. Since I used computers all day at work, I was in no hurry to bring one into the house.


Mitch


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## owlfan12000

I don't remember exactly but it was a Zenith computer from 1986. I think it had an 8088 processor and I know I paid $400 for a 10MB yes MB hard drive. That hard drive really made it special because most people were still using dual floppies.

I'm old enough to have done my first programming on the mainframe at Rice University with punch cards. I had to get an Electrical Engineering degree or Math Sciences degree because they didn't have a Computer Science degree yet. You had to be dedicated then. Write a program, feed it though the card reader, wait 45 to 90 minutes and see if you got it right. Usually you lost another 45 to 90 minutes because of a simple thing like a missing semicolon. I remember debating whether Fortran would ever go away because it was only a 64KB yes KB programming language. We used PL1 for most of our projects. That was a monster program at 192KB.


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## bobgpsr

owlfan12000 said:


> I'm old enough to have done my first programming on the mainframe at Rice University with punch cards. I had to get an Electrical Engineering degree or Math Sciences degree because they didn't have a Computer Science degree yet. You had to be dedicated then. Write a program, feed it though the card reader, wait 45 to 90 minutes and see if you got it right. Usually you lost another 45 to 90 minutes because of a simple thing like a missing semicolon. I remember debating whether Fortran would ever go away because it was only a 64KB yes KB programming language.


They let us freshman/sophmore engr students use some old second generation IBM 7094 discrete transistor mainframes in CS220. The first half of the semester we programmed in Moron (a pseudo assembly language -- dumbed down for safety). Later we got to use Fortran and we thought it was the cat's meow. Yep, used punch cards and it took hours to turn around.


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## owlfan12000

bobgpsr said:


> They let us freshman/sophmore engr students use some old second generation IBM 7094 discrete transistor mainframes in CS220. (


OK you win. You really are old. :clap: I've attached some info on the IBM 7094 from the IBM archive.


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## Sonnie

I think both of you are older than dirt...:whistling: :heehee:


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## alan monro

My first computer was a tandy (radio shack) TS 16 it had 16kb ram wow""":yay::yay::yay:I played a couple of cassete games on it then chucked the useless thing away . Computers are only good for the purpose you use them for. I am waiting for the '2001 Hal' computer but it proberly wont come in the years I have left .Realy who cares.:dunno:


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## Guest

Here's showing age: My first personal computer was an 8086. I do remember all the hoopla when Windows came out. And now I wear glasses from looking at all the little green DOS script and text.

But back in college (1981), we had a REAL clunky system running RSTS/E. I never did feel comfortable typing on that thing.


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## Owen Bartley

My first computer (if you don't count the Atari 800 XL) was an old IBM XT clone. I don't remember much about it, except that it was already past it's prime when we got it. But at least it was a good foundation and I can remember the good old days of the monochrome orange text on black screen. I think I used it to do some word processing and that's about it. We moved up to a P-75 a couple years after that, skipping the whole 486 stage. That was the one I did most of my learing on, with both Win 95 and DOS.


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## santora

My first home computer was purchased by my folks in 80/81 I believe - The Atari 800. It was a tank and came with a whopping 48k. I loved that machine. 

The first machine I ever purchased on my own was the Atari Mega ST4. That was followed a year later with my Amiga 500. One for music, the other for games. Both machines rocked...

Never owned a C64 though. Don't really feel like I missed much.


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## Darren

Atari 520 ST... Mac clone of the day. 512k, had the new 3.5" floppy available


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## MatrixDweller

My very first was a Commodore 64 back in 1985 with an external 5 1/4 drive. The games were amazing on that thing back then. 

In 1987 I got an 8086 w/ 640K of memory, 20 MB hard drive and a 12" VGA Monitor. I later threw an 8-bit Sound Blaster (1st generation) card into it.


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## kmkbeni

Altair 8800 with an Intel 8080 CPU and 256 bytes of memory. I bought this as a kit in 1976 through the Popular Electronics magazine ad. And I still have it in working order!


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## JDRoberts

trs-80.
with tape drive.

10 Print haha haha haha haha haha haha
20 goto 10 

:bigsmile::bigsmile::bigsmile:


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## MatrixDweller

I knew a guy about 8 years ago (~1999) that had a BBS dedicated to the TRASH-80 running on a modified TRS80. He had it mounted in a tower and connected to a small hard drive. He had modded the snot out of it. 

I think it ended up dying a couple years later, after more than 15 years of service, and he ditched it in favor of a 486DX2 with Linux. He'll probably be using that for the next 10 years.


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## Sthrndream

My first computer was Vic 20. I think it had 5k of memory. Then I had a Commodore 64, followed by a Radio Shack Color Computer. I started to build an apple clone but lost interest. Then I bought an AT and agonized over whether I should get the 20 MB or 40 MB hard drive.


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## tonyvdb

my first computer was an Apple IIe, I then bought myself an Amiga 3000T for use with Video Toaster hardware. and then upgraded that to an Amiga 4000 that I still use and is still running like it was new. (who can say that about there PC that was bought 15 years ago)


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## Guest

Gee,

If I can remember back to the early eighties when I started at the HP Santa Clara Instruments Division, I thing it was called a touch screen 150 but not certain of the exact name. It was a big thing at the time.

Not if you mean my first home computer, it was an HP one that I still have and forget the name for I had made upgrades to it over the years; we must have had it for around ten years or so. We even have a new casing. The Mother Board I do believe is still HP, along with other innards.

jtmj
:bigsmile:


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## avaserfi

The first computer I ever got was one I built around 7-8th grade or so.

Pentium 3 at 1.3Ghz
64MB nVidia graphics card
512MB Memory (eventually upgraded to 1gig)
40GB HD
CD Burner (I remember being proud of that one although it eventually became a DVD burner)
Some cheapy Sound Blaster card

I just got rid of it about two and a half years ago after six or seven years of service. Man did I love that thing - it was the coolest thing ever. It even burned CDs and I didn't have to use my dads computer anymore .


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## gem

The first one I can remember our family having was something called a Timex Sinclair 1000. I remember it had a cassette tape for data storage. I wasn't really mine it was our family computer that my dad wouldn't let us touch.


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## MatrixDweller

gem said:


> The first one I can remember our family having was something called a Timex Sinclair 1000. I remember it had a cassette tape for data storage. I wasn't really mine it was our family computer that my dad wouldn't let us touch.


The shop teacher at my grade school bought one of those for our electronics club. They were supposedly only $100 brand new back in 1982. I thought it was way cool back then, just because it was a computer. Imagine trying to type anything lengthy on that membrane keyboard. I guess the 2K of memory it had kind of limited your typing endeavors anyway. :duh:


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## gem

Thats it I can remember it was about the size of a large calculator.

I really hate to date myself but I can remember going with my mom to pick up my older sister from her high school Data Processing class...They were using punch cards


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## EQDruid

Mine was a Texas Insterment 94A. I remember writing code for that thing for 3 days straight, making a game for my mother ( A mini slot machine ) thing had no harddrive, so everything was saved in the system. Mother played it 3 times, then turned it off... SHE TURNED IT OFF!!! Everything was lost, so after that , I made a new "Simpler" program...

10 call screen white
20 call screen black
30 goto 10


........


Run


My own personal strobe light....

Yeah, I'm still not over it :yawn:

EQDruid


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## drf

Tempest game Console (made by goldstar I think) then a commodore 64 with most of the options:
51/4 disk drive
tape deck
plotter printer
dot matrix printer
joystick

then 0x86 compat from there on in.


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## Scotty79

I had an Amiga500.

It had the "extra" RAM upgrade, that you plugged into the left hand side of it, and it had two lights (one red, one green) to show if it was workin... lol!


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## k0rww

My first computer was a Heathkit with a DEC LSI-11 CPU. It had two 256K 8" floppy drives. The operating system was RT-11. The CPU board was from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) but the rest of the computer had to be assembled. This was in 1980. Talk about a boat anchor.

Richard


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## Stigmata

IBM PS/1: 80286 10mhz cpu, 1mb ram, 30mb hd, floppy drive.










sweet memories...


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## Andre

Abacus, Fingers and toes...

Actually I don't remember what it was, it was from the Radio Shack catalog in the early 70s. I was made out of plastic, had buttons and a small screen made of diodes. They called it a computer if I remember correctly. After that:


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## denydog

I don't remember the details very well, but my first home computer was an XT system with a large floppy drive. I started with just DOS, but I remember buying my first computer program, It had word processing, and a spreadsheet. It was also text based. Windows were for gazing at the real world.


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## krakhen

That was so long ago... As far as I remember the first computer I had was an Atari 130 XE, the first "intel" pc was based on a NEC V20 chip running at a turbo speed of 16 MHz! the HDD was 20 MB and it had a 5 1/4 floppy drive.

Had lots of fun with them, also learned a lot...


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## Kal Rubinson

PDP-11 in a desktop version (PDT-11).


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## Goldenbear

Commadore VIC-20. No storage device (I think they had a tape option), so I had to key in the code every time I turned it off/on. Unfortunately, it didn't even last one summer... keyboard started acting flaky


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## SCWillhe

In the early 70's I had two Atari computers. Then in 1975 I built one of the 8800A Altair computers. Could only program it from the front panel switches (no keyboard or output monitor) and make the lights do patterns. Then on to one from PC's Limited later to become Dell(I think). the rest is History.


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## 1hagop

Commodore 64
Tape Drive
2 - 1541 5.25 drives
Okidata color printer
and a screaming fast 9600 baud modem!
I was a Z2VlayE=


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## natlight

TI-99/4A 

CPU: TI TMS9900, 3.0 MHz, 16-bit
Memory: 16KB CPU RAM, 16KB VDP RAM (Video Display Processor RAM), 256 bytes CPU fast "scratchpad RAM" 
Video: 32 single-color sprites, 16 fixed colors. It had different resolution modes for text, bitmap or graphics mode
Sound: I remember the sound was really wierd, it had 2 or 3 different "voices" that sounded creepy.

Here is what the disk drive expansion looked like. My, how the times have changed!


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## johnmcc

Sinclair spectrum, 16k memory .


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## Mike P.

If memory serves me correctly it was a 16 Mhz Apple with a 500 MB hard drive, paid $3200 for it. 6 months later added a 1X external CD drive for $750.


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## Jasonpctech

A Silver TRS-80 followed by a Apple IIe by then I was hooked.


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## mjcmt

First computer - iMac in '96, 2nd computer - iMac in '01, 3rd computer - iMac in '09!


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## Senn20

My first computer was an Apple IIe.

Dual floppy drives, two tone screen, added an Apple mouse and a dot matrix printer. 

Had lots of fun dabbling in Apple's flavor of the Basic programming language.


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## Infrasonic

The Atari 2600 was my first entry into the world of computing. A few consoles later I finally got a "real" computer around 1994 - a Packard Bell Pentium 75mhz with about a 500mb HD, 4mb of RAM, 14.4 modem and Windows 3.11 - those were the days!

I learned quite a bit with that old thing, every game needed a lot of "convincing" to get working but it was a lot of fun!


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## Andre

Quickly followed by










Advanced funtions were taken care of by










Universal Binary Quantum physics were pondered here


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## Theresa

My first computer was a Commodore 64 which I found to be a good word processor on a low budget (in 1984 anyway). Used and owned many since both "PC compatible" and macs, I prefer Windows 7 to OSX on a Mac.


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## gorb

The first computer I ever bought was a Pionex when I was 14 or 15. It was a pentium III 667, had 64 MB of pc133 ram, a 30GB hdd, and a 16mb nvidia vanta  That's also the only computer I've ever purchased, I've bought nothing but parts since then. I can't remember the first computer my family owned, but I imagine it would have been a 386 or something like that.


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## hakunatata

I can't think of the name. But it has a floppy drive and ran dos. I used to play track and field on it where you would just hit the arrow back and forth as fast as you can. Also there was a shooting game where you had to time your shot to hit the ducks flying over you. That was around the days of intelivision. Then the apple 2. going into college I got a dell 200 mhz inspiron 7000, that was when DVD's were coming out. That bad boy still runs, I paid 250 and 500 to upgrade ram and HD to 25 gigs.


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## grn1969c10

A DFI 386sx-16.

She had 2 meg of ram and a 256kb video card. I upgraded to four 1MB sticks of ram and then bought 36 dip chips from some guy on the local trading post to push it to 8MB. I still laugh when I think of how much motherboard real estate all that ram occupied. To this day I believe it was the most stable computer I have ever owned. (Well, barring the occasional 5 1/4" floppy disk corruption and the need to reconfigure the autoexec.bat and config.sys for each and every game!) I had the fastest computer in my dorm my freshman year. Everyone else had 286's.

Matt


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## Grumpy

Timex Sinclare. Followed by a Vic-20. Shortly after that a Kpro and a KproII. I still have every computer I have ever purchased and they all still work. Yes I'm a geek!


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## Theresa

I've had 8088, 8086, 80286, 80386, 80486, several AMD machines, and of course pentiums. I also had one iMac, what a waste of money that was. The Commodore 64 was my first though and the one for which I have the fondest memories. It was amazing what so little memory and a slow processor could do. I did a great deal of word processing on it when in college.


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## gsmollin

My "first" computer, mmm,

The first computer I ever programmed: IBM 360 Model 50.
The first computer I ever touched, repaired, and later slept with it: DEC PDP8L.
The first computer I ever used as a professional: EAI 640 (16 bit minicomputer)
The first computer I ever owned: Commodore VIC20.
The first Wintel computer I ever owned: Zeos 486-100.


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## Trick McKaha

Coleco Adam & still have it.


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## philmadxx

Apple IIe with 80 column card - external 5 1/4" floppy - no hdd green screen. 
Still works


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## WooferHound

I have a Cassette tape with some Apple IIe programs on it.


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## SiNtEnEl

Started with a commodore 64 with a tape drive in 1988 and then moved up to a iAPX 286 PC.
After that i had tons of other computers.. kinda lost track of it. 
I still got the commodore and the Atari 8bit, but i it hasn't seen daylight in years now.


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## FlashJim

IBM PC 5150 named "Little Bob". "Bob" is a name that I've always used for junk folders, junk device descriptions ... basically anything I'm testing on a system. The PC was given to me because it had a broken keyboard socket. I desoldered it and replaced it with one for $1.45.

It took 24 hours to defrag the massive 20MB hard drive.

Since then, I've been on a never ending quest to build "Big Bob". No matter what I build, it's trumped the next week by the latest and greatest.


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## TypeA

A Vic20. I can still remember plugging in the little cartridges into the back of the keyboard and playing river race (or river rat, something like that). Great game, good times.


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## Jason1976

I had an atari computer with a tape drive and a floppy drive. Mostly use to for playing games. The games were better then nintendo. we had some word prossesing programs and a dot matrics printers. Then after that we bought a IBM aptivia in like 1995 for like almost 4 grand with the printer and all. It was a fast 100Mhz P100. with 8MB ram and a 1GB hard drive. at the time it did seam fast running windows 95. In school I was using older systems then we had at home. They were old 186 and 286 computers. They had a some 386 and very few 486 computers. They were using dos and windows 3.1 and some had windows 3.11 

I remember the time my mom bought a 5GB hard drive for over 500 dollars. she also bought 2 16MB ram sticks and the guy said why do you need so much ram you will never use that much.


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## TypeA

Jason1976 said:


> she also bought 2 16MB ram sticks and the guy said why do you need so much ram you will never use that much.


Probably perfectly sound advice, at the time.


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## Jason1976

TypeA said:


> Probably perfectly sound advice, at the time.


At the time it made the computer run a lot faster. was able to have many things open at one time without it slowing down. Right now her computer has 16GB of ram. It's mostly likely more then she needs but she does do lots with her computer. My computer only has 4GB of ram.


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## gsmollin

Jason1976 said:


> ...I remember the time my mom bought a 5GB hard drive for over 500 dollars. she also bought 2 16MB ram sticks and the guy said why do you need so much ram you will never use that much.


At that time you couldn't address more than 640k of RAM. An extended memory addressing program had to to run as a TSR in the first 640k of RAM to address the rest. That program, DOS16M, could only address 16 meg of RAM. After Win95 came out, you could address 32 meg. Yes, the memory numbers have inexorably grown, with sometimes hardware then software limiting the max. With Win7 X64, the motherboard addressing and memory slots are the current practical limitations.


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## Jason1976

gsmollin said:


> At that time you couldn't address more than 640k of RAM. An extended memory addressing program had to to run as a TSR in the first 640k of RAM to address the rest. That program, DOS16M, could only address 16 meg of RAM. After Win95 came out, you could address 32 meg. Yes, the memory numbers have inexorably grown, with sometimes hardware then software limiting the max. With Win7 X64, the motherboard addressing and memory slots are the current practical limitations.


It was a windows 95 system. She had her ram maxed out.


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## aceinc

The first computer I ever programmed (in high school) was http://www.adgeeks.org/ad/guide/angry-young-computer, a Burroughs B-200. Twelve bit architecture, 9.6k of memory, a card punch, card reader, printer and two 800 BPI tape drives. Wrote Machine Language, then Assembler. 

Of course the previous year (10th grade) we worked on http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/402.html which were accounting machines, and were "programmed" by wiring boards http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/plugboard.html.

The first computer I ever owned was a used Data General Eclipse. My first PC was a http://www.zorba.z80.de/, when I upgraded I gave it to my father who used it for a number of years.

My first professional experience was on a PDP 11/45 running RSTS/E, I worked on DEC (Compaq/HP) computers into the '00s and still have a 1987 MicroVax as a night table in a spare bedroom.

Paul


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## mattphelps

Gosh, I see a lot of computer models I had never known that exist. LOL. I happen to have my very own computer and that is a Pentium II. Guess I am a late bloomer. :bigsmile:


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## mdrake

I hate admit this but my first pc was an apple 2c that my parents bought. My first pc I built was an amd athlon system.

Matt


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## gsmollin

aceinc said:


> ... and still have a 1987 MicroVax as a night table in a spare bedroom.
> 
> Paul


Ahhh, I remember that one well. VMS. DEC mail. DCL. EDT Editor. Gosh, you're bringin' a tear to my eye.


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## Rob Greer

My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model III with cassette tape drive. We later upgraded to a 8 1/2" floppy drive.


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## aceinc

gsmollin said:


> Ahhh, I remember that one well. VMS. DEC mail. DCL. EDT Editor. Gosh, you're bringin' a tear to my eye.



EDT was my favorite editor of all time. On a VT100 terminal, or later on the VT220. Did you ever edit a program for an hour or two, save the keystroke file and replay it? Now that was fun to watch, it saved every keystroke, and you could replay the whole editing session. I guess it didn't take much to entertain me back in the day.

Back in high school, we would take a noob, preferably a girl, put a card on top of the rollers on an IBM 082 card sorter without them noticing (hide it with a piece of paper or box), and watch as they sorted a deck. A card would drift lazily across the machine backwards, and invariably scare the wits out of the noob. They thought they broke the machine.

Paul


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## wolfenstein

i think my first computer was a window's 95 IT WAS THE CRAPPIEST COMPUTER ON EARTH:hissyfit:!!!


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## IrishStout

The good old Vic 20.. I must have taken that thing apart at least 20 times. Then I upgraded to a Commador 64... from there it was to an 8086 processor. I think I threw in a Apple in there somewhere, or maybe that was just via School?


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## q2bon2b

Wow, brings back fond memories. My first was a generic 8088 based PC with a miserably low ram and tiny HD (by today's standard ).


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## mjcmt

I didn't own my own computer until 1996 when I bought a green Apple iMac. My second computer was a white 17" iMac in 2001, and now an aluminum 24" iMac in 2009. I love each one of them and I will buy another iMac when I'm ready for an upgrade.

http://www.cultofmac.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/imac-green-front.jpg

http://images.apple.com/pr/images/ref_imac17_3q.jpg

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/08/8-14-07-imac.jpg


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## waldo563

My first computer was a TI-99/4A with 16K of RAM and an external cassette for storage. It was cartridge based and I remember playing "Tunnels of Doom" with 4 color graphics for about 12 hours straight when I first got it.


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## viccmw

Wow. Another one of my favorite subject - the computer  ; HT being my latest addition.

Let's see. My first was the Atari 800 - a 6502 chip which uses a casette tape (!)  to store offline data.

Thereafter, abandoned Atari and joined the IBM PC 'rat-race' and have been upgrading ever since....

If my memory serves me correct

IBM 8086
IBM 80286
AMD 80340
Pentium III 700MHz
Pentium IV 3GHz (can't quite recall)
Intel i930 2.8GHz

Now itching for the just recently released Sandy Bridge CPUs.....:nerd:


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## SirGSS

Ahh.. Memories.

A long time ago, in a state far, far away, I had a homebuilt computer sporting an 8086 motherboard, a ten megabyte HDD, 5 1/4" floppy drive, 640k of RAM, and a black-and-green monochrome monitor.

Give it up for old school. lddude:


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## SinCron

Mine was a Pentium 75mhz with 8MB of ram, 800MB hard drive, cd and a 3.25" floppy drive. Fav game for a while, Monster Truck Madness. First upgrade was to 16MB of ram so I could play Shadow Warrior. I even played the original GTA on it. After that was a 333mhz celeron with a 10GB hard drive. After that, I upgraded the CPU to 800 mhz and got an 80GB hard drive that I didn't end up using until I get my AMD board with a Sempron (I think) running at 1.2ghz. 

Then I got an Athlon machine from my dad that ran at either 2.1 or 2.4 ghz with two 80GB hard drives in RAID0. That was the first machine that had an optical out on the board which I used on my Panasonic SA-HA75 in Quadraphonic mode. Unfortunately, I found that I lost a lot of bass I couldn't figure out why (it wasn't until I hooked up a 15" bass cab to it that I realized that all low frequencies had gone to a sub that wasn't there).

Then it was time for big boy. The beast. Built it in November or December of 2009. Top of the line Gigabyte MOBO (GA-MA790FXT-UD5P), 4GB of DDR3 ram, 640GB WD Black for system, 1TB Seagate for games, 1.5 and 2.0TB green drives for mass storage and a Radeon HD5770 video card. Lots of storage for HD content, recordings and other stuff.


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## m560jldom

first computer was a zenith laptop using dos. then later on built my first pc pentuim 2


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## chrisg67

my first one was an IBM 5150, i was about 7 and my dad gave it to me to play chopper on


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## panaman

I got my first computer when I started college. My parents bought it for me for christmas. I was 19 years old. It was an AST brand 486sx25. It had 4mb of ram, 120MB hard drive. 3..5 and 5.25 floppy drives. It came with DOS 5 and Windows 3.1.
I had a 14 inch packard bell monitor and some 9 pin dot matrix printer. the enter system costed around $3000 bucks.


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## rab-byte

Wow first computer...

Gateway 2000
486Mz with 4 megs ram and a cdrom. Running dos 5.0 and windows 3

I remember upgrading to 8megs, I had to set the binary switches on the mother board (yes physical switches) for it to recognize the extra ram. 

Great games back in the day. 
Sierra had some of the best. Kings Quest, Quest for Glory. 
Lucas Arts... X-wing, Indiana jones, monkey island. 

Anyone remember maniac mansion?


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## lenoxhawk

My first introduction to compuers was with a Commodore64. Men, does that feel like I was in the Stone Ages nowlddude:


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## sideswiper

Mine was a Pentium 3 with a woppin 40 gig hard drive it also had a s-video video card in it. I think i payed close to $1600 for it back in 1998-99


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## tesseract

lenoxhawk said:


> My first introduction to compuers was with a Commodore64. Men, does that feel like I was in the Stone Ages nowlddude:


Comm 64, also my first introduction along with the Apple IIc. BASIC language.. hehe. lddude:

Dabbled with 486/DOS and my favorite game ever... MechWarrior!! then landed with a used Win 98 that I updated to Win 98SE... in 2005!

I am now Vista OS and happy, for the last 3 years. :rofl2: When it lets me down, I will upgrade.


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## rseynaev

The first computer I ever programmed was an HP3000 that our high school had access to over modem. I remember spending hours playing Star Trek on the teletype.

I later joined the Army as a programmer. Got to use my first "portable" computer - an IBM 360 with 256K and punch cards. The system was "portable" because the computer was located in a large semi-sized truck and every once in a while we took the system out into the field.

After the army I went to college (Computer Science major) and bought my first real computer - a Zenith Z-241 (6mhz 286). I remember paying $600 extra for a 30 mb hard drive.


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## nholmes1

First computer I remember using was the AppleII or Lisa in elementary school when they brought in the first computer lab in the region. My first computer I had myself was 486/66 with Win3.11, once I figured out how to upgrade it was all over from there including plenty of overclocking with early celerons and P3 chips.


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## Zeitgeist

Commodore Amiga 1000 w/512KB of memory.

yeah!

Far ahead of Apples (even Macs) at the time..


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## tonyvdb

Zeitgeist said:


> Commodore Amiga 1000 w/512KB of memory.
> 
> yeah!
> 
> Far ahead of Apples (even Macs) at the time..


You bet :T I still use my Amiga 4000 today for video editing. Still working flawlessly after 20 years


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## Zeitgeist

tonyvdb said:


> You bet :T I still use my Amiga 4000 today for video editing. Still working flawlessly after 20 years


Now THAT is awesome. I can't believe that NewTek is still around... seems like they've found their niche in the PC world..


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## Slyder01

i just got into the pc era in 2000, not a good experience with it though as i had to return it from all the error messages.


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## Beatcoaster

I remember my dad's first computer, a 386 with the math coprocessor and a 40 megabyte hd - good times. I got my first pc my first year in college, 1993. It was a packard bell 486sx 25mhz with a 15" CRT and a HP color inkjet printer. I think my parents spent $2500 or so on it, but boy was it the cat's meow. Everyone wondered where I had gotten the cool color pictures on my desk, "oh I printed them"..."no way!" My buddy in the room down the hall came back after Christmas with a 486 DX 50 and so began the perpetual feeling of 'upgraditis' that I still have today


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## Ray3

1989 and I got a brand new Apple MAC SE w/ 1 mb of RAM. I remember wondering if I would find enough reasons to use it and justify the price. Now we have 3 in the house.


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## caper26

The first one I owned was a AMD K6-II I think. It was 300 MHz, and I just tossed the cpu out this week when I was debunking my computer room. Got it about 1998 ish? I remember playing with a VIC20 at a friend's house where I first started programming in BASIC when I was a kid in the 80's...eventually led me to a comp eng degree in software, lol. I still have an ATARI at home which works great as well.


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## jwjacks

I still have my IBM PCjr, and it still works.

Now I am feeling old and depressed


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## Nissan-SR20-Man

Apple IIC - rocking the 5.25" floppy

Packard Bell 486 25Mhz - bought a 25Mhz Math Co-Processor for $400 to double speed to 50Mhz


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## caper26

Nissan-SR20-Man said:


> Apple IIC - rocking the 5.25" floppy
> 
> Packard Bell 486 25Mhz - bought a 25Mhz Math Co-Processor for $400 to double speed to 50Mhz


I remember well the 5 1/4"!! Also the cassette storage...so SLOWWWWwwwww!
...Please Wait...


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## Stereo_Dave

waldo563 said:


> My first computer was a TI-99/4A with 16K of RAM and an external cassette for storage. It was cartridge based and I remember playing "Tunnels of Doom" with 4 color graphics for about 12 hours straight when I first got it.



ME TOO ! Man we couldn't wait to get the joysticks for it ! I wasn't lucky enough to have the Pbox. I still have mine w/ the tape drive and stuff. Pretty sure there's 2 of the Pboxes sitting in my folks basement yet too. 

Wow - and I thought I was old- I'm happy to see so many other old guys here, I wasnt' sure what to expect. I guess this means I don't have to use the term "old school" in my posts ? 

sweet memories


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## Circlotron

November 1989 
10MHz 286 
640x480 VGA 
1.44MB FDD, 
44MB =voicecoil= HDD
AUD$5000 

It was a Philips box running DOS 3.3
Funny thing about it was that you could set the system date in BIOS anywhere from 1956 to 2055 - note 4 digits - so it didn't suffer from the Y2K bug.


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## Mik2121

mine was a windows 95 JEJEJEJE the white one


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## tonyvdb

> Funny thing about it was that you could set the system date in BIOS anywhere from 1956 to 2055 - note 4 digits - so it didn't suffer from the Y2K bug.


The Amiga is the same, 4 digits. Mine is till keeping the correct time/date today.


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## hgoed

The TI-99/4a was the first I can remember using at home. That's the one I learned Basic on. I never understood why it used a tape drive. 

We then had a couple of Apples, but the first computer I bought for myself, and one I will always remember fondly, was the Amiga 500. I was 14, and everyone played their games on Colecovision...or maybe Nintendo was starting to become dominant...but I had a gaming system that pwned them all!!! Dual core. When did the rest of the world catch up?


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## MikeZas

First one actually owned was a terrible Performa PowerPC, famous as one of the worst Macs of all time


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## Sirbrine

I bought a 'screaming fast' 25 Mhz IBM clone in about 1990 I think. If I remember right, it had an Intel 386 processor in it, and one guy tried to talk me into a 286 based machine because he did not think most people needed anything else. I had lots of conversations with people at the time who had no vision for what computers could do.


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## BoredSysAdmin

About 1992 - Whitebox 80286 25Mhz, VGA display, 256K mem video card, 1Mb of memory - No hard drive
Later on added 100Mb hd and 33.6 Kbps modem lddude:


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## Funk Sean

1st computers were the Atari 600xl and the 800xl. This was cutting edge stuff way back then. We also has 2 printers. One was a dot matrix printer and the other was a plotter which was a ton of fun to watch. The plotter used little pens that moved left to right and the paper would move up and down super fast. It drew on paper rolls similar to what you find in a cash register. We also had 2 tape drives, and 3 floppy drives. The best add on was the modem. The modem had "acoustic couplers" which meant that you actually placed the phone on top of the modem and a microphone would listen to the blips and beeps from the phone's speaker.


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## rab-byte

Funk Sean said:


> 1st computers were the Atari 600xl and the 800xl. This was cutting edge stuff way back then. We also has 2 printers. One was a dot matrix printer and the other was a plotter which was a ton of fun to watch. The plotter used little pens that moved left to right and the paper would move up and down super fast. It drew on paper rolls similar to what you find in a cash register. We also had 2 tape drives, and 3 floppy drives. The best add on was the modem. The modem had "acoustic couplers" which meant that you actually placed the phone on top of the modem and a microphone would listen to the blips and beeps from the phone's speaker.


Sweet,
Very 'War Games'
I never understood why we had to listen to the modems try to connect. Funny thing is kids today have no idea what it was like for only one person to be online at a time. I can still remember the connection tones. That's a sound I will never forget.


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## GeerGuy

My brother worked for Radio Shack and got a pretty good discount on everything. We saved up together to buy a Tandy computer. All I really remember doing on it was playing Leisure Suit Larry.


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## Rob Flanery

I don't feel so old anymore...

TRS 80 to start out. Amazing at the time. Then a Commodore, then a 286, then a 486, finally now up to a ? 

Remember. 64K should be enough for anyone.


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## Scolex

First at the house was TRS 80 model III, first that was all mine IBM PS2 55 (convinced parents I needed it for school)


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## FloridaSwede

Radio Shack Tandy. Played the proverbial ping pong game on it. Loads of fun.....


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## Radiophile

The first computer I ever used was some kind of mainframe at college. I was taking a Fortran programming class. We had to sit at a special typewriter; one line of code would go on one punch card. Then we stood in line with our stack of punch cards to run our job. Then it was over to another line to collect our printed output. Those weren't the days. lddude:

The first computer I owned was an Atari 800XL. I also bought the external 5-1/4" floppy drive, and ran most programs from that. I don't recall using this computer for much except some games.

After that, I've had a succession of PC desktops and laptops that are too numerous to remember. I always built the desktops myself and had fun doing so. (My latest "desktop" build is my HTPC.) One computer that stands out in memory is a Dell 320LT laptop that I bought in 1991. (Worst $4,000 I ever spent.) It ran DOS. I remember spending big bucks to upgrade it from 2MB to 8MB of RAM so I could run Desqview, which was a DOS multitasking shell of some type. Of course, this laptop didn't last long before it was obsolete. I had to run Windows (v3.1), so I needed new hardware.


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## CatBrat

Before I purchased a computer, I used a Univac in school, and an IBM 360 on my first computer based job. On my 2nd job, it was 2 IBM 370's.

My first computer purchase was the original IBM PC. So new that I had to wait on parts to be produced and shipped. It had 2 single sided 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives and no hard drive. 64k memory. Later, I added a 20meg external HD that someone gave me, and purchased a card called the "6-Pack Plus" that had more memory, and added a parallel and serial ports to it. I connected a modem to it and ran a small bulletin board system on it. Mostly just swapped shareware games with other people running bulletin boards.


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## rab-byte

It's funny to think about how far technology is advancing. I'm posting this message from an I phone app in a park and I can remember having to physically set how much ram the motherboard would recognize when I upgraded from 4 to 8 megs. 

On the topic of shareware I would love to see someone reboot Decent. Anyone remember that game?


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## CatBrat

I don't remember Decent, but I do remember playing a lot of the Commander Keen games. Sort of a Mario look alike on alien planets, and you got around by using a pogo stick.


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## rab-byte

CatBrat said:


> I don't remember Decent, but I do remember playing a lot of the Commander Keen games. Sort of a Mario look alike on alien planets, and you got around by using a pogo stick.


I remember that one


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## Kriszilla

I loved Decent as well. Fantastic game and I still fire it up from time to time.

My first computer was the venerable Commodore Vic-20. I still remember the commercials with William Shatner hawking them. I got it in Christmas of 81, so I would have been 9 at the time.


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## tailwhip

Nice thread, my first was a Acer desktop 486 dx2 bought right when the Pentium came out. I got it at BB for about $1800 with printer. Had to go back to the store to get a printer cable, lol.


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## chashint

tailwhip said:


> Nice thread, my first was a Acer desktop 486 dx2 bought right when the Pentium came out. I got it at BB for about $1800 with printer. Had to go back to the store to get a printer cable, lol.


Just stumbled on this thread.
My first computer was also an Acer 486-66DX purchased from Best Buy.
Came with a 14" monitor, and HP500 inkjet printer .... seems like it was $2300 out the door.


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## benniebeeker

mine was a commodore 64... i used to play blue max for hours on end...


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## sbdman

First computer for me was a CGP-100 used for computer aided design and drafting. It was several large cabinets in a humidity and temperature controlled room with an 80 Mb drive the size of a small refrigerator. Data losses were common, had to write our own tape backup routines and run them every day. The disks in the hard drives were removable platter systems that had to be cleaned and inspected a couple times a year for scratches to prevent crashes.
The operator consoles were monochrome displays where the cathode ray would scan the surface once and the surface would be kept glowing by a threshold flood showing the drawing being worked on. Any panning or zooming, and the display had to be refreshed to show the new screen. A separate terminal and large tablet/pen was used for commands and input. New consoles came with color, and finally a smart terminal - an IBM 80286 with it's own operating system (DOS - before windows), a 5 Mb drive, a couple floppy drives and "hi-rez" XVGA graphics. A whole computer you could hold in your arms for only $15,000!
Sun mini-computers came next with their version of Unix. They had hard drives that grew to 500 Mb, but still had tape to load and backup. It was common when a new version of software came out that to re-format, partition, load the operating system (a couple tape reels) and the cadd software (about 3 more tapes), and finally the library of parts and formats used for standardized drawings, it would take a whole week to setup!

My first home pc was a TI-99/4a with a 16 Kb memory, and plug in games. I remember spending several hours of typing (and debugging mistakes) my first game from a magazine. After a couple days, I wanted to try another program, reset the computer which deleted the program, and typed another in. I quickly decided I needed a cassette player to back up all the time I lost, so I could replay it again. Hard drives were very expensive ($500) at the time. Next was a Commodore 128 - it could be set up as a Commodore 64, a 128 with higher res display and extra Basic commands, or a CP/M computer with it's added Z80 cpu to run Osborne software - anyone remember Word Star? You could get magazines with some pretty amazing programs written in assembly language - pages and pages of hexadecimal code, it was a lot of time struggling with dull input to get some fun game or useful utility all for the price of a computer magazine.


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## MishMouse

rab-byte said:


> It's funny to think about how far technology is advancing. I'm posting this message from an I phone app in a park and I can remember having to physically set how much ram the motherboard would recognize when I upgraded from 4 to 8 megs.
> 
> On the topic of shareware I would love to see someone reboot Decent. Anyone remember that game?


They did make a Descent 2 which was as good as the original but I do not think it was shareware at least in the full blown version of the game.

One thing I would like to see is a re-make of the Atari classic Yars Revenge.


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## louisp

A $2,640 Zenith PC with a Zenith color monitor and dot matrix printer.


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## typ44q

First computer I used was in 5th grade, we had a computer lab with some kind of Radio Shack trs-80 (maybe?) computers, my first home computer was a Commodore 64 with the giant external floppy drive, I loved that thing!


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## RTS100x5

MishMouse said:


> They did make a Descent 2 which was as good as the original but I do not think it was shareware at least in the full blown version of the game.
> 
> I remember the original like it was yesterday....the first flight sim to make me fall out of my chair I when I started rolling 360's . I spent half my 20's playing Descent2. I even tried to play online using an MCI dial up account one time and ran up like a $800. bill..Obviously I disputed that one :huh:


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