What was your first computer?

I had an Atari 400 like the one that Mark posted.... then I added a real keyboard to it (cramped but had actual keys) and memory.

My friends had a TRS-80 and a Sinclair.... so I built a Xenith Heathkit. The memory was chips that you had to pop onto the motherboard. :embarrassed:

After that I got an Apple IIe... or maybe an Apple IIc? I dunno.... it was all I had until I could afford a Gateway.
 
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PC jr with an expansion thing that you could flip a switch and turn it into PC mode. Came with basic cartridges and enough manuals in binders to need their own book case. Prior to that I had an atari that was bought off a neighbor and stopped working with in days.
 
An old 286 box that was handed down to me when my parents upgraded. Maybe 93 or so? About 96 I built my own pentium box that was pretty badass for the time. I'm not sure it could actually run anything in the market now lol.
 
first let me differentiate between MY personal first computer and the first computer i worked on.

first at work was USAF in 1975 and took up the better part of the room, with giant tape drives and a "work station" the size of your desk.

first personal computer, i don't remember the name, but it required TWO 5-1/4" floppy disks.....one for the program and one for the data, had a green screen with yellow text and had ZERO internal memory and the screen was probably 9" across. that was about in 1981-ish.
 
I had a Digital rainbow 100 plus.

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We also had a VAX 11-730 in the house.

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They were my dad's computers for his business, but we used them too. Must have been around 1981-2 or so.

I think the only game we had was Zork.
 
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trs80
I played a lot of Dungeons of Daggorath on that thing

also learned to program it to play an awful rendition of the Star Wars theme.

speaking of Star Wars, I think I'll go fire up the ps3.
 
Mine was a PC, a 286 16 ghz w 1 MB of RAM.

I bought it to play games on, and the first game I bought for it was the original Red Baron by Sierra. Great game, and it quickly became a favorite in the Air Force dorm I was in, people would flock to my room to play it :)
 
I stared computing using a terminal and dial up 300 baud modem. the kind where you set the phone handset down in the modem. I don't even know what the computer was on the far end. I learned BASIC on that system.

My first home computer was a commodore VIC-20. It had a screaming 5K of RAM. I did some BASIC, but became very proficient at 6502 assembler, and learned the various ins and outs of computer architecture. A cassette tape drive was my only IO device.

From there, I moved to an Atari 800 with a massive 48K of RAM, and a *floppy drive*. I was in heaven! I built a 300 baud modem so that I could connect with various bulletin boards.

I also picked up an Atari 400 that I would eventually use to control the lights our band used.

Somewhere about 1985 I bought a 286 clone with 640K memory and a 40MB hard drive. I remember spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade to 2MB of RAM. The disk had two 20MB partitions. One for MSDOS/Windows, and one for Microport System V/AT - an honest-to-God port of real system 5 unix (I used unix where I worked and loved it). By 1988, I had a dialup connection to other unix systems and was able to do "internet" email.

From there I went to a 386SX, then 486, then through a slew of Pentiums.
 
Mine was an XT type system based on an AMD 8088-2 running at 4.77MHz or 8MHz (turbo switch... BOOYA!) with 640K RAM and a 32meg ESDI interface drive. Oh, DOS 3.31, how simple you were.
 
Like Kerouac, mine was a Commodore 64, but mine wasn't a hand me down, it was brand new. The one pictured here shows a floppy disk, but if I remember correctly, mine had a cassette drive for memory.

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Ah DOS, how I miss thee... Not really. I remember when writing C programs for dos you to pick which memory model you wanted (turbo c, a great compiler).
 
Sinclair ZX Spectrum (48K). Came with "Manic Miner". I must've played that game approximate eleventy million times. I also learned BASIC on it.

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Grandpa had a Tandy 1000, played Thexder, Carmen Sandiego, and The Last Ninja on that. Then we got a 286, which promptly got upgraded to a 386/DX 40 (with a turbo button!). Bring on the Wolf 3D!
 
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