What was your first computer?

[Cyber3xpert]

Anybody had a GameBoy?

 

[BlackViperXI]

Custom IBM compiled with a bunch of parts in 1998, can't recall the exact spec except for it having 96MB of RAM and it was great for playing SNES emulator on.

I owe a lot to that old computer, it led me to the career I have today.

 

[The Fat Controller]

Anybody had a GameBoy?

My two sons had them but I preferred their Sega Mega drive. That was the last gaming machine I ever played games on. I did play a few DOS games on PC but lost interest. I always had much more fun with outside pursuits like hiking and photography.

 

[Johnmcl7]

Anybody had a GameBoy?

Oh yes, that was my first games console. Something I liked about the C64 games were that they were mostly dirt cheap so you could go to the computer shop each week and choose a game based on the box whereas the Gameboy and SNES games were mostly only birthday or Christmas presents.

 

[SkyDogII]

Trs 80 model 3 48k. 2 drives 2 external dual density drives. Used to power the TRaSh Compactor BBS system with a 1200 baud auto answer modem. Ran this back in the last 70’s and throughout high school up to 1985

trs80 model 3
Apple 2e
Atari800 actually used it as a computer and ran a second bbs with it in high school
Atari1200 sold it after a day
Atari5200 just for games
Commodore 64 never used it sat in a box
Macintosh 512 for college
Pc 286,386,etc

 

[Rchawks]

Cyber Tower. Kept it going for 7 years unlike the High D$llar Dell I bought. For the dell I had repair insurance and 3 times they had to replace the motherboard.

 

[Deleted member 113944]

Lol. Cordless telephone my first non mechanical - cable connected device.
I didn't get an electronic "word processor" a Brother, I think, until the 1990s.

 

[radman]

My first real computer was a Nuclear Data ND 812, a big green box with all of 4K memory. It was pain to use, because you had to spend about 20 minutes hand toggling in an instruction set to load in an operating system. One mistake and you had to start all over again. After about a year I got a Tally punched paper tape reader to automate the loader program. The biggest advantage of the computer was that you could use a dummied down version of the FORTRAN language to automate data analysis. I really don’t miss that monster.

 

[netsonic]

My first computer was a Commodore C16. This was in 1991/1992. The swapped it for an Amiga A600. The swapped it for my first PC with an AMD K5 PR 100 Cpu.
Nostalgia, here I come!

 

[Alan_M]

My first was an Acorn Electron.

 

[Simmo]

Tandy (radio Shack) ZX 80! then an 81 right after!!

 

[4wd]

Windows ME machine with 20GB Hard drive in 2001.
The storage was ample though because the first digital camera bought soon after originally had a 16mb memory card to hold 12 images.
Later updated to a whopping 64mb card for about £40! The machine was a little under £1000 which would buy rather more now.
I wouldn't mind but it was unreliable, I replaced the power supply and the modem got smoked by a lightning through the phone line from miles away.
That was fixed, then the graphics card or something made everything go like colour negative style.
The next machine was XP and much better, in fact it would still run I expect if I powered it up.

Not long ago a neighbour who'd never had a computer asked help to set up a gifted elderly Windows 95 machine just to type letters and basic spreadsheets records - it did surprise me how much was familiar and how relatively fast it was.

We seem to have reached something of plateau with Windows 10 and replacement cycle is extending thank goodness.
My photo editing PC bought in 2010 is still very competent and has run faultlessly for probably thousands of hours.
A small Samsung netbook I use to store and upload weather data has run continuously since 2012 and it was already 2 years old when dedicated to that.
80,234 hours = 9.15 years

 

[Olav van Gerven]

The first computer I worked on was a Philips mainframe at school (Amsterdam, 1976...) As big as an average freezer to day, with 4 workstations, progamming in Basic. At that time, the rumor came up that there was acomputer available foor about HFL 2.000 with legendary 64K RAM. Incredible, who would ever give that money fo a thing like that...

My first own computer then was ... Indeed, a C64.

 

[Johnmcl7]

We seem to have reached something of plateau with Windows 10 and replacement cycle is extending thank goodness.
My photo editing PC bought in 2010 is still very competent and has run faultlessly for probably thousands of hours.

I've been thinking the same when I recently replaced a PC I bought way back in 2011 (a hex core i7 3930K) which has been gradually upgraded over the year but still the same CPU and motherboard and still been capable of high end gaming and video editing. It's only the last year where it's been struggling with wireless VR and with AMD's new Ryzen processors shaking up the market I decided to upgrade.

I don't miss the days in the 2000's when a top end system only lasted around 18 months before it could no longer keep up and needed serious upgrades because processors and graphics cards were moving along so fast.

 

[Lastrexking]

Commodore Vic 20, with a 16k RAM expansion pack. Then, I think it was a ZX Spectrum+2, then a Commodore Amiga - after that a number of PC's. I'm purely a Mac person now though.

 

[BossBob]

48k Sinclair Spectrum. It ended up with a full size keyboard, various dot matrix printers, both a microdrive (think tiny weeny 8 track) and a 3.5 inch floppy disk drive and a 1200/75 modem connected to Prestel’s Micronet.

 

[TTP]

The first computer I worked with was,

Facit EDB 3, a successor of,
BESK, Binary Electronic Relay Calculator,
which was a successor of,BARK,
Binary Arithmetic Relay Calculator

We programmed in machine code,
then in FA6, a fictitious addressing language
and then Fortrand, Algol etc.

My first PC cost $ 10,000

All in an ancient time, long gone.

 

[Dashing Chris]

A follow up to the first camera thread I thought it would be interesting to share your first PC.

The very first computer I had experience with was the BBC Micro B which was an 8-bit system manufactured by Acorn Computing in the early 80's and powered by the popular MOS Technologies 6502:

BBC Micro - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

These units were expensive and our school had just one of them which was shared among all the classes during the year so we'd get it for just two weeks in our class room. I remember the game we played had a set of weighing scales and it would have simple sums on one set of the scales and you'd have to work out which numbers to put on the other side to balance it.

These machines remained popular in the schools I went to for many years after due to being simple and durable, my Mum was a primary school teacher and kept a BBC Micro in her classroom with a programmable input board controller (not sure the proper name, you could place paper cut outs on it and players would press symbols to match the screen) which she could easily set up and the kids liked using.

Acorn moved onto the Archimedes series afterwards which used their first ARM processors which are the great, great, great grandparents of the ARM devices found in just about every mobile device and many dedicated and integrated devices. ARM originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine but now with Acorn long since forgotten it's now known as Advanced RISC Machine.

Although popular in schools the BBC computers were generally too expensive for home use so our first home PC was the Commodore 64C which also used a MOS 6502 based processor but far cheaper. The Commodore 64 was a hugely popular machine although the market in the UK was a bit different as we had the Sinclair Spectrum which was also a very popular machine. I asked my Mum why she chose the C64C over the ZX Spectrum +2 but she says she thought it's because we wanted it, all I can remember at the time was that the C64 offered better graphics than the Spectrum.

Commodore 64 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Like most home computers at the time everything was loaded and stored to cassette although I hadn't realised until watching videos about Commodore history that only the UK and Australia heavily used cassettes in this era and other areas particularly the US used much faster (and much more expensive) floppy disk drives. Cassettes would take around 5-10 minutes to load a game although at the time they were very unreliable, my brother bought a commodore 64 more recently and his seems to load far more reliably than I remember our original one so perhaps we'd worn it out.

It's funny to think of a floppy disk being super fast and convenient but we definitely appreciated that when upgrading to the Commodore Amiga 500 which used floppy disks and was vastly better to use particularly for saving.

We were quite late with a DOS/Windows PC as they were very expensive and we didn't get one until around 1996. It used a Cyrix PR133+ processor, 850MB hard drive, 8MB ram and a 15in 800x600 CRT monitor. Intel Pentiums were the processor to have but the Cyrix processors were cheaper and worked in the same sockets as the Pentiums, Cyrix used their PR rating as they rated their processor as faster clock for clock against the Pentiums so the PR133+ only ran at 110Mhz but was meant to compare to a Pentium running at 133Mhz. Their integer performance was good making them popular for gaming but their floating point performance was poor compared to Pentiums which meant Quake ended up killing Cyrix. Quake relied heavily on floating point performance and was an incredibly popular game which meant Cyrix was relegated to a budget role before disappearing entirely.

Cyrix 6x86 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I think its mac, mac thats comes with the color body, I got an orange one still in the back yield!