What was your first computer?

I had a Timex Sinclair 1000. Smaller than an iPad.
You wrote your own programs in Basic and saved them on a cassette tape.

Then came Compuserve and the IBM PC Jr. - it had color text. Wow.


What was your first PC?

Commodore 64. Great little computer.

I guess I never have owned a computer.

I do remember shooting the hell out of buffaloes on some ancient computers in grade school. I think I was supposed to buy a bunch of flour and beans and [censored] with my money. Nah. I just need some more bullets and enough oxen to get me to them good buffalo hunting spots.

A 8080 chip and a breadboard. First after that was a Commodore 64

PC Jr was the first my family owned. Dual floppy and the extra sidecar's of RAM. I used a TRS-80 and then an Osbourne in HS.

My mom gave me a Commodore 64 back in 84 (or 85-86, sometime around there). I remember writing the "if-then" instructions and a few others.

Tandy 1000ex

My parents bought us a Tandy at the Sher-Den (not to be confused with Midway) mall in Sherman, TX in 1988

Hewlett Packard

NEC rebranded for the company I worked for at the time. Had the big boy 20 Meg hard drive and I did the $100.00 upgrade for the 1.44 floppy drive. Had enough power to go to the moon in those days.

Too funny now takes more than 20 Meg to boot up a machine now. I paid $2600.00 for that bad boy

Apple IIe. Dual diskette drives, I was ballin’.

Charlie

Ah, the 5.25 floppy

A wonderful upgrade.
I had some 3.25s until a few years ago.

Univac 1050-2

Big arse apple. Command line to play pong

Yup, been there done that I think mine was a Gateway back in like 97' when I was in 7th grade.

Ti4a

I don’t know but I remember to play a game I had to do some ms-dos crap

Oregon Trail, used to go play that in the neighborhood library back when that was the only place in town that had a computer. Think that was like 96-98ish

Loved that game, ahhh the much simpler times.

Kapro

Apple ][ plus, back in 1982.
Just a broke high-school kid then, traded a good working dual-trace Heathkit Oscillioscope and some cash for a broken Apple2+ (couldn't afford a working one) - but got it working a month later!

Stored programs on mom's cassette recorder.
Took another year before I could buy 2 143k floppy drives, a 300 baud Volksmodem, and a 9-pin dot-matrix printer!

Best deal of my life - led to me becomming a career computer-wiz.

Can’t remember what it was. The screen was black with green characters, early/mid 90s.
Played a lot of asteroids games on it!

Amiga 2000.

An Atari. Wrote if then.. or nor... who cares and saved on a cassette. I wrote a program that would plot the ballistic ark of a 30.06 bullet. Teacher was not impressed.

Then the famous Commodore 64. Then nothing for years. Then had an HP with Windows 95. All more my software was on 5 1/ 4 floppys, so I exit Windows to go to DOS.

Brothers / different mothers

I wanted one of those bad.

No idea and really no interest. I remember some of the computers at school had a “turbo” button I always pushed it

First one I programmed on was an IBM 360 in FORTRAN using punch cards.

Oh yeah, I remember the cassettes
I had an Atari400 then moved up to the 800.
Next was the TRS-80 man we thought those things were amazing.

I started off on a DEC 10 that translated to paper tape that was loaded into an IBM 360. I also did the same with an IBM 1130 and an Interdata Model 70. These machines could be programmed in Fortran, Cobol or machine code. All the machines had magnetic tape storage and true core storage. Those were the days!

Mid 90’s Apple with a DOS compatible card so you could also run Windows. Got it through wife’s school.

IBM PC 5150

TRaSh-80 Model I

Our elementary school got apple computers in '81 if I remember correctly. We didn't have our own computer until I was in Jr High. It was an IBM I believe.

Y’all must have gone to rich schools. I never used or had access to a computer until I started my career.

Same here....

I was an E3 when i bought mine, probably skipped a few car insurance payments to buy it like a moron. That was my signature move at the time.

Atari 400. Programmed in Basic & saved to cassette.

Ours was a Gateway to. Bought it in 97 if I remember correctly. I think we paid between 2-3 thousand for it back then.

TRaSh-80

I think it was an Apple 2c that mom bought to teach her 6th grade students computer literacy.

In college (1966) I had to go to the computer lab to run programs (punchcards) on the one big IBM. Then got a job with an oil company (1970) and ran programs (punchcards) on a big IBM. All in Fortran IV. Next was a Radio Shack 100 that I bought (1980ish) and wrote programs on in Basic. Those were my first gasoline blending programs, which I sold (with the computer) and used the money to get bigger computers. The Radio Shack stuff had to be in the early 80’s. Pretty primitive, but useful. I don’t remember what years we got the first desktop PCs. Had to be after 1985, when I had a job that didn’t require computer use. Left that job in 1990 and the next job had desktops being issued to all engineers.

My first computer was an IBM PC clone from Northgate I still have the glass coffee cup they gave me.

Did they even have computers back then?

I also had a Texas Instrument computer. I don't remember which one I had first.

Same here. TRS-80 by Tandy Electronics and DOS programming language.

Extra nerd credit if you used these.




Charlie

My hearing is shot from years of manning the consoles of USAF mainframe computers and the accompanying punch card readers and printers. I could read a punch card in my sleep.

I have a 90's era water cooled mainframe processor here somewhere. It's a large die, about 7" or so square with 4 water input/output sockets. One of my customers wanted it for a show/tell thing, TSA in Houston almost took it away from me. They thought it was explosive or part of something that could be.

Charlie

I have no earthly idea what brand the first one we had was - something my Mom was given from work that was black screen with green letters - somehow discovered there was some extremely basic DOS bass fishing game on it that I played the heck out of...had to be around 1992-1993.

The first actual one I remember well is an Acer - I want to say that thing was expensive as hell sometime around 1996-1997.

I remember the school had Macs - first the old school ones - then the year they came out the ones that were different colors on top and shaped weird.

Ordered a kit from Radio Shack and built it myself. That was somewhere around 1981 - 1982.

I still have the same template and several others for programming. I can't count the number of cards and paper tape I have punched.

I remember my first job, 1989 EDS, I did lease vs purchase analysis on computes. I had an 8086, had a model in lotus 1-2-3, you would put your numbers in, hit calc, and it would run for 15 minutes to calculate. When they came out with the 286, I was the first to get it in our organization, same spreadsheet would calculate instantly.

When they came out with the 386, of course I wanted it, when I finally got one is when I created model that took 4 days to calculate on the 286.

When I was getting my undergrad at SMU in the late 80's, we would got to the computer room, and do spreadsheets that ran on mini-computers, that were huge.

Trash 80.

Anyone remember this….."There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment Corp. CEO, 1977. From there, and several failed attempts at catching up with the internet market, DEC closed it’s doors in the late 80’s or early 90’s.

I’m on the younger side of folks here, but I remember my family saving up to buy my grandpa’s old computer. He was significantly fiscally stronger than we were. It was a Windows 3.1. Grandpa had asked my folks how we planned on paying for internet if we had to save up for the computer. I remember my mom saying “AOL trials come in the mail at least every week” and we lived on those. Sometimes we would save to buy some discs with hours on them

My personal first computer would have been when I was 14 or 15. I was working on construction sites with my pops. Wasn’t taxed at that age so I was really banking up with overtime!! Saved up and bought a nice computer for myself. Can’t remember, I think that’s when windows XP was first coming out. Maybe I had windows 98 on that one

When desktop computers became common in offices, and I’m guessing it was about 1990, though my recall is fuzzy and the exact year doesn’t really matter, things moved fast. If you had a computer, it quickly became a much used tool to do just about everything in the office. If you didn’t have a job in that short window of computer knowledge acceleration, you were hardly hireable. Seems like that window was about 3 years, going from no computer use to all computer use. I had a buddy that got let go in that exact time frame. He missed all of the huge knowledge gathering - email, spreadsheets, and such. It took him a long time to get rehired in the oil industry, and he was so far behind in computer knowledge, he got let go again, from the new job. He went home and ate his shotgun barrel.

Man, sorry to hear that.
Yep, things moved fast from about 1987 onwards. I was in the 'biz' and could hardly keep up - sold computers as fast as we could put them together - 8mhz turbo xt compatible with 640k and 20meg hd and ega screen, all for $995, with people standing in line with cash in hand to get one.
I also gave away many 'trade in' computers, as 'starter computers' to family and friends. Everyone I gave one to, it changed their lives - and they're all making 6-digits now...

PC Jr. Adding 128kb memory expansion was the size of a book.

X 2. In college

They sure got upset if you screwed up the programming and got it in a loop that printed off a bunch of gibberish on that green bar paper.

Packard Bell 486SX-33 ... $1200 in 1993?

1980. Radio Shack (TRS-80) when I was Shop Foreman for a Company out in West Texas Also Made Payroll checks for 35 hands on the puppy with one of their Dot Matrix Printer's. Slower than molasses..I didn't know it then.