What is the oldest computer...?

Wow... some of you guys have been using computers since the very dawn of the p.c. age! It must be cool to look back at all of the changes since the days of cassettes and "k" memory!

My first computer was a circa 2000 IBM Thinkpad w/ Windows 2000 that I bought used ($50) in 2007, followed by a used Dell GX50 Optiplex I got in 2008 (free!) w/ XP Pro. Compared to some of y'all I'm still kinda new to these infernal confounded machines.

M/A/I BB2 tower with core memory modules and 5 MB disk platter cartridges.

Maybe someone of you is old enough for that? - M/A/I was based in Tustin California and had international service subsidiaries. I was working for them 12 long years before they collapsed.

Zepher said:

Atari 800 in 1980-82 when I was in school in Gaeta, Italy.

I, too, had an Atari-800...in 1979 before their 'XE' model was introduced.

Other's mentioned how far computers have come since then.
Well, I distinctly recall that Atari-800 cost me $2500 (US)!!
That included 2 floppy drives at $495 _each_, upgraded memory and
an incredibly fast 300-Baud modem

The 'puter I built earlier last year (check system specs- link lower left corner),
cost me _under_ $800 (US).

My mom was a computer programmer in the 70s and 80s. I remember when external storage meant rooms full of boxes of punch cards

madtownidiot said:

My mom was a computer programmer in the 70s and 80s. I remember when external storage meant rooms full of boxes of punch cards

Punch cards. Ack!

I took one computer class at college back in '79... Intro to Fortran. I remember going to the computer center at 2:00 a.m. so I could get time on the typewriter puncher things, and then giving the stack of cards to a guy behind a counter to run through the readers... then waiting for an hour to get back a wad of greenbar track paper with my results on it (always wrong, btw). Heh. It was so traumatizing that I stayed away from computers for decades!

The hardest part was getting the computer guy's attention... they were always too busy playing dice games to wait on students... or trying to refine their nekkid girl pics made of x's and o's.