What were your first computers?

[Carl Lawrence]

Hello guys,

What were your first computers, which do not have to be desktops they can be anything in this thread?

1. Learning Computer which I had back in the early 1990s and it was a programmed B/W Laptop.

2. I had a school laptop in late 1990s to help me with school work.

3. My first desktop PC which I got in 2000. It had 7GB HD, 3MB On-board Graphics and Sound with a huge 15" Monitor. It ran Win 98 & ME.

I hope this made sense as I am a bit of a tired boy.

 

[Kirsch]

Compaq Presario ... isn't she a beaut.

 

[The Howling Wolves]

My first computer was my..................



As you can tell I was already thinking of the colors to use!

 

[rbeldua]

mine was, a compaq pentium 133mhz with 64 mb ram, 32 mb video card, 10gb hardrive, 15" monitor. that was way back 1999...its better than nothing...

oh yeah, forgot to mention i was running win98 second edition plus..and i was playing counter strike v6 a lot. and using autocad 2000

 

[Tullynally]

First Computers

My first compute rat work was a DEC PDP 8E. No monitor. It was a desktop box about 18" x 18" by 8" high. The input & output was through a Friden Flexowriter punched tape.

The Friden flexowriter was a Swedish typewriter that punched ASCII tape as you typed. It was used to write a document & punch the tape so multiple copies could be made by running the tape through the Flexowriter tape reader.

Great for limited number documents that could be reprinted from the stored tape. Also for storing computer programs, since there was no internal storage! The computer program was input, ran & the output was punched on tape. This tape was ran through the Friden Flexowriter to print out the result.

These are the computer systems that ran the computer operated machine tools that put the USA into space.

To boot the computer there were 8 toggle switches that had to be set on the front panel for each 8 bit word for the BOOT Loader. This would allow the tape reader to load the BOOT System. Then the program could be loaded. Thet were no internal storage.

My first home computer was a Radio Shack TRS 80. We called it the "TRASH 80".
The input was through a standard casette tape recorder. & it had a CRT monitor!
Basic was the programming language.

By the way I am 81 years old & the Glory Days for computers was the "Space Race" when the "Impossible Things" were done routinely.

I could go on about how computers were advaced from descrtete components to integrated circuits to CPUs on a chip! But I will leave that to another day to bore you "yung uns"

Tully

 

[strollin]

The first computer I used was an HP 3000 mini computer for a computer repair class while in college in 1975. No peripherals at all, input was via front panel toggle switches (programmed in machine language). The only output was the front panel blinky lights. Based on that experience, I felt computers were too much work to be useful.

The first computer I owned was an IBM PC in 1984. It had a whopping 256K of RAM, 2 360K floppy drives and could display 4 color graphics at a resolution of 320x200. With my IBM employee discount the computer (with a dot matrix printer) cost a mere $2500.

 

[Joan Archer]

Hello guys,

What were your first computers, which do not have to be desktops they can be anything in this thread?

1. Learning Computer which I had back in the early 1990s and it was a programmed B/W Laptop.

2. I had a school laptop in late 1990s to help me with school work.

3. My first desktop PC which I got in 2000. It had 7GB HD, 3MB On-board Graphics and Sound with a huge 15" Monitor. It ran Win 98 & ME.

I hope this made sense as I am a bit of a tired boy.

I thought we already had threads like this around here ?

 

[strollin]

... My first home computer was a Radio Shack TRS 80. We called it the "TRASH 80".
The input was through a standard casette tape recorder. & it had a CRT monitor!
Basic was the programming language. ...

Tully - I've got 2 Trash 80's, a Model 1 and a Model 100.

 

[bigmck]

I got my first computer in 1988. It was a Tandy 1000 SX. It had one active floppy drive (but could expand to two), no hard drive and 256 K of memory. That memory could be expanded to 640K which I did. Everything ran from the 5.25 " floppy. Take a look. http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/pc/h/tandyad1.jpg

 

[Elwoodch]

commodore 64....Is commodore still around?

 

[Zepher]

First computers were Atari 400's
then an IBM PS/2 Model 30, 8086 processor, 20MB hard drive, Monochrome screen my dad bought in 89 for $2K when we lived in Iceland.

My first PC was an Amiga 3000 with a 120MB SCSI Drive, 6MB ram, and a 14" Multisync Monitor that I bought in 1992 for $2500.
My Amiga blew away all of my friends PC's at the time.

 

[Borg 386]

My first one was a Packard Bell (Packaged Hell...as they were called). This was in 1995

It came with a Pentium 100MHZ, 16MB of RAM, Video memory of 1 MB, cache memory of 256 KB, a 14.4 Modem, A CD ROM that read at 2X speed, a Hard drive that was 1.25 GB, a 3 1/2 Diskette drive, and Windows 3.1.

And a 15 inch monitor. To which you bolted speakers on each side. They called it "Amphitheater Sound".

We bought it one month before Win 95 came out, so we got a free upgrade.

I had an issue with the software so I called tech support and after describing the sys to the tech, he said:

"Wow, you must have paid some money for that. You could run a small office with that."

I believe we paid over 3,400$ for it.

 

[jebuchanan]

My first was the Commodore 64. My second was an 8086-based system. amber monochrome monitor, dual 5 1/4" floppy drives.