This thread may not evince much nostalgia in the younger members, but for those of you who remember a time before VCRs… …and for those of you who don’t…

What was your first computer?

Here was mine. The Atari 800. My dad bought it for me when I was 12 years old, and I was the first kid on the street to have a computer at home. It had 48 Kb of RAM and I saved my programs written in BASIC (usually copied by hand from my favorite magazine of the time, COMPUTE!) on a tape drive that used regular cassette tapes.

I loved it!!! :D

http://www.smithore.com/_imgs/machines/atari-mule.jpg

Mine was a 4MHz Z80 homebrew with 16K of RAM, 4K of EPROM, and a pair of audio cassettes for bulk storage. Some of the boards were kits, the memory board was prebuilt, and a scratch-built I/O board controlled the cassette decks I/O switch and light panels, and an A/D converter. I also had a home-build EPROM programmer board.

Eventually I increased the memory to 48K RAM and 16K of EPROM. A couple years later I built a new system with the hottest new bulk storage medium--8" floppy disks--and the CP/M operating system.

Mine was a 4MHz Z80 homebrew with 16K of RAM, 4K of EPROM, and a pair of audio cassettes for bulk storage. Some of the boards were kits, the memory board was prebuilt, and a scratch-built I/O board controlled the cassette decks I/O switch and light panels, and an A/D converter. I also had a home-build EPROM programmer board.

Eventually I increased the memory to 48K RAM and 16K of EPROM. A couple years later I built a new system with the hottest new bulk storage medium--8" floppy disks--and the CP/M operating system.


Holy smokes!!, could that even run tetris? was it strictly a word processor?

A self-made old Windows 95 made from donated parts. It crashed everytime I ran Age Of Empires 2, *snivel* *snivel*...

i bought a commodore vic-20 around 1981 with paper route money or some such. it displayed 22 columns on the screen- you could write up to 22 characters on a single line! it also had a sizzling 3.5K of built-in RAM.

here's a picture of the family exploring the wonders of home budgeting on computer. dad could do a neat trick in powering the vic-20 and TV by mental energy alone. ah, those were the days...
http://java.cs.vt.edu/public/users/rtrose/play/Vic20.jpg

hmm... okay, i guess that wasn't really us. but seriously, i spent a lot of time on that machine writing BASIC games with the machine's built-in graphics set, which looked sort of like stick-figures going through aerobics. i got so excited by my vic-20 that i started a computer club in HS. i also liked the school machines such as the tandy and apple ][ computers, but when it came to which machine was best, those of us in the club all furiously believed that commodores were the best and most-cost effective computers and would get into near-screaming matches with owners of apples and ataris over the matter. naturally, none of us could afford an apple or an atari.

First computer I used was a old Apple II
First computer my family owned was a generic clunker with windows 95
First computer I personally owned is the one I am on now, a HP Pavillion a1310y with DVD rom and CD Burner, Intel Pentium 4HT, 1 GB memory, 80 gig HD, Using Linux Mint Elyssa

My personal computer was a Commodore 64...64K and I believe it ran at the impressive speed of 4 kilohertz. Then, I bought the first "high-speed" PC for my insurance agency...an IBN PC with TWO 5 1/4" floppy drives. It cost $2,800 in 1980 dollars!

I believe it ran at the impressive speed of 4 kilohertz.
the first round of 6502-architecture PC's ran at a single mhz. examples were the C64 and other commodore, atari and apple PC's.

our first computer was a Timex Sinclair.
4 years later we upgraded to the commodore 64,
Went through 4 Sinclairs.
you saved things on a tape cassette.
still have fond memories of the old ones.
funny thing is we purchased the first on at the grocery store.

God, I don't remember. My dad works as an IT consultant, so we've always had a computer. It was some ICL (pre-fujitsu buyout) machine, with MS DOS/Windows 3.1x. It's probably still in a box somewhere...

My first computer that was actually mine, was a Fujitsu laptop (512MB RAM, 100GB hard drive, 1 point something GHz processor). I wore it out by revising too much, and now the fan is shot, lol.

Yeah technically my first computer was bought about 3 months ago. It's got good specs, but Vista and Packard Bell seem to hate each other, as it's always doign something wrong.

I can't remember the first computer my family had, persay, but the first thing I can remember that had a keyboard was the spectrum. That was awesome.. Games on tapes! We even had a laser gun and everything....

Holy smokes!!, could that even run tetris? was it strictly a word processor?Tetris didn't exist. That computer did not have a word processor. The only language it knew was machine language, until I ported a Z80 assembler to it (that was what the two tape recorders were for - one to read assembly language source, the other to write machine code to.) It was a tech toy, I implemented a spacewar game on it, and a floating point arithmetic package, several graphics algorithms, a debugger in EPROM, things like that.

My dad was very tech savvy starting around 92 or 93. He updated our home computer every chance he got. In 96, my Grandma gave me a Commadore 64 for my homework since I was starting my senior year. She actually thought it was top notch! Ah...grandmas! :)

Well I'm only 14, so I can't comment on the really old Atari's etc. that all you adults can, but I had my first PC when I was 6/7 (owned by the family) and you can tell by far that the standard of them has risen now.

the first round of 6502-architecture PC's ran at a single mhz. examples were the C64 and other commodore, atari and apple PC's.

It was so slow, I would input all the data for a spreadsheet into my "Visicalc" program and hit the "calculate" button. Then I would go to lunch, get a haircut and have the car washed. When I got back to the office, the calculations would be done . . . HALF THE TIME! LOL

It was so slow, I would input all the data for a spreadsheet into my "Visicalc" program and hit the "calculate" button. Then I would go to lunch, get a haircut and have the car washed. When I got back to the office, the calculations would be done . . . HALF THE TIME! LOL

Never having seen that myself, thinking of something so slow is really hard to imagine.

he speaks the truth, my young padawan.

if you're on a 2.5 ghz machine now, for example, the CPU's on the computers like the C64 ran 2,500 times slower. of course the overhead was much tighter so it wasn't correspondingly that slow, but still...

Never having seen that myself, thinking of something so slow is really hard to imagine.

"Slow" is relative. If I didn't have that slow computer, it would have taken me half a day to hand-calculate each iteration of the data and then my hand written notes went to my secretary who would type the spreadsheet into a formal presentation. That "slow" computer saved me thousands of hours (and wages for secretarial staff) over the years. At $2,800, it was a bargain!

Let's, that computer is still here. I was five or six when we got our first computer...now I'm sixteen (almost). It's no speedometer, but it's dandy. :D

being ancient, my first [in 1982-3] was an epson [anyone here ever heard of 'em?]... i then graduated to an apple [that's what they were before they became macs]...

Pentium 1, 166 MHz
32 MB Ram
4 gig HDD
4 MB video memory
Windows 95

I think it's in my friend's closet right now on the other side of the country. It served me well back when I actually had to use it. I played a lot of Age of Empires, Doom 1 and 2 Starcraft and other games like that on it.

I love looking at the system requirements for old games and seeing recomended: 32MB RAM and thinking, 'wow, once upon a time that was testing computers to the limit.' And now for £500 you can get a Terrabyte HDD...

Has anyone seen that laptop prototype design that is basically two pens, one that projects the screen onto a wall or flat surface, and one that projects the keyboard?

Has anyone seen that laptop prototype design that is basically two pens, one that projects the screen onto a wall or flat surface, and one that projects the keyboard?

No, sounds cool. Where might I find an article or apicture?

The first stored-program computer I ever USED was a Wang 500 desktop computer our high school owned. Basically, it was a suitcase-sized programmable calulator with a row of Nixie tubes (gas plasma digit display; pre-LED tech) for a display.

Then in college I had a chance to play around with a DEC PDP-1 with a roomful of six foot high memory cabinets using discrete transistors.

My first computer was some no-name brand hand-me-down that I remember nothing about except wasting countless hours playing Dope Wars on it - until a friend of mine tried to update from Widows 95 to Windows 98 and deleted Dope Wars in the process. Oh, and having to go back to Windows 95 because is couldn't handle 98... or something.

:p

All I remember is it was some sort of Tandy, and the Windows (3.1), back then they actually were in little windows. *LOL* And the printer was a dot matrix with that continuous-feed paper.

ETA: Oh yes! And it took 3.5" disks! You could store like a whole 1.44mb or something on those things, WOW! :D

My dad still jokes about the color schemes they had back then for Windows. Hotdog Stand! Plasma Power Saver! *gags all over*

My brother did have some sort of console or something back in the Eighties that he hooked up to a small B&W TV to make it a computer...it played videogames like "Pitfall," but it did some computer things too, because I remember I spent ages typing up all this code exactly the way it was in the instruction manual, to get it to perform simple flash card things or to play the Mexican Hat Dance, on which it always cut off right before the ending, but I felt so accomplished and smart. *LOL*

In elementary school when they first brought in a personal computer (the pixels were like a centimeter big, ha), everyone was so awed, it was like a magical creature or something. There were nearly blood feuds just to get to use it. :D

Now I've recently seen an external hard drive that is...ONE TERABYTE BIG. *drools* I was wondering how long it would take before they started measuring things in terabytes!

I'm looking for it atm... in the mean time I found this, which is also pretty cool: http://www.tuvie.com/futuristic-laptop-by-felix-schmidberger

and this: http://rj3sp.blogspot.com/2007/09/futuristic-laptop-design.html

Here it is: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_pen_pc.htm


BTW Cogito you said something about EPROM.. what's that? I'm assuming because of the ROM it's method of storage, and would the EP relate to cassette tape?

I look at those and think to myself, "I could never use a holographic keyboard. I need the feel of keys beneath my fingers in order to know where they are. Laptop keyboards are bad enough, but when it's completely flat!? uh, uh."