What brand was your first computer???

Not sure if it counts as a "computer," but before the Apple IIc, I had a Speak & Spell. It rocked!

A BBC Model B. Proper keys and a reasonable BASIC. I don't think I would ever have learned to program if I'd had a Spectrum, I wasn't a terribly patient child.

(Well, I didn't own it, my dad did - I think the first machine I owned was a 486 PC at university.)

Coleco Adam....

http://www.techtite.com/Features/Adam.html


(Actually, I had a lot of fun with this unit...even had the disk drive for it & the adapter to play Atari 2600 games)

My first computer was a Commodore 64. My most beloved was my Amiga.

Mine was a Colossus.
















(seriously, MJ, Vic-20 for me too, and MAN did i think the 300 baud modem was neat!)

Commodore Vic-20 with a whopping 5kb of RAM

^ OMG I remember those? They had an unusual form factor compared to other desktop/tower Macs.

My first computer was a Commodore 64 too!

ditto

The original price for Commodore64 was $300?!?!? woah.

My first compy was the Vic 20. I bought it second hand from a private school ($20) so i could learn more about computers. I used ascii characters (remember the enterprise?) to make my own video games. I saved them to magnetic tape That was in 1983.

The last project i did was to build a 'hi-res' triangle - basically three lines drawn in single pixels between three points. It crashed twice trying to load the program.

Come to think of it, you actually refreshed my memory on something--I didn't have an original Commodore 64, but a Commodore 64C. It had a nice software bundle too, altho I was puzzled for the life of me why I could only use two colors per 8x8 pixel block in the GEOS paint program. (I later learned more about technical limitations.)

Another fascinating point of note with the Commodores was how the MOS sound chips used throughout various production models changed, and this had quite an audible effect on the tones of the music.

ahhh peeks and pokes... the good ol' days. The most impressive thing I did on my vic was to make a custom character set of horses and a horse racing game. You bet on a horse and they raced by randomly moving ahead one to three pixels at a time. It's a sad commentary on the state of my brain that I can't do something that "sophisticated" in LSL yet, hehe.

the most impressive thing I did with mine was convince a 30 something year old guy that i was a 20 something year old girl, and NOT a 11 year old boy, and to give me his compuserve password.

ahh, the days when typing @#fsdr32034$#)Enter Password: actually worked!


these are the thigns i will at least giggle about a little when i'm in hell.

Actually the C64 was orginally $500+ but keep in mind that it didn't come with monitors and towers then.

The first PC I used (or rather micro-computer) was one I borrowed from work. I can't remember the manufacturer, but I do remember it took two of us to lift it.

The first computer of my own was a BBC Model B. It had a Music 800 synthesizer as a bolt-on, with its own music programming language, AMPLE. Also I think the BBC micro had the distinction of having the best user manual of all time.

Commodore Vic20.

When I got the Cassette Tape Drive I was hot shit!

Before winning my first PC on the radio (no shit!) I had a Commodore 128. Sleek, white and oh so cool.

wow, i remember that now. I did end up acquiring one of those, although I don't recall wth it was used for. Its been a lil over 20 years since having one and hearing everyone else's recollection of memories of their comps are bringing back more memories.

MJ

Oh so that was you? And here I was going to say the best thing I did was convince a 20 something girl that was a 30 something guy and give her the compuserve password I stole while dumpster diving.

I had an Atari 2600 for gaming (does that count?). I was envious of my friends' C64's until my mom got us a Tandy 1000. Woot.

Technico (a company in the Baltimore/Washington corridor) designed their own computer based on the TI 9900 processor. You had to buy a kit (resistors, transistors, ICs, etc) and solder the thing together yourself. I think it took a couple weeks to get the basic system working. It could read and write to a modified cassette player and used a TV set as a monitor. You had to program it in a modified assembler/machine code language. It was bloody awful. I had no desire to have anything to do with personal computers 'till the IBM AT came out.

First computer I had was an Altair 8800. Bought, built and broke it over and over. Best parts of it, learning assembler and flashing lights.

First computer I had that "really worked" was a TRS-80 Model I, 4k mem, cassette tape recorder storage.... at "the end", I have modifed/upgraded it to 128kb mem, 4 floppies and a joystick.

Surprisingly after 4 pages of posts no-one has yet mentioned the first computer I had. It was a Commodore 16. They obviously weren't real common. One page I found described it as this...



In the end I sold it cause 16k just wasn't enough memory and I was writing basic programs that pushed it beyond it's limit. That musta been around 25 years ago now. And so of course what am I writing games in these days... LSL with a limit of 16k per script. You know what they say about history repeating itself. At least with LSL I can have multiple scripts working together. I'm sure it woulda been tricky to network multiple C16's to achieve the same thing back then.

I also started on the Spectrum - had a 48K and fell in love.
I *still* have a working 16K that I fire up every now and then for the memories.

POKE 23609, 255

/me wipes fond tears from eyes.

The tape drive was the backup medium. After writing a fantasticly cool program in basic, you'd save it to an audio cassette, so the next day you could hit play and ............wait........ and then have the program again.

Yes, it was excellent, now I think back. Extremely complete, well-organised, well-written. People don't make manuals like that any more - they wait for a third-party guide to appear.