What brand was your first computer???

ATARI 1040 ST! W00t w00t!

This was also the first computer I owned!!!! I had this model but I also had the whopping 4k memory expansion module LOL

The funniest part was that you had to record your programs to a cassette tape with a regular cassette recorder!

My next computer was a Commodore 64 (and an Atari 2600 if you count that LOL)
1541 floppy drive, KoalaPad, 300baud VICModem and a couple hundred games for it!
OMG I even had GEOS desktop for that at one point!

LOAD"*",8,1 BAYBEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

then I eventually moved up to a Leading Edge (GAG! AWFUL!) 386SX/25mHz, then a 486DX 66mHz, then a 486DX 80mHz,then an AMD K6-2 400mHz, then a P4 1GHz, and now I have a P4 2.4GHz. my how times have changed!

First computer I ever touched was an Apple IIc I believe.

10 PRINT"HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10

The first machine I owned as opposed to worked with was my ZX81 which actually did end up as a door wedge after it's demise! That was after I bought my first speccy, which was before I got my ST ( the first computer with MIDI and afaik the only one with it built in apart from that yamaha thing ) Had various Macs and PCs since, if I'd kept them all I could own a museum

That's cool, I must have done something with that then, I'll have to ask my mom hehe, although her memory is not to great. I'll probably get some sort of response like "I got you a computer back then?"

MJ

That's real interesting to know Kermitt. I always thought there was only the C VIC-20 and C64. Too bad you didn't keep it though, sounds like you would have had a rare computer on your hands.

MJ

Good old tapes. I can remember once when me and a mate were writing an adventure game thing on an Atari 800XL that had a tape deck on it. This one particular night we were up very late working on it. I got up in the morning, still half asleep and went to reload it so we could continue. Cause we'd been saving so much the night before, when I went to load I automatically hit play & record instead of just play. Realised what I'd done pretty quickly and stopped it, but wasn't quick enough and managed to write nothingness over the lead-in sound. Bye bye code.




Like many things you don't always realise what you have until it's too late. Besides I was pretty young at the time and it was more my parents who sold it than me. I do still have an A1200. Don't think they were incredibly common either. Plus the one I have has an IDE plug added on the back of it so you can plug in an external standard PC hard-drive. That must make it pretty rare.

And here's another one I used to own that I'm sure many of you wouldn't have heard of. Amiga CD32. (Yes I was an Amiga buff until Commodore finally managed to kill it with their bad marketing... I had an A500+ too). Only ever had one game for that CD32 and I can't even recall the name of it. If I remember correctly that machine died at some point and then vanished somewhere amongst shifting houses.

Radio Shack Color Computer II... oh baby, I upgraded to the Color Computer III with TWO external floppy drives, cassette deck AND, AND, AND 64k of RAM!

I had a terminal that was basically a monitor and a keyboard with a 1200 baud external dial up modem. The owner of a local BBS gave it to me so I could get on the BBS and chat. I have no clue who made it, I think Al Gore might have in his basement...

Hooyah! I had one those myself as well as the Speak & Math. Never did me any good though. I don't jump back as far as some of you folks have but this was my first. Check out the price on that from May 1994! Hooyah! God I loved MSDOS!



CPU: 25 MHz 486 SX
RAM: 4 MB
HD: 210 MB
CD: 2x

EDIT: This had no floating point support for things like CAD software. Just before the days of floating point processors.

TI99/4A

I miss Tunnels of Doom and Parsec

First one I used was a Unix system my dad had. It was the size of a radiator and had one of those green monochrome screens. I used to play snake on it and when you pulled the power cable out the battery backup kicked in and it exclaimed "PANIC!" at the prompt, that was awesome.

First that was actually mine was an Amstrad 80806, I learnt so much using it: spelling (Police/Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry), programming (GWBasic), the fact that I really sucked at platform games as a kid (Captin Comic).

Ah... happy days.

The first one I used was some kind of DOS computer my dad had. I suppose I could ask him what the brand was.

First I owned was a Compaq laptop running Windows 98 that had previously belonged to my mother.

The first that was bought for me, and therefore solely mine is the iBook G4 I currently have.

Makes me feel very young... and newbie-ish.

EDIT: Although supposedly, at the age of two or so (maybe it was older?), I managed to crash the Sun computer my dad had at work. Apparently this was an astonishing feat. So maybe that counts as my first.

First, my aunt and uncle who lived out of town had a TRS-80 Model III. I visited them about once a year at most, and one day I got a book titled "TRS-80 Graphics", which sounds like an oxymoron but it was possible to do graphics on it. My parents thought I was strange for getting a book on how to program something I didn't even have!

I learned how to program on that and on my school's Apple IIe. My teacher was nuts about the theory of numbers and particularly prime numbers (as am I), and when he gave an extra credit assignment to make a program that generates primes, he was very pleased with my new program that took an afternoon to throw together!

At the end of the school year, the teacher was astonished when he found out I didn't even have a computer! He immediately suggested my parents buy me one, and eventually I got an Apple II+ which became an Apple IIgs in the late 1980's.

Old computers are always fun to reminisce about. I remember the comps in museums that we would always try to break by making infinite loops. Another time I was in a friend's house and a bunch of us kept trying to change the screen text colors and generate rather dull sounds. I don't think that could possibly be entertaining today.

Then there was the time spent at K-mart while my parents would shop; a bunch of demo Atari and Commodore comps being messed with for a half-hour. I remember there was a POKE command to make a Commodore Vic-20 lock up, and I always enjoyed using it so their sales would decrease. Looks like it worked.

ZX Spectrum. 16K, upgraded to 48K (ready for 80K, never modified for that).

I used to play Dictator til dawn

I also played Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Atic Atac and Sabre Wulf a lot.

My Spectrum is still there... and maybe it's still working...

Later i bought a very expensive QL... then, eventually, a PC (80286, with hercules/CGA video card, MFM HD controller, 20 Mbyte HD, 2 Mbyte RAM...)

Ahhh... fond memories. Mine was a Vic20. I remember pressing 'play' on the tape drive and then going off for 20 minutes for dinner... just long enough for Frogger to load.

I remember too the Computing magazine my father would get which had programs printed out in back, in BASIC. We would spend hours with me reading aloud the text, and him typing it into the computer. Some of those programs were really cool.

Then came the C64. I remember the floppy drives were bigger than the computer itself.

-Ghoti

Probably the very first computer I used (not counting all sorts of weird HP pocket calculators) was a HP-75 C or D, like this one: http://www.hpmuseum.org/75.jpg - one could load programs by pulling magnetic stripes through it. I used to play Adventure on it, or at least trying to play - since at the time I was still learning english and did not really understand much of the game

Then came the HP 87 - it ran CP/M, my mom used it for text processing and Visicalc, and I spent hours trying to understand the manual (written, of course, in english) and programming it in Basic. Lots of fun We had some of the peripherics - the floppy drive, of course, and a huge plotter! Here it is in all its glory: http://www.series80.org/87.jpg

After that, I dreamt of a NeXT Cube - and got a DOS PC

OMG we had one of those things! I had completely forgotten about it

Like many people (including Linus Torvalds), my first computer was a Vic-20 with a 1530 tape drive and a 300baud VicModem. I had a lot of fun with that computer, and remember writing my first Basic program when I was 6.

1 PRINT "MEOW! ";
2 GOTO 1
RUN

Then when I was 7, I gave myself nightmares for a week because I tried to listen to a data cassette on an audio casette player.. 0_o ... 0_o ... ;_;

I also remembered having to buy the 3K RAM upgrade cartridge because I couldn't run Temple of Apshaii without it! Those cartridges were massive.

One of these days I want to case-mod my old Vic-20 chassis with a mini-ITX motherboard. That'd be hot!

Really - 8" floppy disk based. We had 2 of them for a contract project.

Extra credit for anyone who knows what the processor was based on.

packard bell... *ducks* but it was a long time and sveral different computers ago...

I spent so much time working on copies of Atari Adventure and Intellivision Dungeons & Dragons in Extended Basic that my parents grounded me from it. I remember ordering programs from the TI99 Users Group and having to type them in by hand off of long printouts.

I wouldn't let my two little sisters near the thing.

I still have it and all the cartridges, cassette tapes and tape recorder in the basement.

Now I feel old....

Atari 800XL

C=64C !!! Loved it, and miss it. It was such a sweet little machine. I ran a BBS from it called The Rising Moon, and had three disk drives connected to it; two 5.25's and a 3.5. I bought a small little Ward's Signature 2000 TV that also worked as a monitor to go with it, and still use that TV in my son's room today. It continues to have an incredibly sharp picture. Even the remote still works.

I had a zillion games for it, mostly warez, and really just loved that little beauty. It really opened another wold for me, between BBS'ing, BBS parties, MUD'ing and the pre-runner of AOL, called Q-Link.

When it came time to upgrade, I bought a new (heavy and clunky) laptop that ran on DOS, but ended up returning it and getting an Amiga 2000HD, which I still have and still actually turn on once in awhile to play some old games.

Only 3K RAM?? That must be what my signature is referring to...



Oh, yeah, we use to...

Wow, some memories came flooding back with this one Thanks for sharing that Kat

MJ