Old School - What was the first computer you used?

[ChillPlayer]

Can't believe there is even a picture on wikipedia of it lol. It was a 33mhz 386 with 4mb of ram and I think 50mb harddisk. This baby was the beginning of my carreer in IT, it's because of my DOS experience as a 12 year I old I always loved the commandline, my friend and I would tweak the system to get as much ram as possible so we could play Commander Keen, later we switched to Linux and got into programming so it's no wonder I ended up as an unix engineer. But it all began with this computer

About 15 years later I even ressurected it as an xpilot server but with a different motherboard, it ran for six months then suddenly everyone in our LUG lost interest in xpilot :cry:

[pikkue]

Amiga 500..ratatata..

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[joki]

My father had a 8086 with a green-monitor (it could only display different green shades) with two 5.25 inch drives. Later he bought a harddrive with 20 MB which was 1200,- german "DM" (about 700€) iirc. I played games like alley cat on it, if anyone remembers that:

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Later I got a c64, was pretty cool.

[elloco999]

Man, does that bring back memories! I played alley cat on my nephews computer when I was young

[John Dow]

The first was a PET 2000. The older brother of a friend had one. And I think the first game on this we got stuck in was called 'gold'

Good that I was allowed to spend the nights often there at my friend, when his brother wasn't at home. The time, hmmm around 1980 I guess...

Sweet sweet memories.

[Mafti]

Well, my first "real" computer was the zx spectrum.

tapes, typing games in with an hexeditor.

heck, even kickstarted the book about the games

(http://www.fusionretrobooks.com/category-s/1477.htm)

[Lux]

Wasn't born until 1971 so I missed some of the early stuff. In elementary school we had about 10 Apple IIe's that we learned Mbasic on and shortly thereafter got a Z80 powered PC with a math co-processor chip and 256K RAM for home use. Then we moved up to a Commodore VIC20 with external cassette drive. It rocked.

One of my buddies through elementary had a Tandy and on weekends we would make programs that asked you questions and responded to your answers. Mad scientists! lol.

The beginning of middle school I did all my papers at home on an Osbourne 1 (green screen - DOS+Wordstar!) my uncle had lent us and started taking computer classes on Apple IIe at the local university with all adults in my class. I was the 7th grader in the class of all adults...hehe.

Around about 8th or 9th grade moved up to an Osbourne Vixen at home(amber screen!) to finish out middle school.

By the time I got to high school we had a 286 at home and not the DX66 variety. School had some Silicon Graphics workstations we used.

Got to do a bit of stuff on a VAX mainframe during the first years of university though it was decommissioned shortly after.

[UnlikelyGibbon]

Thanks to Bill for pointing out this thread to me!

I think the first real computer that I ever used was some sort of Apple II in my elementary school, probably in around 1979 or 1980.

Later my folks bought a Commodore 64 for the family and when I headed off to college in the late '80s, my dad said I should really have a computer. So he bought me some version of the Tandy 1000--I don't remember the exact model, but it had a color monitor and a 5.25" floppy drive integrated into the body, which housed the fixed keyboard. I found this image on Google, which looks about right and even includes the same stand for the monitor that I had:

http://www.pcmuseum.ca/images/Tandy1000EX-200.jpg

It turned out that I was one of only two people in my class (of about 400 people) who had a computer--the other guy had an original Macintosh, which was pretty cool since he had a mouse and I hadn't ever used one of those before!

Thanks again, Bill!

--Gibbon

[Hylander]

First computer I used was a Commodore PET at school. First computer I owned:

Apple //c

128 KB RAM, 80-column screen (on a 9" mono monitor), 1 floppy drive.

[littlefox1970]

A Vic 20. Good for nuttin but DOS ... my mother bought a book full of script games. We'd type hundreds of lines of DOS script to get the simplest of games. Type it all up- press run ... then get syntax in line 451 --- lol Iron that out to discover three more syntax It was fun though- an exciting thing- Most folks didnt have computers.

I worked at radio shack for 5 years when I was very young ... computers without internet ... Internet was truly the catalyst for computer successs.

[Bill Tarling]

A Vic 20. Good for nuttin but DOS ...

Actually - surprisingly not quite true (at least not for an unexpected usage).

Once the market for the Vic 20 was dead, a lot of production factories bought out as many supply shops as possible to stock up on them. The processor and speed was perfect for integrating and running a lot of production line equipment -- but the Vic 20 was disposable (if one died, just throw it away at grab a new one)... that way they were able to stockpile enough units at about $20 each, rather than spending $2k-$5k every time their regular servo components broke down.

Granted equipment has advanced now, but there are still some old factories still using the Vic 20 to run their equipment 8-)

[elloco999]

128 KB RAM

LOL I think the CPU in my phone has more L2 cache than that It's incredible to think how much computing power has grown while at the same time the devices gotten smaller.

[harobed1156]

Something from Texas Instruments in the early 80s. It used cassette tapes as storage, you created your own programs using BASIC, and your television was your monitor. I used it to create a database consisting of a dozen or so cassettes, and I don't recall any other use for it. True story: The database was an alphabetical list of dog show judges where I cataloged their preferences, results, and other comments compiled from AKC journals and shows where I'd exhibited. I used it to decide where to enter my dogs in future shows. The tapes were labeled "Judges A - D", etc... In a routine traffic stop the Massachusetts State Police confiscated the tapes, though I didn't realize it until the following day. I still wonder how many man-hours they spent trying to decipher what must have looked like a secret coded list of criminal and civil court judges.

My first Windows 3.0 computer was a TI laptop roughly ten years later.

[klesh]

I seem to remember it being the Apple IIe

We used it during our "library" class. I remember a program, not a game per se, but a program where you controlled a triangle shape called a turtle, and entered text commands in almost a programming sense, to get the turtle to move around and draw shapes on the screen.

30 seconds of googling reveals this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28pr ... anguage%29

[Orwell 1984]

Hey!

Olivetti 286 - 20mb hd, 2mb memory.

No big deal?

1988 Hungary (actually it was the cccp). Über this:D

[Hylander]

128 KB RAM

LOL I think the CPU in my phone has more L2 cache than that It's incredible to think how much computing power has grown while at the same time the devices gotten smaller.

The really funny thing is, I use a Cortex M4 (ARM7) chip in a couple of my robots - I designed custom boards for them, but run MicroPython on it. The chip runs at 168 MHz, has 192 KB of RAM built in, and 1 MB of FLASH.

http://blog.huv.com/2014/10/nanoseeker-v21-populated-board.html

I know there are lots of smaller/faster chips out there, but this is one I've actually soldered to a board, so its pretty cool.

[LinieBurrito456]

My first computer was a Atary (don`t know anymore, what type is was).

I had "Informatik" in School and we learned some code in an Basic-Book with a turtle on the cover.

I remeber like this:"turtle turn left".

This I found on my search (mine looks like the PC or PC2):

Atarimuseum