What was your first computer?

[NivagSwerdna]

...eventually traced to one hole in the punched tape occasionally failing to punch through.

Nice. 

[matpro76]

Mine was a clone XT PC which I've recently been restoring / pimping. Originally had an 8088, 640K RAM, 2 x 360K FDD, CGA and a monochrome monitor. No color and no HDD!



Anyway now has a NEC V20 running @ 12Mhz, a whopping 1024KB RAM, EGA card and color EGA monitor, 8GB HDD and the original 2 x 360K FDD.

[RobBarter]

Commodore VIC-20, a couple of years later moving onto an Apple IIe.

[Ghislain]

Tandy (Radio shack) TRS80
Later replaced by Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 when that came out...

[Naguissa]

Or your dads computer...

Mine was this


Had a 9600 baud modem and speeds of 4 or 7 MHz. Cost around $3,000 or $4,000 without the monitor. Ran DOS. My favorite part was when I discovered the modem and BBS by looking one up in the phone book. I remember there was no "internet" listing in the phone book and thinking even at that young age how it should be considering it will be just as good as the phone book one day. MY father had the internet at his work so I knew what it was. I thought you could still buy phone books. Seems like they still make phone books as a bunch were dropped of at an apartment I visited several times in 2015 and the phone books just sat there. I don't know how I found the phone number of the first bbs but once I did I found others while my parents found an $80.00 phone bill which was a lot back then. Other things we had was a shitty dot matrix printer my dad bought because he was cheap. It had four fonts you selected on the printer why it could only do that even though it was dot matrix was due to it's shittyness I guess.

About printer:

Dot matrix (quality is defined by dots in print head, needles in spanish)...

4 fonts is a good one! I had a 24 'needles' 8 fonts EPSON LQ-100. In fact, it's still at my parents' house.

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[Cerebus]

ICL 1904S. Not this actual one (that was in the Nederlands) but it's the same processor:

[pie314isi]

Vic 20
MicroBee 16k
MicroBee 56k - which I still have somewhere.

[Zero999]

My first computer was a games console: Sega Master System, my dad bought for us from a friend who'd just purchased a Mega Drive: we didn't have the money for a new machine back then.

My first proper computer was a 386SX 25MHz machine, with 4MB RAM, a 43MB hard drive and an old VGA card with 256kB VRAM. It came with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. We got it in 1993, when most people already had better machines, but it's what my parents could afford, at the time. I often just used DOS because I couldn't be bothered to boot into Windows and I spent a lot of time programming in QBasic and playing games, so Windows just got used for school work.

Now I still use an old PC, an old 2006 era Intel Duo, with 1GB RAM and came with no hard drive, I got from a colleague, in exchange for a bottle of whisky. I soon added a sold state hard drive and upgraded to 3GB RAM, to make it usable. It runs PC Linux OS, because Windows nowadays is grim. The original plan was to buy a better machine soon, but point in getting anything better, because it suits my needs. My next upgrade will probably be another cast of from work or someone else. The days of having to upgrade, a basic machine used for general web browsing and office work, every two years are long gone.

[Roeland_R]

the first was a 'family' computer, it was a Sharp MZ-80K

That was a great machine. I owned one too. I worked for a company that sold these computers as business computer. Don't have it anymore, but still have an MZ700. Compatible with the MZ80K, but a little faster and build in plotter. I think the ink is dry now. [emoji52]

[NivagSwerdna]

ICL 1904S.

I used to travel by train to Bristol Parkway to feed punch cards to the 1904 at Bristol Poly.  Nice memories.

[HecticZA]

8080.
1 x 360KB drive. No hard drive and used DR Dos and later MS Dos booting and also running of that single drive. Can't recall the specs ito of screen or memory.

Steep learning curve.

Sent from my SM-N950F using Tapatalk

[SL4P]

SIGNETICS 2650
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signetics_2650
KT9500 development board

[Messtechniker]

Mine was a IBM XT clone with Intel 8080 processor running at 8 MHz
with 640 Kb of RAM and with a Turbo button for snappier 16 MHz operation.
Initially with two 360 kB floppy drives and no HDD. Later upgraded to two 1,2 MB floppies and a
60 MB HDD *) for 600 DM = 300 EUR.

Compare that with today were you can get 6 TB i.e.
100 000 times the capacity for around 150 EUR. Simply crazy.

*) They don't make 'em like this any more 

[TechieTX]

First actual computer was the Atari Pong in '75, but it wasn't programmable.  For a true programmable computer, it was the Intel SDK-85 or the Motorola 6800 D2 Kit.  I got 'em both around the same time back in The Dark Ages (late '76 or early '77).

These aren't mine; both of the boards I had hit the landfill long ago, so they're just representative examples:

 

Not long after I got an Apple ][, then a Sinclair ZX80 (hacked to 4K RAM with 2114 RAM chips), then an early IBM clone, a ][e and the long run of IBM clones since.  Buried somewhere in there around '80 or '81 was a Ferguson Big Board (Z80), which eventually got upgraded to twin Shugart 8" drives and CP/M.  I still have the 8" CP/M boot disk (somewhere), kept as a novelty, and the twin Shugart drives in the steel case are probably supporting a 4-lane bridge, somewhere. 

I timeshared on a couple of mainframes before that with Teletypes, but didn't own 'em.  The first timeshare was a Sperry Univac in junior high school, then (something else) in college with a card punch.  I've used (but didn't own) SWTP 6800, IMSAI 8080 and a Northstar Horizon in early college.

When everyone else had jumped on the '386 bandwagon, I was still running an AMD '286+'287 with a meg of fast static RAM that ran circles around their '386 systems and DRAM.

[ebastler]

First actual computer was the Atari Pong in '75, but it wasn't programmable. 

Nah, that doesn't count. 

PONG was not a computer (= CPU plus program) based game at all, but rather a smart "video signal generator": Hardwired counters and logic gates to create the video image and sync signals, and two 555 timers to determine the paddle position. It was built from discrete TTL logic in the original arcade game, later integrated into a single-chip solution for home consoles.

[james_s]

About printer:

Dot matrix (quality is defined by dots in print head, needles in spanish)...

4 fonts is a good one! I had a 24 'needles' 8 fonts EPSON LQ-100. In fact, it's still at my parents' house.

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

"Pins" would be the typical English term. I remember we had a 9 pin dot matrix printer, I was envious of those who had 24 pin printers, even better were the ones that could print in color by moving a ribbon that had multiple strips. Fancy!

[geekGee]

with a Turbo button for snappier 16 MHz operation.

I had forgotten about those.  I used to work for a re-seller who briefly assembled 80286 clones.  Those "Turbo" buttons were often "Lockup" buttons on some mobos.

[OE2WHP]

Back in 1982 my first computer was a 8088 with 512k RAM. It had a 5,25" floppy drive, 20MB harddrive a 12" monochrome monitor and a Star LC10 needle printer. The housing was built like a tank.

[djos]

Back in 1982 my first computer was a 8088 with 512k RAM. It had a 5,25" floppy drive, 20MB harddrive a 12" monochrome monitor and a Star LC10 needle printer. The housing was built like tank.

Did you have that spec from day one? That would have cost a fortune! 

[mdijkens]

Back in 1982 my first computer was a 8088 with 512k RAM. It had a 5,25" floppy drive, 20MB harddrive a 12" monochrome monitor and a Star LC10 needle printer. The housing was built like tank.

That sounds more like a configuration from 1985/1986
Back in 1982 the full hight 5.25" 20MB harddisk alone would have costed over $10k
I know since we had a 5MB harddisk that costed $3k5 by then 

[DeanCording]

Speaking of costing a fortune, the first computer I owned was a Microbee in kit form.  It cost $399 in 1982, which is the equivalent of $1,380 today. And you had to provide the monitor and assemble it yourself from bare board and bag of bits.  2MHz Z80, 16Kb RAM, and unlimited cassette storage.

[OE2WHP]

Yes, you are right about the date. The 1982 was a guess out of my memory. It must have been somewhere around 85/86.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Mine was a Sinclair ZX-80 with 1K RAM (which included the display memory!)

Prior to that at school, we had a Commodore PET-II and a TTY link with a real modem in a nice wooden box connected to the local polytechnic. We also had this most strange contraption that looked like it came from an arcade. It had toggle switches and dozens of little lights (probably bulbs, not LEDs). You programmed registers in binary and watched bits move around like Pac-Man. Weird. But I taught me a lot.

[RomDump]

My first Computer was a C64. The one in the 10 year old picture is not the first one I had.

[musicamex]

Mine was a souped up Fat Mac.  I increased the ram to 1 meg from 512k.  I had a Rabbit Drive external hd with 512 megs.  Floppies were 128 and 256 k in those days.  People drove from Albuquerque, 100 miles away to see it.  It would be a fart in a wind storm compared to even a small tablet these days, but, back then I was blown away by what i could do with my fattie.