What was the very first computer you owned or used ?

[Dave Wise]

I helped restore that one.  For some years it was a live interactive exhibit, but today it's disassembled and in storage.

[metertech58761]

First computer I got to see: Commodore PET 2001 (the one with the chiclet keyboard) - 1978/79 school year

First computer I had access to: Apple ][ - ca. 1982

First computer I owned: Commodore 64 - Christmas 1984

Them were the days!

[pzlingo]

I used to have a kind of Street Fighter game written in machine language for the PC-1350.  I had the game in a tape.  The tape was lost somewhere in the garage.  I think if I can covert the tape to MP3, I may still be able to load the game to the PC-1350.

Better use a lossless audio format (.wav, .flac or such). MP3 is designed to avoid artefacts perceptible to human listeners, but your computer's demodulator might be offended anyway.

Hi. If you want still play this game, here is where you find it.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/sharpcasioworld

It is called TheKarate and one of the most cool games written in machine language for Sharp pc-1350

Have fun and stay tuned!
Modify message

[brucehoult]

First computer I got to see: Commodore PET 2001 (the one with the chiclet keyboard) - 1978/79 school year

First computer I had access to: Apple ][ - ca. 1982

First computer I owned: Commodore 64 - Christmas 1984

If we are making so many categories...

First computer I got to see: ca 1972, some kind of mainframe (IBM? ICL?) operating behind a large viewing window at L D Nathan in Auckland, while with my father while visiting his uncle who was a big shot there. Also my first time (and quite deliberately without prior explanation!) in an elevator.

First computer I touched: near tie, 1977, Commodore Pet in an office equipment shop in Whangarei, TRS-80 in the HQ of David Reid Electronics in Takapuna Auckland. I was a customer, having mail-ordered literally ten 7400-series ICs, 555, veroboard, soldering iron, wire from their huge catalogue with the distinctive Moire-pattern cover.

First computer I programmed (low level language): 1978, HP-97 calculator (mag card storage, printer). 26 registers, 224 bytes of program code. Owned by Tikipunga High School (not my HS, but nearby)

First computer I programmed (high level language): 1980, Burroughs B1700. My HS maths teacher had after-hours access to this machine in a bureau in Whangarei. He took our (hand) punched card FORTRAN decks there in the evenings, brought us printouts next day. Sometimes I (and one or two other students, but mostly me) accompanied him, enabling multiple debugging cycles for our (personal, more ambitious than the assigned task) programs. I got to put our HUGE 5 MB disk pack in the drive, enter the 1st stage bootstrap program into RAM using the console, use the TTY console and card punch machine.  My teacher died in August this year, aged 99. I last visited him Nov '22.



First computer I had long term possession of (low level): 1979 TI57 calculator, mail ordered from the aforementioned Davred. 8 registers, 50 bytes of program code. No non-volatile memory. Most complex program I wrote on it (including working out the equations): Great Circle bearing and distance from one lat/long point to another.

First computer I had long term possession of (low level): 1980 Apple ][+. My HS bought it, the aforementioned maths HoD told me to take it home over xmas/ny, figure it out, and then teach him about it. Technically I wasn't a student there any more as it was after the end of term and exams.

First computer I owned: 1989, Apple Mac IIcx. I'd been using/programming Macs for years at work, and been able to take them home when desired, but I finally bought my own because Actrix BBS in Wellington offered shell accounts and UUCP and access to internet mail and "news" (usenet) which they themselves got via UUCP. And I bought a cheap (US$99?) Chinese non-approved 2400 bps modem at Macworld SF (before I had a computer). I also had been using BYTE magazine BIX bbs via X.25 at work, and continued using my work login from home. Maybe a year later both Actrix and BIX got TCP/IP connectivity and I could use the almost free telnet instead.

[pqass]

First computer I programmed (in BASIC, of course): Commodore PET - 1979

First computer I owned: TI-99/4a - 1981
Out of the box it provided too sanitized/polished user experience; eg. menus and BASIC.
Assembler was out of reach ($$) unlike the competition.  Little info in magazine articles.  As such, I missed out on understanding the bare metal.

First computer that left a unforgettable impression: Fairlight CMI - 1982
Computers are not just for games or counting money!

[dare]

First computer I programmed, but did not touch: IBM 360/unknown model. Programmed in FORTRAN using punched cards. This was 1977; I was 12 or 13 at the time.

First computer I got to actually touch: Altair 8800 with ASR33 teletype. Programmed in machine code and BASIC.  Same year (1977), and same computer room as the 360!.

First computer I owned: Homemade COSMAC ELF computer.  RCA 1802 processor, 256 bytes(!) RAM, switches and LEDs. Built around 1980-81.

Still have that one, although I rebuilt it a few years ago:

[J911]

First comp, Commodore VIC-20.. my father picked it up at a garage/moving sale across the street for ~$20

[Martinn]

Still have that one, although I rebuilt it a few years ago:

Hand wrapped? Or did you put the wire wrap tool there for decoration...?
Pictures please 

My first computer was a UMS-85, https://makerprojekte.de/tag/ums-85/ also 256 bytes RAM. Hex code entry, I still know that C3 00 08 meant Jump to 0800 (which was the start of the RAM area).

[coppice]

Still have that one, although I rebuilt it a few years ago:

Hand wrapped? Or did you put the wire wrap tool there for decoration...?

I hope not. Wrapping with those manual twiddling tools produces some lousy wire wraps, and is just masochism. There were lots of trigger activated manual tools that worked well, and there were inexpensive battery powered tools, from people like OK, that were not too expensive. I still have an OK battery powered wire wrap tool that I produced a huge amount of hobby stuff with.

[Gerhard_dk4xp]

My first computer I used was a Siemens System 3003 (https://www.f10479.de/siemens_edv.html)
My first computer I owned was a z80 based self-made CPM80 system.
/PeLuLe

Telefunken TR4, the first commercial microprogrammed machine, 48 bits/word.
Some of us students were even allowed to operate it, so in some sense it was
my personal computer at night when the paid-for operators were at home.

There was a Siemens 3003 next to it, but not really for us.
(Cobol, move inzeile to outzeile, pah!)

Then came a Siemens kit 8080, and I wrote a cross assembler for it in Fortran
on the TR4, with punched tape output.

I then had a homebrew Z80A with DMA and double floppies, wired on a
double Eurocard.

My first AT was a Bullet speedboard 286 pimped to 10 MHz with a
Fujitsu 70 MB disk, some kind of hubris, when the VAX of the uelectronics institute
had just a 330 MB Fujitsu Eagle for all people together.

I ran Interactive Unix on it and even tried to compile Spice 2G6,
but f2c wasn't up to snuff.  Sh***y small segments. Think of
memory management in Fortran by indexing over the limits
of an array.

Gerhard

hubris, hybris, ύβρις = arrogance against the gods

And a blast from the past: last weekend I repaired a W&G SNA-33
spectrum analyzer, 20Hz to 26 GHz with 1 Hz filter BW. Runs under
DOS 6. Still not completely stable, but Phar Lap tools is nothing
I want do deal with any more.

[dare]

Hand wrapped? Or did you put the wire wrap tool there for decoration...?
Pictures please 

(Not sure why I didn't get a notification of your reply...)

All hand-wrapped, using the same wire wrap tool I used in high school!

[N0NB]

The first computer I owned and used was a Radio Shack Color Computer 2 with 16k Extended Color BASIC (wow!) purchased about a week before Thanksgiving 1983 for around $150 as I recall.  Of course I needed an interface cable for the portable cassette recorder we already had.  Probably $15 for that alone.  I quickly learned peripherals were not cheap!  I first connected it to the 25" black and white console TV in the basement recreation room.  Later I used a portable BW TV given by my grandparents.  I finally put a small Quasar color TV on it a few years later.

I really never got along with BASIC.  The books that came with it were probably adequate for explaining the language but it wasn't until years later that I picked up the concepts of logic, program decision branching, modularity, and so on.  By then C held a strong attraction.  Despite that I put it to good use for about six years and picked up a printer and disk drive for it.  The latter proved useful as it freed up the cassette port to be a serial port that I used for packet radio.  I edited the local radio club newsletter on it. I upgraded it to 64k with chips mail ordered from a shop in Kansas City via info received from another ham operator (I no longer recall who     ).

The local RS had a stack of them for sale but I never ran across anyone locally that had one. Most were probably given to the kids and then tossed a few years later.  In the mid '90s I gathered it up along with all of the disks and gave to a good friend who was into that stuff at the time.  He passed away some years ago and that pile of stuff probably went to the landfill.   

In the summer of '89 I bought an XT clone (DTK MB) that was a collection of interesting parts from a local ham who dealt in that sort of thing.  It was built into an XT clone case, had a genuine IBM 62.5 Watt PSU that I upgraded later.  Two "half height" 360k 5.25" drives, 640k, serial port, Hercules monochrome adapter with a parallel port.  It came with a genuine IBM 88 key keyboard and Amdek amber monitor.  A copy of PC-DOS 3.3 was included of questionable origin.     I learned to edit files with edlin.   

About a year later I started using it seriously in electronics tech school and the video combination worked for Orcad and WordPerfect.  I bought an Epson 24 pin dot matrix printer and generated crisp and clean (this side of a laser) lab reports and schematics.  While in school I added a 20 MB MFM HDD, 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drive, 2400bps modem, V20 processor, Super VGA video adapter and VGA monitor.  All of that was an investment that paid off well for me.  After I graduated I added a Microsoft Inport Bus Mouse and MS-DOS 5.0 (purchased legally).

Once I graduated I used it to run a packet radio BBS for a few months with DesqView running three instances of W0RLI PBBS and one more screen as a monitor and all of this on top of an instance of G8BPQ node software.  Setting that all up was great fun and then I got a real job in a new area.  That computer went with me and while I used packet radio there I never set up the PBBS on it again.  Looking back I should have done more with DesqView and other software.

My jump into the 32 bit world was in early 1993 with a "white box" 386DX/40 ordered from some outfit advertising in Computer Shopper.  The summer of '96 saw me replace the MB with a 486DX/100 and about a month later I was handed a Slackware 3.0 CD and I've not been the same since!

Now I buy Lenovo computers and Raspberry Pis.   

[brucehoult]

The first computer I owned and used was a Radio Shack Color Computer 2 [...] I really never got along with BASIC.

Doesn't matter ... you had the easiest 8 bit chip to program in assembly language.  And the only one it was possible to write an actually good C compiler for -- whether they were good at the time or not I don't .. some friends and I designed and built a wire-wrapped 6809 computer and wrote a BCPL code generator in our spare time that gave pretty decent code.

[Geektronix]

TI99

Edit, forgot about this one

[N0NB]

The first computer I owned and used was a Radio Shack Color Computer 2 [...] I really never got along with BASIC.

Doesn't matter ... you had the easiest 8 bit chip to program in assembly language.  And the only one it was possible to write an actually good C compiler for -- whether they were good at the time or not I don't .. some friends and I designed and built a wire-wrapped 6809 computer and wrote a BCPL code generator in our spare time that gave pretty decent code.

I didn't pursue assembly either as my interest at the time was in using it with applications.  I didn't really gain an interest in programming of any sort until I had semi-retired it and was deep into the DOS world at that point.  The programming interest was likely kindled as a roommate was in the computer science program and in one of the later classes we did some simple stuff with debug and writing to the parallel port of IBM PC style machines as part of lab work.  After a few years with Linux I started to learn Perl and Python (late '90s) so that is when I started doing some hobbyist related development.

At one point I was loaned an OS-9 cartridge but there was no documentation so I really didn't know what to do with it.  Had there been some local sort of Coco user group that would have been a big difference maker.  I got to know a few students in various programs at tech school ('90/'91) and that was a lot of fun as they were a great source of ideas and inspiration.

Like you noted earlier in the thread, I was/am a farm kid as well but I was certainly not as inventive.  Phone calls to dial-up BBSs were out of the question (everywhere was a "long distance" call, even to the county seat eight miles away).  Packet radio was my first exposure to any sort of "online" activity.  By that point the most popular systems in use by hams were the C64 and IBM PCs/clones.  I chose the latter route.  C64s were still quite popular with hams until the mid '90s.  By that point I was jumping onto the Linux train.

If I still had the Coco I might revisit it but it's gone and I'm looking forward. 

[coppice]

The first computer I owned and used was a Radio Shack Color Computer 2 [...] I really never got along with BASIC.

Doesn't matter ... you had the easiest 8 bit chip to program in assembly language.  And the only one it was possible to write an actually good C compiler for -- whether they were good at the time or not I don't .. some friends and I designed and built a wire-wrapped 6809 computer and wrote a BCPL code generator in our spare time that gave pretty decent code.

The 6809 was specifically designed to be a good platform for C code. However, the way instructions changed as many flags as possible meant you had to insert a lot of test instructions to restore flags it had just stamped all over when if's, for's and while's were trying to act on the result of a piece of arithmetic which had just completed. It had a lot of good qualities, but the flag handling really hurt performance.

[brucehoult]

The 6809 was specifically designed to be a good platform for C code.

C really wasn't a factor in 1977 or so when the 6809 was being designed. Pascal was.

However, the way instructions changed as many flags as possible meant you had to insert a lot of test instructions to restore flags it had just stamped all over when if's, for's and while's were trying to act on the result of a piece of arithmetic which had just completed. It had a lot of good qualities, but the flag handling really hurt performance.

Relative to what? I was using the 6809 at the time and don't remember any such difficulty, certainly not compared to other similar CPUs such as 6800, 6502, 68000, or more recently ARM Thumb. Or even compared to dissimilar CPUs such as 8080/Z80.

Do you have an example?

Separating arithmetic result or compare from the conditional branch is quite a rare operation, to the point that modern RISC-V does both in the same instruction and x86 and Arm fuse them into one µop.

Doing a TST on a previously calculated value can work, but it loses information vs branching directly after doing the operation, specifically it loses the carry and overflow flags, so is not useful for a general "if a < b then ..." operation, but only comparisons against zero. TO be more general you could TFR the CC to and from A, B, or even DPR, or PUSH and POP it on the stack. Both options took the same number of bytes and cycles.

[SiliconWizard]

The 6809 was specifically designed to be a good platform for C code.

C really wasn't a factor in 1977 or so when the 6809 was being designed. Pascal was.

Yes, nobody would have thought of using C on a 8-bit CPU in the 70's. Madness. I think many people do not realize how big (and expensive) C compilers were at the time. Despite being born in the early 70's, C didn't become popular outside of the Unix world until much, much later. Something around mid-80's even. No wonder why even Lisa OS and macOS were written in Pascal (and assembly) too, even with 68k CPUs.

Which makes a point interesting: while C has been around for more than 50 years, and still going strong, it has been relatively short-lived as a general-purpose language, outside of Unix (Linux, BSD...) and GNU, and of course embedded development and low-level parts of OS's. But if you consider "desktop" programming on "modest"(/home) machines, C has been used approximately between 85 and 95, mostly. And that's being generous. In early 90's, C++ was already beginning to take over for this kind of area.

[coppice]

The 6809 was specifically designed to be a good platform for C code.

C really wasn't a factor in 1977 or so when the 6809 was being designed. Pascal was.

Pascal was only ever a major factor in one computer design - the Pascal Microengine from Western Digital. PL/1, in the form of MPL or PL/M, was big. Other Algol-ish languages had a presence. PL/M and MPL dominated professional development in a high level language on MPUs in the late 70s and early 80s. C was rising by the end of the 1970s, as cheap compilers for the 8080/Z80 and other MPUs were becoming available. When real 6809 machines became available. in 1979/1980. a C compiler was available for it. The needs of PL/1 and C are comparable. I was told, some years later, by one of the designers of the 6809, that trying to build a small machine that could run like a small Unix machine was a key part of their thinking. The instruction sets of the 6809 and 68k were sculpted around getting good performance on PL/1 and C like code. They did extensive analysis of large amounts of real code, across a range of program complexities. They expected the 6809 to have a longer life than it did, as they expected things like the 68k to take longer to become cheap. As it turned out the 68k quickly became affordable, and the embedded market for a 6809 class processor didn't form a big enough market segment until the early 90s. So Motorola dropped the 6809, and focussed on 6800 derivatives - 6801, 6805, 68HC11, etc - as basic MCUs, and the high end with the 68k family. The low end 6805 and HC08 were a huge success. The HC11 did well, but played second fiddle to the 6805. In the early 90s Motorola tried a new middle ground with the HC16, but it had limited success.

[pdenisowski]

The ZX81 - still have mine, in the original box with the manual.  There are even still traces of the Silly Putty I used to keep the 16K memory module from wobbling (and crashing the compuer) during typing

[cosmicray]

Since the topic is ambiguous (about owning or using), I have several possible answers ...

The first time I ever touched a piece of hardware that might be close to the definition of a programmable computer, was in high school (around 1971-72). It was made by Wang, looked mostly like a calculator, and had a box on the side that read an 80-column punch card. The punch cards were plain cards, with all the chads pre-perforated. You decided what sequence of calculations you wanted it to do, punch out the appropriate chads, insert the card, and tell the calculator to read the program. The Wang museum web site shows a Wang 500 with a card reader attached, so maybe that's the one. The Wang 700 triggers a distant memory, and the timing is right, so that could be it as well.

The first proper computer I ever touched would have been about 1973 (February or March) at the local community college. It was a Univac 9400 mainframe (which was approximately a 360/30 clone). The Univac had 128K of plated wire memory (later upgraded to 196K), three 800/1600 BPI tape drives (later replaced with drives that did 6250 BPI), and eight 20 MB removable disc drives (model number escapes me). The unit record equipment was a Univac 0768 drum printer, a 1004 printer/card-reader, another 1005 printer/card-reader, and a card punch. All was local channel attached with no remote terminals. The first summer session, I was part of a group of five students, who did a crash learning experience on how the executive program was generated, and what we could change to gain more efficiency. That experience helped me thru my career. One night, when I was excessively bored, I found the manuals for the 1004/1005 and a stack of old wire plug-boards. After some reading, I was able to program a plug-board to read a card, print a line, and repeat until out of cards. That goes back to mid 1960s technology.

The first personal computer I actually owned was a SWTPC 6800. It was assembled about the time I was working for the community college, along with a some custom electronics hacks/boards I did for it. I still have that (very early) PC, along with the manuals and all the various prototyping boards. A couple of days ago I dug out a box, with a dozen anti-static chip tubes from the early 1980s, and all the DIP chips I bought back then for projects. That is where the 8008 (as seen in my avatar) resides. Lots of 68K peripheral chips, and quite a few SRAM chips.

Those days were special, but nothing like 2024.

edit: In 2019 when I passed the FCC amateur radio technician license, the first thing I did was file the paperwork for a vanity callsign. The high school's ARC call sign had been sitting dormant for about four decades, and I was granted it by the FCC. Currently licensed as a general class.

[metertech58761]

Y'know, I remember picking up a ZX81 without power supply in the late '80s... since it took 9 volts, I rigged it to a 9V battery and the darn thing worked!

Too bad the membrane keyboard was shot (it had those stress lines where the cable made a bend coming through the case and again into the connector).

[kripton2035]

a diehl alphatronic, one with hole paper input... the tape deck came later ...
https://auge.de/projekte/computermuseum/exponat/diehl-alphatronic

[PeterW]

Around 1979 I bought a second hand Interton Electronics VC4000 TV games computer from a friend at work. I had discovered it was based on the same chipset as the Elektor TV games computer and I wanted to modify it to be the same as the EleKtor machine.  It turned out the Interton circuit was almost identical to the Elektor circuit and I just needed to make a custom cartridge for the Interton to turn it into an Elektor TV games computer. The cartridge added some Ram, a custom (Elektor) Rom and some additional address decoding logic. It work fine (first time) but I soon got bored of hand assembling 2650 code.

Shortly after finishing the Elector TV games computer I got my first "proper" computer. A few guys at work got together to buy 5 Compukit UK101 kits. We got them a bit cheaper as a bulk buy. Two of the guys made a trip to Compshop to pick them up. I built my kit the same evening, I did not expect it to work first time but it did. After a while I sold the UK101 to a friend and bought an Atari 400. I wish I still had the UK101. 

[paulca]

Moved... oops.