Post a photo of your first computer. Tell us all the details!
I had one of those 'all-in-on' Compaq Presario desktops. I think I paid around $1000 for it and thought I had this rocking computer because it had 320mg hard drive. It ran on Windows 3.1 and it had a whooping 8k of memory to it. WOOHOO!!!!!
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First computer to multitask. But my 
first computer was the Vic20, Lil. Couldn't do much with it.
A whopping 4K of RAM and cassette player for data storage!
5 whole Kb RAM!!
It had 128 kilobytes of memory and ran at 1 megahertz. I also had a 300 BPS Modem.
Looked like this, though this one wasn't mine:
It was handy having the two floppy drives - not only did it save swapping discs they made a nice stand for the monitor.
I never had a mouse for my Apple ][. I did have some programs that called for saving to tape.
Paia 4700 computer. TWO digit hexadecimal display. Cassette tape interface. Keypad for programming. Interface between keyboard and control voltage outputs for synthesizer like this
Ours had the 16K memory module on the back but if you typed too hard on the crappy membrane keyboard or jostled the machine, it would dump everything in memory and crash. You could load programs into memory from a cassette recorder and plug it into a TV for a display, but it would only display in black & white.
Our next computer was a Commodore 64, which was MUCH nicer in comparison. (My parents still have it, and it still works!)
A strip of blu-tack/Elmer's tack was compulsory on the expansion box.
Happy days... 
The BASIC was very good. I programmed a lot of games. Eventually, I upgraded to one of these:
The Commodore SX-64!
that I actually think the SX-64 looks kinda cool? 
Edit: Holy crap, there's a guy who made his own C64 laptop, designed to look as if it actually came out in the 80s (check out giant game cartridge slot on the front left side!). There's video at his site of him testing it out, too.
Don't you dare BUMP that box.... UGGG
First I owned? A Kaypro luggable (that never went anywhere because it was too dang heavy.)
This is not my rig but it's pretty similar
We also had a 300 baud modem and a 10 meg Hard rive. I never had those joysticks though. We did have a 2 color impact printer - the printer ribbon was black on half and red on the other half (divided horizontally) and the printer would move the ribbon up and down to the correct color - mostly for highlighting words in a printout but it had some verrrrrry limited graphics capabilities too....
The first computer game we played was The Pawn - an all text rpg where you had to type in the commands (walk north - <You've come to a tree!> - examine tree <you find....nothing> DAMMIT! <unrecognized command> shit...)
Later we got a second modem and phone line and ran a 2 line BBS with door games and all kinds of fun.
I was a Q-Link member before it became AOL. My son got an Amiga after that and it was quite a bit cooler.
My father gave it to me when he got a "real" computer (IBM)
I wasn't a programmer, just used it for writing, or playing "Spelunker". So, I also used those red and black joysticks. They were pretty good and durable. I finally gave the system away to a friend. I suspect he either used it for a while or sold it on ebay. I kept the monitor as my only TV set well into 1990s. It had great color and I've seen them used in video-production studios.
A whole 386mhz processor with an extra meg of ram for a total of 2 whole mega bytes of RAM, yowlzer!!!. It came with Lotus 1.2.3. software but I loaded windows 3.1 (19 3.5 inch floppies as I recall). This monster could almost run Wolfenstien 3D without frames dropping out..
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I am pretty sure the DOS was 5.0 under the Lotus 123. I tried to explain to my kids the whole CD/Game Dir/game run/game.exe thing, but they just rolled their eyes and asked me about my first dinosaur ride.. 
Two 5 1/4" drives, no hard drive, 512k RAM (later upgraded to 640k)
Lasted till we got a 75mHz Pentium Compac in 1994.
This bad boy had 64k memory, dual 5.25 floppy drives and CGA!
My first gaming was buying these books that had code in BASICA. I would spend hours plugging in the code to run an ASCII game lol.
But then I figured out to take my ZORK books and turn them into simple games in that BASICA format.
Actually saved up $400 for a VGA card and monitor only to find out my first lesson with PC building, see if the PC will support said upgrade first.
EDIT: Forgot to mention the plus of the 5.25 when a certain hold punch in hand. Double sided 5.25!!!
Stored my programs on paper tape. The 6502 was a hell of a processor back in the day.
Similar to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COSMAC_ELF
Most of the parts from that computer went into the second computer I built, which I still have.
Before that I'd built some pretty crazy relay machines. The sound of dozens of relays clicking is like music. It had a phone dial and a bunch of switches for inputs.
Before that I owned a Bell Labs "CARDIAC"
http://boingboing.net/2009/06/03/cardiac-paper-comput-1.html
Those photos really bring back some memories.We really have come a long way haven't we?
But I loved my ZX Spectrum + 2A 128k
If I ever have to take trigonometry again, I'll blow the youngsters away with it! 
Actually, I inherited my sister's Atari 800XL with "a blazing 1.79MHz clock speed, and a full 64K memory." Had 2 daisy-chain floppy drives that sounded like Sherman tanks on meth. No programs for it, so I had to learn Atari's version of BASIC and write my own programs; but I did manage to create a pretty nifty database program with it. It's still up in my attic.
First real PC was an AST Premmia 486 with Win 3.1, an awesome 350MB hard drive, modem, and 8MB RAM. Ran it until Win2K came out, and flat wore out the keyboard. Took it apart and put it back together so many times, I could almost do it blindfolded. Ahh, the memories!
Looked something like this and was made out of magnesium or something. It was my grandfathers from back in the 40s or so. Somebody stole it.
Before it could be shut off, or moved from one place on the desk to another spot on the desk, the "heads had to be parked".
One day there was a sharp earthquake jolt that made the apartment building jump up momentarily, which made the heads move on the disk, and that computer became unrepairable and never worked ever again.
I enlisted in the army in 82 as a Fire Direction Computer (artillery aimer). Our first day in the classroom, our drill instructor's first instructions were to hold up our hands in front of us.
"See those? There's your computers!"
But more important, the first computer game I loved. Played "Wasteland" 20 times or more all the way through. The game was intriguing, in the fact that it was dynamic. The ending was ever changing, depending on the choices I made during game play.
It's what actually got me started on video games.
Can't believe they're finally making a real sequel. 
LynneSin
I almost was buying one of them - when I bought my first PC.... But I got warned about it becouse the combo... And becouse it was a Compaq... Even in the mid 1990s, Compaq had allready got a reputation they never really was able to go away with...
I had a whole 1.080gb Hardrive (who I was told I was never to be able to fill up) 4mb RAM, later made to 8 and then wopping 32mb RAM... and a impressive 128 grapic card. Later one replaced with an 512 mb grapic card... And yes. I had a impressive Pentium 1 prosessor, who was 100mhz.... The fastest on the marked at that time was an 172mhz prosessor, who I could not afford.. Even tho the PC got to a wopping 15.500 NKR in the end... (That was a LOT of money) And I had WIN95 who was brand new then
(a loosely operative system, who often broke down But I learned a lot about Computers then
And after that - I was stuck on the computer... I think I have had 5 or 6 computers since 1996, and even tho the prize have fallen, the computer itself have been far better than I ever could imagine in 1996.. Today I am on a HP with Intel i7, and 8gb ram, and 2gb on the graphic card,..
Many hours wasted. Drawing out the maps on butcher paper, getting stuck in the maze, the words 'xyzzy' and 'plugh'.
I run Linux (exclusively). I bet I can get a copy of the colossal cave. Nethack it ain't, but it would bring back memories.
Plugh, is it pronounced with soft or hard "G", or is it "pluff"? Gotta get it right to get through the cave.
Then run "adventure" from the terminal
IBM 1620
1968
Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University)
Note: I am still a Mainframe Programmer
My 'first' was a 1401.
And 480k ram disk, 32k card and speech synthesizer. Play Tunnels of Doom and Parsec occasionally.
Played with lots of toys I've the years. Coolest was probably the Grid laptop with bubble memory. Then the plasma screen compaq luggablea.
Big iron was a pair of 3090-600's and 4381, which hooked into the Vax cluster via a PDP-11.
Got to type on the worn indented Bakelite keyboard of a card punch for a Honeywell DSP7 (which emulated a DSP-2), thing had core memory, as in little iron rings wired together to make the memory. 32k of it. Have a couple of 300 meg disk packs for it in the basement, 12 12" platters went into a drive which looked like a top loading washing machine.
It did snap together like a suitcase, which made it portable, even though it was fairly heavy. It had a 10 MB hard drive, two floppy drives and a tiny green-on-black built-in monitor.
Not sure if it was even really a computer at all!
Ours had dual 5.25 floppy drives, no hard drive and ran on MS-DOS 2.0. I did a bit of programming in GW basic back then. We also had an add on color 14" monitor.
My cellphone 10 years ago probably had 100 times more power than this PC
I know you love them. 
Banks were giving them away if you bought a 3 year CD. Got it about 1992.
It used the floppy disks and a very small screen. I didn't use it much and have since given it away.
IBM 360/91
and he says for home use this was the first one he used...
on edit... my husband is having a blast looking at old photos of computers he has worked on. Thanks for the thread.
I had to deliberate whether to save money, or buy the "big" hard drive -- 40 vs 80 MB. I upgraded the hard drive 2-3 times, but I think the original still works. Max ram was 8 MB, enough to run Tenon Intersystems' MachTen Unix-style OS virtually. Finally shut it off when the last program I was running on it was released for System 8 only.
This was a "high-end" laptop -- the only faster Mac at the time was the IIci, which used the same 25MHz 68030 CPU. IIRC, it and the PB170 were the first Macs to exceed one MFLOP -- about the same as a Cray-1 supercomputer.
Went out and bought this: Performa operating a 7.5 OS
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then became aware that I knew absolutely nothing about a computer so went and bought this:
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so now I just introduce myself as:
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and dream about the old days:
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Ran on CPM-80 from floppy discs.
First one I used was my brothers Kaypro:
First one I owned - and used Papert's LOGO on - was a Commodore 64:
(Still have it!)
first really useful computer for me (sure wish now I'd been able to buy stock then!)
the only thing it was good for was game cartridges.
High school: Fortran, COBOL, PL/1 (all in one year. interesting high school, huh? the machine actually belonged to the university and we sent decks of punch cards up there every night)
Tech school: CP/M, North Star Basic, business computing
First job: programming, hacking, and operating. Employment discrimination software in MS Basic, pong in Forth, disassembler in assembler
First successful build: digital/analog monosynth not unlike a Roland Jupiter voice on steroids. 3 DCOs, 3 envelopes, 3 LFOs, a bunch of weird features from Electronotes that no one put in commercial synths. Keyboard, no MIDI, long dead and gone. 
First purchased personal computer: IBM PC/XT with WordPerfect, Cakewalk, a 4-in, 4-out MIDI interface I had to write my own driver for (I bought the cheap one, but 4x4s were hard to come by in 1990).
Once I started making music with computers, I stopped staying ahead of the curve. This is being written on a Dell Dimension xps t600r, a medium-good desktop from 2000, running W2K. YouTube works just fine.
The TRS-80 had the best way of crashing I've ever seen. Extended instructions would address all of memory, so loops could tromp all the way through the address space, sometimes nearly instantly, sometimes slowly, hitting all the memory-mapped hardware (screen, disk, cassette). When it looked like the game of Life was eating your screen from the top down, you had a couple seconds max to get the floppy out before the loop hit the floppy disk controller, usually writing garbage to either the directory or the file you last used.
Bad loops were just tiny chunks of code that would copy themselves either higher or lower in memory, often on top of themselves in a self-modifying way. For some reason, software bugs and especially power surges created them often. And the bitmapped screen gave you a bit-by-bit view of them when they passed through video RAM (which was RAM you could run executable code in, way uglier than the game of Life)
Hmm... spontaneously created computer viruses? If one could hit the floppy controller in such a way as to write itself to disk...unlikely but not impossible.
The other common form of crash was the fast one, when a single instruction, capable of moving the entire 64K of memory, would be passed zero (meaning all 64k, not zero, because who wants to move zero bytes with an extended move instruction?) as a size, and would promptly (in milliseconds) move ALL OF MEMORY from some random location to some OTHER random location. Poof! And, because this was a powerful instruction that vastly speeded up the Z80, ROM was full of them and a random jump into BASIC or DOS was liable to hit one in just a few instructions.
Another bizarre TRS-80 feature (perhaps others did it too) was self-modifying ROM code. WTF? you say? ROM code would build, in RAM, jump tables, and then modify them regularly. It would also modify bits of DOS, which it in theory didn't even know was there (or was it that DOS nestled itself closely around bits of code that ROM copied into RAM and then modified before executing?
Cost: about $3000.00 in 1990. A fine little machine, but I wish I had invested the money instead. What I've spent on computers and software over my life makes me sick sometimes. I've worked from home over the last 16 years so all the technology expenses are valid. But still ... crap, I hate thinking about it.
First one I owned, anyway... bought it for a sliver under $1000 with money saved from my paper route:
12kB ROM, 16kB RAM, cassette data/program storage. No printer. All the BASIC you cared to program...
But it did play Star Raiders, which was half the reason I bought it...
She lasted a long long time. I wrote my master's thesis on this little sucker. I printed said thesis on a little printer (a small inkjet that was made in Japan).
I ended up giving this to my late mother who had not a clue what to do with it.
Right now my new phone is far more powerful than that PC ever was.-
In socialist Britain, the BBC planned a TV program to introduce people to computers and what they could do. Problem is that the BBC is a non-commercial outfit, so did not want to support a particular brand of computer over another. So they invited companies to submit tender to build a BBC branded computer. Acorn Computers won the bid. The program was a success that follow-up series were made. The BBC microcomputer was rolled out to nearly every school in the UK.
What of the BBC Computer today? Well Acorn developed something called the RISC processor... launched into its Acorn Archimedes and also into Apple Newton's systems. The computers themselves may not have been a stellar success - in fact Acorn as a business name is pretty much dead - but the development of the RISC processor by Acorn (and Apple) meant that this division of Acorn was spun off as a separate company. This spin off, now known as ARM Holdings, design microprocessors that power pretty much every smartphone out there and a whole load of other devices such as cable and satellite tv boxes, sony playstations, flat screen tvs and more.
features a 80 MHz PowerPC 601 processor, 8 MB or 16 MB of RAM, a 250 MB, 500 MB, or 700 MB hard drive, and a 2X CD-ROM drive in a high-profile desktop case.
This was the first I bought for myself. Before I used the university's VAX, Macintosh SE, and an IBM AT at work. I learned a bit of BASIC-V, but after years of therapy, I can reenter society.
With all the bells & whistles I paid $2000...got me through my masters and then it was just so slow.
5" floppy drive AND 64mg hard drive, monochrome monitor, $3500 in 1986.
This beast was about 100lbs. I think the disk held around 500K. you had your OS in the A drive, and used the B drive to store a file.
I had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid. I don't remember when exactly my parents bought it for me, but it was in the mid 80s. I remember using it with a small Sony TV that I had in my room. Before having my own, I remember playing "Summer Games" on my uncle's C-64.
For a while I had to struggle with the Datassette player (which was utter torture) until I got a 1541 floppy disk drive. The first game I got on disk was "Racing Destruction Set". I remember cutting bits of the floppy's casings in order to make them double sided.
Later I also got an 803 printer.
I had a "The Arcade" joystick, made in the Netherlands (not sure why I remember that detail).
This screen pretty much sums up a part of my childhood, so much so that I named one of my bands "?Syntax Error".
Not photo of the actual machine I used:
World's first portable. CP/M with 64k and two, count 'em, two 60k floppy drives
First computer used PDP-4 size of refrigerator with a massive 4k of RAM and a teletype for data entry !! Long term storage was paper tape.
Kind of like this one here;
Cuz, if we are being honest, this really was it!!
We had one of those and I was completely obsessed with playing it. Obviously, I got pretty good, LOL. I wonder where it is now. I'll have to look for it... 
8" floppys (I think that was the size--they were HUGE!!!) It was a wonder for those of us who though IBM correcting selectric was the top of the line. 1981!
Last edited Thu Apr 12, 2012, 09:39 PM - Edit history (1)
named so because installing a G4 processor was cheaper than replacing it. Took me twelve years to max it out. Details here.
rocktivity
She still uses this one to play PPC games. She has a Mac Mini and an iPad.
This is the Bondi blue, imagine it being green.
