Your first computer

[Roundhouse]

Zx

 

[[)roi(]]

Xmas 1981 my Dad back from trip to states drops this little beauty under my xmas tree:

• Texas Instruments TI 99/4A with a speech synthesiser unit.
• 
• Together it sat on my desk with a huge 1970s model Blaupunkt TV, similar to picture below:
• 

The only thing he forgot (probably on purpose) was any gaming cartridges, so to use this thing I had to jump into the manual and start to learn basic, by the middle of year I was fairly proficient at making simple games like tic tac toe, and finally progressing by the end of year to a 3d sprite version. 1982 was also the year I started learning assembler, seemed like the natural thing to do (as all the decent games were coded in assembler) - http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/software/s_carts/editor.html

For my birthday later in 1982, I mustered together all my pocket money, and of course quite a bit extra from my folks / family to buy a 5 1/4" Floppy drive and speech recognition unit. Man this was certainly way better than anything else on the block! The speech recognition unit was a lot of fun as you can imagine, you only had to repeat a word 7 times to program the unit (error rate was around 50%) So along with my brother who was a bit of an electronics fundi, we had the TI after ~1 week of some experimentation controlling a few light switches by voice command (Star Trek se m**r).

..and thus began my road into all things geek.

 

[CamiKaze]

286...

 

[Necuno]

Apple ][

Was my fathers, but he also had an IMB that took those 8 inch floppies.

View attachment 90588

What was the first computer you worked on?

Mine: Sharp MZ80K - father bought it when he started to get involved in computer automation for his work.

View attachment 90550

 

[Wimhotep]

My first was also a ZX81.

View attachment 90562

1st "computer" ZX81
Bought for R 300 from a computer store in Cape Town.

Then XT , AT , 386 , Pent III , IV
Today .. i7

 

[bekdik]

My first computer was an Univac (ICT labeled) 1004 plugboard machine

 

[BigAl-sa]

My first computer was an Univac (ICT labeled) 1004 plugboard machine

and of course you worked with Grace Murray Hopper in programming the thing

 

[Hectic]

286- no harddrives, colour screens or sound cards, only 1 x 5.25" floppy drive running of DR Dos 1.x?

 

[EchoZA]

ZX-80 (in kit form) then ZX-81 (also in kit form) followed by ZX Spectrum 16K, then a 48K, then the 48K+ and right up to the 128K... a few years break then Amiga 2000B (for Lightwave rendering) and then onto PC's.

 

[moondoggie86]

"My" first pc was a 286 that my dad bought. Ahh...the days of Shareware. Dangerous Dave, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D and Ski

He bought another pc in 2003. Intel Celeron 600Mhz with a 6gb HDD. A tiny knock against the casing would send the pc into restart heaven. Pressing F5 (refresh) too much would have the same effect. I got a Sis 32mb GPU that I installed to play NFS Underground. 5 FPS/s...no problem. Finished it.

Two days ago my monitor blew so for the time being I'm sitting with this

 

[Electron1]

ZX80

Then I bought a 286 clone with 20MB drive and I think it had 16MB RAM

 

[Fox1]

"My" first pc was a 286 that my dad bought. Ahh...the days of Shareware. Dangerous Dave, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D and Ski

He bought another pc in 2003. Intel Celeron 600Mhz with a 6gb HDD. A tiny knock against the casing would send the pc into restart heaven. Pressing F5 (refresh) too much would have the same effect. I got a Sis 32mb GPU that I installed to play NFS Underground. 5 FPS/s...no problem. Finished it.

Two days ago my monitor blew so for the time being I'm sitting with this

View attachment 90596

What keyboard is that?

 

[moondoggie86]

What keyboard is that?

GF bought it for Xmas. Genius Manticore.

 

[Kosmik]

Hmmm if recollection serves:

XT with dual floppies only
286 1Mb Ram 10Mb MFM drive with 360k floppy
386 Dx 33 , 4Mb Ram 20Mb 360k floppy plus 1.44Mb Stiffy drive
486 DX4 100Mhz 16Mb 512Mb Hdd Ram 40Mb IDE, Creative 16bit with Quad speed CD-ROM
P200MMX 40Gb + 80Gb Hdd 32Mb , ATI Rage II and 3DFX Voodoo 1
P2 Celeron 400 256Mb Ram 120Gb Hdd , Savage S4
P3 Tualatin 900Mhz , 1 Gb Ram 512Gb hdd , Savage 2000
Core 2 Duo E8500 4Gb Ram 2Tb drive Geforce 9600GTX=>ATI HD 6850

 

[gregmcc]

commodore Vic 20.

Who remembers those Hercules monitors. If you were rich you had CGA monitors

 

[House]

ZX Spectrum and then the Commodore.

Remember back in the day if you wanted to play games, bought the magazine (which generally had 30+ pages of code for a single game in every edition), which took hours to type and then you could play. Once the system was shut down, you needed to type the code again to play again.... Learnt a lot about coding for games back in the day....

 

[Gozzy]

I was around 7 or 8 when my dad got a 286 PC, not sure what specs they were as I was too young to understand pcs then

Then my first pc (1996)

Proline Pentium 1 166MHZ
16 MB Ram but upgraded to 32mb ram.
2GB HDD
Had a 1mb GFX card and then a year or so later we added a Voodoo 2
Windows 95

I remember we got Microsoft Game Sampler 2 CD with, I can't remember exactly what games was on there, apart from Neverhood.

Then my dad Bought MS Flightsimulator 95, I still remember my dad paid a whopping R400 for it (1996)

 

[Deep78]

sigh ... Commodore 64, many many fond memories floppies and tape drive :}

 

[joeyhza]

My first PC was a 486 DX66 with 2MB SIMM RAM. A 120MB Hard Drive and a CGA Screen. Using DOS 6.0

 

[KingBel]

We had a zx spectrum as well. Then my brother bought an Olivetti.. With cga graphics..
Played my first computer games on that.. Montezumas revenge.
Then I broke the keyboard a few times playing double dragon.