Your first computer

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

Loved "speeding up" the tape drives by the slightest increments using a small screwdriver on the motor speed adjuster, so the Speccy could load the games a bit quicker.
Ended up with a finely tuned tape deck that could load the average game in 2 minutes instead of 2.5 minutes!

Yes, remember those days. Funny how those loading times were never a real issue as it gave me enough time to make a cup of coffee, sandwich and take a slash before I spent the next 3-4 hours playing my game.

We also spent our Sunday afternoons making copies of friends cassettes on my old mans hifi.

 

[gregmcc]

I remember playing Space Quest I on my XT. It was 3 x 360k floppies and took about 3 months to finish.

Games nowadays are a few DVD's big and you are done in 10 hours!

Bring back the xt!

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

I remember playing Space Quest I on my XT. It was 3 x 360k floppies and took about 3 months to finish.

Games nowadays are a few DVD's big and you are done in 10 hours!

Bring back the xt!

Agree. GOG is my favourite place to source games for my kids.

 

[gregmcc]

Agree. GOG is my favourite place to source games for my kids.

Don't lie. We know they are for you!

 

[oldhat]

C64 - 1986

 

[Lupus]

386 sx 25 mhz with a 120 meg HDD and 4 megs of RAM. Also remember the graphics card being a Tseng Labs Et4000 and a Soundblaster pro 2. Also had a Tatung monitor, first games were hero quest, dune 2 and Star Control 2

 

[adrianx]

This was my first computer. I must have been about 10/11 years old.

After that, [-]I forced[/-] my parents bought me an Atari600XL.

We had a Spectravideo 328 with a cassette player and one of those green screens.

I almost forgot, I had one of those too... maybe that came before the Atari.

 

[biometrics]

1981 (80?)

To add:

This was a video game like Atari but I bought a cartridge that let you program it in assembler. Needless to say it was way over my head, never wrote one line on it.

 

[geezer]

The first computer I worked on was an IBM XT 286: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ibm_px_xt_color.jpg
We used at work when we replaced the old valve computer on our CEC Magnetic Sector Mass Spectrometer. This was in 1983. It had a 10MB hard drive, and 2 floppy disk. Yes, we did not spare expenses those days!

 

[Kosmik]

386 sx 25 mhz with a 120 meg HDD and 4 megs of RAM. Also remember the graphics card being a Tseng Labs Et4000 and a Soundblaster pro 2. Also had a Tatung monitor, first games were hero quest, dune 2 and Star Control 2

Ahh, the time when sequels were better than the original's: Dune 2, Star Control 2 , Doom 2

 

[Spamhater]

My first computer that I had was an Commodore 64

 

[Arthur]

My dad in SA still has one of these in the cupboard, I think its a ZX Spectrum.

It's basically a keyboard but it takes tapes in the corner.

I think it still works.

Must've been a QL - the only microcomputer Sir Uncle Clive made with a built-in Microdrive was the Sinclair QL. It had a mighty Motorola 68008 CPU. Later ICL repackaged the QL into the OPD (One Per Desk). Remember that?

Yip, the Sinclair ZX81 was where I got my start, too. 1kB RAM! (But I had the 16kB expansion pack!)

Hehe. Did you ever get the dreaded "RAM Wobble" and "White Outs", where all your painstakingly entered programming disappeared as the system reset because of the lousy edge connectors on the RAM Expansion Pack? Memories!

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Ahh, the time when sequels were better than the original's: Dune 2, Star Control 2 , Doom 2

Space Quest 2.
Police Quest 2.
Test Drive 2.

 

[GardenGnome]

My first computer was a Cyrix 5x86 133Mhz CPU ( more or less equivalent to a Intel 486 DX4/100) 8Megs of Ram and a 540Meg Hard drive, yes that was a big drive at the time.

I later discovered it was a 2.5inch laptop drive with ATA adaptor to plug into normal ATA sockets on the MB. That was awesome because I could take the drive out and carry it in my pocket to go and get games from friends. So in 1996 I was walking around with a 2.5Inch drive in my pocket.

This PC was bought from Computer Mania in Maynard Mall in Wynberg around 1996. I remember they were outside the old Dions that used to be there.

I started with Novel DOS (which could actually multitask) and progressing to Win3.1 then to Windows 95 and finally Windows 98. I pushed the envelope of this machine with its Trident 9440 graphics chipset ( I still remember the specs) , playing classics like Doom, Descent, Duken Numem 3D, and Quake 1 and 2. Unfortunately it struggled with Quake 2. I also cut my teeth with Linux on this machine running an early version of Redhat but I remember Gnome struggled to run and I had to use a more basic Window Manager ( FVWM if I am not mistaken).

Today this PC sits in an attic somewhere probably as I gave it to my friend to give to his Granpa as an upgrade to his typewriter so that he could write his WW2 Memos on it. I have lost touch with that friend and I suspect his Granpa is probably gone by now. I used the PC for at least 6 years first as my primary for 4 years then as my backup server for another 3.

The nostalgia... I think I must buy my next PC/Laptop by CM lol

 

[spiff]

my first encounter with a computer was in 1980 when a friend of mine got us into UCT's computer sciences department. wow!

then in the early 90's my first work computer, if I can remember correctly was the companies Sunvision SparcStation. we had 10 workstations running through a novel network. what an amazing setup.
no viruses
no crashing
no blue screens
no network issues.
no crap at all.
just login in the mornings.... do your work... log out and go home.

interesting to note that before I was born my father work at a computer company in Observatory, not sure of it's name now, back then you walked inside the computers to fix them, swop out valves or setup the conveyors for the punch cards.

anyone else have fathers that were in the computer business before you were born?

 

[RoganDawes]

The 16 K memory upgrade, cost more than the computer - if I remember correctly

Quite possibly! I was too young to know But we also had a Petron TriChord extension. Let the ZX81 make noises!

Pity the little thing was so flimsy, that pressing keys disturbed the connections to the extension device (RAM or TriChord) and reset the computer!

 

[RoganDawes]

Ours might have been the same, Hercules graphics and amber screen. Used to play Kings Quest 1, California Games, Digger and Golden Axe. Used floppies. This was around 1991.

Similar setup for my first PC (XT). Computer Warehouse special, had switchable 360/720kB floppies, Hercules card and a green screen, and a Turbo switch to run at 4.77 or 8MHz. Then I got a CGA card and monitor and could run dual screen! This worked since the Mono screen buffer and CGA screen buffer were at different locations

But I suspect your timing is a little off, we got ours in about 1985, or thereabouts. In 1991, 386's were pretty common, I think.

 

[chrisc]

In 1979 I bought a ZX Spectrum. Also got a Microdrive since loading and saving via cassette was a pain. Had the Spectrum for 3 years and used to edit a club newsletter on it and print it on a dot-matrix printer. The printer would not print characters that went below the line, so all the "y"s and "g"s were truncated.

 

[garyc]

Started off using something that looked similar to this. Did not own it, but owned time on it.



A really fast machine – dual processors and it also marked the transition from magnetic core memory to semiconductor based memory, allowing up to 8MB. It even ran ASCII games (Adventure and Star Trek).

When the 80s finally arrived I bought a PC/AT.

 

[biometrics]

In 1979 I bought a ZX Spectrum. Also got a Microdrive since loading and saving via cassette was a pain. Had the Spectrum for 3 years and used to edit a club newsletter on it and print it on a dot-matrix printer. The printer would not print characters that went below the line, so all the "y"s and "g"s were truncated.

View attachment 90666

It was launched in 1982.