What was YOUR very first computer?

[videopac]

Mine was a second hand Telmac 1800... An RCA Cosmac (CDP 1802) based computer. Bought it in 1979 with money earned working in the summer

[JohnnyRockets]

VIC-20 baby!

 

Purchased for $70 with my Christmas money sometime in the early 80's!

 

Nothing like it!

 

And now I find myself learning to program for the C64 in Assembly, all these years later... funny!

 

 

 

JR

[Catsmasher]

In high school i wanted to buy an Ohio Scientific computer. It was an open board and you had to hook it up to power and a tv. Same time as early TRS80s but cheaper. My Dad said "No way. Dont waste your money. Computers are a fad."

Thanks Dad.

[gorf68]

A brand sparkly new VIC-20...

 

 

I did have a Telling Colourstars TV games system from a couple of years before that.

 

 

Still have both!

[+Gemintronic]

It *should* have been an Amiga. Instead it was a PC compatible that I had to spend hundreds later making it almost as feature intensive as an Amiga..

[number six]

Coleco Adam!

 

I really, really wanted a Comodore 64, but the Coleco was on closeout so guess which I got!

 

I shouldn't complain, the Adam was fun for a few years. Eventually did get a C=64. What a great machine.

[Fixitguy74]

My oldest brother got a Color Computer for Christmas one year and he let me use it often. He later upgraded to a Coco 3, did the memory upgrade, got a job with the Shack and loaded up on hardware & software. I know he by no means has everything available for it, but he sure has a lot. All of which is on ice in the back room of his computer shop that he owns.

 

I have a lot of fond memories of those machines. I used the word processor on it for homework, learned to program some basic, almost got in trouble for making the speech cart say bad words and played a ton of games. I personally didn't own a computer untill much later when I got a pc in the late 90's.

[retroillucid]

IBM 286 running with Dos and Win 3.1

Monochrome screen

 

A printer that could raise the deads ...loud and annoying!

[Keatah]

Mine was a second hand Telmac 1800... An RCA Cosmac (CDP 1802) based computer. Bought it in 1979 with money earned working in the summer

 

I so much wanted one of those Cosmac VIP's.. But for whatever reason I didn't ever acquire one. Either way, whatever classic system you had or still have, it's a great thing. A great thing for nostalgic trips and all that. So few hobbies allow for such a colorful trip at low cost. And when the last VCS console is shut down for the last time. There'll be emulation to carry the flag.

[tigert]

My family never owned a computer growing up, the closest thing we owned that resembled a computer was a Smith Corona typewriter with an LCD screen, even had a disk drive to save copy’s of your document’s.

 

My first computer though was bought at a garage sale in either 1999 or 2000, I bought it myself it was a ti-99 with a the voice module and parsec, I think I might have had another game too but I can’t quite remember when.

 

The ti-99 really got me with the computer bug though, it wasn’t long after that I started buying up from garage sales, or asking anyone if they had an old computer they were throwing away.

 

I had a 386 after, followed by a 486, followed by a 286 from my neighbor.

 

That 486 though…. Man, that thing had 16megs of ram, all individual 1mb sticks, sick, and a 1mb trident video card.

[tremoloman2006]

My very first computer was a Data General NOVA with a Teletype terminal connected. 10MB Hard Drive! Check out the size of that disk!

 

You are probably wondering... how the hell did I get this? My father worked for a precision sheet metal company at the time and he was about to start his own business. He bought a used system and brought it home to learn how to use. I got the jist of programming punch tapes and the rest is history.

 

I was only 7 or 8 but it did get me into computers.

 

My first PC was the TRS-80 Model III which I will always have a soft spot for.

[richard_g]

The very first thing to move shapes around my TV - if that can be termed a computer? - was the ubiquitous AY-3-8500. Pong built by my older brother from an article and PCBs from Practical Electronics.

 

He built the UK101 shortly after that - AWSOME! My future career was cast right there.

 

What could you show a child of 9-10 now that would instill such a reation?

Edited December 11, 2012 by richard_g

[Trebor]

VIC-20 complete with data-cassette and green monochrome (Commodore 11"?) monitor.

 

Loved Cosmic Cruncher, Clowns, Jungle Hunt, Moon Patrol, and Alien carts. My favorite titles though, were the Scott Adams Adventures...The Count, Adventureland, Pirate Island, Voodoo Castle, Mission Impossible...good times, indeed.

 

SYS32592...forever etched into my mind.

Edited December 11, 2012 by Trebor

[Mad-Mike]

My first computer was a Tandy 1000 SX, which was given to me by my sister in 1997. That's right, everyone was running Windows 98, and here I am clattering around at the MS-DOS 3.21 (for the Tandy 1000 SX) command line.

 

I remember that computer fondly, 6/4.77 MHz 8088, proprietary keyboard, Tandy CM4 color monitor, 2 360K DSDD Floppy drives 5.25" form factor, and no hard drive + 384K RAM (later upgraded to 640K using the local Opelika' Radio Shack's outdated catalogs to order the parts).

 

I used to spend hours playing Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny on it, and I even went as far as running Ultima VI: The False Prophet on it...which was a nightmare at 6 MHz in TGA, even if I did have 3 voice sound, especially after being used to my other sister's 386.

 

Then it died, and I replaced it with a cobbled-together 486 I built myself with nary a clue what I was doing. Fun days...installing AOL 3.0 and 4.0 so I could set up an AOL acount whilst circumventing the ads that I could not bypass without a mouse by alternating versions through the setup process, getting a NMI error during Ultima VI and getting a lovely psycadelic pallette change. Spending hours in mIRC talking in #Captain_N on gammaforce and having to exit to DOS and restart Windows 3.1 because GDI and RAM were all used up, LOL. My how far I've come.

[RickR]

VIC-20. Purchased it and a datasette around 1981 from Montgomery Wards!

[SeaGtGruff]

VIC-20. Purchased it and a datasette around 1981 from Montgomery Wards!

My first computer was also a VIC-20 with a datasette. I got it for Christmas, so I don't know where my parents bought it-- possibly at Sears or K-Mart. I had wanted an Atari 800, so I was somewhat disappointed to get a VIC-20 instead, and I wasn't thrilled that the display had only 23 rows of 22 characters. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun playing the Scott Adams' text adventure games, or adapting some of my programming assignments in college to the VIC-20 (my first adaptation was a program to calculate the first weekday for any given year and display a monthly calendar). I also typed in a lot of programs from magazines and books. I bought the 16K RAM expansion/BASIC programming extension for it, as well as "Mapping the VIC-20," and experimented with writing interrupt routines to switch screen colors at specific scan lines. I also wrote my own 6502 assembler and disassembler for it. I was just learning how to wedge my own "commands" into the BASIC interpreter when coverage of the VIC-20 was essentially dropped by the magazines. (I actually submitted an article for the VIC-20 to Compute! magazine and got a "nice" form letter rejection, which really bummed me out at the time.)

[Jinks]

Hearing these stories make me wanna dig out the trs80coci2 and tandy 1000sl/2....

[KiwiArcader]

Amstrad CPC464 with a green screen (quickly upgraded to a colour screen) is the first computer I owned. Plenty of cool games etc. and tape loading was way faster than my in-laws Atari 800XL. Still, I think I actually spent more time on that Atari truth be told.

[Classic Pac]

My very first computer was Radio Shack Color Computer 2, it wasn't new but something found in the trash...and I found it. Programing in BASIC especially when you haven't got a way of storing all that work was a real pain. But I admit I learned a few things no manual teachs you. First of all for the most part BASIC is BASIC. expect for a few specialized command words most BASIC programs will work on any computer that uses it. Also a single mistake in a very long program can have strange twists. I still remember typing out this one that was suppose to give you random waves. I made 1 tiny mistake and that wave fell flat. I did manage to get 1 game for it. I don't remember which one but it seems Coco 2 games have worst graphics than a 2600.

[onefallinghope]

First? Northstar Horizon, with an external 8" floppy and a nice green phosphour terminal. it was frigging sweet, had a wooden case, and I still have it!!

 

Second was a VIC-20 (that one was sold by me to raise funds for a C64)

 

Third was a C64

 

Then an A500

 

I remember sometime around 93 i also got a 486DX2 66... which was pretty much bleeding edge at the time, had a 14.4K modem too. ...which was a big leap forward from my first modem, which was a 300baud Commodore modem (which I did quickly replace with the 1200)

[Cebus Capucinis]

Lots of VIC-20s! I wish my parents wouldn't have been so militant IBM, as I always had to go to a friend's house to play VIC-20 and later C64.....we really missed out on those machines!

[AtariDude]

i am not going to count the VCS since it was only for playing games and not a computer in my mind. My first real computer was an Atari 800XL. It was a great little system that I got a lot of use of (ok..ok..mostly games...but I did do some actual school work with word processing) and even today, the XL's keyboard is one of my favorite keyboards due to the tight feel and response of the keys.

[almightytodd]

Bumping an old thread, I know... ...but it's better than starting a new one. I bought a Timex/Sinclair 1000 in 1982, and stayed up until four o'clock in the morning playing with it that first night. The fact that I could "own" an actual general purpose computer was just magical to me. I found an emulator for the TS1000 a while ago, and wrote a short demo program. Here it is running on my Acer One netbook:

 

 

This also gives me an excuse to show-off my guitar playing skills...

[gamecat80]

"My" first computer was a C64. Actually, my mom bought it for the family sometime in the mid 80s. I wanna say 1985 or 1986.

It was just the very basic keyboard computer plus the attachments/power supply and a small green-screen monochrome monitor. No disc/floppy drives, joy sticks or printer -- just the main computer & monitor. We only had like 6 Fisher-Price cartridge games for it. I still more-or-less remember them: Basic Programming (?), Kickman, Seaspeller, Jupiter Lander, Up & Add 'Em, and Dance Fantasy. We had to use the control buttons on the keyboard since we had no joystick. Once we got an NES around 1988, we no longer played the C64. The C64 is LONG gone -- I think it was thrown out in the 90s

 

I looked up those C64 games, and many now are rare (and expensive) and damn-near impossible to find anymore. Some I could not even find. Should have held onto them :!: Guess hindsight is 20/20...

[00WReX]

First game system was an Atari VCS around 1982...still have it.

First computer was an Amstrad CPC 464 with colour monitor (around 1985)...still have it and love it.

 

Cheers,

Shane