Do you remember your first computer?

[Frodo]

I'm old enough to have used this, even if it was just for play at the time:

[Lief 🗽]

Yes, it cost a few thousand dollars.

[Frodo]

Yes, it cost a few thousand dollars.

I meant simply using a computer, even it was your parents'. 

[The Dowager Mod]

Vic-20.

[memphis]

Similar to this

1.2 GB hard drive
16 KB RAM
133 MHz Pentium processor
Ran Windows 95
Cost about $2,000

[muon2]

This was my first computer at school. The HP 2000 timeshare.



After two years of sending cards to the machine, my school got a terminal and telephone coupler to speed communication. I still have a shoe box full of ASCII punched tape programs I wrote used by the Teletype machine.

[anvi]

muon2 has the real goods there.  Those are fantastic.

This was the first pc I ever saw.

http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn64/anvikshiki/thetwo_zpsf479190d.png[/img]]

[Adam Griffin]

I technically got my first computer (hand-me-down, from my mom's place of employment) when I was 4-5, circa 1993. It was probably originally made in the mid-1980s (just guessing). It was a very basic machine with just a command prompt. I remember playing a few floppy disc games on it, though. It looked something like this:



My first substantial computer came in early 1999 - a Gateway. It was pretty sweet at the time: 256 MB of RAM, 10 GB hard drive, 350 mHZ processor, and more software than I could ever use. It also was close to $2500, jeez.

[Flake]

My first substantial computer came in early 1999 - a Gateway. It was pretty sweet at the time: 256 MB of RAM, 10 GB hard drive, 350 mHZ processor, and more software than I could ever use. It also was close to $2500, jeez.

This is the one I had as well!

[Ebowed]

I remember upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows 98.  But I don't remember what the computers looked like until I was about 11 or 12, when I got my own laptop.  It was a compaq presario with a 2.6 GB hard drive and 64 MB of RAM, and it ran Windows Me (upgraded from 98).

[RR1997]

My first substantial computer came in early 1999 - a Gateway. It was pretty sweet at the time: 256 MB of RAM, 10 GB hard drive, 350 mHZ processor, and more software than I could ever use. It also was close to $2500, jeez.

This is the one I had as well!

This was my first computer too! Oh the childhood memories.

[WalterMitty]

the trs-80.  it was 1982 and i was in kindergartem.

[afleitch]

Commodore 64.

[Badger]

An Apple II e. We got it litterally several weeks before the release of the Mac was announced.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

The first computer my family ever had was the Tandy 1000, before I was born.  The first computer I remember using was my an old Compaq that, as far as I know, is still around somewhere.  When I was about seven, we got a Gateway that worked for about a dozen years.

[anvi]

An Apple II e. We got it litterally several weeks before the release of the Mac was announced.

The irony of the early story at Apple was that Jobs always maintained that the Apple II sales were starting to tank and that's why the company needed the Mac.  The fact of the matter was that the company was still doing quite well with Apple II sales, and the first highly-priced Mac, because it had so few applications, was dragging down company profits after its release.  But Jobs literally tried to kill the Apple II division because of his Mac crusade, and that's how Scully got the upper hand with the board.  The more experienced Steve Jobs of the late '90's and early 2000's was a much better businessman that the young lunatic of the early '80's.  The Apple IIs were good machines, so long as you knew how to write some basic OS code instructions by yourself and maybe do a little BASIC programming.  The Xerox-inspired Mac with its graphic interface was certainly innovative and nice to look at-- but I remember the first time I used one I felt suddenly dumber, because you didn't have to know any code at all to run it.   

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

My first substantial computer came in early 1999 - a Gateway. It was pretty sweet at the time: 256 MB of RAM, 10 GB hard drive, 350 mHZ processor, and more software than I could ever use. It also was close to $2500, jeez.

This is the one I had as well!

This was my first computer too! Oh the childhood memories.

Yeah, my dad bought one of these for work in 1995 but never used it. It sat unused at my house until I was three (so around 1999), when we moved it to my Grandma's, who learned to use it. We didn't have another computer at home until I was about ten.

[angus]

the trs-80.  it was 1982 and i was in kindergartem.

haha!  That was my first computer as well.  It was a gift for my 15th birthday. 

Quinceañeras get a big puffy dress.  I got a computer!

[muon2]

the trs-80.  it was 1982 and i was in kindergartem.

haha!  That was my first computer as well.  It was a gift for my 15th birthday. 

Quinceañeras get a big puffy dress.  I got a computer!

The Z-80 microprocessor that was the CPU for the TRS-80 worked well in kits. I had to build one to use in my first year grad school course on experimental methods (1979). I had the advantage of having built one based on its forerunner the Intel 8080A for my junior year electronics lab, which we then programmed to play the school anthem on nearby radios. All those early microcomputers put out so much radio noise that the FCC had to create new regulations.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Yes.  It was TRS-80 Color Computer with a full 32K of RAM (technically, it had 64K RAM, but only 32K was used because the other half of the address space was reserved for the ROM-based OS.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

It was a Compaq Presario.  I forget what it looked like, but it took over a minute to use the "fill" bucket in MS Paint.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

We had at least three Atari System's floating around, whereas the PCs came and went until about 1999 when we then kept one continously in the House.