what was your first computer?

linter

taking off from some amusing responses in the 'how many funds do you own' thread, i thought it'd be fun to know what PCs folks here had s their first computer. mine was an Osborne, followed by a Kaypro, both circa 1982. both had similar specs -- a superb, ha ha, 5-inch display, two sludge-slow 5.25" floppy disk drives, 64k memory and a modem that made future advances to 300 baud seem like a miracle ... all for the low low price of around 2k. i bought a printer with the kaypro, bringing my total to around $3,200 iirc. but remember - both the O and the K were portables. the first of their kind. weighing only 25 lbs each!
was the operating system CP/M? i believe so. No windows for a few more years ....
what about you?

LLJB

Wow, I don't remember any of the specs or even the precise timing, but I think it was mid '80s and my first computer was an Apple. Around the same time my Mom wanted to buy the stock but my Dad refused and it was probably the biggest mistake they ever made.

msf

I never believed in those newfangled contraptions. Too much trouble to administer. I stuck with terminals. Very intelligent terminals, mind you, like X terminals, but terminals none the less. Finally gave in somewhere around the turn of the millennium. I think it was an HP something or other, I forget.

My mother was another matter. She had an Apple II, which I never understood. I would see her spend two nights doing a sysgen (loading a new OS) on her S/360 at work and wonder why she wanted more grief at home.

Mark

1986, a Mac+ along with a dot matrix printer. Grad school advisor would only accept computer outputs. He marveled that I could do graphics on the Mac and insert them into documents which apparently his DOS-based whatever was incapable of.

msf

linter said:

a modem that made future advances to 300 baud seem like a miracle ...

Thanks for the reminder. A portable terminal that I'd used (at 300 baud) did have a switch for slower settings. Now that you mention it, I do remember it had a 110 speed. Fortunately, never had to use that.

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1612.99

Old_Skeet

My first computer for me was a Commodore 64k ... Then I upgraded and got another 64 that was packaged in what amounted to a small suite case containing the two disk drives, the computer with small screen and it's key board. I did a lot of things on that Commodore 64 back in the 80's well beyond the capacity of what some believed a small machine could perform.

Anna

Personally owned and, if an 8-bit was considered a PC, I guess the Commodore PET with that awful keyboard. I got it between '78 and '80. Dumped it later for a 286 that I kept for years (40mb drive). Prior other people's computers that I used extensively earlier in the 70s - PDP minis-8/11(&GT 40)/12, and mainframes UNIVAC something, CDC 6400, DEC 10, etc. mainframes. Some of us old folk were still in school when schools started giving students access to computers. New wave majors were being set up In computer programming, computer engineering, etc. Seems like I blinked and my hot reverse polish scientific calculator was yesterday's curiosity. One of my side projects as a first year graduate student in the early 70s was interfacing a PDP-8 to a mass spectrometer so that data could be fed to tape for the hot new fields of computerized data analysis and pattern recognition. Ah, and the early "supercomputers" with parallel magic. Anyone remember Cyber?

Sorry, you asked for one PC and I went into a senior moment. My answer has to be Commodore PET.

Gandalf

Keuffell and Esser slide rule! But first electronic one that I bought was a 512K Mac (aka fat Mac)

hank

1. 1982 - Commadore VIC 20
Cost: Around $120
Memory: 8 bits (expandable to 16 or 32)
Optional Storage: Cassette tape deck
Optional Monitor: B&W
Optional Printer: Dot Matrix

2. 1987, Apple 2E, Apple green screen, floppy disk drive, inkjet printer.
Cost: $1,000+ including peripherals

3. 1992 - Zenith (IBM clone), HD Drive, Microsoft Windows
Cost: About $1500 without peripherals

Sven

Like MSF I used a terminal networked to the university main frame computer. That was before word processing, excel spreadsheet, and Powerpoint software, let alone internet. How things have changed... So I do appreciate the all the new tools and how they make my life easier.

hank

Old_Skeet said:

I did a lot of things on that Commodore 64 back in the 80's well beyond the capacity of what some believed a small machine could perform.

Having had the earlier Commodore VIC 20, I can only imagine what a 64 might do. While I used the "20" primarily for work related word processing, loved the "Sea Wolf" submarine game purchased for it. It's the only video game I've ever really enjoyed. You fired torpedos at ships moving across the surface and had to get the timing "just right" as the ships were moving at different speeds. Great for hand/eye coordination. Nice sound effects too.

MrRuffles

In college I got a Commodore 64, initially with a tape deck which was a real PITA to work with. Upgraded to a 1541 disk drive which failed (as they all did) and was replaced by a 3rd party drive. Used a 12” B&W TV as a monitor. Used it mostly for games and some minor programming as I used the school’s DEC 2060 via VT52 or VT100 monitors for my schoolwork.

In grad school I got a dot-matrix printer and GEOS (Graphic Environment Operating System) software for it which installed a GUI and a sort of WYSIWYG word processor that I used for writing papers. Also had a direct connect 300 baud modem (no acoustic coupler) that I used to access CompuServe.

icyone

It all depends on what you consider your "first".

First working, useful code: Wrote my first successful code in FORAST & it ran on BRLESC.. Would have been in the 60's & I was frustrated with the amount of hand calculation I was doing to make stereographic plots. Went to talk to the mathematicians across the hall for help & never got THEM to understand sterographic projection, so I took a class & wrote the code myself. You took the paper sheets over to the card-punch ladies & eventually your deck could be found in the box outside their office; then you could walk over leave it in the in-box for a short test run. Later, checking the out-box, a deck by itself failed to run at all; a couple of sheets of errors was bad news, a suitable modest output was "SUCCESS". Ultimate humilation was a HUGE pile of garbage output -- meant you doubly screwed up AND didn't include proper fail-safe exit in the code. (Usually you tried to grab it & sneak off with no one looking.....) Typically some corrections were needed & to save time you could punch a few new cards yourself on the key-punch that sat on the stair landing. (FORAST, BTW, was an excellent language which had some nice capabilities not found in FORTRAN, but was not widely used & eventually abandoned. )

First computer that was "mine" at work: a PDP that arrived with my first scanning microscope.

First (and most totally beloved) computer on my desk: my true-love SGI. Somehow I managed to succeed in dodging the curse of M----soft. When M---soft slides were required for a meeting, I got the boss to come by after hours and make them for me.

First home computer -- forgot the mfg, but ran a current version of LINUX. Second computer I built myself, but after that decided building fro scratch wasn't worth the time & effort.

Current home computers: System 76 desktop "Wild Dog" and laptop "Gazelle"; both Linux. No M---soft, no Apple, all happy.

rforno

First computer I owned was in the mid-80s .... Apple //c, green monitor, then added an external 3.5" floppy a few years later as my 'hard disk' -- OMG all my school work for the whole year, plus Appleworks, on ONE DISK!!!

The first computer I remember using was a TRS-80 color computer in a weekend community college programming class I took back in ... 6th grade-ish.

Apart from a 4 year stint in later parts of college and early work, I've been an Apple person for my computing (but not cloud services) needs. Given my career, I've certainly forgotten more about Windows than most people will ever learn, though. Also somewhat handy w/Unix, too -- most of the boxes I used to host were -nix based.

davidrmoran

An expensive Leading Edge PC, later bought a 'ram disk' board and MultiMate, to match the Wang OIS system I used at work for tech writing. Soon had to learn various Unix (also Apple) systems at various later editorial jobs.

BobC

1987, Compaq portable, the case "cover" released to become the keyboard. Screen was maybe 7" or so, not sure, but very small, and of course the background was black, with green letters. Graphics were basic at best. It was, in essence, a hyped-up word processor. Cannot believe I used that and thought it was ok.

PatShuff

1st Timex Sinclair had to program in GW Basic. Programs and data were loaded and saved onto audio tape cassettes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81

2nd Hyperion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion

Low_Tech

1992, IBM clone, Windows 3.1, 33 Mhz chip, 170 mg. hard drive, large floppy and the "new" smaller floppy that wasn't really floppy.

I got the box, keyboard, mouse, and a 10-ton monitor for $2,000.

I bought a pin printer a year or so later, don't remember for sure but it was around $200-$300.

Went online in 1994 with AOL. Had dial-up until 2005.

davidrmoran

epson lq800, or close

hawleyl

My first computer was an IBM 701 as part of a class in programming at UC Berkeley around 1958, 59. It was the last class given on the 701 before it was decommissioned. Vacuum tubes comprised the circuitry; a power substation was located just outside Cory Hall to power the computer and air-conditioning. When IBM went on a sales trip for the 701, they thought there would only be orders for five. They came back with orders for 18, which they built, and then were persuaded to make a 19th. Can you imagine only 19 computers were the total computer market in the early 1950s?

My first personal computer was based on an S100 bus. My S100 chassis contained a Zilog CPU, a disk controller, a SCSI (Small Compute Serial Interface), and memory cards. I used a Persci 8-inch floppy disk drive. (When I took the disk drive in for repair in Hollywood, the repair shop said they also did work for Fran Zappa.) I later acquired an Apple IIE, then a Mac 512; and now I use a Macbook Pro laptop.

Old_Joe

@Mark- Ditto on the Mac+ and matrix printer, circa '86 also.

msf

hawleyl said:

My first computer was an IBM 701 as part of a class in programming at UC Berkeley around 1958, 59.

Cal was still a great place to learn this stuff decades later - land of BSD unix. The CS dept. let me sit in on an OS class and gave me an account to do the assignments, even though I wasn't a registered student. Don't remember the computer there at the time, though.