What was your first computer?
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An old Mac (can't remember the exact model) with Mac OS 7.0.0. I think the harddrive was around 400MB of storage not sure what the RAM is in it. It came with a few fun games including a tank game and a crossword puzzle game that could also make cross word puzzles. Some of the games that I got later on it you have to open a certain way or the OS would crash (not sure if a manually updating the OS would help (it has never been on the internet (one of the games that did not crash it had an OS update on one of the CD-ROMs)). It also has a Floppy Disk drive.
If I recall application installs took about 20 to 40ish minutes.
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In 1997, when I was 5 years old, my father bought a computer for his work. It was Pentium 486. Sometimes father allowed me to sit to the PC. I remember Norton Commander and games on it. I played Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 1-2, Duke Nukem, Blood, Little Big Adventure and others. It was very nice time :).
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What a wonderful thread!
My first computer was a ZX81... 1K of memory later expanded to a 16K with a RAM Pack. You had to have a bit of cardboard under the pack or it would wobble and fall out.
Next up I think was a VIC20... first colour computer.... 3.5K of RAM.
Then It was an Acorn Electron.. then a really powerful 48K ZX Spectrum.... still have it and it works
Finished off with an Amega 500 before moving onto PCs.
Fun times having to save things to tape.
Games I remember:
Scott Adams text adventure games
Manic Miner
Horace Goes Skiing
Attic Attack
Bomber (Vic20)
3D Monster Maze (ZX81 - whole game in 1K)This still works
Fun times
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Guess I was fortunate for having had access to some vintage computing equipment. The first computer was a PC 1715 built in SΓΆmmerda/GDR with two 5 1/4 floppy drives. The CPU clock was running at 1 MHz (Processor U880). That popular computer also had a few secret competitors with a four times faster CPU version (mostly with a 4 MHz CPU).
A real Computer like the PC1512 was partially available for 60.000 Mark (East Germany) and remained a dream for many.Study allowed access to some PC clones (some with color graphics and some without). That was cool to play some of the most intriguing games ever made. Who with a smile would not remember BlockOut!, Digger, Sokoban and alikes.
Dinosaurs like an IBM/370 clone and it's successor EC1056 with attached printer/puncher and disks (40 MB per staple) brought much fun and wisdom that there is something to earn money with. This year IBM released the z/15 which is still able to run programs developed in that Dark Ages.
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I admit that I have used public equipment and corporate assets for a decade before I finally "owned" one. They purchased a "laptop" to me, with PC-DOS, a prototype for Ericsson with a floppy drive - 12Kg on the scale at Schiphol where I had to explain what the contraption could be used for. The main application was "Sidekick" to edit C-code and write emails and work as a VT120 terminal.
I started with the same Zx80 at the Design Centre but at that time, I had own "workstations" and my favourite was a Tandberg terminal that we expanded at Regnesentralen (NR/NCC). Others expanded "Mycron" to the marvelous 1MB with shelves of 64K memory cards. I started trying the same but was derailed by Intel presenting the iAPx86. Well, I lost on the addresses but was awarded the DMA interleave. And by then changed work, and at ND we received the first computers from Apple - Lisa and Mac that we placed in the "community area" outside our offices.
At ND I built a Xenix workstation from a Wyse PC, and I purchased this when I left ND in 1992. I bought a PC to run Rational Rose and make "Rose models" during weekends and play games - around 1988. This was for home use only and playing games.
We had good editors for coding, and Norsk Data had superior "LED" compared to what is available even today. If I made things, it was quickly moved to where it could be used. Big things like Oracle could not be worked on a PC, and my private "laptop" was stuck for weeks checking the memory for a buffer overrun. It was very unusual that computers were "private property". The Commodores were gimmick the consultants played with while we held meetings, but the true story is that I never took time. But it started with an IBM 370 and Nord-1. But: I made my own C-compiler. -
My first computer was a Radio Shack pocket computer, but before that I had a Sym-1, which was not a full-fledged computer. It looked like a bare motherboard, but with rubber feet underneath and a little speaker plus a row of 6 8-segment LEDs for output and a hex keypad for input.
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Mine was a Spectrum+ 48k with one of the classic cassette players connected with jacks 3'5.
I remember the load of games was a flipping coin, you take the risk when almost game is loaded, may get a fearly "LOADING ERROR". You've turned angry instantly, had to rewind and try again: Hard days for gamers . Sometimes I used the POKE codes, for cheating, extra features, etc.
Also -at least in my country- in computer magazines were gifted playable demos each week.
Then when I grown up I bought a Pentium 166MMX and 17" monitor with my first salary...with second one the printer and a scanner: full equipment
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Radio Shack TRS-80 with Level II BASIC, 1980. Programs loaded in via cassette tape.
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My first was a 48k spectrum,Then a commodore 16/plus4.
I finally had a commodore amiga 500.
I still have 2 amiga 500's in their original boxes.
All great computers. -
@other ditto but I had cassette loader for games..Impossible Mission was my favourite, gave me headaches when I played to long lol
note: also had Pong..2 controllers and a box, plug it in to the tv, in my case it was a black & white Philips and play.
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Mine was a Toshiba HX-20.
Data was still recorded on cassette tape, not floppy disk. -
My first computing device was not a full-fledged computer. It was a Sym-1, and looked like a bare motherboard except it had rubber feet under it, the input was a hex keypad, and the output was a tiny speaker and a row of 8-segment LEDs. I played Hunt the Wumpus on it. I also had a music program that played only one track, and a bunch of other little programs.
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A Blast from the past
This was apparently Jonβs first post on this forum, on 21st November 2013, about a month before I joined on 20th December 2013.
This was a couple of years before the first Technical Preview was released on 27th January 2015.
One of the first computers I used was a Compaq Portable
My first computer was a Viglen PC, with a 720x480 pixel portrait, monochrome monitor.
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@other said in What was your first computer?:
My first box was a Commodore C64β¦ great introduction!
+1
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Cool stories in here, my family's first was a boring old 8086 running at 0.00716 GHz. It had a CGA graphics card but an orange display, so it could only display four shades of orange in graphics mode. As a result I hardly played any games and got into the Internet instead when I was about 10 or 11, well before HTTP was invented. And the rest is history.
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@bigbumplover said in What was your first computer?:
0.00716 GHz
Or like what was actually used at the time: 7.16 Mhz
Interestingly, this is the same clockspeed as the NTSC Amiga, with a Motorola 68000. The PAL version I had ran at 7.09 Mhz. Possibly the slightly higher clock is to account for the 60hz display rate for NTSC compared to 50hz for PAL. But the PAL version had higher resolution
Amiga was a gaming powerhouse even at that speed - especially with its awesome sound capability, not at all like the bleeps and bloops of the PCs speaker at the time.
One of my favourite games: Rick Dangerous!
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@Pathduck I had a friend with an Amiga 500 and I was super jealous, especially of the multitasking ability, something I wouldn't experience until I got my hands on a 386 and installed Linux (before kernel 1.0!)