What Was Your First Computer?

Discussion in 'The Bucket' started by ComputerJohn, Jun 13, 2011.

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  1. gcarroll

    gcarroll Zoanthid

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    Commodore 64 followed by Apple IIe. Macs ever since. I think I'm typing on #11.
     
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  3. Servillius

    Servillius Montipora Digitata

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    Sinclair ZX81. I wasn't in the U.S. at the time, so not sure if the naming conventions were different. Our school had a TRS80 I learned to program on... kinda.
     
  4. antole

    antole Spanish Shawl Nudibranch

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    Commodore 64 with cassette drive, wow was that slow but I loved it, then my first Mac
     
  5. TritonsGarden

    TritonsGarden 3reef Sponsor

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    I remember writing a Basic pre-complier so that my source code would not need numbers. The pre-complier would add numbers for me.

    I did not buy a home computer until the early 90s. I worked with them all day and didn't want to mess with them at home. At work my first was a DEC PDP-11. You had to enter an octal boot code using toggle switches to boot it from the tape drive. A 20MB hard drive was the size of a washing machine.

    Jack
     
  6. barbianj

    barbianj Hammer Head Shark

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    I worked with a DEC PDP 8E. "8k of core memory". Ticker tape feed, no monitor- data was printed out on green bar paper. It was upgraded to 8" dual floppies, IIRC. The floppy drives were so heavy, I could barely lift them.

    My first personal computer was a 286-12. I paid a lot for a 20 meg HD, a math coprocessor and a paper white monitor. I hated green. At 12 Mhz, it was called a "white elephant" in reviews, because nothing could sustain that kind of speed long term. :eek: I had to install the memory chips onto the motherboard myself. The chips themselves were not on a card like they are today, they were individual chips with 18 legs or whatever. They were very fragile, and it took a long time to get them in place. There were no instructions, and the first go around, I installed them all backwards and nearly burned them out.
     
  7. cgarner

    cgarner Skunk Shrimp

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    My first computer was a Tandy. I think it was the 1000 model. I used it for word processing and playing pong and some crappy football game.
     
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  9. barbianj

    barbianj Hammer Head Shark

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    Haha, I didn't see that before I posted.

    When I was in college, we would write a program in the computer lab, then the program was punched out onto cards-like a week later. When I got the cards, I had to walk to a different building so that the cards could be loaded and my program ran. I remember standing in line with a shoebox full of punch cards thinking how ridiculous it was. If I had dropped that box, I would have been screwed. :p
     
  10. Ron P

    Ron P Astrea Snail

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    Wow blast from the past there. Lol

    My first was a TI-99/4a. I loved that thing. The tape drive was just a regular cassette recorder with a little cable that plugged in the back. The speech synthesizer was really cool.

    I went from that to an atari 800xl. I thought wow disk drives are awesome! I picked up a 186 a few years later.

    I remember when windows first came out and thinking it was kinda lame. Lol
     
  11. Renee@LionfishLair

    Renee@LionfishLair 3reef Sponsor

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    I don't remember what is was, but I remember trying to type reports when it would run out of RAM and I couldn't type another word more. It would drive me INSANE. The drive was a tape deck of sorts.


    ----------------
    Sent from Tapatalk, so please forgive grammar and spelling :)
     
  12. barbianj

    barbianj Hammer Head Shark

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    I remember when the internet first came out and thinking it was kinda lame. lol. It was just text, no graphics. How could THAT be better than BBS's??? ::)