What Was Your First Computer? What Do You Use Now?

For me, it was a Packard Bell 386 running Windows 3.0. We had 2400 baud for the modem. I remember I spent my tax return on it, and it cost over $2000. I think it had 2 or 4 mgb of Ram.

I guess I had a slightly faster computer. Pentium 2 333mhz cpu, 4 mb video card, 8 mb ram, win95.


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I guess it depends what you call computer. The first thing I had you could only play that simplistic tennis game on TV, then the commodore 64, 128, 512. It's about here they slowly became real computers. Amiga 4000/30 and 4000/60.

When they were going the way of the dodo, I switched to PC. From then to now, more than I can even remember.

My first "drive" for the C-64 was just a cassette player. I had to write down in a book what part contained what.

My very first was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, affectionately knows as "the CoCo". I remember learning to program that thing in Extended Color BASIC, a version of BASIC Tandy leased from Microsoft. My CoCo came came with 16KB (yes, that's a "K") of memory (expandable to 64KB if you were willing to drop if off for a few days), and used a cassette tape for offline storage. I remember being VERY excited when the first floppy drive for it came out. Modems back then were 300 baud or, if you had money to burn, you had a Hayes "Smart Modem" 1200 baud.

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A family friend was getting rid of some junk in his barn and he offered me an old Casio "computer". I don't remember the model, but you had to hook it up to a TV for a monitor and it attached to a tape recorder. Now i have a Dell laptop at home (needs replacing), IBM Thinkpad at work and a couple of tablets.

Amiga a1200,used it mainly as a gen lock to lay titles over my videos,for the youngsters a picture i just downloaded



Now i have a few but use an ASUS mainly

Compaq portable w/dual floppy drives ( the one that looked like a sewing machine ), Mac Performa 577, Packard Bell ( due to work ), Sony Multi-media ( water cooled ), MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, iMac.

​I think that covers them, may have missed one.

Franklin Apple II clone

The TI-99/4 series holds the distinction of being the first 16-bit personal computer.[2] The TI-99/4A had a 16-bit TMS9900 CPU running at 3.0 MHz. No storage until they cMe out with a floppy drive you could add on to it. This was about 1980 or so. A big difference from not that my desktop has 7.5 TB IN IT.

Horoscope Fish said:

My very first was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer, affectionately knows as "the CoCo". I remember learning to program that thing in Extended Color BASIC, a version of BASIC Tandy leased from Microsoft. My CoCo came came with 16KB (yes, that's a "K") of memory (expandable to 64KB if you were willing to drop if off for a few days), and used a cassette tape for offline storage. I remember being VERY excited when the first floppy drive for it came out. Modems back then were 300 baud or, if you had money to burn, you had a Hayes "Smart Modem" 1200 baud.

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Click to expand...

Ditto! I coded all sorts of "zork" style adventures on cassette tapes back in the days! Never imagined that I would even own a cell phone back then, nor would I ever have imagined that my current phone would have like "a billion" (tic) times more processing and display power...

Well let's see. The first one wasn't really mine, but it was the University's. It was housed in a climate controlled building as large as a good sized hotel. I took Fortran 4 programming language and used punch cards for programming. Next one I was involved with was a Burroughs my parents had for their bookkeeping business. The harddrives were open discs a little larger in diameter than 78 RPM records. I think there were 4, if I remember correctly. The computer cost my folks quite a large sum of money and it only did accounting (monthly and annual reports). No income tax, or anything else. It used paper punch tape for storing the individual accounts records. My first computer was a VIC 20, then a Com. 64, and then......................OMG........................... a 286 with a meg or so of ram. What fun! Ha!

My sister worked for IBM and bought me a scrapped PC Convertable for $10 in 1988. It came with the printer, monitor, and modem modules. I still have it, but generally use a tower I built a couple of years ago.

(Not my picture)

My very first computer was one of these beauties....



At first we only had the tape drive, then later a dot-matrix printer and a 5.25 disk drive. That when I was at school.

YEARS later I bought my first PC, which was a Pentium 75 MHz, with 8MB RAM & an 850 MB HDD. I had to save a bit longer as it was just after they found that Pentium 60's couldn't do maths and kept making mistakes!

An IBM PC Model 5150 my parents purchased for me in 1984 for college. It was upgraded to dual DS/DD 5 1/4 inch floppy drives and 128 kilobytes of RAM, which I later upgraded to 192 kilobytes. In addition, it had a monochrome graphics card, and a 14-inch monochrome monitor. It cost just short of $2400, back then.

I used it with a early word processor and an early version of PC Basic to model mechanical systems for some upper level Mechanical Engineering classes. It was a very good machine for it's day, to me, and several of my co-horts in college. But it almost got several of us thrown out of school.

My parents had it and used it for a few things until a few years ago, when the local animal shelter's IBM PC (same model) quit working and my parents gave it to them. It was still working as of two years ago, at 28 years old.

The very first computer I used was at college it was an English Electric DEUCE back in 1969.

English Electric DEUCE - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Now that was the beast that I actually learnt to program on using punched cards.


This was my first personal computer my dad bought it for me late 1981. It used the TV as a monitor and a cassette tape for storage.

pic courtesy of wikipedia.



I moved to the BBC model-B next which was amazing, then got my son the Atari 520ST in the late 1980's for christmas.

Still remember playing Llamatron on it that was the craziest game ever.

In the early 90's I got my first PC running Windows, had a few home built PC's for a few years starting with MS DOS up to Windows XP.

Then in 2002 I got my first Mac when Apple launched OS X 10.00.

Been a Mac user ever since.

The FAA had a little "computer" to teach Air Traffic computer programming. It had 256 bytes of memory. Yep, bytes. Then of course there were the mainframes. My own first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 with 5K. The first modem was 300 Kb/sec. The office computers were various IBMs and clones. I spent quite a bit of time upgrading the motherboards, processors, and memory, and of course MS-DOS and then Windows. I built my first PCs because it was much cheaper then. Now I have an HP desktop, HP laptop, and a Samsung Chromebook. 300 Kb/sec to 30 Gb/sec in 30 years. ::what::

My dad in his wisdom got was this beauty, and i never even owned The Elite. I wanted a Spectrum

Got my 1st PC about 12 years ago, can't remember exactly what was inside, I know it was running windows 95, and by todays standards, it was very slow.
And on dial up internet at the time, which took about 10 minutes to download a mp3 file, now you can download the same file in seconds

Pretzel said:

Ditto! I coded all sorts of "zork" style adventures on cassette tapes back in the days! Never imagined that I would even own a cell phone back then, nor would I ever have imagined that my current phone would have like "a billion" (tic) times more processing and display power...

Click to expand...

imagine if someone from the future 2014 went back and told you in the year 1984 for instance of the cell phones youd be using then how your mind would try to comprehend it. and how overwhelmed youd be and how hard it would be to wait so many years to finally see it happening. its such a far leap forward that its hard to comprehend and yet your so anxious to see it but have to wait so many years.

My real first one of any consequence was one of these babies...