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What was your first computer ?


Bruno

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Hi all, Mine was a 486 33MHz with 4MB of RAM and a 210MB Conners (was it something else) hard drive. I played a lot of games on it ;) and at the same time learnt a lot about computers that friends start calling you for help when their own computers act up on them. Later on I upgraded toa Pentium 166Mhz with 32MB of RAM and a 2.5GB hard drive. The hard drive crashed and I added an 8.4GB (the largest capacity that piece of junk can handle). I added more peripherals to it, including a Diamond Monster 3D (the first generation! :P , and mid-last year, a CD-RW drive. Unfortunately, I'm left with no computers access at home when it died early this year ;) ?I'm now eyeing one of Dell's Inspiron laptops as my replacement. :D Cheers!

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My first was a TI99 4A ,2nd Commodore 64, boy what a step up, Then a real IBM XT that had 640k of ram and a big 10MB hard drive. I now have two 1.2 gig XP machines and one old 200 Pentium with Windows 98 SE that I use for testing software. My main workhorse is a 933 MZ machine with 512 Meg of ram and a 60 GB hard dirve with two CD burners. All of this with a super fast cable connection to the world. Boy how things have changed in the 25 years I have had computers at home.

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It was an Apple clone - a Franklin. That was back in 1984. I'm running a Dell Dimension now with 2GH - but I think I had more fun with the Franklin. Ran the program Dollars and Sense on it. That was a good personal money program. Al

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steve57765

I got my first PC back in 1994 (I think) it was a Gateway 233mg Pentium MMX 16 mg RAM 4gig harddrivenow I have a Gateway Pentium 4 1.9ghz 768 RDRAM 2 hard drives a 40 gig and 120 gig What an upgrade huh??

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All,WASHad access to a compaq luggable, also a Kaypro.made punchcards at OSU, I was in Grade school, for honors class, never actually saw the machine.Had AppleII at school (high school)TI99/4A at home.ISDesktopHomeBuilt P4-1.9, 1Gig ram, 80GB HD, 10fans, MSI Board, CD/RW, DVD. MX700, IBM Model M keyboard/Win2000 Advanced Server-Mandrake in VMWareLaptopSony VAIO Z505LS - Win2000/Mandrake Dual BootFile Server - Cel500 HP e-VectraPrint Server - Cel500 HP e-VectraSons ComputerPII-500 - old gateway board, built from scrap. great for kids gamesMany half working machines in my workshop, remanants of the time between Then and Now

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Actualy wanted to start a poll, but then what choises would you give ? So I started a normal thread;What was the first computer you've ever owed ? The box that got you interested ?And what is the latest one you got today ?Mine was a commodore 64 with tape deckGot a self-build K7S5A sis735, AMD 1700+ these days, (and two old P1)Bruno
My first computer was an IBM 1620 followed by an IBM 1730 B) . Anyone old enough to remember those machines is either retired or about to retire B) . I've also worked on every minicomputer manufactured between 1966 and 1975, over 350 different machines ;) . Then I moved into mainframes for 25 years while working on every PC level as they came out. Busy time!
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The box that got me interested was a IBM 1401 with 2K (yes that's K) memory, no random access drive, with 4 tape drives for input/output. High/Low?equal compare was an option otherwise it was compare equal or unequal. It took a whole room, air conditioned, with a raised floor to hold the beast. Only banks and insurance companies had enough money to afford them.

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FIRST COMPUTER...ever Used - electronic : Dec PDP8/Data general - time share & teletypeBuilt- Analog: Home brewed three Potentiometers a meter and a wheatstone bridgebuilt - digital: (Mechanical) Digi Comp used plastic straws , rubber bands and wire flip flops and a Mechanical binary display - clocked mechanically by handbuilt - digital (electronic): MOS Technologies KIM1, 6502 board based computer (4k ram) with a "real" operating system and crt display: IBM PC1 (Built November 1981 delevered following January (I think... May be off by a year... anyway it was part of IBMs "first day ship" for employee sales). 64 kb ram two floppies, no harddrive.)Current PC: ABS Athalon 2000+ Love it!...Okay I'll shutup now! B) ---Chuck

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What memories!! My first home computer was an Atari 400 with a membrane keyboard and plug in cartridges. I bought it at Sears. I have never had as much fun with any computer since then, as the Atari gave me all of my initial "gee whiz" experiences -- first programming, first on-line (with a 300 baud modem connected to CompUserve, all the way down in Columbus, OH), first word processing, etc. I wish I had kept it.I bought it after a friend of my wife came to our home with a 2600 game console, and wife and kids had a ball with it. I announced I could do better, that I'd get us a computer that would play the same games but do more.That keyboard mashed my fingers flat until I bought and installed a Home brand (if memory is correct) "real" keyboard.

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My first box was a "portable" KAYPRO 64K with a small (about 9" maybe) green screen built into the front panel, (2) 5¼" floppy drives using the CP/M operating system.I purchased this critter along with a Mannesman Tally 9-pin dot matrix printer and word processing, spreadsheet & database software for about $3,700 in 1985. The word processor & spreadsheet programs were hard enough for this total neophyte to learn an adequate amount so that they were truly useful, but that D*** database (DBII) still gives me nightmares.Oh, the rapture when the floppy mfrs. came out with the doubled capacity of a whopping 720 KB per disk. You had to format every disk and also format your workfiles for filing and printing. God help you if you booted or shut down with a disk in either drive - it was bye, bye!The printer was a real piece of work - a true workhorse and practically indestructible, but Jeez - it sounded like a Blackhawk helo on liftoff while printing. Oh my, they were the days!

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Oh ya! I remember the Wang. Do any of you remember the Univac 1218 or the UYK-20? Ok, so they weren't mine....Uncle Sam owned 'em. But if they didn't run right you'd think they were mine. They were early 70's vintage ship-board targeting and defense computers. The Univac 1218 was the size of a refrigerator, had not a single integrated circuit. It weighed about 600 lbs and you could hit it with a big hammer and it wouldn't miss a beat. I now own a $3 calculator with more horse power...My first out of the service was a Timex Sinclair.I have several computers now, my favorites being my 400MHz Pentium powered w/128 MB RAM and 2 10GB HDD's on raid 1 running E-Smith (linux) serving up my internet and laser printer to.... My wife on an AMD 1.7MHz Athlon w/512MB RAM and myself on an Athlon XP200 w/768 MB RAM. We both use dual monitors...nothing like a large desktop!Long live Arpanet!

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First for me was a TRS80, then a Commadore 64 which I must add I still have and it does work. Love those floopies.Three Sony's later (pcv-90, pcv-302ds, pvc-r547ds) I finnaly built my own. Anthlon XP1800+ KT266A 512 ddr.Love this system, handle everything I throw at it.By the way my first post to this board. Love the newsletter.

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My first "home computer" was a DEC --Digital Equipment Corporation for those too young to remember-- PDT-11. This was a great stride for the 1975 state ot the art. It consisted of a scaled down PDP-11 processor with a mighty 32k of memory.. and two 8-inch floppy drives that held something like 300 k bytes apiece!! It ran the RT-11 operating system, the grandfather of MS-DOS, and along with a VT-100 terminal and an LA-100 "letter quality" printer was a primitive word processor. DEC sold the systems to employees for around $600, which was about 25% of the list price. Considering inflation and what you can get today for $600, it was pretty pricey!! The first PC I had was an IBM XT clone with an 8088 CPU that ran at 10 MHz, had 256k of RAM and a "huge" 5 MB disk drive. By then I had graduated to a "real" word processor -- Wordstar -- and a real spreadsheet too -- VisiCalc. Wonder where THEY all went... B)

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jimholeman29

My first computer was an HP 86A. What i liked was that I could program whatever I needed to in Basic and when ready just type "run". I had both a printer and a plotter for output

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First was a Commodore 64 which sold last year on eBay for a bunch. Offered the guy the printer, floppy, tape drives and a software library, all in working order, for the cost of shipping but he wasn't interested. Went through a dual floppy DOS6.0, and finally got an XT with a 10 M HD. Now what would you do with all that memory? Plugged in individual chips to populate out to the 256K RAM...wow! 5 or 6 Win machines kind of bunch together in there between. Now running a home built WinXP 2GH P4 with 1G RAM and 200G of HD. Not ready to upgrade yet!Dam I am old!

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First computer was an Ohio Scientific C1P. (around 1978-79) A blazing hot 6502 cpu (1 Mhz!!) packed with four thousand and ninety-six bytes of static ram. After a few weeks I expanded the memory to an awesome 8k. It took EIGHT chips to add 4k. I guess that means each chip had 512 BYTES! <G> Pretty decent computer. About as fast as an Apple. Easy to program. Used cassete tape for program storage. When you loaded a program the listing would scroll up the screen. That would allow you to know which program you were loading since, OF COURSE, you wrote all the programs yourself and knew what they looked like. I had fun writing Craps (the dice game) simulations on this. I discovered an infallible system to beat the casino! Thankfully, I tried the program on another computer (an Apple ][) and found out that the C1P's random number generator wasn't as random as I thought. <g> I'm now using a barebones system fleshed out with the remnants of a Dell. It's specs are an Athlon 2100xp on a K7s5a board, 512mb ram, 48 gig storage.

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The first computer I programmed was an IBM 650 mainframe about 1957. It was binary coded decimal and the main memory was a magnetic drum. It was capable of about 200 instructions per second. Along the way I used DEC PDP 11, VAX 780 and IBM 3080 mainframe, all running UNIX. Yes even on a large IBM mainframe.The first of what could be a PC type was a TI 99-4. Very good graphics programming support. The first PC I used was the original IBM PC with two floppies and no hard drive and could only display text on the monochrome monitor. It cost over $4,000. My current home system is a Dell 8200 with 1.8 GHz P4.

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A Radio Shack TRS-80 back in 1979. 4 k of RAM, Radio Shack cassette for program storage. It was the most fun computer I've ever had because it was my first and I was learning to program in BASIC on my own. Exciting for someone who had never worked on a computer before. I used to wake up in the middle of the night with a brainstorm to try. I'd load the BASIC program I was trying to write and debug, write or alter some code and run the program. When it was correct it was great. When it wasn't it hard to seleep. I upgraded to 16K of RAM for only $64! Built an expansion box with a floppy controller, 32 K RAM, 300 baud modem for another $300 plus. Got it to run the first time then built a case and must have shorted something because it never ran again. I paid more for that machine than I did my present Dell pentium 4 at 2.53 GHz!Raj

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I don't remember the name of the first computer I worked on. It was in 1969, used punch cards, and had a removable hard the size of serving platters. The hard drive was changed depending on what program was to be run, it was probably more like a very large version the 5 1/4" floppies with read-only programs before real read/write hard drives were used (or invented?). All progamming was in Fortran 4. Trying to find a programming error in a 50 page printout was always fun.The bought my first computer on July 16, 1990, a used $150 Kaypro 2, the one with two 5.25 double density floppy drives, no hard drive, 64K ram, and the CP/M language. By that time everyone was using Windows and no help at all, but I had all the manuals, the time, and the will to decifer them. Wordstar, Datastar, spreadsheets, I learned them all. They were written by Microsoft (!) and completly integrated, just like Office 2000, only easier to understand. I typed out proposals, news letters, mailing lists, labels (sorted by zip code of course) for my woodworking business and the woodworkers association I belonged to.

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headstart.jpgBought my first commercial PC in mid 1980's, had already built a couple as hobby projects, tiny calculators, really, with 1K of memory. Memory cost about $200/K, had to solder all those CK722 transistors and 1N34 diodes and.... gawd, I'm ancient.My first commercial PC was this Philips Magnavox, a really souped-up XT clone that had a Siemens Semiconductor 8088-2 processor that ran at 4.77MHz or 8MHz in "Turbo" mode, had a huge 40 MB HD, 640KB RAM, lo-res VGA, a Sony 8-bit sound card, an internal caddy 1X CD, a 3.5 floppy, and a mouse! It was originally manufactured by Vendex, Korea.At that time, most glass teletypes were text only, green and white mono, computers had 5.25 floppies. used DOS and no one had ever heard of using a mouse or a CD. If there was a HD it was no larger than 10MB HDThe HeadStart was almost $2,000 including the monitor at Wards, bought it on sale for half, the model was discontinued because Magnavox had sold the brand.It was way too far ahead of its time. It came with its own Geoworks OS (another first, a pre-Windows GUI in the DOS days), and a number of applicationson CD including a word processor, spreadsheet, paint program, encyclopedia, atlas, and games. It even played music CDs but you had to use earphones or hook it up to an amplifier. The volume control was on the sound card on the back of the case..
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My first computer was a Morrow MicroDecision MD3 CP/M box. I bought it in 1984! Used it for almost 10 years. It had two dule sided 5 1/4 disk drives. I added a 5 megabyte hard disk to it as well as an add in MS-DOS "card".Those were the days!

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Wow, what a trip. I probably won't remember them all, but it started in 1955 with a course in wiring those boards for IBM sorters, collaters and printers. In 1965, I had to learn Fortran on an IBM 7094 to deal with a mountain of data collected on a field trip. Then we got an in-house IBM 1130 which had a 1 MB removable disk in the late 60's. From there, in 1972, an IBM 1800 which was like the 1130 but was interrupt driven. I had to rewrite parts of the operating system so we could attach a number of remote terminals. Somewhere in there I bought a HP35 for $400 (I still have it) which totally upset my former spouse.From there, a Digital Equipment PDP 9 and assembly language for twin Honeywell 640's, I believe. Before I got my project finished, the company changed to twin IBM 360s or 370s and everything had to be re-coded.My first home computer was a Sinclair ZX80 before the Timex era. There was a guy in NC who sold parts to add two floppy drives and with a printer and basic there were lots of things to do.After IBM announced the PC, I knew I needed a hard drive. Before IBM added one, I bought a Columbia with a memory board, 10 MB hard drive, 15" amber monitor and daisy wheel printer for about $4,500. I was astounded when I was told it didn't come with an operating system, and I refused to buy it unless they included one. They did, DOS 1.25. The Columbia had a hard drive controller which was mounted horizontally above the floppy and hard drive as it was much too large to fit in a slot. It also had a case that was a bit tricky to remove. While it was still in warranty, it needed service. The service guy could not figure out how to get the cover off. After that, I bought two more, used, for spare parts.Then I started buying parts and putting them together myself. One XT system had extended memory, two 50 MB hard drives and a mainframe tape drive attached. I bought voter registration lists on tape, cleaned them up and sold them to politicians running for office.I have been through 286s, 386s, 486s, Pentium, Pentium II and my current is 1.8GHz Pentium IV with 1.5 GB memory and a 60GB and 80GB drive. I have also used DOS 2, 3, 5 and 6 (I skipped 4 for reasons obvious to anyone who tried it) and Win 3.0 (which sent me back to DOS), Win 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, ME and now 2000. I think I am at the end of the line with MS.In addition to the 1.8GHz PIV running W2K, I have a 400MHz PII running W2k, 1 233MHz Pentium with a SCSI card and a number of 1 or 2 GB drives running DOS 6 and Win3.11, a Sager 900MHz notebook running WinME and 4 233MHz Pentium machines running Win98SE (one for current spouse, one for 5 year old granddaughter, one for my workshop and 1 spare).If I can ever get finished maintaining, "improving" and fiddling with the current crop of machines, I would like to learn Linux so I can wean myself from MS. I have an enormous amount of legacy hardware and have no idea how Linux would deal with that.

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Mine was a KIM-1It had 2k memory, a hexpad for input, 2 serial in and 2 serial out ports. It used 6502 assembler code. When I got it I spent 3 weeks programming it so that it would turn on a light I connected on an out port when i pushed a momentary switch connected to an in port. A digital switch!Now, I use stuff I throw together with standard available parts. Nothing special. But I pretty much keep all the components current.

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TampaThunder

Mine was a Coleco "Adam" which used a cassette tape drive. Had a daisy wheel printer that was loud as heck. I used it for term papers in college back in the mid eighties. You could also play some Colecovision games on it. That's the only thing that kept my roommates from throwing it out the window when I was typing/printing away at 3 a.m.Dem were the daze! ;)

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I've been receiving Scot's newsletter for several years now, always reading it with interest, but never felt moved to register so I could post in the forums... until this thread, that is ;) This topic just brought back so many memories I had to add my two cents...First owned computer: Processor Technology Sol, 48kB, Kansas City format tape storage, 2 90k Northstar 5.25" floppy drives, 16x64 character addressable display, 1.7MHz 8080A cpu! This was my sweetheart for 3 years until it got killed by varmints. Yes, I had it setup in a warehouse I owned and I kept it on 24/7 - the warmth in it attracted mice that used it as their home unbeknownst to me and their urinations killed the main system board. An interesting tidbit is that I purchased this system from ComputerMart of New York in lower Manhattan from owner Stan Veit, who later became founder of ComputerShopper.First computers ever used: alternately a DecSystem-10 and DecSystem-20 at the University of Montana (1975), and a PDP 11/45 at the same place. The 11/45 had a GT1000 vector graphics display with light pen that ran the most awesome lunar lander simulation I had ever played (it might still be the best).Current system: a self-built 2.4MHz P4 on a Gigabyte motherboard, 512kB ram, 80 gig h/d, and other typical bells and whistles of today's systems.

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Visualdesigns

A Sinclair ZX81 [i think it was called Timex in USA]. I still have it! It used a Z80A Microprocessor [clocked at 3.25MHz] and came with 1K of RAM. I bought a 16K expansion pack. The keyboard was so small I had to buy an expansion 'box' with a keyboard - the computer went inside the box!!! I now run a P4 2.0Ghz self-build with 768Mb of RAM.I think I paid too much for the ZX ;)

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