What was your first computer?

[mechman]

Let's start showing our age - I'll start.

I cannot remember the model number but the manufacturer was Amstrad (A german company). It had a 8086 processor which ran at 4mhz. 512KB of internal RAM. Dual 5 1/4 floppies and no hard drive. I booted up off of either a DOS Disk or GEM disks - depending upon what I wanted to do.


mech

[lcaillo]

At home it was a Mac, the original 128K. At work it was NEC with a Z80 processor, IIRC. Started programming at LSU on a IBM 360 mainframe using punch cards for data entry.

[bobgpsr]

Homebrew handwired 6502 running at 1.0 MHz with 2K bytes of RAM. Did use a support chip, TIM, which had a terminal monitor (debugger & serial I/O) program in ROM. Used an ASR-35 Teletype for I/O @ 110 baud (keyboard, printer & paper tape). Circa 1976.

[jvc]

The first one was actually a Commadore VIC 20, but we only had it for one day. We took it back and upgraded to the Commadore 64. It was amazing what you could do with just 64k of memory. After about 6-8 months, it quit working. We had it repaired. About two months later it quit again. We put it in a closet, and it's still there.

The first one that most people would call a real computer, was a Macintosh Performa 575. That was about 1994. We just gave it away a few months ago, and it was still working fine.

[wbassett]

First experience with them was in high school on a teletype style terminal (it had a roll of paper instead of a monitor and round keys instead of a standard typewriter style layout). You had to call the local college on a regular phone, and when you heard the modem kick in, you put the hand set in a modem cradle. This was in the day that Cobol was still done on punch cards and FORTRAN was one of the great languages!

A couple years later I got a Commodore 128, quickly followed by an Amiga 1000. I also have a very rare Commodore SX-64 (still have the Amiga too!). I remember when I was a senior in high school IBM announced their blazing fast 4.77Mhz computer and said "It will be years before anyone ever comes up with something faster or more powerful for home use."

Now I have multiple computers and the video cards have more ram than the size hard drive I had for the Amiga, and that 40MB (yes you read that correctly... MB not GB) hard drive set me back well over $200!

[Bob_99]

My first 'system' was an Ohio Scientific motherboard where you had to load everything with tape. My first real system was an Ithaca Intersystems S-100 with Z80 CPU, 64K of main memory, two 8.5" (1.2 Mb) floppies and CPM for an operating system. It was advanced for the time with 256Kb of buffer memory. I still have it and boot it up periodically.

Bob

[nova]

Hmm,... don't recall for sure. I remember an Amiga, an Osborne and an 8088 something or other. The first real computer i bought was a PC Partner 486DX/33 w/math co-processor and an additional 4 meg of ram (foe a grand total of 8), a 2400 baud modem, and an upgraded Oak video card,.... just got rid of that system about 4 years ago it was still running. I also remember buying Wing Commander and the system was so fast it made the game unplayable, there was no turbo button to slow things down.

[eugovector]

Commodore Vic 20, and some portable thing from Tandy that people refered to as Rambo. My first windows machine running 95 on a 75mhz intel from Packard Bell. Man that thing flew when we updated it from 16mb of RAM to 32, which cost about $80 if I recall.

[eddthompson]

mechman wrote:

Let's start showing our age - I'll start.

I cannot remember the model number but the manufacturer was Amstrad (A german company). It had a 8086 processor which ran at 4mhz. 512KB of internal RAM. Dual 5 1/4 floppies and no hard drive. I booted up off of either a DOS Disk or GEM disks - depending upon what I wanted to do.


mech

I think you will find Amstrad was British, it was short for Alan Michael Sugar Trading, an interesting fellow, was the the Donald Trump on the UK aprentice.

My first computer was a commodore 64, with floppy disk

Then i think it was a 286, an amstrad with incredible cga graphics.

Edd

[mechman]

Edd,

Really?!?! I always thought they were german. Learn something new everyday I guess! Thanks! And for that I give you the dance banana:



mech

[Sonnie]

As best I can remember in the early 90's we purchased our first computer. It was a 386DX (or SX) with I believe 4 or 8MB of RAM and maybe a 200MB HD... with a 13 or 14" monitor. It cost us ~$1400... and we had no clue as to what to do with it.

Anyone remember some of the first computers every made?


The public got its first glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries.Start of project: 1943
Completed: 1946
Programmed: plug board and switches
Speed: 5,000 operations per second
Input/output: cards, lights, switches, plugs
Floor space: 1,000 square feet



The UNIVAC I was delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.
Speed: 1,905 operations per second
Input/output: magnetic tape, unityper, printer
Memory size: 1,000 12-digit words in delay lines
Memory type: delay lines, magnetic tape
Technology: serial vacuum tubes, delay lines, magnetic tape
Floor space: 943 cubic feet
Cost: F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer




Data General Corp., started by a group of engineers that had left Digital Equipment Corp., introduced the Nova, with 32 kilobytes of memory, for $8,000.



The Kenbak-1, the first personal computer, advertised for $750 in Scientific American. Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-scale and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973, after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corp. closed its doors.


Scelbi advertised its 8H computer, the first commercially advertised U.S. computer based on a microprocessor, Intel´s 8008. Scelbi aimed the 8H, available both in kit form and fully assembled, at scientific, electronic, and biological applications. It had 4 kilobytes of internal memory and a cassette tape, with both teletype and oscilloscope interfaces. In 1975, Scelbi introduced the 8B version with 16 kilobytes of memory for the business market. The company sold about 200 machines, losing $500 per unit.


In the first month after its release, Tandy Radio Shack´s first desktop computer — the TRS-80 — sold 10,000 units, well more than the company´s projected sales of 3,000 units for one year. Priced at $599.95, the machine included a Z80 based microprocessor, a video display, 4 kilobytes of memory, BASIC, cassette storage, and easy-to-understand manuals that assumed no prior knowledge on the part of the consumer.


Adam Osborne completed the first portable computer, the Osborne I, which weighed 24 pounds and cost $1,795. The price made the machine especially attractive, as it included software worth about $1,500. The machine featured a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.

[Bob_99]

Brings back some memories. Here's a picture of the Ithaca S-100:



The S-100 bus was suppose to be THE bus and would last forever since you could exchange everything in the system, including the CPU card. Just goes to show that you can't trust in anything.

Bob

[eddthompson]

Seeing those big valve computers always makes me think of Asimov stories.

edd

[Kal Rubinson]

My first was a DEC PDP-11 in the form of a MINC (lab computer). Had 2 8" floppies, 64K RAM and it cost me $3500 to add a 5meg hard disc. Ran MINC-Basic. Quickly upgraded to a series of more mainline PDP-11s running RT-11 before chucking them all for a slew of PCs.

Kal Rubinson

[SLAYER]

Hi guys
my computer was a Apple macintosh plus 2
i dont know anything about it eccept it the floppy was on the monitor and the monitor was in black and white. also harddrive was scsi , it had keyboard and a 1 button mouse and you had to use a startup floppy othewise it would not boot
my mother bought it from a friend of my brother when i was 14 .
even though i dont use it . its still in mint condition around somewhere lol
ill try to take some pics.

[Mitch G]

The first computer I used was a DEC PDP something - probably an 8. Hehe that was in highschool. I had to cheat off the smart girl to figure out how to program the darned thing. I just couldn't get it. Two years later I'm majoring in Math and Computer Science - go figure. And then end up in as an engineer for a Telecom company.

But, the first computer I bought and owned myself was an Acer desktop - in the mid-90s, iirc. Since I used computers all day at work, I was in no hurry to bring one into the house.


Mitch

[owlfan12000]

I don't remember exactly but it was a Zenith computer from 1986. I think it had an 8088 processor and I know I paid $400 for a 10MB yes MB hard drive. That hard drive really made it special because most people were still using dual floppies.

I'm old enough to have done my first programming on the mainframe at Rice University with punch cards. I had to get an Electrical Engineering degree or Math Sciences degree because they didn't have a Computer Science degree yet. You had to be dedicated then. Write a program, feed it though the card reader, wait 45 to 90 minutes and see if you got it right. Usually you lost another 45 to 90 minutes because of a simple thing like a missing semicolon. I remember debating whether Fortran would ever go away because it was only a 64KB yes KB programming language. We used PL1 for most of our projects. That was a monster program at 192KB.

[bobgpsr]

owlfan12000 wrote:

I'm old enough to have done my first programming on the mainframe at Rice University with punch cards. I had to get an Electrical Engineering degree or Math Sciences degree because they didn't have a Computer Science degree yet. You had to be dedicated then. Write a program, feed it though the card reader, wait 45 to 90 minutes and see if you got it right. Usually you lost another 45 to 90 minutes because of a simple thing like a missing semicolon. I remember debating whether Fortran would ever go away because it was only a 64KB yes KB programming language.

They let us freshman/sophmore engr students use some old second generation IBM 7094 discrete transistor mainframes in CS220. The first half of the semester we programmed in Moron (a pseudo assembly language -- dumbed down for safety). Later we got to use Fortran and we thought it was the cat's meow. Yep, used punch cards and it took hours to turn around.

[owlfan12000]

bobgpsr wrote:

They let us freshman/sophmore engr students use some old second generation IBM 7094 discrete transistor mainframes in CS220. (

OK you win. You really are old. I've attached some info on the IBM 7094 from the IBM archive.

[Sonnie]

I think both of you are older than dirt...

[alan monro]

My first computer was a tandy (radio shack) TS 16 it had 16kb ram wow"""I played a couple of cassete games on it then chucked the useless thing away . Computers are only good for the purpose you use them for. I am waiting for the '2001 Hal' computer but it proberly wont come in the years I have left .Realy who cares.

[kc7brown]

Here's showing age: My first personal computer was an 8086. I do remember all the hoopla when Windows came out. And now I wear glasses from looking at all the little green DOS script and text.

But back in college (1981), we had a REAL clunky system running RSTS/E. I never did feel comfortable typing on that thing.

[Owen Bartley]

My first computer (if you don't count the Atari 800 XL) was an old IBM XT clone. I don't remember much about it, except that it was already past it's prime when we got it. But at least it was a good foundation and I can remember the good old days of the monochrome orange text on black screen. I think I used it to do some word processing and that's about it. We moved up to a P-75 a couple years after that, skipping the whole 486 stage. That was the one I did most of my learing on, with both Win 95 and DOS.