Your first computer specs (you owned not used)

[XRubicon]

386 processor 16 megahertz with 4 megabytes of ram and 40 megabyte hard drive.

[XRubicon]

1. oops wrong forum...

Sorry meant this for lounge...

Let it ride or lock..

[Separation]

11. Hold on a sec....

Woooooooooo
Woooooooooo

Ok, now it's fit for GD. Please continue.

[LadyHawkAZ]

49. LOL!

[laundry_queen]

113. omg, LOL! nt

[ChisolmTrailDem]

164. DUzy! nt

[Jgarrick]

2. Atari 400 with 16K of ram and a cassette drive.

[targetpractice]

18. Yes, Star Raiders!

For me. Atari 800 with 8K (upgraded to 16K and the 810 disk drive).

Used the hell out of it before switching to an Amiga 2000.

[Warren DeMontague]

36. Heh. I think I had the same one.

It had that weird phony keyboard.

[GreenPartyVoter]

47. Had the 800 XL. :)

[Warren Stupidity]

60. Atari 800.

[bullimiami]

91. Atari 800, cassette before we upgraded to floppy. 48k i think.

gruds in space
in search of the most amazing thing
boulderdash
miner 2049er

DOS 2.5

[stevenleser]

155. Wow, same thing! Loved that computer!!! nt

[William769]

3. All I remember is I had to put in a floppy disk to boot it up.

Tandy HX 1000.

[TroglodyteScholar]

53. TX here

I think it was a 286 processor like 11 or 13 mhz. 128k ram? Does that sound right?

EGA graphics, tho.. super hot! King's Quest IV was amazing.......

[William769]

62. I don't remember the specs but I do remember

The King's quest series And of course Jeopardy!

I spent hours playing those two.

[TroglodyteScholar]

72. I looked it up...

256k RAM was the base configuration for your HX, and 640k for my TX. Your HX had an 8088 processor, whereas my TX had an 80286...with a twist:

Despite the 80286 processor, it was still an XT-class PC, not an AT-class PC, as it adapted the 80286 to operate over the same 8-bit data bus as previous Tandy 1000 models, and had 8-bit XT-style expansion slots. As such, it could not operate in 80286 protected mode or perform 16-bit memory or I/O transfers in one bus cycle, but it did benefit from the higher speed of the 80286 and its other added instructions in real mode.

(Wikipedia)

[William769]

74. Thanks!

So many years ago.

[Mojo Electro]

81. King's Quest!

[Separation]

4. Packard Bell

386 processor, 16mb of ram, and a 14.4bpm modem. Oh yea, one pissed off wife that I was always tying up the phone line.

[Brickbat]

5. TRS-80 Color Computer.

4K Ram, Motorola MC6809E 8-bit CPU running at .89MHz, 8K ROM. 8 colors. Saved to 1500 Baud Cassette Interface.

[joshcryer]

99. This.

And it was in an era where 486's abounded.

[azurnoir]

117. I had the Color Computer 3

64k of ram, but you could up it to 128, 16 colors on screen out of 64, it was a fun computer as you could mess with the programing in ways other PC's did not allow for

[Codeine]

166. Me too!

Was yours a tiny little thing with chiclet-sized keys?

[Pholus]

6. TI99/4A in 1984

16k of RAM, 3 MHz CPU, used a cassette drive. Loved the noise, felt like a computer god when my senior class project program filled the memory.

[MannyGoldstein]

38. The noise using the tape storage?

That was cool. It had the most inefficient storage scheme imaginable, I wrote an algorithm for that thing to make it more efficient.

That was a cute computer for its time.

[Pholus]

52. I kick myself for letting it go so easily...

It was the ONLY computer my parents could have afforded for me and I got many, many hours of enjoyment out of it!

Ahhhhh, memories!

[Paulie]

87. I still have mine and the PE box

But go here and you can time travel: http://www.harmlesslion.com/cgi-bin/showprog.cgi?search=Classic99

[csziggy]

104. My Mom still has one new in the box

Never been taken out so far as I know. It's still in a closet in her house.

Dad gave it to her but she was not interested in using it. Years later, he talked her into using a 286 with a word processing program to edit the historical quarterly. Even when I upgraded her to a 486 with Windows 3.1, I had put that DOS word processing program on it and set it up for her to use. She used the same program for the 25 years she was editor of that quarterly so I guess it worked good enough.

[lpbk2713]

65. Same here

It's out in the garage. Never had the heart to get rid of it.

I spent hours programming in TIBasic.

And I ruled the world with my 2400 baud modem.

[yodermon]

153. was looking for the ti994a subthread

Bill Cosby was hawking them for 100 bucks w/ a $50 rebate... my dad sprung for one, I taught myself TI BASIC in 4th grade, saved my own money to buy *extended* basic (multiple commands per line, yee haw!) and the rest is history. If we hadn't bought that thing my career might have been completely different.

[Shandris]

176. My grandfather bought me one with that same rebate...

...only Sears had them at $50 off at the same time if you bought a monitor. So the 99-4a was free, but the monitor was OH LAWD expensive! Bought a couple of the cartridge games (hi Avalancher!)("Beware of falling Congratulations!&quot and the extended BASIC. I didn't upgrade from that until it was time for a Commodore 128, and that was years after it had been released. '91, I think? '92? Then nothing new until a 486 in 1999.

Warm fuzzlies.

[Pholus]

188. Same here!

It was a great computer for the time.....

[DisgustipatedinCA]

7. My first PC was a Packard Bell 486SX 25Mhz. I think it had 4MB of RAM, 200MB HDD.

I did own an Apple IIc long before that, but my subject line lists the first x86-based machine I had. I'm pretty sure I have remote controls that are more powerful than the 486SX, and I have single movie files that are 50 times as large as the hard drive in that machine.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

8. VIC 20: RAM: 5 kb. ROM: 16 kb.

Followed by a Commodore 64: 64 kB RAM; 20 kB ROM.

[laundry_queen]

114. Yep, VIC 20 here too. nt

[mainer]

130. We're dating ourselves. Vic 20

then Commodore 64.

[Spirochete]

163. I started with the Commodores too

First a Vic 20, then a 64.

[ladyVet]

191. This was my first one, too.

Had a lot of fun with it, for a while, and then my oldest son took it and went to town. The first two boys learned about computers with that thing, until I bought a snazzy new desktop at Wal-Mart a couple of years after my third son was born (mid nineties, and yes, there's a big gap between the first two and the third ).

The desktop had a floppy disk drive. I remember getting something newer years later that had a CD drive, which I had no idea how to use! Heck, I still have floppy disks from my last job, about six years ago. I kept my timesheets and other stuff on them.

[X_Digger]

196. Same here. I saved money all summer to get the vic-20.

If I recall, it was $200! (Big money to a kid mowing lawns.)

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

9. I don't recall the specs. It was an

Apple 2+. I think it might have had 64k ram, because I shelled out for the extra 16k upgrade card.

I think that was all the memory you got - I don't think there was a hard drive. Just RAM. And I had the Novation Applecat 2 modem, for a blazing 1200 baud speed

[randome]

10. IBM Turbo XT.

You pushed the button to make it run faster!
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[Denzil_DC]

182. If it was like ours,

all pushing the button did was make a pretty light come on on the front panel.

[Electric Monk]

12. I had an Abacus as a child. Does that count?

[Liberal_in_LA]

15. lol. I had a slide rule, used it in physics the year before we switched to the hp calculator

[quaker bill]

31. I used K&E duplex decitrig through Organic Chem.

calculators were to expensive for me until TIs came along and I could get a programmable for $40.

I still have the slide rule, the leather case and original instruction manual.

[Liberal_in_LA]

59. my slide rule disappeared

[pokerfan]

39. hp rules!

My college calculator...



My calculator for the last thirty years:

[Liberal_in_LA]

58. yep. also owned that second one - in the 90s

[pokerfan]

80. Now I mostly use my phone

where I've installed an emulation of a 41CV. Not perfect, but at least it's RPN.

[eppur_se_muova]

93. Some a**hole stole my 15C ...

I had to go back to using my 25C.

The NiCd cells eventually died, but it still works off the power brick.

[pokerfan]

95. There's an easy mod to make it work off of regular AAs

It involves cutting into the battery pack (dremel tool) and removing the original cells, Mark the plastic shell for polarity purposes. Did mine ten years ago and works great.



http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv016.cgi?read=95939

[eppur_se_muova]

96. I did that once before, but wore out a second set of cells. :)

You can still find the NiCd cells, so you can recharge instead of constantly replacing cells -- but they're not environmentally friendly, and Li cells are the wrong voltage.

[caraher]

142. I use HPs to teach responsibility

Student forgets calculator, asks to borrow mine. "Sure, here ya go..."

I actually got my HP as a gift from my wife, who'd forgotten that uses RPN... but I just went with it and never looked back. Parentheses? What a kludge!

[bobduca]

98. Remember the moon lander "game"

[MannyGoldstein]

106. Your calculator is missing the "=" key

Probably fell off.

[pokerfan]

185. keeps it from getting stolen from my desk

Who would steal a broken calculator?

[Liberal_in_LA]

13. a 386, I think. or a 486

[Make7]

14. 6502 processor @ 1.79 MHz with 64K of ram and a cassette drive

[GreenPartyVoter]

48. I had 2 of those in high school, then took an ST to college.

[QC]

16. Commodore 64.

Hottest thing going at the time.

[LadyHawkAZ]

25. Same

[QC]

37. That 64k of RAM was pretty mindblowing at the time. n/t

[LadyHawkAZ]

43. I can't argue with that. I thought that machine was the best thing EVER!

I was 11 or 12 when we got ours.

[KatyaR]

50. Me, too.

Color monitor, TWO disk drives, a dial-up modem, and a dot-matrix printer. I was jammin', baby!

Meanwhile, my boss had a HUGE "portable" computer that was as big as a large Samsonite hard-sided suitcase and weighed a ton. I can't remember the manufacturer, but one end unlocked and became the keyboard, and it had a built-in monitor and hard drive. We were both tech junkies, if you could be tech junkies in the early 80s, and we were so excited. I remember that the big dot-matrix printer we had in the office would shake like an earthquake when you sent something to print.

Good times...

The first computer I ever used was an IBM desktop. I was a word processor in a pool for a regional five-and-dime store, and when we transitioned from the big, floor word processors that used the huge floppies, we actually helped Word Perfect develop and write the training manual for the software. They wanted it to be written in a way where a layman could understand it (and not a software professional).

I am thankful I was young when all of this started--I learned a lot and, because I caught on so quickly, I became the go-to person for hardware and software problems. I became a software trainer and learned a lot of different programs. I wouldn't have had the career I've had without having learned from the ground up.

[QC]

67. I remember those "portables."

Also used one of these--getta load of those 8" floppies!

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=527

[HubertHeaver]

119. That suitcase looking thing was a kapro.

The computer lab in the business school was full of them.

[X_Digger]

197. 'luggables' -- osborne, kaypro.. ugh. n/t

[ChisolmTrailDem]

165. Present! nt

[cthulu2016]

17. Well, the first one I owned was a Timex

Remember that thing for $99 (which was a lot at the time)... first computer under $100. Hell, I think programmable HP calculators were a lot more than that.

Got one at a yard sale.

Never got it to do much of anything. Probably why it was at a yard sale.

Fast forward to the 1990s. My first real computer was a Gateway in the Windows 3.1 era.

[ellenfl]

19. all i can remember is windows 3.1. eom

[JCMach1]

20. Sinclair ZX81 with a Z80 processor and 2K of RAM and a cassette tape drive

Upgraded to 16K RAM with a module that crashed all your work if you bumped the thing...

[quaker bill]

26. Ran one of those at work.

[muriel_volestrangler]

133. 2K? You were lucky. I had 1K.

It really was 1K in the UK - and elsewhere, as far as I can tell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81

And, for the general tone of this thread:

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/dc333014c5/four-yorkshire-men-by-at-last-the-1948-show-from-greatest-comedy-sketches

[JCMach1]

193. might be my 'squish' memory remembers 2k... you are probably right

I definitely remember the don't you dare touch it 16K module...

[enough]

21. Apple IIe.

That doesn't count as specs, but I had to join in the nostalgia.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

89. same here IIe

[trotsky]

22. Commodore VIC-20.

3.5 KILObytes of RAM.

Tape drive.

It was freaking awesome. OK technically *I* didn't own it, my dad did. But it was OUR computer.

[corkhead]

137. My first one too. Couldn't afford the tape "drive" however. The computer was nearly worthless

and is long gone, but I still have the box it came in kicking around. I traded it to a friend of mine for an electric guitar. It's storage capacity of about 10 LB of paperwork from the early 80s greatly exceeded the capacity of the computer itself.

[BainsBane]

23. Mine didn't even have a hard drive

It was an old apple you had to use a start up disc with.

[Lugnut]

110. Mine wasn't an Apple.

I don't even remember the brand. There was a floppy disk drive but not much else. It was a real dinosaur.

[BainsBane]

111. back then if you used a PC, you neededd to know dos

I never learned it.

[quaker bill]

24. IBM 8088 64K RAM 5.25" floppy (no hd)

I had to write my own printer driver from the manual as a .txt script, then convert it to an .ini....

I did go for the upgrade amber screen....

[Glitterati]

92. ROFL, same here

an IBM PC, 2 floppy disk drives, 128k of memory (which my father in law asked me what I thought I was gonna use all that memory for) and the IBM green screen, 300 baud modem. They didn't even MAKE color monitors then, and no hard drives.

I bought this as an IBM employee and paid $6,000.00 for it discounted!

We added a color monitor and had to write a BasicA program to DOS1.1 to get it to switch to the color monitor (no color graphics cards then). Our first external 10MG hard drive weighed 5 pounds.

When 1200 baud modems came out, we thought we were flying - and the 14.4s were made in heaven!

[quaker bill]

136. I wrote a primitive sorting and scoring program

It took Y/N answers from a series of questions stored them and then performed a 2d array matching / scoring routine. My first attempt had to be reworked to precisely dimension each array to keep all the code and data required just barely under 64K.

You would answer the series of questions and it would say Process?

Hit enter and the program would do roughly 10,000 string comparison loops to get to the best match.

In short, I coded a "still processing" message to appear on screen to assure the operator that the program was not broken.

About 7 minutes later, you would get the answer.


Of course, it was so much better than keypunch cards.



(it must sound kind of like: We walked to school through 3 feet of snow, ten miles, uphill both ways - - - and we liked it)

[Glitterati]

149. And that was kick ass computing then

IBM employees had to wait until all the first customer orders were filled, before we could take delivery of our purchased PCs. They shipped the first one in 1981 and it was 1983 before we got ours.

I worked on a project so that our 200 department field reps could modem in their monthly reports. On 300 baud modems. ROFL.

[corkhead]

138. you didn't hop it up with the V20 chip upgrade?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

[quaker bill]

144. No, I lost it in a divorce

and then bought an absolute rocket ship 80286 with 16Mb, EGA color, and a hard drive when the dust settled. At some point a bit later on I got an 80386 with a 14.4 baud modem and found the www.

[TheKentuckian]

27. Commodore 64, 64kb ram, tape drive, basic or machine, 300 baud modem. Later upgraded to 5.25 floppy

Nothing compares to the upgrade from that tape drive to the floppy, biggest upgrade on the same platform ever.

Longest viability platform too probably, an easy 10 year run just by adding the disk drive and getting new software.

[CBGLuthier]

28. 6502a processor, two digit hexadecimal display, 4k memory

It was part of this

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

195. I took a class in 6502 assembly language some 30 years ago

It was a pain in the ass to enter all the commands but once you did the program ran faster than any BASIC program I had used.

[oldhippie]

29. TRS-80 Model 1, Z-80 with 16KB memory and cassette storage ....

... thems were the days!

[caraher]

143. Same here

I enjoyed listening to the radio interference it caused...

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

30. Macintosh SE

8mhz 68000 Processor
2mb Memory
40mb External Hard Drive

I didn't keep it very long and got a 386 PC instead.

From the time I was very young there was always a "computer" in the house though, my mother had a DEC VT52 in the house for work. The insane thing was just to prove it was possible, around 1994 or so she had it hooked up to the internet.

[NightWatcher]

32. load "*", 8, 1

That's all I remember. That plus a cassette tape drive and a printer that took hours to print a term paper.

[politicman]

33. our first computer was a monster, it was that huge (with no operating system)

Don't know the name or the specs because it was that long ago.

But about 1990 or so, me and my brothers drove an hour away to buy a computer that a guy was selling in the paper.

We had a van at that time, and so when we got there, the guy took us into the room with the computer and it was huge.

We paid a 100 bucks for the thing and loaded it into the van.

At home we set up a desk and put the computer on it, it literally took up the whole desk.

Back in those day we didn't know what an operating system was, so the only thing that we could do with the computer was type words into it. Was still young then so got bored of it quickly and let it just sit there for years before we finally threw it away.

Anyway that the first computer we ever owned, back in the dark ages

[MannyGoldstein]

34. Z80 cpu, 2.5 mhz, 64k RAM

But *two* 5 1/4" floppies, which was really cool. CP/M OS.

(Kaypro II)

[LeftyMom]

35. 1.023 MHz, 64 KB RAM, 20 KB ROM. And two floppy drives, which were an expensive external.

Mostly people still used tapes.

Good lord, I must have been one of the first kids to ever have their own computer.

[gollygee]

40. It looked like this

I have no idea of the specs but that's it.

[Boom Sound 416]

41. 1.8 inline four cylinder with a 5 speed stick

[Logical]

42. Dual Floppy IBM PC - $2100 - Here is a picture of one.....

[gvstn]

82. I think I have one of those in the basement.

If not exact, pretty close. I think it has a 1.2gb HD. Monitor might be slightly larger but I nice green tint to it. Haha!

[penultimate]

109. heh... If it's anything made in the time frame of that, I doubt it's a 1.2GB HD in it...

[gvstn]

115. I'm pretty sure

I tried to copy the HDD over to a new computer (late P4 era maybe 2004-6) and there was only about 400mb of files still viable but the HDD was seen in BIOS as 1.2gb (I believe). Can't say for sure but it is still down in the basement. Fairly sure if it was running Win95 as OS andI was only trying to save WordPerfect documents but there was a DOS 5 folder on there too. Not really sure when it was bought but I think in 1998, 20-40gb were the norm so for such a small HDD it was probably early 90's.

[penultimate]

121. Back in the early 90's we're mostly looking at drives below 1GB for regular folk

That system that Logical posted is something from the early 80's. I'd say around 1998, it was pretty common to have drives in the 12GB to 20GB range being affordable for most. In fact, around 1999ish, I recall buying a new 14GB drive for like $180. I thought that was a crazy amount of storage space, because before that I only had a 1.5GB drive.

[Glitterati]

150. IBM PC - first shipped in 1981

That photo looks exactly like the one I took delivery of in 1983.

No hard drives. At all. It was years later when hard drives became standard in a PC.

[gvstn]

159. Yes, I'm conflating two computers in my mind.

The one I'm referring to in the basement isn't even IBM, just the IBM keyboard posted.
It is a Swan 386/sx with one each 5.25 and one 3.5" floppy. The HDD is probably smaller than 1.2gb closer to 500mb but I didn't open it up. Something like these:

http://books.google.com/books?id=tzAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT19&lpg=PT19&dq=swan+386sx&source=bl&ots=uUydsVFe98&sig=pRmOvz6CcoEe16bwyddieCRAdpE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nU9JU8moNcrA0gHM7YDYCQ&ved=0CGIQ6AEwDA#v=onepage&q=swan%20386sx&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=cSMUxSP5pKgC&pg=PT146&lpg=PT146&dq=swan+386sx&source=bl&ots=bKJLptRDHf&sig=RKh57f6HTGHo7HQQiEt4dvvWb_k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nU9JU8moNcrA0gHM7YDYCQ&ved=0CGYQ6AEwDg#v=onepage&q=swan%20386sx&f=false

[pangaia]

44. Apple 2E

No idea it's specs. I didn't know what specs were then. All I remember is the floppy drive. It took me months to understand where everything went when I turn it off and took out the floppy.

But, may I say,(against thread rules-)--please-- that I was in grad school at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign and worked with faculty and student composers using the Illiac 2 and then the Illiac 3 for musical composition. I would name names but, there is the off chance it would blow my cover.

[Nye Bevan]

45. Commodore PET with a WHOPPING 32K of RAM (the max available)

Went all the way from 0400 to 7FFF! And then the screen started at 8000 hex so you could POKE 32768, 65 to get the letter "A" at the top left. And the second cassette buffer, which started at 033A, was a very handy spare place to put little machine code subroutines (executed by typing SYS 826). Fond, fond memories......

Am I showing my age here at all?

On edit: if you include programmable calculators, it was a TI-58. I LOVED that thing but was always intensely covetous of a TI-59 (which I never owned, but had more memory and the ability to read and write magnetic cards!)

[Cresent City Kid]

131. I had the TI-58

That photo brings back memories.

First computer was a Kaypro 286 which was really only good for word processing. My old man wrote a few books on it before he passed it down to me.

[corkhead]

140. Don't mean to brag, but I still have my TI-59, I also had the thermal print cradle for it.

Very misplaced priorities as a teenager. It took many an hour working at Burger King for a whopping $2.30 per hour to pay for it. I used to plot out biorhythms for classmates with it. It was also easy to cheat in chemistry and algebra class with it because I could program a lot if information into it, which actually turned out to be a backwards way to learn the material.

[CincyDem]

162. I loved my TI-59 but it's long long gone

Had a friend whose brother was an air force guy. PhD electrical engineer doing some secret secret stuff out in the middle of nowhere. He got us a deal and 5-6 of us bought them for about 30% off street price. Wow - what a deal. We were living large with those mag strip cards that looked like sticks of chewing gum.

Unfortunately it took our profs about 2 tests to figure out we could program all the statics equations and fluid dynamics stuff into the mag cards or memory. They made us clear the program memory before test and made sure we didn't run any cards during the test.

What a blow to my GPA. LOL

[Jenoch]

46. Apple Macintosh PowerBook 520c

with 25 MHz 68LC040 processor, 12 MB of RAM, and a 320 MB hard drive. It had a passive matrix screen but it worked good for me. I was sharing a Macintish IIci with another co-worker. We got a big, new project at work and I wqs the project leader, going to the client's office and plant (3M). I bought the laptop with my own credit card for $3,000 betting that I would get reimbursed. I did not think it would take two years however. 

I still have that 20 year old Powerbook and it still works. I fire it up every few years just for fun. It surprises me how long it takes to boot up.

At home I'm using an Apple Powerbook G4. It's old, it does not play video, but it does have the best keyboard of any laptop I have ever used.

(I mostly use it for writing.)

[ChairmanAgnostic]

51. a sinclair itty bitty laptoppish machine with very little memory.

i also won a two floppy IBM laptop that had a green and black screen. i don't remember the specs, but I recall counting on my fingers faster than it could calculate.

[RebelOne]

54. Apple 2E with only a disc drive,

but that was a great little computer and I made a lot of money with it doing freelance work.

[mainstreetonce]

55. Sinclair zx80

Hook up to a portable TV screen. Program it yourself from a manual. No storage device. 1982 or 83.
Tape recorder as storage came next.

[jrandom421]

56. Honest to God original Sinclair ZX 80

Not that bastardized Timex ZX-81. Built it from a kit, made my own RF modulator and cassette interface, and was happily programming away in Z80 assembler for a start.

[Jackpine Radical]

57. Sinclair zx-80

with a clock speed of 3.25 MHz, and equipped with 1 kB of static RAM and 4 kB of read-only memory (ROM).



The Sinclair was pretty much a toy. You stored programs on a tape cassette & loaded them into the computer from a cassette player. Output was to a conventional B&W TV.

The first actually useful computer I owned was an Osborne 1:

Osborne 1
Introduced: March 1981
Available: June 1981
Price: US $1,795
Weight: 24.5 pounds / 11 kg
CPU: Zilog Z80 @ 4.0 MHz
RAM: 64K RAM
Display: built-in 5" CRT monitor
52 x 24 text
Ports: parallel / IEEE-488
modem / serial port
Storage: dual 5-1/4 inch floppy drives
OS: CP/M on diskette

[enlightenment]

61. I don't remember mine -

but I remember the one my little brother built in 1974. He was thirteen. He bought the parts at Radio Shack and built it from scratch - circuit boards and everything. It had a "modem" - a cradle that the phone receiver fit into that allowed him to do something . . . all I recall is that he wanted to play D&D with a friend.

[longship]

63. Heath ET-3400

It helped me immensely in my senior university physics digital instrumentation class. I aced the class easily because of what I learned from this little Motorola 6800 machine.

I later upgraded to the Apple II (nope! Not the Plus -- we called that one the minus. The Plus was a step down for hackers).

Cut my teeth on CDC and Burroughs mainframes. Yup! Key punches and 80 column IBM cards. Burroughs had CANDE, interactive terminals, but they were 300 baud teletypes. We still input the programs on cards and then edited them on the terminals.

I also had the absolute pleasure of working on the DEC System-10 that had real core memory. It was wonderful.


It was all time share terminals while all the IBM hacks were still key punching or fighting an overloaded Sys370 with the absolutely horrible SPF editor.

Brings back memories.

And don't get me started about the Harris /6 mini. Faster floating point than a PDP-11 but a bitch.

[ileus]

64. TRS 80....what was that an 8088 processor?

Those were the good old days.

[Warren Stupidity]

69. z-80

[WillowTree]

66. HP Pavillion SomethingOrOther

6 gigs of hard drive and I swear, I thought I was right up there with Kim Kommando herself. I remember well the day when I upgraded to 64 mg of RAM and my significant other at the time telling me that I would be blown away by the how fast it was going to be.

[flvegan]

68. Atari 600XL

'nuff said. It was a fun toy when I was 12 or so. Loved it.

[FrodosPet]

70. My first computer owned was a Commodore 64

6510 Processor at 1 Mhz with 65,536 Bytes of RAM, and a Single Sided Double Density 5 1/4" floppy disk drive (holding 170 kilobytes). With a COLOR screen - 320x240 pixels, 16 colors!

If you cut a notch on the side of the disks, you could turn them over and use the back!

[REP]

71. I didn't own it but helped buy it: Varityper EPICS with 12mb/s Emerald RIP

And big huge floppies.

[Ms. Toad]

73. Vic 20.

http://oldcomputers.net/vic20.html

[Junkdrawer]

75. Leading Edge Model D...512K Ram..4.77 MHz (dip switchable to 7.16 MHz).....

Back then, you worried that the 7.16 setting destroyed compatibility. Of course, it was the almost compatible BIOS that really was the problem.

[Fumesucker]

76. Z-80 microprocessor at a couple of megahertz with 2K of RAM

I eventually upgraded to 16 K.

[LiberalArkie]

77. Trs-80 model 1 with 4k of ram

[mike_c]

78. Zilog Z-80A, 1.77 MHz CPU, 4Kb RAM, cassette tape IO (no HD)....

TRS-80 Model 1.

[tridim]

79. A Vic-20, while saving money for a C-64 and floppy drive.

[Bigmack]

84. Me, too. 5 KB. nt

[cherokeeprogressive]

83. 286... 20mb hard drive... and a HUGE 2mb of RAM.

The MOST expensive part was the RAM. I put it together myself.

[madokie]

85. 10 meg 80286 with 1 meg ram

20 meg hard drive. 12 inch black and white monitor and 9 pin Epson printer. Added a math co-processor so I could run AutoCad 10. Paid $1270.00 bucks not counting the math coprocessor it was 200 bucks more and I wasn't aware I would need it when I purchased the computer but when I tried to run ACAD it said I had to have a math co-processor so back to the computer store for it. Then I paid almost 350 more bucks for a Genie Digitizer. 1989 when I bought all this. Dos 3.1, windows 3.0 hadn't come out yet and when it did I passed on that as I was used to DOS by then and all windows did was slow down a computer.

this was a pretty high performance computer when I purchased it My brother had a tandy 1000 that didn't even have a hard drive when he bought it. It was a 8086 processor and with only 640 ram. He added a 10 meg hard drive that cost him an arm and a leg, sorry don't remember what he said it cost.

[liberal N proud]

86. Does a Commodore 64 count?

After a brief moment with that, I went to a PS2. Uptown!!!

[OriginalGeek]

107. I'm counting mine.

Had a 10 meg external hard drive, a tape drive, 2 floppy drives, a 2 color dot matrix printer and a 300 baud modem.

We got a second phone line and ran a Color64 BBS on it.

[Heddi]

88. Commodore 6400 with a dot matrix printer

hooked up to the TeeVee in the spare room.

Man, I loved me some Ghostbusters games. Balderdash was my favourite, though.

Now, PONG and Atari 2600 came before the commodore, but commodore was the first compuin' machine.

[deathrind]

90. Still got it.

Packard Bell.
286 / 12mhz
40 megabite hd.
1 megabit ram.

[lumberjack_jeff]

94. 286-10. 640k ram 20mb hdd. EGA video. I paid $2100. n/t

[hedda_foil]

97. Kaypro II with 64k memory and two 5-1/4" floppy disks.

It had a metal case that made it sorta portable, though it weighed as much as the sewing machine it resembled. Great machine. It ran an early version of Word Perfect. It got passed down through the family for more than 10 years. Talk about solidly built ... and very pricey in 1982.

Released: 1982
Price: US $1595.
Weight: 26 lbs
CPU: Zilog Z80, 2.5 MHz
RAM: 64K
Display: 9" green phosphor screen.
24 X 80 text only
Ports: Serial port
Parallel port
Storage: Two internal 5-1/4"
SS-DD 195K drives
OS: CP/M, SBASIC



http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html

[csziggy]

100. Apple ][ 48 k RAM - with two floppy drives!

Just like this:


Aside from making a convenient height stand for the monitor, the two drives allowed one to run a program and save data without having to swap discs!

[n2doc]

175. That was what I had. But I used our TV as a monitor

Those were the days….

[csziggy]

181. I bought mine used in January 1982

It had the monitor, the two floppy drives and an external fan that slipped into the slots on the side. The external fan was useful since the main power switch was broken - the computer plugged into the fan and the fan switch controlled both.

There were a lot of what now would be called open source programs for that computer. I paid for a checkbook program and a graphics program called Fontrix. I did all my accounting with the checkbook program and designed the programs for our shows with Fontrix.

I finally had to upgrade and got an IBM XT clone made by Packard Bell. Macs were out, but they cost twice as much as the Packard Bell - and I could get shareware programs for the XT for pennies on the dollar compared to similar programs for the Mac. Macs had better graphics, but I couldn't justify the extra costs for my business.

[Art_from_Ark]

101. I have no idea what the specifications of this were

but it was a Japanese-language word processor with DOS capabilities. It had a built-in printer that used a special kind of thermal paper. It even had a game that featured two of the worst poker players ever

[valerief]

102. 1988 Macintosh. I upgraded it to 1 MB of RAM. nt

[enigmatic]

103. IBM 166mhz

8MB RAM and a 2GB HDD. on a 28k modem. And I thought it was a HotRod!

[Cali_Democrat]

105. 486....8 megs of ram (I think) and about a 200 mb hard drive.

Don't recall the processor speed.

WOW...what a piece of shit!

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

108. Slow, noisy, and prone to cause outbursts of profanity.

[flor de jasmim]

112. Kay Pro 64K single disk drive, WordStar software

[eridani]

125. Remember the usergroup?

F riends United Computing with Kaypros

[betterdemsonly]

116. Had a 286 ps2.

don't remember how much ram it had. It was just used to download stuff from local bbs systems. 2nd computer was 486dx with 16 gb of ram. It went online and stuff.

[steve2470]

118. 900 mhz 16 mb RAM 2 gig hard drive nt

[Angleae]

122. Commodore 128

It had a monitor and a floppy drive, thats about it.

[Exposethefrauds]

123. I still have and use the first PC I ever bought, it is one of the most powerful PC's that will ever

be invented by man....

[AverageJoe90]

192. LOL, DUzy. xD

[Major Nikon]

124. E6-B

Still have it.

[Exposethefrauds]

126. Photoshop?

I really don't remember seeing Spock with that in any episode, which one was it in?

[Major Nikon]

147. Not photoshop and it actually appeared in several episodes sometimes in multiple scenes

[Exposethefrauds]

183. That is really cool. Thanks!

[LakeVermilion]

127. Hewlett Packard 150 Touchscreen

I thought it was ahead of the game when it had 3.5 inch disks rather than the standard 5.25 floppies. It had two disk drives, one of which always has the system disk (MS DOS). I learned about hierarchy through the touchscreen folders. I learned about saving documents. It had a rudimentary word processor (no font choices) and a spreadsheet program. It also included a dot-matrix printer.

The HP had 160 kb of ROM and sped along at 8 Mhz. It was priced over $2000, but we paid less because my spouse worked at the 3M Company. They worked a deal with HP to provide employees a significant discount on home computers.

I moved from the HP 150 to an Apple IIGS, and then to the ill-fated Power Mac 6100. Its amazing that all of these were cutting edge at the time of their release, but 6 weeks later they were old news.

[Turbineguy]

128. Apple II Plus

a $3000 four function calculator.

[CountAllVotes]

129. Macintosh SE/30

Essentials

Family: Classic Macs

Codename: Green Jade, Fafnir

Gestalt ID: 9

Minimum OS: 6.0.3

Maximum OS: 7.5.5

Introduced: January 1989

Terminated: October 1990

Processor

CPU: Motorola MC68030

CPU Speed: 16 MHz

FPU: 68882

Bus Speed: 16 MHz

Register Width: 32-bit

Data Bus Width: 32-bit

Address Bus Width: 32-bit

ROM: 256 kB

RAM Type: 30 pin SIMM

Minimum RAM Speed: 120 ns

Onboard RAM: 0 MB

RAM slots: 8

Maximum RAM: 32 MB

Level 1 Cache: 256 bytes data, 256 bytes instruction

Expansion Slots: 1 SE/30 PDS

Video

Monitor: 9" built-in

Max Resolution: 1 bit 512x342

Storage

Hard Drive: 40-80 MB

Floppy Drive: 1.4 MB SuperDrive

Input/Output

ADB: 2

Floppy: DB-19

Serial: 2 Mini DIN-8

SCSI: DB-25

Audio Out: stereo 8 bit mini

Speaker: mono

Miscellaneous

Power: 75 Watts

Dimensions: 13.6" H x 9.6" W x 10.9" D

Weight: 19.5 lbs.

Released in January of 1989, The SE/30 was essentially a IIx inside an SE case. The second floppy feature of the SE was no longer offered in the SE/30, in favor of a built-in hard drive. The machine sold for $4,369.



I did not pay $4,369 for "it". Was more like $2,000.00 if I remember right.

[intaglio]

132. Tandy TRS-80 Zilog Z80 @ 1.77 MHz and 4kb Ram

The expansion interface was added giving me a 85k floppy disk drive!!! and a whole 48kb RAM!!!!!!!

[Motown_Johnny]

134. an 8088 Laptop. I don't remember the rest of the specs

but I can tell you that my current phone makes my first computer look like a stone tablet and chisel.

I got an IBM 8088 desktop soon after. No Windows back then. 5.25 in. floppy disk drive, dial up modem running AOL (since that is about all we had back then).


Dinosaurs.

[rogerashton]

135. 1981

TRS 80 model 1 level II memory upgraded to 48K, tape storage. The salesman asked me why I wanted all that RAM, but within a week my wife had overloaded and crashed it.

[sendero]

139. I built my first box....

.... as I did 90% of the rest. XT clone with 1 meg ram and 10 meg hard drive. 5.25" floppy.

It was a true POS but the beginning of a love of computers I still have.

Now, before that I build a single board computer with a Z80 processor and 16K of ram. This was in 1977/1978. I got it working fine but there was no software for it and consequently I never really did much with it.

[Sancho]

141. I was an early PC user...

I started an Apple II+ (so excited when I got a disk drive and got rid of the cassette tapes),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_Plus

next was an Osborn (with CPM, a tiny screen, Supercalc and Wordstar) and I typed most of my dissertation on the Osborn!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1

a Franklin 1200 (ran both Apple DOS and CPM),

and the very first Mac!

After years of decks of cards and keypunch machines, COBOL, and big green bar printouts the "personal computer" was so cool!! I spend hours with a 300 baud modem dialing in from a home phone.

Wordstar, Supercalc, and other applications immediately started replacing the IBM Selectric and my trusty calculator (yes, I used a slide rule too).

[MohRokTah]

145. 8088 processor at 4.77 Mhz

Built it myself.

[beachbum bob]

146. timex sinclair 1000

bought new in 1982....

2 kilobytes of memory built-in and you could add a module that plugged into the back of the unit for a total of 16k of memory, it was the size of a pack of cigarettes. I used a cassette player to save and load programs.

[SomethingFishy]

170. Man I had one of those....

You'd sit there for 45 minutes waiting for the cassette to load and then it would crash The good old days

[DustyJoe]

148. dinosaur

IMSAI 8080 S100 bus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080
Was a Monster
After that Commodore Vic20 (still have an old one in my garage lol)

[Champion Jack]

151. 286?

Mono color screen (orange) no hd, ran off of two giant floppies
Just a little better than a chisel and stone tablet.....

[JoePhilly]

152. DEC Rainbow

I still have the CPU and keyboard in the attic.

[NOLALady]

154. Vic 20

[kcdoug1]

156. Timex Sinclare

With a 16k memory pack

[DBoon]

157. TRS-80 Model 4

Z-80 processor, some megahertz

48 K memory

136 k floppy

[HooptieWagon]

158. TRS-80 from RadioShack.

[Johnny Noshoes]

160. Looked through this whole thread....

It seems I'm the first Amiga owner to post. So here goes....

Amiga 500: No hard drive,one floppy drive, 2mb of chip ram ( Fat Agnus ), and of course the custom chips for sound
and video. Color Commodore Monitor. The OS booted from a floppy and if you wanted to run anything else it loaded
from the floppy. A friend of mine could not believe you had to load the OS ( Workbench ) from a floppy disk.

I bought it in 1991 and it cost me a whopping $1000.00 for the computer and the monitor.

[L0oniX]

161. Atari 800xl. BBS rocked back then. Phear muh Hayes 300 baud modem!

[Atman]

167. Mac II with 4mb of ram and 40mb hard drive

Laser Writer, cost $6,000.

I'd complete a design job, send it to the printer and it would still be printing when I woke up the next morning.

[enough]

178. Oh man you are bringing back old memories. We used to run a DesignJet 450CA

off a Mac G4, and you had to be a zen master in the practice of patience. The office would be in a state of high anxiety any time the thing was printing, while trying to be cool so as not to put a jinx on the operation. Each sheet took so long and any little glitch could add an unknown amount of EXTRA time, and you wouldn't know if the drawing was perfect till it was done.

Now we just e-mail the files to the place and everything's ready and perfect by the time you get there to pick them up . And for most purposes, paper isn't even required. Some things have greatly improved.

[Aerows]

168. LOL Check this baby out

an 8086 with 512 KB of RAM, a 3.5" floppy drive and honestly, I don't even remember whether or not it had a hard drive. If it did, it certainly wasn't anything to crow about.

[lunamagica]

169. IBM Aptiva

Pentium processor! (we were so thrilled with that),

8MG Ram, 1 GB hard drive, Windows 3.1

Worked perfectly until we upgraded to windows '95 without adding any ram. After that it became slooowww and frustrating.

[Throd]

171. Epson 386/25 with 100mb hard drive. Impressive in its day (for a few months)

After a few years I couldn't even give it away.

[Vashta Nerada]

172. I used many before I owned my first one.

The first computer I remember using was the Apple IIe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe

I also remember using the Macintosh Classic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Classic

The Macintosh LCII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_LC#Models

And the Packard Bell 486SX: http://pbclub.pwcsite.com/wiki/index.php?title=486_SX-33_H2

However, the first computer I actually owned was the Toshiba Satellite 2800: http://www.ehow.com/info_8111951_toshiba-satellite-2800-specs.html

Specs are at link.

[uriel1972]

173. Locally made TRS-80 Compatible...

Two colour monitor, green and black of course. Did some programming played, some games, pined for a c64 which I eventually got with my brother for christmas when I was about 13

[DavidDvorkin]

174. Single-vision lenses

Focal point about two feet.

[steve2470]

177. I was really late to the game, I can see

I used a mainframe in 1978 with punch cards, but that wasn't the question

[krawhitham]

179. Atari 400 -> Atari 800 -> Atari XE -> Commodore 128D -> NEC 486DX-33 laptop -> then Home built units

1st one built was a 486DX4/100 desktop


Current one is a AMD FX-8350 desktop

[Denzil_DC]

180. No-name IBM 8088 clone, 640kb RAM (woo!)

No math coprocessor (extravagance), black and white display with no graphics (another extravagance), no hard drive, two floppy drives (one 5 1/4 inch one 3 1/2 inch - we were always forward-looking) - one to load the OS and programs, one for data. With a 1200 baud internal modem, we were flying. Built like a brick shithouse, you could have run over it with a tank and it would have survived, and it weighed a ton. It cost several arms and a leg.

I can't remember whether it's still in the attic or I bit the bullet and scrapped it, but if it's still up there and I could find the disks, I bet it would still boot up and run.

We got to moon with far less.

[IcyPeas]

184. Tandy 286

and it was expensive!!

[Omaha Steve]

187. Coleco Adam

Even ran a BBS on it called Little Orphan Adam.

[PCIntern]

189. ADAM...It had a word processor!!!!!1 Hugh!!!1 nt

[brooklynite]

190. Apple IIe, 64KB Ram and a 5 1/4" floppy drive

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

194. Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

Bought it in 1982. It had a TMS9900 processor running @ 3meg. 16K RAM. Used an audio cassette deck to load/save data. Had an RF modulator to use with a small screen TV for a monitor.

I think I paid $200 dollars for it.

It's stashed away somewhere in storage.



Apparently there's a website still dedicated to its use.

http://www.99er.net/

[NYC_SKP]

198. Cutting edge at the time, 486-33 Mhz, 256MB Drive, 8 MB RAM, 21" NEC monitor, $10,000.

I still have the invoice, best processor and graphics, and the largest monitor available, nearly half the cost of the package.

RAM was $100/MB at the time.