My first computer...

[Archae]

Was a TRS-80 Model 1.

Had 4K RAM, a cassette recorder/player for data storage, and b/w screen.

My first IBM clone had an actual hard drive!
10 mb!

I bought today a portable hard drive for storing my backups.
It's smaller than my cell phone, plugs into the USB port of my laptop, cost me $50, and holds...one TERABYTE!

It's just mind-boggling!

[dhol82]

1. I remember my first calculator

1973 physics class.
Got a TRS (I think 80). It cost $125.
The number of functions it had was laughable. You can now get one on a key ring for $2.99.
Also had a slide rule.
Life is interesting and can be really funny.

[malthaussen]

16. Got my first calculator the same year...

... a TI that did basic arithmetical functions and square roots! Wow!

75 bucks.

And considering what the dollar was worth in 1973 versus now, that's like $500 in current terms.

-- Mal

[stonecutter357]

2. lol my video card has 11GB GDDR5X ram ........

[Initech]

3. When I was a kid my parents had the Apple IIe with the green screen and dual floppy drives.

Now my Galaxy S9+ has 10000000000 times more computing power than that ever did!

[Submariner]

4. A Leading Edge desktop 20 mb storage

It worked great until a moderate Venice, CA earthquake jolt made the desk jump up about 1-2 inches. The hard drive stylus’s jump off the hard disk and it never worked again.

[rurallib]

5. in 5 years you will probably chuckle that you once thought a terabyte

was a lot of space.

[unblock]

7. petabytes, baby!

[unblock]

6. the computer i learned on was at my father's lab (he was a physics professor)

it had, i think, 8k of *core* memory. ram chips had only just been invented and this computer predated them.

core memory was a metal ring with a wire wrapped once around it. it could hold a charge or not, each ring was a single bit of information. so 8 thousand times 8 bits per byte meant 64 thousand little rings. they were wired to circuit boards, which were then housed in three giant boxes the size of big refrigerator/freezers. it also housed vacuum tubes for the logic -- no transistors!

yet another giant refrigerator/freezer-sized unit was basically one big hard drive with 3 metal disks, i think about 14 inches across. not sure how much memory they held but i'm sure it wasn't much.

then there was a punch card reader and in an adjacent room there was a punch card maker and a keyboard, computer-controlled typewriter, and a graphics screen.

i seem to remember my father telling me it cost the university $100,000, which in today's dollars is about $850,000.

[Stuart G]

8. What is..."mind boggling" is this story..

I took a class in 78 or 79.. where the teacher said.."one day people will walk around with computers, telephones, and adding machines..in their hands.. He pointed out that the chips and inner workings that cost so much then, would come down to a point, where everyone will be able to afford them in one way or another..

Yes..I thought he was "nuts"...yet.......he is/ was.. totally correct....

[Lochloosa]

9. What is a computer?

[True Dough]

10. How did you post your message?

By telegram?

[Lochloosa]

13. My phone.

[yallerdawg]

14. That's what the little girl in the commercial says...

when her mom asks, "What you doing on your computer?"

[AllaN01Bear]

11. mine

was a ibm 286 with dual floppies and a dying hard drive of a whopping 10 meg of storage . was upgraded to a 486 with dos 6.22,( my fav operating system of all time .) would crash when one would install/uninstall software or when the temps would change either up or down. finaly one day the hd would only let me uninstall software and files onto floppies and then it died a mercifle death.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

12. I had a VIC-20.

5 KB of static RAM!

[Tribalceltic]

15. My first was an Atari 800XL

I was so happy to get a cassete drive for it after a few months... losing the programs I had typed in form magazines sucked!

My first hard drive for it was a choice between 5 Megs or 20 Megs for $20 more... I went with the big one thinking i could never fill it up.

[malthaussen]

17. My first was an Apple II+ with the extra 48k of memory...

... which I burned out by installing it backwards (who knew?) and had to replace immediately for a cool $250.00.

I won't even say what it cost -- I took the advice of a "friend" and got totally shafted.

A friend had a Trash-80, too, and as soon as I saw it, I said "that's the future right there." True in the larger sense, even if Radio Shack didn't appreciate it.

-- Mal

[rsdsharp]

18. My first was a Coleco Adam.

Supposedly it had 80K of RAM, but 64K of that was for the gaming system. It had a cassette tape for data storage, that never worked. I later found out that the system generated a burst of electrical energy on startup, that erased any electronic data in or near the tape drive. No wonder the damn thing never worked; I erased the tape every time I booted it. Unfortunately, they didn't warn me about this little problem. It did have built in word processing software, so it was a step up from using a typewriter. It also had a daisy wheel printer that was as loud as a machine gun as it printed pages at 125 wpm. It used a television as a monitor, and since we only had one at that time, you couldn't watch television if the "computer" was in use.

I "upgraded" to an IBM PCjr. I apparently bought it just as IBM was discontinuing it. It had a monitor, 128K of RAM, and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. No hard drive, and no printer port. The printer port had to be purchased separately and BOLTED, yes bolted!, onto the side of the CPU. I bought a separate dot matrix printer with a tractor drive. The only software I had was a PCjr. version of Word, which worked well enough to get me through law school.

[Archae]

19. I still remember the daisy wheel printers.

You bet they made a racket!

I saw one printer, worked sort of like the daisy wheel but the typeface was on a belt, not a wheel, and did that thing make a nuclear-war-level noise!

My own first printer was a dot matrix, and it was noisy enough too.

Nowadays? I no longer even have a printer, I simply don't need it.

[becca da bakkah]

20. My First....Computer, That Is...Wink, Wink....

...was a Commodore 64. Not so affectionately called a "Common Bore", because of its annoying limitations. The hard drive was a separate unit, called an '8', as I recall. We added another drive; a '9'. Which, I think, you had to remove a plastic tab to designate one as an 8 and one as a 9.

When we upgrated to a PC it set in the closet for years. I donated it to the local thrift shop....but even they weren't much impressed with it.