First Computer?

[Kisa the tea]

The first I ever used was a family computer. It was used by everyone. I was young so I don't remember what brand it even was but it was a tower desktop with a crt monitor and no internet.

Others would use it for documents and work. I remember using it for microsoft paint and that one pinball game that came pre installed.

Spoiler: image

 

[N2k12]

I was just remembering my first and I wonder if anyone else has fond stories to share.

I was 19 years old in 1984. This was just before the Commodore 64 came out. I bought mine second hand from a Ham Radio operator, a TRS-80 that had been extended to it’s maximum of 48 Kb of memory, along with a whole heap of software.

Hardly anyone in the general community had heard much about computers back then but I was the weird kid. I heard about them and I wanted to know more, and the best way to do that is own one. To give people an idea of the technology back then, cash registers in shops were still mechanical adding machines.

Floppy drives and hard drives hadn’t been invented yet. Software came as code written in books, you’d type all the code in to the computer and the last line of code was the command to Run. We could copy a program on to an audio tape but that was incredibly unreliable, get the slightest bit of stretch in the tape and all your digital information was garbled. Even a big shift in the weather and your tape was ruined.

Software piracy was huge back then too but a lot harder to track, much of my software came on A4 photocopies. 48 kilobytes really isn’t a lot of space, to me it became a game, finding new ways of condensing code so that I could run larger programs. I was pretty intense on that for a while and learned as only I can.

Then I got a new girlfriend, bought my first V8 and started working a second job. Forgot all about computers then and they didn’t interest me again until 1995. Now it was girls and fast cars and surfing and parties.

my first computer was a dx 66mhz with 8mb ram. and the ram was so bad, it could not access the first 640k to "shadow" the bios, so the pc was a brick. i upgraded to 16mb ram, and a new cpu. pentium 1, 133mhz. windows 95. those were the days..

 

[tazz]

ZX81 - Learnt BASIC (1982 I think).
Acorn Electron - my favorite clicky keyboard of all time.
Atari ST - Learnt 68000 assembler inside out (around 1987). I wrote a few games and some simulations of plant growth in different environments.

Then I started work where the first business computer I worked on was a Nixdorf something-or-other. About the size of a small car. This got replaced with a Novell network.