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.

 

[Jumpinbare]

Like Outdated, the first machine I owned was a TRS80 (Model I). I quickly found that the Basic Interpreter was too slow for some of my needs, so I taught myself Z80 Assembler and did a lot of programming that way instead of Basic. I think I purchased a total of 1 piece of software, "Dancing Demon". Otherwise I type them in from magazines as mentioned above, or just wrote them from scratch.

 

[AO1501]

....Otherwise I type them in from magazines as mentioned above, or just wrote them from scratch.

Oh yes, I remember magazine listings you had to type in, and almost inevitably debug and fix to get them working. Often very non-productive, but a great way to learn!

 

[Slime_Punk]

Some hand-me-down IBM desktop (probably circa 2004?). It was the old family computer and my parents had just moved me and my sister to essentially BFE and I had nothing else to do. I started recording music on it (I can't believe it was even remotely capable of this) and just kind of got addicted to that whole process.

I had used computers prior to this, of course, but being able to actually install (totally not pirating, lol) software and give myself viruses in realtime was a whole new experience. Prior to that I didn't even know that you could seriously just multitrack guitars, basses, and even virtual instruments like drums in your own home without a studio. My mind was a bit blown.

I kind of wish I had lived through the early days of the C64, but you don't always get to choose that part . At least there's good emulation, fantasy computers and mini versions available!

 

[WildCat]

It was a throwaway IBM PC I'd gotten back around 1999, none of which were needed anymore at the place(s) my relatives worked at which is where they came from. They weren't fast at all compared to the hardware of that time, and certainly not today...if you had one of these computers or anything else from the 80s/early 90s, you'd know that anything from that era would move at a snail's pace compared to even the smallest of today's devices. I'm guessing that place was going through an upgrade of sorts and switching over to newer equipment, or maybe they just had to get rid of some equipment for whatever reason, I don't know exactly. I'm not sure of the specifics, but it looked similar to this one:

16 colors max, no mouse and no fancy GUI, but you had what's IMO one of the finest keyboards ever made. I do remember that the one I had booted up directly to what's called GW-BASIC (a variant of the BASIC programming language), and try as I did none of the 5.25" floppy disks I had seemed to work. Maybe I wasn't doing something right with the disks or maybe that's just the way it was, I don't know...I was pretty young (13 years old) when I had it and really didn't know what I was doing at first.

Having it was pretty significant for another reason though, as that's the time when I started taking to coding. Again, really didn't know what I was doing - it was all Greek to me at first - but I decided to hack it anyways and flip through the GW-BASIC manual that came with it to figure out how to write programs. I got better at it eventually, nothing spectacular or game changing, but an interest for learning how to write code. All of it on my own too, self-taught - the rest of my family would have been scratching their heads trying to figure out how to operate the damn thing in the first place.

I moved on to QBASIC on a Windows desktop with a hell of a lot more horsepower not long after that. After learning QBASIC, I tried my hand at other languages like C/C++, Visual Basic and Pascal. Had I not done any of this I don't think I'd know a single lick about coding today, much less even be interested in it.

 

[Fraxinus]

I remember seeing the movie Tron in the theater in 1982. I was so excited by the movie that I immediately began teaching myself BASIC and I would go into my local Radio Shack to type my programs into their TRS-80 display models, which their sales people appreciated. I eventually convinced my family to buy me a VIC-20 for home.
I spent much of my career doing various types of data processing (including on my Army unit's Wang VS45) - a good type of work for ASD1 people, for which I'm thankful.
These days I'm overwhelmed by my cell phone and disillusioned with technology, which in many cases has become another type of addiction and means of amusing ourselves to death.

 

[Outdated]

These days I'm overwhelmed by my cell phone and disillusioned with technology, which in many cases has become another type of addiction and means of amusing ourselves to death.

I still like dabbling with code a little, mostly just pimping my old games a bit, but I never took to the phone and these days I hate them more than ever. These days I've reverted back to the 70s a bit, the phone lives almost permanently plugged in at the back of my computer, I don't take it with me when I go out, and if I don't feel like answering it when it rings then I don't.

 

[Callum]

My first computer was windows 98 machine in the early 2000s, I think I was like 4-6 years old. But it definitely spiked my interest into computers which still remains today.

 

[tazz]

Sinclair ZX81

Memory expansion pack slotted straight into the back of the machine and if you so much as scratched yer arse too close to the thing it would wobble and the system would crash.

Typing in large programs from magazines was, um... tricky.

Retro Isle - Sinclair ZX81

Retro Isle - Retro games spectrum commodore amstrad

www.retroisle.com

 

[Jumpinbare]

Sinclair ZX81

Memory expansion pack slotted straight into the back of the machine and if you so much as scratched yer arse too close to the thing it would wobble and the system would crash.

Typing in large programs from magazines was, um... tricky.

View attachment 119008

Retro Isle - Sinclair ZX81

Retro Isle - Retro games spectrum commodore amstrad

www.retroisle.com

I still have an operational one at home

 

[Fraxinus]

Sinclair ZX81

Memory expansion pack slotted straight into the back of the machine and if you so much as scratched yer arse too close to the thing it would wobble and the system would crash.

Typing in large programs from magazines was, um... tricky.

View attachment 119008

Retro Isle - Sinclair ZX81

Retro Isle - Retro games spectrum commodore amstrad

www.retroisle.com

I remember the ads for that in the backs of computer magazines in the 80s. Due mainly to is price point, I thought that I wanted one.

 

[Jumpinbare]

Using z80 assembler to get the numerical value of the processor commands, then putting those values in a REM statement and sequentially pokeing those values in memory, I was able to get my zx81 to do speech recognition and efficient word processing - stuff that machine was widely considered incapable of.

 

[tkcartoonist]

The first computer I ever used was either my ma's IBM PS/1 that I've been off-and-on working on for the past few months, or one of the many Apple IIs that we had at my grade school. I'd play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail at school, and King's Quest VI and Commander Keen at home.