QOTD: What Was Your First Computer?

[Glorian]

My uncle worked for a local university and they were getting rid of some dell desktops and gave us one, pentium 75mhz 64 mb of ram and a 2gig hard drive, thought we were cool cause the sticker said windows 95 and we upgraded to 98se, first hardware installation i ever did was a modem, musta been all of 14 years old.

Probably not a piece of cpu history but my first pc none the least.

 

[engrpiman]

HP 41 C ( it may be a calculator but it still works )

Intel 286 - don't remember anything else

 

[jsloan]

hey did anyone have an apple 1, at one time i has one of the kits, and it was running, someone gave it to me, sadly i got rid of it, out the garbage. got rid of all the old computers, including an original pc, xt, ect...

 

[acecombat]

Mine was an Intel 286 with it's 16kb of cache and no ram. Mine was the deluxe model and came with a 20mb HDD and 5.25" FDD.

 

[Hupiscratch]

IBM PC, Pentium MMX 133 MHz, 28,8 kbps modem, i think about 20gb of hd. can´t remember the rest, I was too young!

 

[christop]

Commodore vic-20

 

[hercules]

I am not even going to try to remember

 

[icebain]

IBM Portable PC 5155

 

[qwertymac93]

my first computer was a powermac 4400, we called it "the dinosaur", mainly because it took a full 5 minutes to open aol. although once a program loaded it was okay...if waiting 60seconds for google is "okay". i was 8 so i didn't care about aol, or the internet, just them cool nintendo games my brother riged to work on it, ahh, many good times had playing bomberman, super mario brothers 3...pong...

 

[deltatux]

the memory of my first machine was a Windows 95 machine (I remember one older but I was too young to know what it was, I was like 2 yrs old).

The oldest one I know was:

Pentium I 133 MHz
32 MB SRAM
8 GB HDD (still have the HDD with me to this day)
Trident TGUI9680-1 graphics card (I don't think it can really called a GPU).

 

[intelliclint]

My first computer was the TSR-80 Color Computer 2 when I was 11 years old. Used the Motorola 6809 that ran at 1Mhz and 16kb or RAM. I upgraded the RAM to 64kb. I also got the extenal floppy drive controller and 2 5 1/4 inch drives. (Friends with tapes wrapped up with envy). I latter moved on to Amiga 1000 and 600.

One thing I miss is needing to do some programming to operate the computers and the programming manuals that come with them.

 

[intelliclint]

My first computer was the TSR-80 Color Computer 2 when I was 11 years old. Used the Motorola 6809 that ran at 1Mhz and 16kb or RAM. I upgraded the RAM to 64kb. I also got the extenal floppy drive controller and 2 5 1/4 inch drives. (Friends with tapes wrapped up with envy). I latter moved on to Amiga 1000 and 600.

One thing I miss is needing to do some programming to operate the computers and the programming manuals that come with them.

 

[freeman70]

My first computer was Commodore Vic 20. It had a 1 MHz 6502 CPU, 5K (kilobytes) of RAM, hooked up to the TV via an RF modulator, and a cassette drive. I remember doing my own programming in BASIC and spending hours coding free games from Vic 20 computer magazines. We really had a lot more patience back then. I remember waiting up to a minute for some programs to load from cassette tape. Everyone envied those few who had the 1540 floppy disk drive because it was so quick loading programs at 300 bps (bits per second) and held 170K per side. At the time, my friends and I dreamed of machines with 256 color graphics at 640x400 resolutions and 100 MHz CPUs. With the steady onward march of technology, we didn't have to wait long for these kinds of improvements. However, in the process, I seem to have lost all patience with my machines. I even get irritated waiting for my old K6-400 machine I use as a doorstop to boot Windows 98. It's more powerful than any machine I could dream about back in my Vic20 days. I guess our expectations of our user experience are subjective. My father always tells me that "Anticipation is the soul joy of realization." I think I agree. My main rig has a Intel quad core Q6600 overclocked to 3.2 GHz and I still don't think it is fast enough. Maybe getting an Solid State Drive will make dreams come true. Probably not.

 

[razzb3d]

hmmm... got my first machine back in 1995:
- 133mhz Cyrix 586 cpu
- Acrorp 6 SIMM mainboard
- 8MB of ram
- 800MB Quantum fireball HDD
- and 1MB Cirrus Logic VGA Card
- 14" Noname CRT...
- NO CDROM, Sound card or other things we take for granted today.

First thing i did was install and play DUNE II...I think i was 10... anyways, by 1999 the thing looked like this:

- 198MHz (66x3@3,5v) AMD K5 PR200 CPU - also nicked a large aluminum heatsink from an old phillips TV
- 128MB ram (4x32MB SIMM modules)
- Acorp Mainboard (via chipset), 4 SIMM, 3 PCI, 2 ISA, NO AGP, NO DIMM
- 3x 2GB Western Digital HDDs (the Quantum went to a better place)
- ATi Mach 64 2MB + 2x VOODOO 2 PCI Cards in SLI
- Cheap ISA Yamaha OPL3 Sound Card
- Creative CD-ROM
- 17" AOC monitor - i was very excited about this - my uncle bought it for me...

I can remember even now when i got the firs 3dfx card and played quake I in Glide... it was breathtaking...

 

[veryed]

Franklin. I think it was some kind of Apple clone, if I remember correctly. Powered by an internal 5 1/4 inch disk drive. That's about all I know/remember about it. I could play Oregon Trail on it which was all I really cared about at the time.

 

[Guest]

Mine was a TI-99 that you hooked up to a television monitor, where you had to type in the lines of code from a book so you could run the program. As soon as you turned off the computer, it lost all the typing you had done, unless you saved it as a file on a cassette drive, that you could get as an optional add-on. You could insert a cartridge program into it but we never had any. My buddy and I used to run the horse racing program over and over. Man-o-War was the horse I always chose to win. I only remember that one program though. Shame I don't still have it. I gave it away or pitched it, close to 20 years ago.

 

[texas-saluki]

PC Jr.... yea my mom worked for IBM and thought it was a good idea

 

[qwertymac93]

is tomshardware playing an april fools joke? i know i didn't post my last comment @ 04/02/2009 2:40 AM, i mean, that would be tomorrow.

 

[robjen1019]

Texas Instruments 80, got to love Parsic and spaced invaters

 

[voidrunner]

My brother was trying to teach me basic fortran and qbasic when i was 9 or so on a 286... rather than learning i was just playing Netwars..hehe

first computer i really used was a P100 with 8mb of EDO ram and a 2mb Trident vid card and 850Mb hd.

Later we added extra 32mb of ram and a 5Gb Quantum Fireball hd. I had a ton of fun trying to do 3D Studio MAX rendering on this ..... beast

 

[talys]

I had a TRS-80 Model I... to put this into perspective, some time after I bought it, I was able to upgrade it to accept *lower case* (as in the opposite of upper case), by taking it apart and installing a kit that involved soldering. There was also an accoustic coupler, cassette tape drive, and a 48k expansion memory upgrade that probably cost more than the 160GB Intel X25-M I just bought.

I loved that computer!

 

[Guest]

Back in 1996, my dad had an IBM Aptiva tower[see image: http://kcomputerzone.ca/media/gallery/Ibm/Aptiva.jpg]. I can't remember correctly the specs, but I belive it had a Pentium processor at 233MHz, 32MB of memory, and 6 GB of hard drive space. Wasn't the best machine, but I played RollerCaster Tycoon on that.

 

[androticus]

Altair 680b circa 1976 -- Motorola 6800 MPU @ 1Mhz and if I recall, a whopping 1K of RAM. Initially had to program it in binary from front panel toggle switches, but later added an old baudot weather teletype.

My favorite computer? My Atari 68000 thingy (can't remember model number) -- awesome all-in-one console with a (truly) whopping 1M of RAM -- the first general computer to feature such a titan amount. It used the GEM operating system, which had been ported from the PC (where it never achieved much success, despite being vastly superior to Windows 1 and 2).

I also had a Radio Shack Color Computer -- I loved that little puppy! A friend of mine recounted an incident at a RS store -- he was in line behind an irate customer complaining that he'd hooked up the computer to the TV but the damn thing didn't work. The clerk hooked up the CC to a TV... PLUGGED IT IN -- at that point, buddy's face apparently sagged massively -- ...the clerk turned it on and the thing worked perfectly.

 

[Spazzy]

Commodor vic 20............then commodor 64 and man was it cool......lol It is amazing how much technology has evolved!

And yes, I still have my C64, tape drive, floppy drive, game cartridges, and floppies with programs I both wrote and bought. I believe, I still even have the comprehensive programmers guide to c language for the c64.

 

[kgrach]

Altair 8800 compatible "Clone" kit
My Dad always one to get me neat and educational toys brought me my first computer. It was a kit that I had to build myself. When I say build I mean soldering parts and wires to the boards. I even had to build the power supply. It was hardware and software compatable with the altair 8800 and it came with 1024 bytes of memory.
Don't know if most here would even recognize it as a computer since it used big toggle switches to program in binary machine language. Results were displayed in binary usings red leds on the front of the unit. Buuut since it required me to build a new memory board so I could run software from microsoft I guess it counts.

kgrach

PS My first modem my father got me weighed a good 50 or 60 pounds and had a green rotary dial telephone attached, I think it was 75 baud.