First Computer?

[WiffingWaffles]

A Dell Optiplex running windows XP.
It had a Pentium 4 if i remember correctly.
Love the old days of playing Halo CE on PC (The demo)

 

[tlc]

Got my first computer in fall 1997. A Tandy 386SX/33. 2 MB RAM, 100 MB hard drive, DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1, 16 color Cirrus card. I bought a 33.6 hardware modem for it. And a HP color printer, I would actually print pages to see what the colors were supposed to look like.

Those were the days. I found DOS 6.22, and tried WFW 3.11. Spent ridiculous amount of time digging through Filepile and OAK Archives for Dos/Windows utilities, and tweaking Autoexec.bat and Config.sys and ini files for just a sliver of improved performance. I accumulated a huge drawer of floppy disks which I still have. I upgraded it to 10 MB RAM which made quite a difference. I bought a Cirrus video card at a resale, and while it wouldn't go, I swapped the chips into mine and one of them gave me 256 colors, I was the king now! I ran that thing until fall 1999, but wow it felt like a lot longer than 2 years. I met a ton of people in the area from the local chatroom run by the main ISP in the area. And email pals from all over the world on Lycos chat and mIRC. Fall 1999 I was given something or other with a Cyrix 150 CPU, which was very unstable, and sometimes I would go back to the 386 which was stable as a rock, it never crashed no matter what. It also fired right up some time after Y2K with no problems.

I have a picture, but I have to get it on here first. Tomorrow.

 

[AuAL]

My “first computer” wasn’t actually mine, but the first one I got to program. It was a PDP 11/45 in the engineering department of the local university. I was still in high school and was taught how to use it by a friend of my father’s (he was a member of staff.) I remember inputting the bootstrap loader on the front panel toggle switches, then loading the OS from magtape spools.

While still in high school, I enrolled in night classes at the uni to learn Fortran 4. I think this was on an ICL 1900 running George 3. We never got near it - punched up our programs on cards, left them in the pigeonhole and got teletype printout, wrapped around the deck, the next day. If you didn’t put 1X at the start of the output format when printing out a column of numbers, the duty operator got really annoyed with you…

 

[Ghostinthemachine]

Family pc was a vic 20,terrible thing my first personal PC was a zx spectrum 128k with light gun,I adored it

 

[Simon68]

Commodore Vic20 bought for twenty quid from an advert in a Newsagents window in 1988