First Computer?

[Outdated]

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.

 

[maycontainthunder]

First computer I had (and still have) is an Atari 520STFM. I doubt I'll ever use it again because I can go on youtube and watch far more skilled people complete the games!

 

[Misery]

A Tandy 1000.

......

I dont really have much to say about it. But yeah, that's what it was.

 

[Progster]

I didn't get a computer until I was in my 30s, growing up computers were expensive and my family didn't have one. My first computer wasn't any specific brand, but one made up of various components by the guy in the computer store. It ran on Windows XP. My next computer is the one I'm using now, and I had it custom made. Got help on a forum to chose components, and had the shop build it for me and then ship it to me. I've never been into computers in a big way, I just learn enough to get the job done.

The time will come when I will need a new one, then I'll start researching again...

 

[Judge]

My first PC was a Philips Headstart 80286 desktop computer I bought around 1987. I had worked every day with a proprietary IBM computer system since 1982, but always associated them strictly with work. Took me a few years to see them as something other than a boring business related number-crunching machine.

It had an enormous 20 MB hard drive, a 3.5 floppy and a 5.25 floppy drive with a separate Philips monitor. And it had a staggering amount of memory- 1 megabyte. I bought an optional accessory board that allowed me to increase my RAM even higher, to a whopping 3 megs. But it was a good experience in getting my feet wet and jumping into the world of computer hardware modifications.

Man, it was one powerful beast! ROTFL....though it did come with a nice software package of several DOS apps which included a membership to Prodigy. My first online interaction with others before the Internet. And I bought an IBM 101 keyboard that could survive a nuclear blast.

Though what really launched my becoming a computer geek would be to purchase a game, and not being able to run it as it would always tell me "insufficient conventional memory". For which I had no idea what that meant. But I began to read a whole lot in my DOS manual and learn how to modify both my config.sys and autoexec.bat files which gave me the memory I needed and suddenly I could play my Lucas Arts game "Battle of Britain 1940". But it became quickly apparent I was more interested in making my PC run optimally than playing computer games. Used a file management program called "Xtree" to navigate my hard drive.

And the rest got me where I am today....

Looked similar to this one:

 

[Judge]

By the time I got my first computer there were very few programs I had that required constantly loading multiple floppy disks. Just a few 5.25 disks as I recall. Thank goodness for that, given how fragile those big disks were.

Funny though. I always loved the feel of a 5.25 diskette between my fingers. Soft and pliable. But you sure had to be careful in inserting them into their drive slot!

I've always looked back at those DOS 3.0 to 5.0 times with great fondness. When Windows 3.1 just ran on top of DOS and didn't become the proprietary monstrosity it became with Windows 95 and on.

Weird to recall my brother getting a Commodore 64 years before I got into computers. Clearly he didn't follow through when the 286 computers came along. These days he carries on like most computer-illiterate persons. Refers to much of anything having to do with personal computing as "effing magic". Go figure. Maybe I should ask him if his experience with the Commodore "soured" him some way. Never thought of it until just now. Hmmmm.

 

[Outdated]

But it became quickly apparent I was more interested in making my PC run optimally than playing computer games. Used a file management program called "Xtree" to navigate my hard drive.

This was me too. Early in 95 I inherited a 386, although it was quicker than most 486s at the time, 40 Mhz. And it had 8 Mb of ram and math coprocessor.

Naturally I wanted to play games and to have a CD drive. First game was the original Tomb Raider. So I needed CD and I also needed a graphics card, that had 4 Mb of ram, huge for the day.

I had Dos 3.11, not as many bugs as 3.10. I had Windows 3.1 but I hardly used it. I just used to boot into Dos and I used Xtree Gold as my file manager. Games played a lot quicker if you didn't have Windows running.

And just like you, that's where the computer interest really took off. I upgraded my own computer a few times, then the internet started to become more available to the mainstream public and if you wanted internet with pictures then you had to upgrade to one of the new processors with MMX technology.

I upgraded almost everyone in my pub's computers, all they had to do was pay for parts and shout me a couple of beers while I did it. And with all the old motherboards and processors I collected them and mixed and matched to get the best I could out of them, then I'd buy a second hand case and a second hand screen and gave away free computers to people who couldn't afford one. All set up with pirate copies of Windows and a few games.

 

[Judge]

This was me too. Early in 95 I inherited a 386, although it was quicker than most 486s at the time, 40 Mhz. And it had 8 Mb of ram and math coprocessor.

I resolved my 386 computer's shortcomings by increasing the RAM to 16 MB and mostly being able to simply swap my Intel 386 CPU for a Cyrix 486 CPU. Made my PC an instant 486. Installed a CD player and abandoned my 5.25 disk drive. All my software ran better. Loved that. An era when motherboards and CPUs weren't so fussy or proprietary.

 

[Outdated]

I did a lot of work near enough for free and I spent thousands putting together rebuilt computers for the less fortunate. Everyone thought I was mad and I was doing it all backwards and I should be making money. None of them could understand.

I did it because I liked doing it. Charging money would have taken some of the fun out of it.

And compared to many other people's hobbies I wasn't really spending all that much. Plus I always had a bit of a different attitude towards money than most people. It's nice to have enough but if you have enough what's the point of having more?

 

[Isadoorian]

First family computer we had was one from Dell we got around 2002 or 2003, I'm not sure what the specs were unfortunately. All I remember is it had Windows XP.

Several years later I got a laptop which I partially used for school (writing a lot by hand eventually makes my hand sore and possibly cramp), it was also a Dell and had Windows XP, unfortunately that died in 2008 or 2009, something with the battery.

Then in 2010 or 2011 my grandpa got us a new PC which had a Intel i7-2600, Nvidia GT420, 1TB Hard Drive, 8GB RAM, 330 Watt PSU and Windows 7. Then in 2014 I took it as my own sub-par gaming PC, and eventually upgraded the Graphics Card in 2017 to a GTX 1050Ti and got a used 1080p monitor for cheap, then a year later got a 240GB SSD for Windows.

Fast forward another year and then I'd order and build my current PC (AMD Ryzen 5 2600, Nvidia GTX 1660 Super, 16GB RAM, 500GB NVMe SSD, 550 Watt PSU).

 

[Alexandria]

My first computer was the Acorn Electron!

 

[UberScout]

My first one i owned myself was an old Windows XP desktop I got from a school event once (well, my parents brought it home, but my cousin, before he became evil, actually souped it up for me because I had a Halo game i wanted to play)

It just so happened my friends which were literally right across from me, had a CRAPTON of shareware discs AND fully registered versions and product keys for games that required them, they let me borrow them all the time (though soon i realized you can't just do that with friends lol)

Honorable mentions fron my XP days:

Diamond Caves 2: A shareware BoulderDash clone which had its own level editor; you would run through a "digdug" esque level avoid monsters and such collecting diamonds to exit the level. Shareware version let you play up to the first episode.

eGames! Galaxy of Games: My mother and I LOVED this one! The eGames discs were a big part of my tween years with the computer I had. Most of the games really sucked and like the other stuff was mostly shareware, but some of those games were so fun even if I didn't have their full versions. Fairy Chess was a chess program that let you edit the board with chess pieces I didn't even know existed (Mosquito takes Knight, anyone?) There was an aftload of card games and casino games, too.

eGames! Maze Madness: Same formula as above, it was disc two. And it was mostly pacman clones or those generic "tilt the marble into the right holes" games.

Impossible Creatures: THIS GAME WAS SO. COOL. Okay, it's a real time strategy game and it played like StarCraft, BUT inbetween missions you're taken to this laboratory screen where you can mess around with animal DNA and combine them to create half-animal hybrids that have their own enhanced abilities based on what those animals are like in real life: so, if you took the DNA of say, a gorilla and combined it with an elephant, you'd get a very tall monkey with leathery skin and beefed arms and a very, very long nose; mash a lion together with a horse and now you've got a big cat with an uncontrollable urge to hit things with their face! Lol

MicroMan: Tiny Megaman inside a computer. That is all.

Although some of these games, had... Rather ghoulish and unnerving qualities...

 

[Duna]

I inherited an ATARI ST.
I think I was 18 at that time.
Before that I remember standing in a phone booth with a friend who had a modem and a bag full of coins and we called some computer to "download" a game.

 

[Princess Viola]

My first computer (as in 'the first computer that was specifically bought to be my own computer') was an eMachines T2642 from early 2004 with a 2.6 Ghz Celeron, 256 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB hard drive when I was 7 years old.

Before that, I used the family PC which was from...early 2002 I believe? I actually don't know the brand name, the case says 'V Premier' but I genuinely cannot find any results for that on Google other than one answers website from 2007. So I also don't know the specs either but I do know it was Windows XP.

Of course, even after getting my own computer, I still used the family PC a lot too (I say family PC but it was literally just me and my dad who used it and I used it a lot more than he did. But that's probably why I later got my own computer so we could both use the internet at the same time) because I'd been using it since we got it and both PCs were in the exact same room.

And then I switched over to just using the original PC full-time after something happened to both computers in like 2006-ish and they fixed the family PC but said they couldn't fix my eMachines. I still have both PCs, maybe I should open it up and try and get it working again, if only for nostalgia purposes - even if I have more attachment to the 'family' PC at this point. Kept using it until I got my first laptop in early 2009 (although I went back to that PC whenever my garbage Toshiba laptop would die or whatever and need to get fixed - that laptop sucked btw -, pretty sure the last time I used it was in like 2012-2013. Still worked completely fine then, IDK if it still works now though.)

(There's also the eMachines gaming PC from 1999 I used sometimes too, but I don't really count that necessarily because that was at my dad's place so it wasn't like I was constantly using it like the two XP machines I had growing up - still got that too and I wanna fix that up too [if it needs fixing up beyond cleaning])

 

[Shevek]

Mine was also called a TRS-80, but it was a used Sharp palmtop with a docking station. It had a thermal tape printer and a microcassette for storage. The display is 24 characters. I doubled the memory to 4k for an extra $100. It only ran a quirky version of BASIC. I bought it because I'd been getting into engineering, and a programmable calculator was too limited. I set it up to do very convenient calculations about almost any kind of basic structural element. Those functions are included in CAD systems now, but I'll bet mine was far faster to use. I never had to guess if I needed the next size of something, of if I could save weight and money.

 

[Duncan74]

Commodore 64 but almost had a zx81 a year or two earlier.

I then had an Acorn A3000 that completely changed my school grades. This was in late 80's or 1990 IIRC, so doing my school work on a computer and printing it out on a dot matrix printer on perforated z fold paper was most definitely 'niche'.

I then worked out on a building site for a whole summer when I was 17 and used all my wages to by a 20MB external hard disk and a canon black and white laser printer that could print 4 pages per minute.

When I got to university I upgraded to a A520 and because I was editing the hall and college newspaper paid UKP1000 for a 17inch CRT monitor. ;-) Now I actually only stopped using that monitor and threw it away 5 years ago after countless moves, including UK to NZ. So despite the crazy price (same as my first car 10 years later) I got good value from it.

 

[AO1501]

Mine was also called a TRS-80, but it was a used Sharp palmtop with a docking station. It had a thermal tape printer and a microcassette for storage. The display is 24 characters. I doubled the memory to 4k for an extra $100. It only ran a quirky version of BASIC. I bought it because I'd been getting into engineering, and a programmable calculator was too limited. I set it up to do very convenient calculations about almost any kind of basic structural element. Those functions are included in CAD systems now, but I'll bet mine was far faster to use. I never had to guess if I needed the next size of something, of if I could save weight and money.

I have one of these even now. A PC-2. It's still in great working condition, and was used all the way back then to calculate free air resonances.... I had to write the software myself of course.

 

[AO1501]

My first computer was a Research Machines 380Z in 1979, which got me into computing since I had to learn to program it to solve a problem.

After that, TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2, some indiscriminate DOS PCs, and then Macs. I currently have the PC-2 (above) and a 1984 TRS-80 Model 4P, along with several other systems, including a Mac Classic II and PowerBook 170.

 

[Shevek]

Today, I'm celebrating the awakening of my first barebone computer, now running Linux. I won't brag to my most tech-savvy friend, though, because for his first computer memory, he was stringing ferrite beads on wire, three stitches per bit.

 

[The Pandector]

Since I worked with computers, I didn’t hanker after one at home. Finally, I bought what I thought the most promising model of the time, an Atari 800. The only software I bought was games and an assembler. Wrote a fully functional word processor, caught up with all my correspondence. Wrote a few games, which weren’t sophisticated then (think Space Invaders and Missile Command). Working on environmental control when my wife mentioned the impact her pregnancy would have on my R&D budget. Great boost for my work skills.

Ah, she was a jaguar, that girl… she had 48 hummin’ K’s and two five-and-a-quarter floppies ready to whirl. I had to fade away, but we’ll always have those late nights in Oxnard.