Your first PC:::

[davidd]

Hi

what was your first PC?

My first home computer was a Commodore 64 back in 1982. It had a tape drive and took about 20 mins to save 48Kb of program...

My first work computer (in 1983) was an IBM PC XT , with 512 Kb of ram (needed an extra board for the last 128Kb) and a 10Mb hard drive. 10 Mb!! It was huge! I never filled it. It ran MSDOS version 2.1. Have worked up through the DOS versions to Version 5, then Windows 95, 98, 2000, and now XT. Time for Windows 7 (or perhaps a Mac?)

[JohnRA]

Promise not laugh ?????

OK .... In that case I'll tell you.

It was a Tandy TRS80. Programs loaded (eventually) by tape & had a whopping 4k memory.

As soon as finances permitted it was replaced by the Commodore 64

[DAdeGroot]

It took ages to convince my parents that a computer would be a good idea, so our first one was an Amstrad PC1512. 8088 cpu, 512kb of ram, dual 360kb floppies, 16 shades of grey hybrid CGA display.

I eventually shoehorned a full height five and a quarter inch hard disk into it (ESDI). Alas, by the time we got it, 286's were the norm. Still, it served me well for about 4 years.

[bjholton]

First one was a microbee which only had a orange-black monitor ... ( keeping it inline with the bee theme i am guessing..... ) was good for programming in basic and that was around the very early 80's...

have now progressed to having 3xP4's with between 2gb and 4gb ram .... 2x Compaq laptops with the new one running 2gb ram .... to have this sort of computing power way back then would have been unheard of.... lol

[hus]

Home made case with a 8080 processor, small black and white tv as monitor and another case that was real heavy which was a olivetti 8 inch floppy disk drive and the operating system was the old CPM 2.2

[Kym]

PC ... Nec APC IV (1983?)
First computer I ever got to use/program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130 in 1971
http://www.users.on.net/~farnik/wiki...RetroComputing

[ricktas]

Vic 20, which was followed by a Commodore 64. Both of which I still have.

[Calxoddity]

First one I ever owned: A 1984 XT clone with 512Kb RAM, *two* 5.25" floppy drives, a Hercules character-based graphics card, and amber character-based (ie not graphical) monitor.

Bought it from a PC shop in Seattle, about a mile from Microsoft HQ. Now if only I'd bought Microsoft shares with that money....

[ameerat42]

A Casio pocket computer, with 1K RAM, then a Commodore 64. I got both almost at the same time, and used them for different things. The Casio stopped working after it got drowned in its second flood. The C64 only got dunked once. I used to dismantle and dry them. Eventually I got a floppy disk drive for it. Boy, did it sing then! But I'd bet there are heaps of us who fondly remember our adventures with such gear at the time. Am.

[Xenedis]

what was your first PC?

I was quite a late entrant into the world of computer ownership, only having my first in 1992.

It was a 286 with 640KB of base RAM (and 512KB extended RAM), had a 20MB hard disk and a CGI display, and ran MS-DOS 3.3.

This computer was a laptop, and a specialised one at that, as it was a Yamaha music computer and had MIDI interfaces on it. It was purchased second-hand, not for the music capability, but for the computer part.

I installed Stacker 2.0 at one stage, and ended up with a whopping 60MB of disk space. Disk compression utilities were supposed to double the amount of disk space, but this one trebled it. Score.

Since that first computer and in the 18 years since, I've only owned five more PCs:

1. Generic 486SX (33MHz) with 4MB of RAM, 130MB HDD and 14" CRT [1993];
2. Generic Pentium MMX (166MHz) with 16MB(?) of RAM, 500MB(?) HDD and 15" CRT [1997];
3. Packard Bell - Pentium 4 (1.8GHz) with 256MB of RAM, 40GB HDD and 15" LCD display [2003];
4. Dell Inspiron 9400 - Core 2 (2GHz) with 1GB of RAM, 160GB HDD and a 17" wide-screen LCD [2006]; and
5. MacBook Pro - Core 2 Duo (2.8GHz) with 4GB of RAM, 500GB HDD and 17" wide-screen LCD [2009].

(I really cannot remember the RAM and HDD specs of my third PC.)

Some people 'round here have more PCs in their possession currently than I've owned in the past two decades! Yes, Dave, I'm looking at you. :-)

It ran MSDOS version 2.1. Have worked up through the DOS versions to Version 5, then Windows 95, 98, 2000, and now XT. Time for Windows 7 (or perhaps a Mac?)

I started with MS-DOS 3.3, ran DR-DOS 6 at some stage, then ran MS-DOS 6.21 and 6.22. I think I missed MS-DOS 4 and 5 altogether, although I remember when MS-DOS 5 was released, as it was quite a major upgrade at the time.

With Windows, I started with 3.0, then went to 3.1, 3.11 (for Workgroups), 95 and finally XP.

I missed Windows 98 altogether, as well as Windows 2000. I never ran Vista or Windows 7, as in the Vista days I was happy with XP on my Dell laptop, and when I moved to Mac OS X last year, I bid farewell to Windows altogether.

I still have my Dell laptop here as a backup, but haven't needed it. Once I fully transitioned to my Mac I reformatted my Dell's laptop, installed Windows XP from scratch (plus the drivers for the laptop) and ran through Microsoft Update. It's basically a fresh, bare machine with no apps installed.

I periodically drag the Dell out of retirement and run Microsoft Update to keep it current, and I've just done that today.

Ah, it's fun to reminisce! :-)

[Dizzy Photographics]

the first computer in our house was the commodore 64...i remember that well lol...until the nintendo all the way from America came along anyways. Then i had no interest in computers until my dad purchased one in 1992...dont know what it was just that it could connect to the internet and was interesting. Though in our house it was mainly used for games more than anything else

[kiwi]

I built a sinclair z81 I think it was from a kitset


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[dbax]

mmmm I can just remember my Amiga 500......those were the days everyting loaded each time by disk, wonderful.....and it even had windows before windows

[davidd]

So, it seems I'm not the only old f**t who has used computers for ever!

I look at my 1Tb external drive sitting on my desk, and think it has 100,000 times the storage of that first 10Mb drive, and that was a full-height 5 1/4" drive, and weighed a ton!

My laptop has 3 Gb of ram, or 2000 times the IBM's memory, in 2 little strips about 3 inches long. The IBM had the mother board full of 16 Kb chips, to get 384 Kb, and a second plug in-board (full size) for the last 128 Kb.

Where will the next 27 years take us in computer power? ( I probably won't be here to find out!)

[dieselpower]

First one was a microbee which only had a orange-black monitor ... ( keeping it inline with the bee theme i am guessing..... ) was good for programming in basic and that was around the very early 80's...

Same here. My olds had one, and there's a photo of me at about 9 months old reading a basic programming manual. Trend setter I guess, I now work in IT. We even had an old Microbee modem for cruising BBS's, although I think this was a later incarnation of the one that we had when I was a tot.

[Miaow]

Apple ][ which i made into an Apple ][+ even had a floppy drive and a colour card - mind you only had 48K of memory lol

[pgbphotographytas]

Mine was an Amiga 500

[bigbikes]

I cannot remember exactly what brand it was but I do remember it was a 486 with 8mg of ram and a (I think) 750 h/drive and was extremely slow.
What a beast of a machine that was

[Calxoddity]

Mine was an Amiga 500

That was my second computer: did my post-grad IT diploma on it - great little unit.

Regards,
Calx

[davesmith]

Commodore VIC 20 for me. 5KB RAM, an awesome bit of kit. Unfortunately we didn't have the tape drive, or "datasette" as I think it was known, early on. I'd spend two hours one-finger typing up game code in BASIC, another 2-3 hours trying to find the inevitable syntax error, 5 minutes playing the actual game then losing it all when it was switched off.

Ironically though, that experience 30 years ago of endless basic coding wasn't for nothing. Today I still build database and excel applications in visual basic.