Nostalgic for your first computer?

AlmostAtheist

I just read a piece on CNN about the Commodore 64. Apparently it is what hundreds of thousands of people (the article says "millions" -- really? millions?) look back on as their very first real computer.

Like so many other things in my life, my introduction to computing wasn't on anything standard. My first computer was the Interact; an 8080A-based, 8k RAM, internal tape-drive little bit o' heaven. Loved it then, love it now. Of course, my dad didn't settle for a mere 8k RAM -- oh, hell no. He boosted it to 16k! (Enough to hold your home address about 300 times over, or the JWD home page 4 times over [without the images]) My dad and I split the cost of the keyboard upgrade -- $75 if I recall correctly. I was 12 at the time, I think.

I was moved to post about it when I found this memorial to it: http://oldcomputers.net/interact.html

This is where I learned BASIC. And Assembler. It taught me about binary and hex. Registers. BIOS. The boot process. It was all there in rudimentary form. It even taught me a bit about hacking. (White hat, of course!) I remember renaming often-used variables to one-character names in order to reduce the memory used by the program, in an attempt to squeeze a few more bytes of code in! Ah, the days!

Our Interact died many years ago. I got another one, but it didn't work quite the same and really, it wasn't the same. It's gone now, too.

What was YOUR first computer? What did it teach you? Do you still have it?

Dave

brinjen

It was a 286 12Mhz with 4Mb RAM, total of 60Mb HDD, EGA graphics and a 5 1/4" FDD. It ran MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.0 (in standard mode of course). I don't still have it, I often wish I did. Poor thing, changed my life and I ruthlessly upgraded a couple of years later.

Abandoned

My first computer was a TI 99/4a. Some of you may remember it. It came out about the same time as the Commodore Vic 20. I couldn't afford the floppy disk drive for it, though, so I had to save all the programs I wrote on cassette tape. I did spend the extra bucks and get the Extended Basic module. It came with an additional 16K of memory, leaving me with a whopping 32K. Remember, that was before the Commodore 64 redefined what a home computer was.

jaguarbass

My first computer was a radio shack tsr-80, with a cassete tape drive.

Hortensia

my first computer was an atari, I think 256k, no images at all, just green letters on a dark background. No fonts, no graphics, but I used it constantly.

MissingLink

I first had access to a TI 99/4a at school. There was only one for the whole school district - so only the "gifted" kids got access to it. Cut grass like mad for 2 summers and sold whatever I could to buy my first Atari 800. Freakin awesome! I totally customized the thing - it was very "ghetto" with extra switches and knobs and wires hangin' out. Don't have it any more, but still enjoy using an emulator on the PC to play M.U.L.E. with the wife.

AlphaOmega

This was my first computer :

A Sinclair ZX81 - no colour and as far as I remember, no sound either and definately no hard drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX81

AlmostAtheist

bttt

JH

My dad's first computer and my first to play on and learn from scratch, was a 486 as they called it , at 25 Mhz Not much Ram and a tiny hard disk...lol with Windows 3.1

WTWizard

My first true computer (as opposed to one of those calculator/computer things) was a Tandy TRS-80 Model 4. It was, compared to today's computers, a piece of crap. It was not compatible with most video games. I tried writing BASIC programs to get video games, but they never came out (I never got it to put out moving sprites). The printer was a dot matrix with a ribbon drive.

That thing developed a major problem. Very often, the cursor would start blinking extremely rapidly, and it would start repeating a key held down a tiny fraction of a second. It was difficult to get it back to normal, and the fix would last until the next time it felt like acting up.

Its monitor was also crap. It was built into the whole unit. The monitor was monochrome (green) built in to a chassis that included the keyboard and two floppy drives. There was no hard drive. The damn thing only had 64 K of memory, of which something like 39,000 bytes was free for use. I paid something like $1500 (in 1985, at that in 1985 dollars and not in inflation adjusted today's dollars) for that. Perhaps I should have gotten a Commodore 128 or something else that was compatible with many video games.

Nostalgic for your first computer?

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