Your First Computer

[Rockin' Kat]

The first computer my parents got was a WYSE 286. My dad bought it because it was the same as the computers being used at the company he was working as an engineer at. Presently it's upstairs on a desk running MS DOS 5.0 w/ Win 3.0. My dad sometimes talks about how he bought right when the 386's were coming out. I just remind him it's the only computer he's ever had that didn't die .... really... every other computer my dad has ever had always ended up having hardware failure that brought it down. The 286 just got old.

 

The first computer I could call my own was an Apple PowerMac 6100/60 I got in 1995 on the grounds that I needed a computer that was compatible with my school work... it wasn't really that hard to move my homework between platforms... I just really wanted my parents to buy me my own computer and my best friends had Macs(and a IIgs with a crap load of games), the school had Macs, and I liked them. I sometimes wonder how I managed to get my dad to buy it really. Considering what all the big tech magazines said when talking about Apple at that time, sinking ships and what not... I seem to recall that he had a co-worker who was really fanatical about them or something, so that might have had something to do with it.

[jeremysart]

My first computer was in 1988, the Intellivision ECS.. as if that counts, hehe.

 

But really it was the Atari 400, which I never used as a computer, just played Star Raiders, Dig Dug, and Pac-Man all day..

 

We eventually got an IBM 5150 with MS-DOS 3 when I was about 10, later upgrading to the IBM PS2 386 with Windows 3.1

 

I miss those days of installing new sound blasters and upgrading to VGA graphics..

WOW! You have a 5 gig hard drive!?

[Ross PK]

Mine was an Acorn Electron.

 

 

I got one for Christmas when I was around 8 in around 1984.

[stalepie]

My first computer was Babbage's analytical engine in 1845. After my dad built his time machine, the Excelera model no. 8588 in 1984, he sent me back in time to the year 1844 where Ada Lovelace raised and cared for me as a two-year-old child. Stuffed in my baby-jeans pockets were 4,000 pounds of British currency which my dad had given me and which Ada quickly took for herself and Charles to use on developing the under-funded analytical engine. As I grew older, I was quite bored of the normal games children played in the 18th century such as crocqet and pony-riding (having a fear of horses did not help here) and quickly longed for something else. Fortunately Ada (my foster mother) and Charles devised a new game with their machine called Jump Scot which involved me hopping over the exterier of the analytical engine (as well as the incomplete but nevertheless mechanically-working difference engine) while Charles tried to work out complex mathematical formulas to see if my hampering with the device caused any problems in the machine's output. This was a way of playtesting back then, but to add humor to the fun, Ada would guess what number the answer would be depending on which type of hopscotch movements I made which messed up the workings of the machine and outputted incorrect answers, much to Charles Babbage's disgust. As I grew older and heavier this game was no longer playable and fortunately in the year 1853 my father finally returned to the past citing a future war in the year 2011 in which America is invaded by North Korea and Iran. He said we must hurry and return to the year 2010 when things were still quite tranquil and that I must help him with his machine projects to develop enough energy-producing plasma (the fuel source needed in the time travel machines) to return to the mid 1980s where everything was all right, and everyone was under the safety and protection of uncle Reagan and Max Headroom.

[Nesbroslash]

Gateway 2000 running Windows 95. I used it when I was like 4. My fondest remembered game was definitely Sonic and Knuckles Collection, since my parents refused to get a game console for me and my brothers that wasn't portable.

[cybercylon]

Apple IIe... technically not ours, but one that was lent to me for quite a long time for a computer math class I was taking. Wrote a basic program where you could make something called shape tables and manipulate them over a background.. say a picture you drew with a KoalaPad. Wish I still had the code for that program.

 

First one that we actually owned: a Mac Plus.

[roberto]

The first computer I "saw", at a friend's house, was a TI99/4A but my first one was a C64 (I actually wanted a ZX Spectrum 48k but when my dad took me at the computer shop they only had the 16K version left, so we bought the C64! )

[Osbo]

My first computer was a used 8088 XT clon with 512k of RAM, a 30 MB hard drive, and an Hercules card and monitor. Not the best gaming machine ever, but I used to play games on it all the time, and I used WordPerfect and dBase III Plus a lot.

[Koopa64]

The Apple][e of course!

[ZackeryH]

I had a Vic-20 with a cassette tape drive. I had several games for it like Spike's Peak, Lode Runner, Donkey Kong, and a bunch of cassette tape games. I recall a game where you sold hotel rooms and set the price for them. I had a lot of fun playing on that computer. My parents sold it at a yard sale in the early 90's and I really didn't want to get rid of it. If I recall they sold it along with an Atari ST computer for $15.

[PsychoKittyNet]

A Macintosh LC III http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_lc/stats/mac_lc_iii.html

 

I remember I thought it was awesome, as it was one of the first computers I remember seeing that had a monitor seperate. I also had an external CD-ROM drive, and quite a bit of software. I was the only kid in the nieghborhood who had a computer, it was even better then the ones at the school. Yea, I am a nerd.