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What was YOUR very first computer?


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Can't really call it "mine" -it was my parents', I just happened to be there- but mine was a Commodore 64. It was ~1989, I was four or five years old. I don't know exactly when they got it (I think it was around that time though), but that's when I first remember it. We had Ms. Pac-Man (Thunder Mountain), Beach Head II, Blue Max, and what I'm pretty sure was Stealth. I even remember going with my dad to Radio Shack and buying what I now know to be a TAC-2 joystick. I've been hooked on games ever since.

 

I accidentally blew up the Commodore, though; the power in the living room must have gone through the light switch. I decided I wanted to play Ms. Pac-Man in the dark (it was more arcade-like, after all), so I loaded the game up (or maybe had one of my parents do it...I was, like, five) and then turned the lights off, and the computer went with it. Knowing what I know now, it was probably the power supply that went bad and not the computer itself, but we got rid of the Commodore after that. Some kind of 286 or 386 followed a couple of years later.

 

It's ironic now that it was my father, who hates video games and considers them the world's all-time greatest waste of time and can barely contain his derision at the very mention of them, who originally got me into games with the Commodore system. I'm a little unclear as to why we had those games though, if that was his position on them. Maybe he felt differently then. (He's loathe to admit it these days, but mom tells me he went through a bit of PacMania when they were dating in the early '80s.)

 

Before I was born (or thereabouts) my parents had a Timex/Sinclair, which I believe was THEIR first system. Mom had a Frogger game for it, but I forget if was a tape or a program listing that you had to type in and save to cassette.

 

The first computer that was "all mine" was some kind of 286 that my mom and I found at a rummage sale in 1995 (I was 9 or 10). I remember it was $50, and I don't know what made my mom agree to buy it for me ($50 is pretty spendy for a rummage sale system that you don't even know the working condition of, and she wasn't typically wont to cave to my and my brother's cases of gimme-gimmes), but I had to have it, and it came home with us. After we got a power cord for it at Walmart, and my dad had the floppy drive replaced (turned out the system had a few issues, but my dad had the computer guy at work give it some help), I was ready to roll with my very own computer. The only software I had was a word processor and spreadsheet (which dad thought would be good for me to have), and the system was at least a decade old with only an amber screen, but I didn't care. I had my very own computer all to myself and I absolutely loved it. A friend had a copy of what I believe was some version of the Friendlyware games (it was a mishmash of the the two versions I've seen...and the Pac-Man was closer to Pac-Gal than FW Pac-Man) that was on the computers where he went to school. We played the living shit out of that ASCII Pac-Man game, even when we had Sega Genesis and SNES and Playstation was right around the corner. Eventually that system got sold in a rummage sale (from whence it came...), which I regret every time I think of it. I'd love to at least track down a copy of that games disk, but I can find exactly zero information on it. It had to be some version of Friendlyware.

 

I think the first computer I got in the course of my collecting was the Commodore 64.

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My first computer was a Spectrum+ 48k bought second hand by my parents for Christmas in 1990. I still have it and it works but the membrane said goodbye a lot of time ago... I have good memories of it and I used it intensively until I got a SNES four years later.

 

It came with a couple of joysticks and a bunch of games but my favorites were Green Beret and AticAtac, I spent a lot of afternoons playing them. :)

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I'm not quite sure the meaning behind the uppercase "YOUR" in the title, so I'll answer like this:

MY FAMILY'S first computer, and the one that teethed me on programming was my Coleco ADAM. I still have it, and it still works. :) After that were an XT clone, and moving on from there ...

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My family got an Amstrad CPC464, I think it was in 1983. It had a colour monitor, Z80 processor at 4MHsz, 64KB memory and a built in tape drive. It was a great home computer and had some awesome games. The version of BASIC was great too.

Same here, a CPC 6128, got some wonderful moments with it, playing and programming, still having it, can't throw, sell or give it.

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1st Computer was an Ohio Scientific (8" floppies!!!) in late 1984. Followed by an Eagle (5 1/4" floppies and a much smaller footprint) in 1985. In 1986 I got an IBM PC-XT with 640k RAM and a 32 Mb harddrive (heaven!!).

 

1st console - Intellivision (1983)

2nd console - Atari 5200 (1984)

3rd console - NES (1986). Still have it.

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  • 2 weeks later...

1. VIC 20...My cousin had a C64, schools had Apple IIc/e, which I also used...Complete with Monochrone green monitor and data cassette only.

2. Later had an Turbo XT complete with 4.77/10 MHz switch - CGA 4 color/RGB or Composite mode. Two 5 1/4" low density disk drives. No hard drive. PC Speaker Sound.

3. Huge jump and much later on Pentium 100. Ensoniq Soundscape was awesome.

4. Another big leap later.... P4 1.3 Ghz - Northwood - Half way through ownership slapped on a PowerLeap CPU bringing it to 2.8 GHz

5. Several more years later and current PC - second generation Core i7 2600 stock 3.8 GHz.

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4. Another big leap later.... P4 1.3 Ghz - Northwood - Half way through ownership slapped on a PowerLeap CPU bringing it to 2.8 GHz

 

Did they make Northwoods running at 1.3GHz? I thought that would be a Willamette core, Didn't northwood start at 1.6?

 

Correct, and my bad. It was after the Powerleap upgrade that the P4 went to 'Northwood' level (minus some cache, if I recall correctly)...I was an "early" adapter of the P4 - Willamette.

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Oh, also at some point, I picked up an Aquarius from a yard sale. Didn't have any carts or tapes or anything, so all you could do was doodle around in BASIC and not save it. It must've been after the PC Jr.s, because I wasn't very interested.

 

Some guy there (a salesman I guess) actually took the time to review what I had typed into the computer.

 

What tomfoolery is this?? That doesn't sound like the RadioShack I know. Surely you mean you asked for some computer help, and he said "Um...I don't know. Would you like to buy a cell phone today?"

 

My first computer was a commodore 16, shortly to be replaced by a 64.

 

My BASIC debugging was done by a mechanic in the garage where my dad works. Not once did he suck air in through his teeth and say 'that'll cost you...' :)

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  • 2 weeks later...

I had to wait many years to have two important things: cars and computers.

 

I'm 32, but learned to drive with 26 years! This is very strange, my mother had a car since I was 4 years old.

My first computer came a bit earlier, it was a petium 3... Here, the main reason was Brasilian polytics for computers at that time.

 

On second thoughts I had a nice 6507 back in 1984...

Edited by Liduario
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My parents never were into computers until I got my first job after high school in 1998. But, before that first PC came into the house, I picked up a complete TI-99/4a computer with controllers and several games a the local flea market for $25. I spent hours playing with that old computer and when the HP finally came into the house that summer, the TI was still being used for gaming. I had gotten an Atari 7800 system before that, but the TI was my introduction to computers in a big way. Odd, seeing that I was nearing 20 years old by that time. What is ironic is that the HP is gone and several other PCs have come and gone in this house, but I still have that TI and it still works. I dropped it, fell on it once in the night, left it burried in my closet for a year, and stepped on it numerous times, but it never has died! Right now it is in semi-retirement as another TI I got a couple years back gets some play. I just got a third TI-99 base tossed at me last month. If I can get the 'Q' key to work, I will have a third system once I get a third working converter box. :)

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It was a VIC-20. I was searching garage sales for a C64 when I seen a VIC 20 with tape drive. I don't remember how much I paid for it but it was working and I tried one of those type-in-games found in the back of the manual- took a lot of time with the "hunt and peck" method.

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  • 4 weeks later...

First one I used at school was a TRS-80 model III, but I didn't get much time with it. My dad got a coco 1 as partial payment of a debt and had no use for it, so he gave it to me. It came with a stack of books and a cassette cable, nothing else. I didn't even realize it took cartridges; I just typed in and modified games and saved them on a generic tape deck. This was early 80's and I didn't get another computer until a friend gave me an unwanted XT-8088 w/ 20 meg HD in about '92. Then it was on!

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