What was your first computer? - And why did you get it? (and more autistic details that almost no one would care about)

Some sort of 8080 breadboard kit my dad picked up. Programmed it in machine language in octal with a numeric keypad. It had three banks of display LED's linked to some registers.

While I don't work in IT, I have no fear of computers because of my early exposure to how they work deep down.

The first recognizable modern computer I had was a Sanyo clone of an IBM Portable, which was IBM's answer to the Compaq. It was an 8088 beast in a luggable case with a built-in CRT. By the time I replaced it, I had installed a memory upgrade on an ISA card, a processor upgrade (80286, baby!) with a sketchy vampire clamp to the original processor, and a 20 meg hard disk in one of the floppy bays.
 
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I was kind of young but I remember that it ran Norton Commander on top of DOS. I'm pretty sure it had a 386 in it, but I couldn't tell you who made the computer itself.
 
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BBCA2A.JPG

The BBC Micro...Basic is the word!
 
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First computer in the house was my parents' 16KB specrum with the rubber keyboard.
I used it when I was very small to play shape sorting games and shit like that.

When I was at primary school they had the old BBC micro B and we played with LOGO and we had a turtle that went along the ground with a pen to draw on massive sheets of paper. Shit was crackers I tell you. We also had a game where you could type in commands and the creature on the screen called "Pod" would do them. We used to try to type in swear words.

After that, I was given an Amstrad CPC464+ in the 90s, it was probably the last legit computer that used audio cassette tape as a storage medium. Someone else at school had one and we used to swap games. Being able to pirate games by using a tape deck was pretty fucking cool, and I used to get an Amstrad magazine with a tape full of useless shit on the cover every month. There's something theraputic about having to wait several minutes for games to load.

Then when I was a teenager, I bought myself an Amstrad PC1512 which was desperately outdated but good enough to do word processing so that was how I got my homework done. I had a dot matrix printer as a Christmas present one year, it was noisy as fuck. When I went to college I had saved up a lot and got myself a Pentium 60 that ran Windows 95. It was the first computer I had with a colour screen.
 
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crunchysalty said:
The first one I played with was the ti-99, when radio shack was still cool:
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That's the Radio Shack I miss everyday!

polonium said:
When I was at primary school they had the old BBC micro B and we played with LOGO and we had a turtle that went along the ground with a pen to draw on massive sheets of paper. Shit was crackers I tell you. We also had a game where you could type in commands and the creature on the screen called "Pod" would do them. We used to try to type in swear words.
Click to expand...
Here in the states, most schools fell for Apple's incentive and always had their IIe's in the computer room, this lasted into the 90's.

After that, I was given an Amstrad CPC464+ in the 90s, it was probably the last legit computer that used audio cassette tape as a storage medium. Someone else at school had one and we used to swap games. Being able to pirate games by using a tape deck was pretty fucking cool, and I used to get an Amstrad magazine with a tape full of useless shit on the cover every month. There's something theraputic about having to wait several minutes for games to load.
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Unlike my brother who got copied floppies of game ports like Elite's Paperboy to run on his C64, but I do recall the loading times being pretty long!

Curt Sibling said:
BBCA2A.JPG

The BBC Micro...Basic is the word!
Click to expand...
I think they tried to bring that over here and it just didn't happen!
 
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Commodore 64. My old man was a programmer at the time, and sank a lot of money into it - we had the thermal printer, the disk drive, even a digitiser (graphics tablet, these days) for it. I still have it (with the accessories), as well as a bunch of games. Incidentally, if I'm not mistaken, @telemuchus avatar is a fuzzy from the commodore 64 game 'Creatures', or its sequel.
 
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DangerousGas said:
Commodore 64. My old man was a programmer at the time, and sank a lot of money into it - we had the thermal printer, the disk drive, even a digitiser (graphics tablet, these days) for it. I still have it (with the accessories), as well as a bunch of games. Incidentally, if I'm not mistaken, telemechus' avatar is a fuzzy from the commodore 64 game 'Creatures', or its sequel.
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Sounds like just what we had for our C64, though we had a dot matrix printer, some VicModem that didn't seem to work for our computer (though perhaps my brother didn't know he had to connect to a BBS) and even this fancy ass monitor that is STILL in my possession! These things do come in handy for any composite video device!
commodore1702_sm.jpg
 
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BadHabits said:
appleimac-1348175545-19384.jpg


This thing had a touch screen and everything, shit was sick.

I guess these were pretty rare, so I have no clue where we got one.
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They weren't that rare. Apple just made the perverse decision only to sell through a very few outlets, fucking over many small independent retailers who had sold their products since they fucking started out. Mild powerlevel, still pissed about that as I worked for one of those at the time.
 
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