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

It was some old Compaq all-in-one that ran Windows 3.1, got it secondhand from my grandmother when I was like 6. Wasn't much to do besides play a few games, make stuff in Paintbrush, and mess around with this print-shop program that someone else had installed on there previously. I was going to see about putting more games on there, but the floppy drive broke not long after I got the idea to do so, and neither I nor anyone I knew had any idea how to fix it.
 
First computer my family had was an Acer desktop that we bought in '95 or '96 from Best Buy. I remember that it was expensive as fuck, something like $4,000, and that it had a metric fuckton of bloatware, even by modern standards. We bought a Gateway desktop a couple years after that, and then my uncle who is a big computer guy built us a desktop a short while after that.

The Gateway was weird, only because I remember we bought it at a Gateway store in our town, which as I remember, was basically like a modern day Apple or Microsoft store except with shitty Gateways.

Over the last fifteen years I got pretty interested in computer hardware, and have been through probably two dozen laptops and desktops, including a few Macs, during that time.

One cool thing is we had broadband back in like '99. We had a DSL line installed at our business to run credit cards and shit, and I remember how in awe I was not having to log in to AOL in order to access the internet. It's crazy to think about, as a lot of my friends were still on dial up well into the 2000s.
 
Unfortunately, I don't really remember much. All I know is that it was a Windows 3.1 desktop. I only really used it to play some games.
 
It was this big fat blueberry bitch.

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The first family computer was a Tandy Color Computer III with both an external floppy disk drive and a cassette drive. That Christmas, my uncle gave us a dot matrix printer as a gift.

I was starting high school at the time and my dad wanted something that would do word processing as opposed to using a typewriter. I used it for high school papers and the basketball team's statistics. He used it to make it easier to print and update the family genealogy.

The software I remember having was:
  • Deskmate: A crude Office-like program with word processing, databases, and spreadsheets (if not other stuff we never used). There was also a music program on it. I never created my own music, but I did play the included Christmas Music medley during Decembers.
  • VIP Writer: A more WYSIWYG-type word processor.
Having had brief units of BASIC programming in junior high, I also tinkered around with some of the BASIC on this system. The only major thing I did was take a program out of the manual that had the computer play When the Saints go Marching in through the speaker.

Also, my dad not being computer literate at the time meant he thought all he had to do was buy the computer and it would do anything you wanted. He had no idea you had to buy software.

We eventually sold it to someone else and upgraded to something that was "IBM Compatable."

The first computer I remember having was a 386 that my neighbor sold. I don't know what his day job was, but he built and repaired computers on the side. He did good work and we missed him once he stopped his side business, retired and moved away.

This was during my college years, so I needed my own dedicated computer for class papers and programming assignments.

At the time, most computers ran DOS 5 or 6 and Windows 3.x. This was no exception. I had a menu program that loaded at startup to allow me to choose between Windows or the number of DOS programs I still had and used. The software I can still recall having was:
  • PFS:First Choice (Office-like suite) followed by a then-current version of Office.
  • DOS Fax & Win Fax for sending and receiving basketball statistics.
  • Turbo Pascal and public domain versions of LISP and/or PROLOG for class assignments over the years.
  • PK Zip/Unzip
  • A shareware image viewer whose name escapes me.
  • COMit (for connecting to the relatively-new internet with my 9600 baud fax modem which was fast for the time).
  • Various shareware games, some of which I purchased because I enjoyed them that much. I'm half tempted to try running them under DOS Box to see if they can be played again.
  • F-PROT Antivirus, because it was free at the time (and I think one of my CS professors recommended it).
The only real story I have is why I had to get rid of it. One day, I decided to run a defrag on my hard drive while I was out for the day. I put a note on my desk 'Do not turn off'. Somehow, it fell on the floor and my mom didn't see it, saw my CPU lit up and turned it off thinking I left it on for no reason. Unfortunately, that trashed the hard drive bad enough, I had to get a new computer. Not having our neighbor's side business to turn to any more, I got a new HP desktop from Office Depot that I had to take back the next day because the internal modem was defective.

Edited to add links to some of the older software for which I could find information online.
 
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My first computer was a Vic-20 with a tape drive and 3 cartridge text adventures.

My dad won it in a poker game, told me that by the time I was his age, computers would be everywhere, so I might as well learn to use it.
 
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Mine was a 25mhz 386SX, I think I got it in either 1990 or 1991. It was custom built by one of my dad's co-workers, and he cloned his hard drive onto it, giving me a bunch of games like Civilization, Red Baron, and Chuck Yeager's Air Combat for free. The first two games I bought for it were Wing Commander II and The Colonel's Bequest, both on 5" floppies. I kept the same massive tower case and upgraded it to a 486DX2/66 in 1994, added a SoundBlaster 16 and a CD-ROM drive in 1995, a Pentium 166 and 16mb memory in 1996, then added a 3DFX Voodoo 2 in 1997 for GLQuake. I finally got rid of it in 1999 when I started college and replaced it with a Pentium III PC and a shitty 450mhz Celeron laptop. I really wish I had kept it.
 
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(not counting the Amiga 500)
A Pentium 2 400 MHz with 64 MB RAM and an onboard Riva TNT we bought from Aldi (with monitor included) in 1999. Sold it to my school in 2001 or so.
I used that monitor till 2010 or so.
 
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The first computer we had was a second-hand PC my dad got somewhere in late 1990s. I can't recall the specs, but it had a low-spec Pentium CPU, if I'm not mistaken, which was replaced by a cheap Celeron later. Also, it had a giant protective screen on its monitor and Russian key layout scratched on the keyboard with a pen.
It had MS-DOS with a local Norton Commander clone on top of it, then briefly Windows 3.1 and finally, Russian version of Windows 98 (pirated, of course).
I used it to play various DOS shit. The fact that we actually had a PC (wow!) hid from younger me the fact that we were actually very piss-poor back then.

Unlike you first worlders, we only got Internet in mid 2000s, when dial-up became less astronomically expensive. It was quickly replaced by basic ADSL around 2008-09.
 
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It was a second hand computer from a charity. We qualified because my brother had open heart surgery. This was in 2000. At the time more people were starting to get computers and internet. Before that I only knew like two people that had internet in the 90s. It as a pretty amazing thing to have at the time given our income bracket. It was also pretty old but I didn't care.

It was a 1993 computer running Windows 95. It used to be used in a doctor's office. When they replaced it an employee was allowed to take it home and give it to her son, who put a porn dialer on there. We found it when we started the computer up.:lol:

It had a lot of storage space for the time. I can't remember how much. But it was more than you'd expect for something that old. Probably because it had been used for medical stuff. I think it was an HP.

It was the type with the horizontal tower with the reset button. And a neighbor told us to be careful with the button because they were prone to breaking. Well my sister broke it and I had to open everything up and pop it out. That was the first time I saw inside a computer.

We had AOL.

*dialup noises*

In 2003 I got a Compaq Presario. People would say "It's awful" but it was fine. I never had any issues with it. Plus it was a nicely discounted floor model since Sears was closing its electronics department. That Sears just closed up in the winter. Sears is dead. The final nail will be pounded into that coffin sooner than later.

In 2009 I replaced it with this computer I have now, an HP. Which needs to be replaced badly but that ain't happening any time soon. I do have a tablet. But I can't get used to mobile even though it has a mini bluetooth keyboard. So I don't use it a lot.
 
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Are you really expecting me to remember what type of computer I had in 1998? It had dial-up. That's all I remember.
I'm not including the second hand piece of shit we got in 1996. It was useless.
 
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I don't remember specifics but it was an old Compaq desktop from around the mid-90s I got from a relative. Barely had 300 MB of harddrive space and at one point I had it compressed not wondering if it was a bad idea or not.
 
My very first computer was an Apple IIc. My dad wouldn't let us get a modem because he thought it would cost money to call BBSes (he insisted that calling people on his cell phone cost extra too, until I made him go to the AT&T and ask). When I was a freshman in high school, a family friend gave me his Commodore 64 with modem, and explained to my dad it wouldn't cost anything. He introduced me to BBSes and it was great. Then my first actual PC was a 386/25. My parents were delighted that computers were causing me to make to make friends (it was mostly to trade hardware and tips) because I was the weird loner kid up until that point. I scrounged up the parts to build another PC and ran a BBS on it from my sophomore year till graduation. I wrote about in another thread, but basically it was a "fuck the adults" thing where we could bitch about our teachers and how awful being a teenager was. I never got found out despite the adults at my school trying to find out who owned the phone number. Oh those were the days. I consider my 386 my first computer because that was the one I actually learned how they work on.
I saved up and got a Soundblaster Pro, and even connected to packet BBSes (like regular BBSes but you used radio to connect instead of phone lines). Yeah, I had a ham radio license. Also, thanks to keeping questionable company, I learned how to make long distance calls that weren't charged to my number (I am aware now of how dumb that was, but I was 15). With that knowledge, I would call the big porn BBSes and the major warez sites and get all the 256 color dirty pictures I could download along with the latest games. Since it was risky to do what I did, I would usually do it once-twice a month, then upload my ill-gotten gains to local boards, which made me very popular among the horny teenaged male demographic, along with the dirty old man crowd. The games were also fun, but I just uploaded those.
 
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I don't remember the specs, but it was a custom-built white box hand-me-down from my dad running Windows 95, and in an InWin V-500 computer case, which was the Cadillac of cases back in the mid-1990s to early 2000s, when everything else was plastic shit with ugly curves. The panel was a single three-sided piece which wrapped around and cut my hands many times as an elementary school little shit, especially upgrading it with a motherboard and that fucking cartridge Pentium II, all to run Windows ME...
 
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