2 weeks, 4 days ago-
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Tell me about your first computer, where you got it, what you used it for, the best thing about it, the worst thing about it.
Mine was a Compaq luggable. Compaq Computer Corporation introduced the first IBM-compatible portable computer in November 1982. It weighed about 25 pounds but it was sweeeettt.
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The year was 1997, Grandma gifted the family this Packard Bell multimedia machine. She wanted to make sure we were ready for a digital lifestyle. 🙂
I remember setting up a camcorder to capture the process of re-installing Windows 98 with Best Buy support on the phone! Because you know, I had to break it a few times to figure out how it worked.
Processor – 133MHz Pentium Processor
Memory – 16MB, Upgradeable to 128MB
Hard Drive – 1.2GB
Graphics Chip – S3 64v+, 1MB Video Memory, upgradeable to 2MB
Sound Card – Standard Packard Bell Sound/Modem Card
Optical Drive – 6x NEC CD-ROM Drive
Optical Connection – IDE/Atapi
Floppy Drives – 1x 1.44MB 3.5″ Floppy Drive
Expansion Slots – Unknown
Operating System – Windows 95
Navigator Version – Navigator 3.6
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Requires Time travel. Radio Shack sold them. It had a math coprocessor button (Woohoo!). I can still “see” the cursor on the monitor. Done inputting? Double-check, yes! I’d push the “button.” Time… I did not sit and wait for the results. It would take maybe twenty minutes before I could print out the inventory information. From spreadsheet to databases and still using spreadsheets. We have come a long way together. Great question, Kim. Fun, dredging up old memories.
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My first computer was home-built with a 286 motherboard and DOS 3.1, later upgraded to Windows 3.1. It had 64K of RAM and a 20MB hard drive. It was built by another ham radio guy in trade for a ham radio antenna in 1992. My son taught me how to use it as he was in the 5th grade and had a Commodore 64.
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Mine was an 8088 clone. Darned if I can remember a brand. A friend put it together for me, and I used to to start my career as a Clipper programmer. Before that I was a bookkeeper, and that little 8088 jump started my career in computers. That was in the early 80s, and I retired in 2013 after 30 years in the computer field, the last 21 working support for a regional bank. That little 8088 was a life-changing experience.
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My first computer was a birthday present from my husband. It was 1990 and we lived in Cairo, Egypt. My husband thought it would help me pass the time. There weren’t any computer shops there at the time, so the guys at his office built it from parts ordered from the states. It had a 1 mg hard drive and I can’t remember how much memory it had but it was in bytes not megabytes. No pictures, only typed words. I learned a lot on that computer. I also learned how to take it apart and put it back together and add components. I don’t miss it. By the time we came back to the states I was using Windows.
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It had to be about 1982 or so. One of the first IBM desktops made….big box with a screen not so big.
My boss came to town….set it on my desk….and left me with it. No training no book. The spreadsheet program then was Lotus 123. I figured out how to get into the program, but could not figure out how to exit for the longest time…. just had to turn the power off. Been learning all I can ever since. Of course, the most important thing I have learned over all these may years is….just about the time you catch on….they change it.
Kim, you are the best!!!! -
My first computer was the first TRS80 that was made. I used it with the phone modem , and visited many bulletin boards and made some friends. I played Scott Adams adventures, which was a lot of fun. I remember thinking my computer was broken when I subtracted.18 from 1 and the answer was .81999999 . I expected .82 as the answer I also purchased and subscribed ro Cload which sent me a cassette tape with programs on it on a regular basis. I don’t know how I was satisfied with just 16k of memory and wrote many programs in Basic. Someone said around that time that one day everyone would have a computer and we thought that would never happen
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The first computer I used for work was a compact lugable with the 9″ green CRT. It was a great computer. I ran data aquistion software, terminal emulation software, and some industrial automation programming languages. I remember how cool Xtree pro was. At about the same time I used a “Lunch Box” style computer as well. That one was a 286 and it was before mice were being used. They existed, but almost no programs supported them. I used my digitizer board as a mouse. Did you ever run a fractal video program to see how good your monitor was?
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Ah, bygone days. My cute lil Tandy 1000 (costlier than any computer one would buy now!) — with Deskmate, a color screen, a 300-baud modem (and you paid an arm and a leg to go online!)
I was not too much later a beta tester for America Online (and who here remembers a great program called GeoWorks Ensemble).
For those who I deal with in a rowdy comment section at our TV station who think everything was better 20-30 years ago, I say, ya know why? You were 20-30 years YOUNGER! Of course it was “better” in the eyes of youth.
The stuff we have now is downright amazing – but that sense of discovery I shared with my late great brother Pete… was just wonderful -
My first computer was an IBM 5110, 2 2.4 mb disk drives and 120 character printer at a cost of $20,000. Used in my CPA practice to do bookkeeping and prepare financial statements. I also thought that IBM would expand the use to home computing but they went the PC route. My next computer was a Compaq luggable at a cost of $3450.
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Mine was a Hong Kong special (I was in Japan) and I bought in 1987 a PC that everyone was buying. At work, we started off with CROMENCO and CPS Word Processors both had 8″ disks.
The CROMENCO had a 10MB hard drive, 640K RAM, the box was 3 feet by 2 feet by 18 inches tall.
Later the DoD purchased Zenith 100s, then 240Z. In 1991 while in Korea a Packard Bell for Home.
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# IBM-1130
# I didn’t own it. I couldn’t touch it. I could sort-of see it through layers of special glass at my college.
I could type out punch cards, which white jacketed (and masked?) techs collected.
My clumsy Fortran IV card deck would return to my mailbox marked “syntax error”.
The computer was a leased IBM 1130.
The punch card chaff (punched out pieces) made terrific confetti. -
My first computer was an IBM Aptiva from Radio Shack. Very slow. Little memory. 28K modem. But some very nice Bose speakers that I still have. Half hour to connect to the internet and up to two days to download a single picture. Used AOL to connect and that slowed me down too. I am on my forth computer now. HP notebook. $1200 computer for $747 at Sam’s Club. Not bad. Need to find out how to upgrade my processor in order to get Windows 11.
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Kim,
My first computer was an Apple 2E. It had double 5-1/4 floppy drives. I don’t know why I bought it and it was expensive at the time. I used it for playing some games. Not much application software was available at that time. That was in 1984.
My second computer was a PC with a 286 matchco processor. I needed the mathco processor to run AutoCAD. Thank god for the 486 a couple of years later. LOL.
Ed
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I bought my first computer on October 14, 1987 and it was probably the only whole computer I would buy for years, into the 2010s . $599.95 . It was a RAKOA Rk-6 which was an IBM-PC XT clone. It had one full size floppy drive, 512 KB of ram, I think MSDOS 2.1 and a monochrome monitor and card, I think it had Hercules graphics. I became an upgrader from then on, going to CGA, putting a used Seagate ST-225 20 MB Hard drive I bought for $200 {retail was $299.95} . I used a writing program called Wordstar which was site licensed to The Ohio State University and of course, GW-Basic. I put some Borland Products on it including Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic and spreadsheet Quattro and eventially got Lotus 123 and Wordperfect. I upgraded to “286-10 ” in 1989 and bought a case and also had my hard drive up to a Walloping ONE HUNDRED EIGHT MEGABYTES, a hard to comprehend size by putting the Perstor ARRL controller on a 60 MB MFM Hard drive. I recall that I put the 8088 back together with the 20 MB and sold it at the time. Later on 1991-386 SX {Windows 3.0} → 1992→Windows 3.1 Ami Pro Wordprocessor 8 MB of ram and 486-33 1995 up to the AMD 586 -133 that was really a 486-DX4 that ran clock quadrupled at 133 mhz and nearly approached a Pentium 75 in performance.
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