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What was your first computer?
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Mine was a Tandy TRS-80 (all-in-one):) Gotta love the sound of the floppy discs working so hard.
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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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It was a 8088 clone computer .
with 2 5 1/4 HD floppy drives, 640k ram monochrome monitor.
Was great at the time dos 3 and GW basic used for gaming and continued to learn programingGlen
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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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A Sinclair kit, from England. It used a tv for a monitor. Second was a “portable” suitcase all-in-one– I don’t remember who made it. Those were fun days in the computing world…
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My first computer was made by Alpha Micro in Irvine, California — about 1980. It used 5.25″ floppy drive and supported a VHS tape drive for making backups. I don’t recall the sized of the hard drive, but it was adequate. One of the nice features was that the operating system supported multiple users simultaneously. Each user had their own dumb terminal, and they were hardwired to the computer.
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My first computer was a Rakoa RK-6 which was an IBM Clone, a 4.77 mhz 8088 that looked like and functioned like the IBM PC XT . When I purchased it for $599.97 {six hundred bucks} it had 512 KB of ram, one 360k 5 1/4 floppy and a monochrome monitor with a Hercules graphics card. I upgraded it while I owned it with a 20 mb Seagate ST 225, a CGA monitor and card. I used wordprocessor Freestyle {site licensed at Ohio State University, Lotus 123 spreadsheet, and lots of GW-Basic. For my second, I went to a computer show summer 1989, bought a 286-10 AT motherboard and a case and moved my hard drive over. I think I had the Perstor RLL controller by that time formatting the 20 MB Hard Drive to 38 MB. Story would get long at this point if I detailed upgrades. I will highlight processors here. 8088→ 286 10→ 368SX16{1990}→486-33{1992}→486DX2-66{1994}AMD586-133{1995}→K5-75{1995}→K6→133{1998}→K6-3-450 {1999}→Several Athlons, Phenoms 2000-2009→ Several AMD FX’s 2010→2015 then my current computers are Sandy Bridges, IVY Bridges and one i7 Haswell. I’ve went through a whole OS sequence from Dos 2.1 to Windows 10.
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I purchased my first computer in 1984. It was a Texas Instrument TI99/4A. I was a big fan of Compute! magazine as there were a lot of type you could type in. It came with no data storage. I used a cassette recorder to save any of my work. There were game cartridges you could purchase. In 1987 I purchased a used Apple IIc with only a green display. I immediately joined a local computer user group, of which I have been a member for 35 years It has been amazing to see how computing has changed in all those years.
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I also started with a luggable – but on a tighter budget – a Kaypro Z-80 based machine.
I can’t recall exactly when I got it but it got me through grad school par-time nights – in 1986 I got an MS in Computer Science from RPI.
I bought a Pascal complier so I could work from home instead of schlepping to the lab that was about a 30 minute drive.
I wrote my master’s thesis on it and printed it on a dot matrix printer and glued it to galley sheets and RPI bound it into a softcover book for a symposium put on by us students.
I used the spreadsheet it came with to calculate amortization tables when we were doing a re-fi – I think it took like 1/2 hour to calculate and print a 30 year amortization table.
After that a series of Intel PCs, then in 2010 a MacBook Pro, then in 2021 an M1 Mac Mini and a few months ago an M1 MacBook Air too. -
I was working as an IBM office products (typewriters, copiers, word processors) salesman when I bought my first computer in 1979 or 1980. It was an awesome Radio Shack Color Computer. I think it had 4K memory which I upgraded to 16. My storage was a cassette tape recorder and my display was a Panasonic TV. I remember I programmed Hammurabi on it in BASIC. That was fun. Now, compare that to my Apple Watch 7 😉
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Used: (1988) Zenith 250 desktop. No internal hard drive (dual floppy disks), orange monochrome display, and encased in a metal box to process classified data (it was a Tempest thing).
Owned: (1992) Gateway Nomad(?) laptop. 4mb RAM, 78mb hard drive, and 64 shades of grey display. I still had it up until 2020 when I cleaned out my man cave.
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A Radio Shack handheld with 8K memory. It was amazing at the time, I learned enough basic to program it to calculate
water treatment product dosages, this was in about 1978….. what and change since then. Too little memory. -
I bought a Timex sinclair 1000. It connected to a t v set. It was slower than a slug and recycled everything before printing. It takes space in my attic. after that I bought a Adam Cpleco. It came as a complete package and had a five inch disc drive. I was plodding without a guide into computing. I needed help seriously. I still need help.
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We bought it for our church office through the suggestion of one of the engineers in our church in 1988. It came from a shop where they put it together, added about 64 Mgs of Ram, and attached a name plate (literally, just one they had in a drawer), and gave us a color monitor. It ran on Microsoft DOS (no number, just MS DOS), which was quite an advancement in those days. It had two floppy drivers and a small hard drive. One of our church members gave us Q&A, which we used as a word processor, although it had a spread-sheet capability. That church member also gave us an early version of Aldus (not yet Adobe) PageMaker with a tutorial that I used to teach myself PageMaker.
I do remember that we could get additional applications (including games) by going to a store where they had floppy disks where you could literally pick up a new, as we called them back then, “program.” I made friends with some of the neighborhood kids who got the word around that our church was the place come and play games on the computer after school.
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It was 1985, I was in my sophomore year of college. I picked a Radio Shack Tandy 2000 that was on sale, made the mistake of trying to save money by buying a brother printer/ typewriter and a Toshiba monitor/ television. I had a journey keeping it all together while working full-time, college full-time, and raising a family. Glad that today’s computers are more reliable and easier to use.
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