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What was your first computer?
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Don’t remember the year – but it was a Comador 128. Actually – it was for our 2 boys in grade school. The entire neighborhood ended up in the basement. All the kids learned a lot about computers. We set up a family email address through AOL and we still use it today. Obviously the kids have their own emails.
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My first computer was a PC’S Limited Turbo PC IBM clone. Sold by to me by Michael Dell from his dorm room. (Yes, THAT Michael Dell.) It had an Intel 8088 microprocessor, 640 kilobytes of RAM, a 360-kilobytes drive and eight expansion slots. Sweet?
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Hi had a Tandy 2000. I loved it because I had it and I could play solitaire on it. The worse thing is that solitaire is about all it did.
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My first computer was an Alpha Micro manufactured in Irvine, CA. I used it for business functions as it supported multiple users simultaneously. It used flopy discs and did not have a graphical interface. It was a DOS based machine, and much of the software I had to program myself.
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My first computer was an”amiga” don’t remember much more except it was a video editing beast at that time. Way before windows. Wish I still had it.
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TRS80 Winter of 1977 . No hard drive, no floppy, no sound. Keyboard was built into the system. I loaded it with a cassett recorder and wrote programs in Basic.
My first program was: What is your name?
Blank rectangle box would appear and flash.
I typed in Joe and hit the enter key.
The thing replied with “Hi Joe”.
I was amazed and hooked on computing. Loved that thing and spent many restfull hours on the thing. -
In the mid-70s, my brother built a Mits Altair from a kit he ordered from an ad in BYTE Magazine (I think). The only means of input or output were toggle switches and blinking lights on its face. I coded a program in machine language to read input from the toggle switches. We tediously loaded software with the toggle switches.
We got an ancient teletype machine hooked up to it that provided better input and output capability. My brother eventually got it to support output text to an old black-and-white TV. We also got it to support reading and writing to a cassette recorder.
Those were the good old days.
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Mine was a computer made by Texas Instruments, one of their first attempts, used a tape player for a hard drive.
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Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1978
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Sinclair kit build. around 1975
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A Leading Edge Model D with two 5 1/4″ floppy drives. It was made by South Korean manufacturer Daewoo and was IBM PC compatible.
The CPU was an 8088 chip.Wikipedia: “The Model D was an immediate success, selling 100,000 units in its first year of production. It sold well for several year; until a dispute with dealers forced Leading Edge into bankruptcy in 1989.”
It is possible that I was the cause of that issue. When I received the computer, the instructions said to plug the monitor into the receptacle on the back of the computer. Since I always checked polarity before using a new device, I checked – it read mis-wired. The hot wire was connected to the chassis. This risked electric shock or worse. I contacted the dealer and reported the problem. They called back indicating that all the units they had were also wired that way and said they would call the distributer. They called back and said the dealer found all the units there were also mis-wired. The dealer called the factory whose response was “ground, what is that?”
Nevertheless, the PC served me well for several years.
At one time I ran a small computer repair shop but closed it when I moved to a retirement community two years ago. At 85, I still still build and repair PC’s for friends and other senior citizens.
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My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1978. It had 4k of internal memory, and no hard drive.
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My first computer experience was on a IBM System 360 mainframe computer as a high school senior in February 1978 at P.K. Yonge (kindergarten thru 12th grade) in Gainesville Florida. That’s part of the College of Education at the University of Forida (go Gators).
Kim, I remember using a “luggable”, so called portable, Compaq computer in 1983 or ’84 that was like carrying my wife’s portable sewing machine (and just as heavy).
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In 1986, I had just gotten out of the Canoe Club (Navy) and was working for a defense contractor. I bought some computer with a 20Mb hard drive and an Intel 8087 math co-processor. I think it ran DOS 3.0. No mouse. I loaded WordPerfect on it and printed to a dot matrix printer. I can still hear it. That was the closest I ever came to being technically competent. Today, I am Mr. Analog.
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Had a Tandy 1000 bought in 88 and used for Church Bulletins and a few games! Don’t remember much about it, but it had a floppy drive!! Did enjoy the use of it though and was our first computer!! Bought it Radio Shack and I don’t remember the price, but I do know it was very expensive!! Wish I still had it!
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