YOUR FIRST COMPUTER?

[Khipata]

I would like to know what was the first EVER computer you saw in your life and the first EVER you owned (or still own)?

First computer I ever saw was Yamaha MSX-2 and Soviet BK-0010

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK

I literally saw them same time in the University in September 20, 1989

Next year (February), I purchased my first computer, BAIT (or BYTE), a weird and complicated Soviet Sinclair ZX Spectrum clone

http://zxbyte.ru/index_en.php?id=0

First ever Thinkpad I saw was 600 in 1999
First ever Thinkpad I had was X20 which I upgraded to X21 myself in 2002

[Hans Gruber]

My first computer was a Commodore 64.

[JohnD.]

My first computer that I saw, was on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine (January 1975) and it was an Altair 8800.

My first computer that I owned was the model 5150 IBM PC (the original IBM PC) in August 1983 with a Hayes 2400 bps modem and Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer. I still have that computer and printer. My parents bought it for me for college and spent (approx.) $3,300 on that machine and that was with an IBM Employee discount (my father was good friends with a guy, whose son worked for IBM at the time).

Thank you for asking the question,
John

[RealBlackStuff]

1963 First computer ever seen: Honeywell H400
1968 First computer ever worked on: IBM 1401
1977 First computer ever owned: Commodore 64
For follow-ups, see http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 65#p404265
Currently: 3 desktops and way too many laptops

[Neil]

I don't remember the first computer I ever saw. I wasn't that interested in computers at an early age. Back in the '70's some of my friends in high school were messing around with the Commodore 64, but not me.

It was probably twelve years, or more, after high schools that my younger brother built my first comuter for me. It had a 50MHz CPU, 150MB HDD and maybe 4MB RAM. The first that I purchased for myself, was an hp Pavilion with 200MHz CPU, 4GB HDD and 32MB RAM, running Win95. I still have that computer, but haven't used it in a couple of years.

My first laptop was a ThinkPad 770 that I purchased off lease for a little over $300. After a couple of years, my wife suggested I sell the 770 to a friend of hers that needed a laptop...so I did. That gave me the opportunity to find whatever ThinkPad model I wanted. But, I couldn't decide what the ideal model was, so I've bought (and sold) close to a hundred different ThinkPads since, keeping a few models in my collection. It was during this period that computers, and ThinkPads in particular, became something of a hobby.

Currently, I have 20 ThinkPads (3 get daily use), 1 hp laptop and 7 or 8 desktop machines (only 3 of which are actually in use).

[Dekks]

zx81 with the shiny paper printer......
first laptop was a no-name 486DX2 with 16MB of RAM
first proper lapt0p was a compaq armada m300 p2 333Mhz
first TP X30

[killer]

IBM 1401 in 1967 at IBM's office on the Hagley Road in Birmingham. I started a job there on 1st June 1967.

[thinkpadcollection]

First tangible complete computer that is not built up since I am always addicted to building all computers to my choosing was Compaq LTE386s/20 purchased discontinued price was very low is one grand in 1993, This is also earliest hack by changing intel for AMD higher clocked CPU and swap oscillator chip to run 25Mhz. No problem. Prior to this was LTE 286. Yuk.

Then lot of long string of computers all built up by mine then finally changed mind and bought older notebooks so it is easier to play with than hassle of big computer swapping all the cables every time and saves on space.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[precip9]

An Intel 8080, clock speed 2 megahertz (mHz, not gHz), with 4096 bytes of ram.

I haven't had as much fun since.

[MisterB]

In school, I played with a simple 8080a trainer and learned how to enter opcodes and get LEDs to blink. The course got us to the point of assembly coding a primitive version of Pong. I also took Basic and Fortran courses on Apple IIs.

At the time, I bought any calculator or computer I could pick up second hand. I had a Timex Sinclair, Commodore 64 and Plus 4 and a few others. I can't remember which came first. I developed a fondness for HP RPN calculators that carries to this day. They impressed me a lot more than the computers I was using at the time. The first computer that really made an impression on me and got some real use was an Atari ST. I think it was the stable monochrome display that didn't give me eyestrain more than the computer.

My first Thinkpad was my 770X which I still have. After a couple of other 90s laptops, it was heaven.

[Norway Pad]

In middle school, sometime around 1986/87, we used the computers they had at school. I think they were Tiki 100 units, had a monochrome screen and loaded the OS from a floppy. I had never used a computer before, so that was amazing stuff. At the time I had an old typewriter with ink ribbon at home, that I used actively, so I still remember the astonishing feeling when the teacher showed us how to type a document on the computer. And even more so when I realized I could actually erase, insert and even move text around. A new world compared to the typewriter where I could do no corrections.

After that I used computers in various schools, but I wasn't forward thinking enough to actually invest in one for private use. Instead I bought a brand new Canon typewriter with an eraser tape, (What the heck was I thinking ) which was nice for typing documents, but turned out to be one of those things who just became.. obsolete.. So around 1995 I finally came to my senses and bought a used 486 desktop machine. I think it was an IBM, and I still regret throwing that one away.. Some years later I got a 56K modem, and a new world opened. After that I went through various desktops. My first encounter with a Thinkpad was at work in 1999, a 360Cs that I later rebuild and still own. In 2002/3 work gave me a T30, and the first Thinkpad I bought for purely private use was the T43 in 2007. Which is so far the most money I have ever spent on a laptop.

After that it went downhill (Or uphill, depending on how you see it) and I now have around 20 Thinkpads. Some of them might go away over the years, while a core of specials will be kept as a collection.

An interesting thread, nice to read other people's histories.

[Hans Gruber]

My first Apple computer was an LC2 in 1992. My first PC was a 486 66mhz in 1994. Back then they called PC's IBM compatible machines.

[Khipata]

I had and still have great many computers, but never ever owned ANY apple product, not even iPod, iPad or iPhone The ONLY one I have, I bought for the collection in 2015 (5-6 months ago) and it is Apple Newton Message Pad H1000 in pristine condition, still working and I have to confess - amazing product for its time

[jdk]

Packard Bell 486 with 8mb RAM. Came with Windows 95. I put WFW on it and it screamed. I learned a lot on that machine, everything from IRQs and DMA conflicts to memory management and compiling my own kernel. Later overclocked to 100MHz, and upgraded to 40MB of RAM, it ran the first release of KDE no problem.

It had a 14.4 modem and took an entire day to download Slackware sets. I learned my first programming language (Pascal) on that machine, and learned the UNIX command line.

My senior year of HS, I had to pull it out of retirement due to hardware failure on a homebuilt system. It was about 7 years old, used for AIM and web browsing with K-Meleon. Never had a single hardware failure, despite PB's reputation.

[Sir_Andross]

I was fortunate to receive an old Compaq Armada E500 at the age of 7. Before that, I was using an old Amiga 500 to play Putty!

The Compaq sported 1400x1050 and ATI Rage graphics and a P3. It had 64MB RAM, but upgraded to 192MB with Windows 2000 Professional, then XP Pro (which unfortunately downgraded the resolution to 1024x768). I had no internet on it.

[shawross]

It was an IBM clone XT and it was about 4.9 MHZ. It had dual 5 & 1/4 360 kb floppies but no hard drive. Also it had the old green monochrome screen and it was as basic as you could get back then. It had the 8088 microprocessor which I was studying at college and doing some minor programming in advanced full screen debug.
I can't remember exactly when I purchased it and I can't remember how much ram it had but I obtained an ad on memory card to increase the ram. I think the ad on card was ISA. Things have come a very long way since then.

[pianowizard]

I don't remember when or where I first saw a computer, or what kind of computer it was. But I first used a computer at age 7 or 8 in the 1980s, when I took a summer course on BASIC programming.

Here's my first computer, which my dad bought in Aug 1990:



It was custom-built, with 16MHz 80286, 1MB RAM, 40MB hard drive, 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive, 1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive, monochrome monitor, DOS 3.3 initially (DOS 6 later).

I still have the hard drive, which is almost twice as thick as today's 3.5" hard drives. Back then, "40MB" was really 40MB, rather than 40,000,000 bytes. This drive probably still works although I haven't tested it in a long time.

UPDATE: I see that people are including other "firsts". Here are a few of mine:

First laptop: Dell Inspiron 8200, Aug 2002, with 1.6GHz Pentium 4.

First Thinkpad: IBM Thinkpad 600E, Sep 2002, with 366MHz Pentium II and initially a 6.4GB hard drive, which suddenly died and forced me to splurge $104 on a 30GB replacement drive.

First Lenovo-branded Thinkpad: X60s, Dec 2006, with 1.66GHz L2400 Core Duo.

First touchscreen laptop: Fujitsu Lifebook B-2131, Aug 2006, with 400MHz Celeron.

First netbook: HP Mini 5151, Sep 2010, with 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280.

First 2-in-1 PC: HP Pavilion x2, Dec 2014, with 1.33GHz Atom Z3736F.

[jdrou]

First computer ever seen: don't remember
First computer used: Honeywell 6000
First microcomputer used: TRS-80
First computer owned: FastMicro 386-40

[rkawakami]

First saw: Not sure. Probably the MITS Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics or a similar system covered by Radio Electronics, both in the mid-'70s. If you don't mean microcomputers but big "iron", then an IBM 360 or 370 at NASA-Ames around the same time.
First owned: Probably would be a custom-built 386-based tower around 1988. Running MSDOS 3.3 at first, upgraded (?) to Win 3.1.
First used: A time-share BASIC system using dial-up ASR-33 teletypes in high school (1973-74). Not sure what hardware they were using (Tymshare).
First Thinkpad: 600E in 2002. I was a late arrival to the Thinkpad user community .

[Temetka]

First computer ever seen: Some kind of WISE terminal at my dads work
First computer used: An Atari ST
First computer owned: A genuine IBM XT with an orange monochrome CRT
First Thinkpad: A 770X

[sysiphus]

The first machine in the house that I got extended time on was a Macintosh IIsi, with a 30MHz 68030, 12MB of RAM, and a 40MB SCSI hard drive, along with the matching ~12" color Apple CRT (I believe a rebadged Sony). Rather nice little machine, and it had a WONDERFUL keyboard. I really should have kept it and just gotten an ADB-USB adapter. Even though it lacked the Page Up/Down/Home/End type keys, it was glorious to bang out papers on. Compared to some experiences above, I know it's not even close to the eldest machine, but it's still hard to believe it came home from the store 25 years ago.

[DrThinkpad]

First computer used : Pentium MMX with 64 mb. It was already obsolete back then, I was probably 4 years old (1998)
First computer owned : a Compaq PC, with a Pentium III Tualatin 1.2ghz with 384mb of ram. A GeForce 2 MX from Inno3D was added to it later. Bllazing fast for its time, but was quite unreliable. Became the reason I started being handy with PCs, as our family technician practicaly robbed us.
First computer bought : a used Thinkpad T40. Also the computer I kept the longest (5 years).
First computer built : Took a motherboard from a defective Dell Studio. Added an E8400, 4gbs of ram, a Corsair PSU and a GTX 460 and put everything in some ATX case.

[KentT]

First computer seen,

DEC PDP-8 (I was admin too, donation from ORNL to the special needs school I attended)

First computer owned,

Hot rodded PC XT clone (had 3.5" floppy drive and 360k floppy drive, 12 MHZ NEC licensed Intel 8086 overclocked)

First Laptop computer,

1997 NEC Versa 6230 (Voc Rehab Assistive Technology Grant for Technical School/College)

[MikalE]

The first computer I ever saw or used was the Hewlett Packard 9000F mainframe system for the Expanded Minuteman Data Analysis System while in the Air Force. c.1984.

The first computer I owned was an IBM Aptiva 166.

[evening_hunger]

Atari 65 XE

[Puppy]

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.

[theterminator93]

Commodore SX-64 for me. Oh the memories...

[Stargate199]

First computer I remember using

Laser (which I think was a Microcenter brand at the time) 486SX 33Mhz with a 2X CD-ROM, Soundblaster 16 and I forget the rest

First Computer I owned
Generic PII 400Mhz system, 256 MB RAM, and I forget the rest. Bought this at a garage sale in high school

First ThinkPad I owned
600E 400Mhz PII, 192MB of RAM (I think) 20GB Drive.

[aptivaboy]

I don't recall the first one I ever saw. The first one I owned was a no name 386SX running at 8 Mhz, or 25 Mhz with the TURBO BUTTON!!! GO TURBO!!! After that, it was an IBM Aptiva, 2176-166, which I still miss.

Thinkpads? I don't remember which one I saw first. My first one was an i1450.

[Omineca]

First personal computer I ever saw was probably a TRS-80. It's the first one that I remember seeing in any case.

The first computer I actually used was an Apple II at school in 1981.

First owned: Commodore VIC-20.

First laptop: Hyundai Neuron Lite (a monochrome 486/SX25 with a 120 MB hard drive, for those who remember such specs).

First ThinkPad: T41.

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