YOUR FIRST COMPUTER?

[mpcook]

1967 - DEC PDP4. I learned Fortran programming and programmed on this computer using paper tape.
1975 - IBM mainframe (DK model#, IBM360?), used punch cards and SPSS version 2.
1982 - Purchased an IBM PC model 5150, 8088 processor, upgraded to max ram (640k) with double 5-1/4" floppies...whoohoo.

[DaKKS]

Custom built 400mhz Pentium 4, 384mb ram, 4gb hdd and some older nvidia graphics. I was the coolest kid on the block haha.

Anyway, i asked for a computer on my birthday, thinking my parents would give me their IBM since they'd upgraded to a newer HP. Instead, I got a box of parts. My father decided that he wasnted to teach me how to build a computer. He created a monster.

[Cigarguy]

Does an Abacus count as first computer seen?

First one I owned was a TRS-80 with cassette/tape drive.

[hengster]

1994 - Saw and used a ThinkPad in my elementary school classmate's house, his dad uses it for work and we use it for Simpsons DOS game (awesome graphics). Cannot recall the model could be a 760 or 770 or some variation, but it has a floppy drive in front and quite compactly sized.

1997 - Owned an Acer Aspire Pentium 233MHz, Windows 95, 32MB Ram (not so sure), 3.2GB Hard Disk (yes very sure), floppy drive, cd (not dvd) drive, 56k dial-up modem.

The good old days.

[farmall77]

I'll have to shorten this down, I must have owned close to a hundred different machines over the decades.

We used Apple ][+ and //e machines in school, along with a few TRS80 model 2 & 3's

Mom and Dad brought home a beautiful Apple //c in '88, but then we found out what a complete con game Apple was.

I found a Laser XT at Sears ca 1990, $100 on closeout, kind of an unholy love child between an XT clone and an Apple //c.

in Late '90 or early '91 I built an AMD 286/20, 2mb RAM, used 20Meg HDD that came with Windows 3.0 and a racing game. Man that was life.

Built a AMD 486DX4-100, running Windows 3.1 Never really got that machine to be stable. Used it for several years, but so did my younger brother, which might explain all it's hardware issues.

Built and used quite a few different machines, mostly AMD chips. Last one was retired last fall.

First laptop was a Compaq in 2007, lasted until early last year. A 17" Toshiba came and went, miserable garbage.

September 2015, a good friend suggested a ThinkPad, a little research and hello T520, then a "spare" T520.

Then an S20 replaced my last homebuild, an amazingly capable professional class workstation. Then I bought a D20 to go along with it.

Got a free ThinkCentre M52 tower, aged but operable.

Took a job with the company I bought the S20 from. It's not what I went to school for, but it's interesting. Bought three T61's my first week. For a few months I sold parts or rack and tower servers, and mostly got yelled at. You name it, IBM x3250 M2's and M3's, PowerEdge 610's 710's 910's, HP ML350 G5's and 6's whatever. I love to tinker but I'm horrible at sales so it was a miserable way to make a living.

[BillMorrow]

first computer i ever saw in person was an IBM that i loaded my first program into (a deck of punch cards) at heald college on van ness avenue in san francisco about 1965 give or take a few years..
that computer crashed when trying to execute that simple program..

first computer i ever saw in print was the blue altair box on popular electronics sometime in the 1970's..
about 1975 more or less which got my interest up again..

first computer i ever owned was a polymorphic graphics "poly88" kit..
a long narrow orange S-100 buss box i assembled..
it did not work, mainly because it had no I/O or anything other than a cpu and buss with nothing else in there..

i swapped it for an IMSAI 8080 that i also assembled and with several thousand dollars of nmemory, I/O and a cromemco dazzeler board with an 3208 EEPROM would do much more than the poly88..

the list is long and varied from that IMSAI 8080 which a upgraded with a (George) Morrow Z80 CPU board, 8 inch floppy discs, a dumb terminal i jiggered to talk to a video board and act as a dumb terminal running a friends software monitor or CP/M.. sold that to a theater stage lighting company in palo alto and bought a Alpha-MicroSystems box with a multi tasking OS (AMOS) and other I/O like a 6 port serial I/O card to run some dumb terminals (wyse 50 and televideo, which i still have along with an Alpha_microsystems AM-1000 downstairs!) to an IBM PC (the 8086 model) and thereafter i retired and sailed away with a built up PC clone..

first IBM was a 700C i got in miami beach and it just flowed on and on from there..

there is a LOT more to tell but i don't want people falling asleepo at the computer..

[theterminator93]

there is a LOT more to tell but i don't want people falling asleepo at the computer..

It's close to bedtime here, I'm game.

[BillMorrow]

sometime around 1984 or thereabouts i went to a ross dove auction company auction of the now bankrupt gavilan computer company in los gatos area..
it was a laptop running MS dos..
google is your friend.. so is wikipedia.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavilan_SC
i would up with a bunch of those and had a good time reselling them from my house at the end of dawnridge drive in los altos hills..
i also came away with a really nice ZILOG Z1000 or something like that mini-computer..
it was a wonderful modular mini-computer with all sort (for then) of storage, I/O and so forth, running unix system 5 with berkeley enhancements..

you might want to stay awake long enough for a few more trips to google and no i have not googled these old/dead companies.. though i might after a type a bit more..

in those days the hard drives were just changing from CDC Hawk and CDC Phoenix 18 inch hard drives (google again) to what was called "Winchester Technology" HDD's.. what is more or less used today but in that time they were 18 inch, maybe also 12 inch and for sure 5 inch platter size drives..
there is a 5 inch drive in that AM1000 alpha-microsystems computer downstairs..

my last alpha micro was a really big rack mounted thing i had added a LOT of capability to over the years since i used it to run my home based business at that time..
when i retired i sold it along with the business and moved to florida with my wife to live aboard a 65' sail boat.. an irwin 65.. google again folks..

now lets backtrack to the first S-100 buss computers..
a couple of guys in emeryville had a company called Kentucky Fried Computers a name not unlike some of the computer at that time which ran pretty hot..
those two put together the first 5 inch floppy drive with a controller card that would fit the S-100 buss and it came with a basic language interpreter with hooks to read-write the floppy drive..

WOW, this was great since up to about that time the only I/O was a bill godbout (google again guys!) paper tape readers (a manual photosensitive tape reader one would pull a piece of punch tape through, OR a teletype ASR which would read and punch paper tape)
or front panel switches to toggle a program into an altair or IMSAI box, a byte or long-byte at a time..

there was also a fellow, Li Chen Wang (sp?) who had written Palo Alto Tiny Basic which he gave away free and later enhanced it for harry garland and roger mellen (sp?) who were stanford proifessors who had started a company they canned CROMEMCO.. they called it control basic.. their claim to fame was their DAZZLER S-100 card that did graphics.. google again..!
i had swapped roger an nifty h/p pen size VOM which was hard to get from h/p without connections i had at the company at that time and which dazzled him enough to trade a dazzler card with a 2408 chip or two on it.. this was all in the early to mid 1970's..

uhmm, where was I..
ok, homebrew computer club was started by a bunch of guys, including lee felsenstein and gordon french, who had been among other things some sort of model maker..
in his garage was a live steam model locomotive that ran.. but not in the garage.. it was about4 feet long and gordon wanted to sell it to me for something like $500 (in 1975 thaty was a LOT of money) and i did not have it to spare..
i still kick myself..

at one homebrew meeting, steve wozniak and steve jobs both showd up with their still in development APPLE-II and were showing it around telling us not to break it as it was the only one they had..
up to that point they made tha APPLE-I (but it was just an Apple computer powered by a 6502 motorola cpu i think)..
my friend BOB MOODY was a partner in the BYTE SHOP on el camino near california ave in palo alto and he made wooden boxes for that early apple computer that had a place for a keyboard, an audio tape player that was used for loading programs and a shelf for holding an 8 inch video monitor..

i'm drifing a bit and i'm sure eyelids are getting heavy, so for now, i'll sign off and maybe some of the other geriatric computer fossils will step in with tales from the crypt of home computing..

[johnny9fingers]

The first computer I saw and had hands on access to was my Dad's Tandy 1000 SX. We had dumb terminals in my office, so not sure if that qualifies. My first was a ThinkPad T30, I really miss that little machine. Since then It's been T60, T61, R51, all purchased from members of this forum. Then a brand new T530 that has been abducted by my daughter. And this puts me in a quandary as I need a new machine. My head is telling me to get an HP ZBook 15u, but my heart is saying get either the P40 Yoga or P50u... I'll just have to wait for some reviews to come out. But the thing that sticks in my mind is I've really liked each ThinkPad and they never let me down......

[fatpolomanjr]

Lenovo 3000 N100, in 2007, was the first I ever owned. My university gave it to me for a "Let's send these students to graduate school for PhD" kind of program. Been around desktops since Windows 95, however, and laptops since Compaq days in the early 2000s.

[Norway Pad]

..at one homebrew meeting, steve wozniak and steve jobs both showd up with their still in development APPLE-II and were showing it around telling us not to break it as it was the only one they had..

I ready your entire store, and I assume very few people today can claim to have been right there, at the very start. Even though I'm far from an Apple fan, there is no way denying that those two guys, along with Bill Gates, are symbols of individuals, organizations and brands who have had very much influence over how technology developed over the years.

[DK6400Brian]

First computer ever used: 1988. RC759 Piccoline (Local Danish build computer for educational purposes).
80186, 6-8 MHz, 256-1024KB RAM. CP/M.

First computer owned: 1994. Second hand Digital Equipment Corporation MicroVAX II.
VT220 terminal. External 2nd. HDD and external TK-50 Tape-unit. Never got into it. Donated.

First computer owned and used: 1995. Pentium 100, Windows 95 and OS/2-Warp. 4 MB. Quantum 1GB HDD, 4xCD, Floppy.

First IBM owned and used: 1995. Second hand IBM PC Model 5150 and IBM PC/XT Model 5160. 4.77 MHz.
IBM EGA card and IBM EGA monitor. 720 KB FDD. 8087 Math Co-Processor
Maxtor XT-2190 190MB HDD MFM/RLL (From the 2.nd harddisk enclosure for the DEC MicroVAX II)
Had to give both machines away before I could get hold of a matching 1xspeed CD-ROM and a Soundblaster for 8bit-ISA, which would have turned the PC/XT into an awesome multimedia machine.

First Thinkpad: 1998. Second hand 365XD. That was my primary computer from 1998-june 2003, where it was replaced with a gorgeous 770Z. The 365XD is in fact up for an overhaul during these weeks.

[cadillacmike68]

First computer ever used: some DEC mini in HS, it took pinched cards and "mark sense" cards.
After that I programmed on CDC Cyber 70, DEC VAX, IBM 4300 and AS400 series in college.

As a Lieutenant I was the Platoon Leader of a support company and they had a Honeywell Level 6 mini that had gigantic 8" disk drives. It ran the parts stock control system. Later some Burroughs BTOS based kludge was interfaced to it.

Around that time I bought my first computer, a PC clone with dual floppies, later upgraded to a 20MB HDD instead of the 2nd floppy.
Later, I bought a Compuadd 286 with a 40MB HDD.
Later still, I built a full tower based on a Pentium MMX 233MHz with 6 SCSI HDDs, 2 SCSI CDRWs, a SCSI tape drive and SCSI Scanner. It now sits next to this desk and holds the corded phone at a convenient height. It will still run, but why bother.

In civilian work, I worked on a variety of micros, from Compaq, HP, NEC, Wyse, IBM, and many others. I serviced dozens of different customer micro brands and network architectures in the pre-internet days.

It was around 1993 when I got my first laptop, can't remember the brand, a 468DX4100 CPU can't remember the HDD size. FDD, no CD. At the time I was working for an IBM division as a contractor. Later I actually worked for BM, until we got sold to ATT. As a result I used lots of Thinkpads from that time period and got some employee deals. This is when I decided that Thinkpads, particularly 700 series and later, T-series were the besting around period.

So, I bought my first Thinkpad, an i-series 1411 that I gave to my wife. I got a used 760LD for myself.

I bought my first T-series, a T22 soon after and that's when I stopped using the tower. I dragged that T22 and later a T30 all over the desert on several deployments. I even bought my first two T61s while in the desert (my wife already had a T61 at home though).

I've only used T-series ever since. Up to T61s now, am considering a T500 for the wife, but she is fine with her T61. (Maybe I'll get it for myself)

In later army work, I worked on mostly dells but also the occasional Thinkpad T40 series.

[Medessec]

The first computer I ever really got to myself was an eMachines eTower 330... Windows 98, Pentium I, 3.2GB HDD, clickety click click... lot of good childhood memories in that thing, a real shame I don't know what happened to it. About 50% of the time spent on that thing, was spent in Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, some more spent on those big collections of mini games on CDs. I also had to spend a lot of the time reinstalling Windows when I screwed something up, or figuring out how to repair it. But I probably owe my entire adulthood aspirations in computers to that stupid old white box.

The first computer I actually bought and owned with my own earned money was a Toshiba Satellite A305-S6916, Special Edition. It was an exceptional bargain performance machine, bearing a T6400 Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and a Mobility Radeon 3650. Windows Vista SP1 still dwells on it's 320GB HDD... I actually still have the laptop somewhere in a box, although it hasn't survived the years well. It's chipped and cracked in numerous spots, and kinda... just powers on when it feels like powering on. Other than that... the indicators will flash and it will simply not POST.

Of course, my computer history remains in the realm of laptops and kind of goes on from there, but I'll leave it at that, since those would be my first actual computers.

[TPFanatic]

A Hitachi Visiondesk all in one with a 14.1" 1024x768, Pentium II, and both CD and floppy disk readers.

I grew up on an out of warranty A31p after its owner moved to an R50p.

[UMPC2024]

You guys can probably date my age with this one:
Sony VAIO AR-230G 17" behemoth with a 1 hour battery brand new, matte silver trim not shiny on outside rim
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (loved that OS)
1.83 GHz (?) Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo
1 GB RAM that couldn't be updated past 2 GB
Cost more than a decked out T430

Was so stoked to see it in Casino Royale when Daniel Craig used it to type his resignation letter.

[TonyJZX]

Lets just say I remember the powerhouse dream machines I lusted after...

I remember the Byte Magazine of the day that showed a $20k HP Compaq 386dx33 4Gb 120Gb hdd in a day when the avg. machine was a crappy 286 16mhz... the 1st 32 bit machine.

I also remember at where the gun pcs of the day were the 486dx50 and 486dx2/66 which was a revolutionary increase in power over the avg. pc.

EVERYONE seemed to be spending $2,000 $2,500 $3,000 on a 486dx2/66 machine and it ruled the roost for a long time until the Pentium came out.

[mpcook]

First computer I ever saw (in person) was in 1967 at 16 years old, a DEC PDP-4. I learned to program it in Fortran and punched the programs on paper tape which was fed into a reader. First owned was an IBM PC 5150, 8088 CPU, 640K ram, dual floppies, in 1983. I bought it directly from IBM (for thousands) and promptly learned some basic unix so I could get connected to usenet and email.

[schen]

1979, I was a freshman at Texas A&M University, I got a job working for a BA prof who had me type his "punch-cards" for him and then run his "stack" after he had checked my cards. This was of course on a mainframe at the Teague building where the computers were located! In my spare time, I got the machine to punch out "X-Mas" on some colored cards and gave them out for Christmas that year!

Don't have the slightest idea the model number of the machine I was working on, although, I'm certain that it was an IBM of one kind or another.