What Was Your First Computer?

michaelmichael writes "News.com.com is running a special report, asking readers to tell everyone what their first computer was. This was prompted by another article commemorating the 60th anniversary of ENIAC." I started on a trash 80 in like 5th grade. And although I did a lot of programming and games on 8086s, it wasn't until I got a 286 in middle school that I really considered a machine "Mine".

Commodore 64, baby!

[TripMaster Monkey]

I also did a lot of work on the TRS-80 when I was in junior high (yikes...just dated myself there). I put in a lot of late days and managed to write a few cheesy games (press play on tape :P). But the first computer I actually owned was the Commodore 64 (in bold because it was awesome).

(BTW, don't try to chat on IRC with a 300 baud modem and a 40-character-wide screen. It causes brain damage.)

My first was a VM/370 account

[Mainframes ROCK!]

An emulated IBM 370 on VM/370. Running WATFIV. happy days.

You made me a programmer

[Renegade Lisp]

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 which I got when I was twelve. Much more deeply than the actual computer I remember the moment when I had first switched it on and typed "print 2+2" on that piece of membrane pretending to be a keyboard ("print" was actually a function key, you couldn't type it letter by letter). I still remember my astonishment when I pressed the "New Line" field and the number "4" appeared in the top left corner of the screen. It was something radically different from a pocket calculator. Or so I felt. Since this moment the fascination of programming has never left me again.

Mine?

[overshoot]

Well, the first that I owned was a SOL-20, but that was only because the prices finally came down to where I could afford one of my own.

Although, that DEC PDP-8 was pretty sweet at the time.

Mac 128K

[daveschroeder]

Purchased on January 24, 1984, from, of all places, a Dillard's department store in Dallas, TX.

There it is, next to a NeXT Cube and a CHRP box, on the top shelf in my office:

http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/CHRP_128K_Cube. jpg [wisc.edu]

Also present are a 20th Anniversary Mac and a PowerBook Duo, with dock:

http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/20th_Duo.jpg [wisc.edu]

And over 22 years later, I'm still using Macs. Even found a wife who loves Macs too. ;-)

Apple ][+

[LoadWB]

It was in school, our GATE program had an Apple ][+, and I had a subscription to COMPUTE! Magazine. Later that year my parents bought a TI-99/4A. I want to say this was around 1980/1981, I was about 6. Later that spring I wrote my first video game on the TI.

First encounters with modems is more interesting.

[XorNand]

My first computer was a Packard Bell Legend II AT (286), purchased by my father in 1988. The interesting thing is that my parents were absolutely steadfast about not allowing me to have a modem. My father was overly concerned about me calling Sydney Australlia (always Sydney for some reason?) for hours at a time. My solution was to illicitly buy second-hand 2400 bps modems from the kids at school who were, at the time, upgrading to expensive new 14.4kbps ones. And I do say "modems"--I went through three of them after my parents kept discovering them. I would get up at 3am and run a 100 foot telephone cable from our living room to the basement, where I would spend about three hours a night chatting and playing Tradewars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon. Always by dialing only local BBSs of course. Kinda funny that 15 years later I would help found a VoIP company, which helps people save on calls to Sydney. ;-)

Acorn Electron

[seti]

My first computer was the Acorn Electron, I used to write games on it (including my very own Spaceballs adventure game.. ahem).

A1200

[Shadow Wrought]

The first computer I ever played with was my friend's C64. We also had those at school in the sixth grade computer class. My brother also had an IBM PS2 at about this same time which I also played with.

My first computer, however, that was mine and mine alone, was a Commadore A1200. It had the stock 68020 running at 14 Mhz and 2 megs of RAM. I splurged and spent $600 upgrading it with a expansion board with a 68030 CPU and FPU both running at 50 Mhz! I also got an 8 meg simm to bring the memory up to 10 (the simm was half of the $600). That plus an 80 MB HD meant that I never had to worry about space;-)

If I'd got a NES would I be working in Pizza Hut?

[MBAFK]

My dad wouldn't buy me a console when I was little, he thought you should be able to do more with a computer than just play games so I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas when I was 7. By boxing day I was bored shitless with Rambo and read the manual, after "10 print "Commodore 64 "; 20 goto 10" I was hooked.

Sometimes I wonder what I would be doing now if he had given in and bought me a NES.

Tandy from Radio Shack!

[ereshiere]

I got a Tandy 1000HX when I was seven or so. 3 1/2" AND 5 1/4" drives! Wow! And DeskMate built-in! Later I received a Tandy 1000RLX, which was my first very own computer. I got a 40 meg HD to play Space Quest 4, the first game I drooled over that required a hard drive... Now those were the days. I still want that DeskMate 3 that came with the RLX; I have dreams about that weird yellow on blue color scheme.

Either: a PDP-1, or a VIC-20

[dpbsmith]

The machine I built myself in high school out of approximately forty DPDT relays didn't count, because it didn't have any memory or any way to execute a program automatically. It was a five-bit binary adder and multiplier. But in order to make it multiply, I had to press about six buttons repeatedly in a predetermined sequence. I always figured eventually I would add some kind of clock and sequencer, but I never got around to it. By the time I got more than about a dozen relays, the train transformer I'd been using to power them no longer had enough power; my allowance didn't enable me to buy enough #6 Ignition dry cells; and my parents flatly refused to let me have a car battery.

GENIAC certainly didn't count, and neither the the "analog computer" with three potentiometers and a voltmeter that I got as a science kit.

The PDP-1 truly feels to me like it was "my" first computer, even though I had to share it with about a hundred other MIT undergraduates, and come in at 2 a.m. in the morning to get time. I used it mostly for programming, but also for what would now be called word processing (formatting with a program called TJ-2, and outputting in Flexowriters which had IBM electric-typewriter mechanism and produced what would later be called "letter-quality" output. No spreadsheets, but Expensive Desk Calculator was a lot more capable than most real desk calculators. No MIDI, but using Pete Samson's harmony compiler I coded up a few pieces of music and had the PDP-1 play them in four-part harmony.

Games? Spacewar, of course. And "flight simulator simulator." That was a byproduct of a real research project, which coupled the PDP-1 for human input (joysticks etc.) and display to an analog computer that did the real simulation heavy lifting. That was the "flight simulator." The guy who did it, Ray Tomlinson, knew that people enjoyed "flying" it so he made a "flight simulator simulator" in which the analog computer was replaced by a much simpler and less-realistic set of calculations made by the PDP-1 itself.

The first computer I personally owned and had in my home was a VIC-20. I don't have anything like the same depth of feeling for it that I have for the PDP-1, however. At about the time I bought the VIC-20, there was a gentleman who lived about a block away from me who was in Digital's AI group and they let him keep a real computer--I think it was might have been one of the original Microvaxes--in his house. I was green with envy.

I built mine

[grondak]

8085-based.

See "How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot" by David Heiserman [amazon.com]. It makes a great starting point.

I just built the computer bits, not the robot bits, because my family was living in a tiny military housing home at the time, and there was no room for all of Rodney. I remember ignoring my teachers to write assembly in class and being frustrated with switch-flipping.

There was a series of Byte articles on building your own processor out of LS components, too... "Komputar" or something like that. I didn't build that one, but maybe I still will. Of course, I'll do it today with VHDL just to tickle my programmer.

TI 99/4a here baby... and it still works!

[Fallen Kell]

It had some overheating problems a couple years back. Turns out it needed a new fan (imagin that a fan would die in 20 years of use and dust, dirt, fuzz... ). Once I took it apart and replaced the fan and cleaned out all the dust, it is running like it's good old self. Now if I could just find the hard disk enclosure or a disk drive for it, the tape load system is just painfully slow, although it is nothing like having your favorite program's "song" memorized to let you know how far it is in the load process...

Re:First encounters with modems is more interestin

[Ghostx13]

My first box was a C-64, but I didn't really get into computers until I found an old (well really new then) 386 while dumpster diving. I didn't know much about computers at the time. Just what I had surmised from the schools computers and watching the techs work on those. Basically someone had thrown out a perfectly good 386 - the power cable had just come loose from the HD.

So now I had to get a modem. I found a huge stash (15) old cardinal 2400 baud industrial modems (big metal cases) and a couple of 9600s dumpster diving at an airport. I was the toast of all my geek friends because I had modems to give to everyone. We used them forever. We were all members on as many BBSes as we could find locally. We'd play LORD on every one of them. It was great.

We progressed to playing Warcraft on direct dial during the week, and on the weekends eveyone would bring their boxes over and we'd play over null modem cables. Pre-curser to the lan party I guess ;-).

Re:ENIAC

[Txiasaeia]

My first was a Tandy 1000. Whopping 4.? MHz processor, no HD, *16* colours, and sprung for an extra DD 5.25 drive and 640k total RAM. No hard drive. The beast cost me something like $4000 CAD when I bought it.

One of my fondest memories of that computer was when I bought the CRPG "Megatraveller" and discovered that it required a hard drive. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to copy all of the files onto 4 DD 5.25 disks and use each one under certain circumstances (startup, space, first half of planets, second half of planets). It was great.

I also remember asking a guy a few years later how much it would cost to upgrade to a couple of 3.5 drives, but he just laughed at me. Bastard figured it wasn't worth the money to do so. Oh well.

Machine breakdown by country?

[mccalli]

If you're in the UK and you're of the right generation, your answer will likely be a ZX variant (80 maybe, 81 possibly, Spectrum more likely) or Acorn of some kind (BBC B, Electron, maybe a BBC Master). If you're in the US, then as I understand it your answer may well be Apple II or TRS-80, maybe Commodore 64.

Not that C64s weren't popular in the UK as well - I had one myself (still do have one actually). But I had it after my Spectrum 48k.

So what other regional quirks exist? I've heard of something called the MicroBee for Australia? What about Germany - they normally went for Commodore hardware as far as I know. As for the rest of the world, I really don't know what the taste in computers was but would definitely be interested to find out.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:A1200

[Shadow Wrought]

My friends and I used to joke that between the Apple adn the Amiga, Amiga hired all the engineers and Apple hired all the marketers;-)

It frustrated me to no end in college when i had to use some 68040 based Mac which ran slower than my pre-upgrade A1200 running an "obsolete" 68020. Grrr.

Vic-20!

[Anonymous Coward]

My father worked at Commodore's UK office in the early 1980s. His job was to 'approve' third-party software and peripherals for entry into a sales catalogue. He was at a meeting at the UK office when Jack Tramiel introduced the Vic-20 to the UK staff by taking it out of his briefcase and declaring that it 'was the future of home computing'. My father had one of the first Vics sent to the UK, in fact it had to have an NTSC-to-PAL converter fitted. He eventually gave it to me, as well as several carboard boxes full of tapes, disks and peripherals sent to him by various companies looking to get their gear approved. Sadly, the Vic is long gone now, which is a shame, as it was a pre-production model, and probably worth a bit today.

Re:Amiga 500+

[kossico]

Those WERE the days! I remember getting the Amiga 500 for Christmas in what must have been 1990 or something. I remember using the pointer-edit utility to change the mouse pointer into a teenage mutant ninja turtle. I also remember when my dad bought us the "1 meg drive" (an upgrade to 1 MB of RAM) so that we could play Sierra's Colonel's Bequest. Sadly I also remember one of the last games we got when we had to drive to Toronto which had the closest remaining store that sold Amiga software. We got one of the later Space Quest games (maybe 4?) and it required something like 10 disks and you had to change the disk and wait 5 minutes every time you switched screens. Those WERE the days!

And remember the fact that the joystick/mouse port would even accept Atari controllers? Ya!

Re:Commodore 64, baby!

[db32]

I was only a kid, but the C64 was my first machine. Jumpman, Jumpman Jr, Ollo, Ollo II, Hero, Space Taxi...ahh fond memories...except for Mission Impossible...I hated that game, I couldn't figure out what the HELL you were supposed to do. But that was years ago...sniffle...

TTL. This question brings back a lot of memories.

[fyngyrz]

My first computer was built out of TTL in my parents' basement; 74181 ALUs and such. That's all there was at the time that you could really get everything you needed at a reasonable(!) price. Ran slow, hot, and had some pretty odd instructions, frankly. But I was young and crazy. It was fun. It was also an entertaining change from hot-rodding guitar amps, which is what I was doing for money at the time.

My second computer was built around an 8008 chip. Not as much fun. All the cool stuff was already on the chip.

My third computer was an SBC from National Semiconductor, using an SC/MP MPU. Nothing to build, so it was all about the programming. The SC/MP was a bit of an oddball, so I learned some new things.

Then I got a SWTPC 6800 "kit", which was really just a solder and screw assembly, then a Gimix 6809 (still have it, and it still works), then an IBM PC, then several Amigas, then several more PCs and RISC PCs (I have PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha machines on shelves, they ran RISC versions of Windows NT), then Linux, finally grabbed a Mac (mini.)

During the course of my career, I worked at IBM (Boca Raton) and got to use their ATOM uP, an old (at the time) punched card machine... the specifics of which have thankfully slipped my mind (punched cards are annoying, suffice it to say) and a scientific mini, the model of that is also fogged out, and I didn't use it that much, really.

I did a lot of hardware designs using the 6809 and its A/B variants when it was current; I liked (I still like) that MPU, it just seemed to have the best instruction balance of any 8-bitter I ever ran into. By comparison, the 68000 and family were pretty much of a dissapointment. I thought they'd be 6809's on steroids; Not so. They were a step wider (good), a step more orthogonal (also good) and a step simpler (backwards.) Fewer clever addressing modes mainly, but that was exactly what made programming the 6809 such a breeze.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Texas Instruments TI99/4A

[bgarcia]

I believe it was the first 16-bit home computer. Unfortunately, it ran slower than all the 8-bit competitors available at the same time. But my parents bought me one (no doubt because they were on clearance) and I was writing all sorts of cheezy programs in basic in no time! I wrote two programs that used every last bit of the available memory in that machine. Took forever to load & save programs from tape.

Fun times. :-)

Re:You made me a programmer

[chato]

I think what was lost when the IBM PCs became popular, was the fact that you no longer started inside a programming language interpreter. In an old ZX80/Atari/Commodore, after booting you had just the prompt:

READY

The computer was inviting you to type something. Nowadays the computer invites you to explore what others have done, not to create your own stuff to make it work. And that's a huge difference.

First computer

[Anonymous Coward]

The first computer I had the chance to try was the microbee (http://www.thepcmuseum.com/appliedtechnology/seri es2/default.htm [thepcmuseum.com]) a nice little fellow with builtin monitor (memory hexediting tool).. The real monitor, the brown and yellow one was not as nice, and the fact that I didnt have floppydiscs was even worse, but hey a storing everything one tapes actually worked.. the first computer I could realy call my own tho, was the C128.

Re:You made me a programmer

[Anonymous Coward]

Spectrum 48K. Must have been about 7 or 8 years old and soon figured out that programming it in BASIC was the only fun thing to do with it, a couple of years on down the line there was that whole big thing about fractals and I had it sit there for almost a week drawing either the Mandelbrot or Julia set (set infinity too high!), don't remember really. After that there was at least a ten year gap until I touched a computer again (final year of college VAX/VMS FORTRAN) and I've never looked back, it's just so damn satisfying. Often wonder what the hell I'd have been doing right now if it wasn't for those formative years.

TI programmable 57

[Anonymous Coward]

ancient but fun for avoiding math classes. i think the first example if i remember correctly was 'pirates', an angle-range game. a negative number was too close, positive too far... image: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/calc/h/ti57 .jpg [parse.com]

C-64

[savorymedia]

Got a C-64 when I was 12 (someone get me a walker and some Geritol, please...and GET OFF MY LAWN, DAMMIT!). I still have it, although it doesn't work. I currently own:

1. 3 C-64s (total) - 2 original 64s and 1 C-64C 2. 1 VIC-20 (ROM burnt, but cartridges still work) 3. 1 C-128 4. Damned near every peripheral known to man for all of the above (including modems, multiple floppy drives, cassette drives and dot-matrix printers).

and the pièce de résistance...

5. A fully-functional Commodore PET 4032.

/me is TEH Commodore Geek. ;)

Re:If I'd got a NES would I be working in Pizza Hu

[rcastro0]

Same here, only replace "Commodore 64" for "Sinclair ZX 81" and "NES" for "Atari 2600".

To be precise, the Sinclair ZX 81 was a clone made in Brazil called TK 82-C. Exact clone, down to the membrane keyboard. Oh the memories. Z80 processor, 2 kilobytes memory shared for video -- video was max resolution 44 by 64 pixels (screen was 32 characters wide by 22 characters tall). Today you can have the whole thing on a browser... See it here:
http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/ts1000/ [vavasour.ca]

PDP-11/05 with RT-11

[HPNpilot]

Big old clunker, only had dual 8 inch floppy drives.

I had a VT-52 terminal, ASCII only, no graphics.

The box itself had 16k words of core memory and no boot ROM card, so each time I started it I had to toggle in the boot code on the front panel switches. Fortunately I figured out a VERY short routine which worked. The core memory consisted of two 8K by 18 bit (2 parity bits) planes, each of which was a quad wide card for the Unibus backplane, and two logic cards each of which was hex wide. The RX-01 floppy drive required an interface card, as did the serial interface for the VT-52. IIRC those two were quad width. This thing pulled well over 1000 watts of power.

RT-11 was very much like DOS. A friendly DEC field service person gave me the full software distribution, which operated quite differently than the way Microsoft does. What you get is a bootable OS which brings you into a SYSGEN procedure. In this, you specify exactly what you have for peripherals, what their bus addresses and interrupts are, and the code essentially assembles and links up a custom version of the OS for you. That's right, you actually had the source code right there. I took advantage of this to add my own "extensions" and later, device drivers (tricky until you got the hang of it).

RT-11 ran BASIC, which I used for most quicky stuff, and of course ASM.

Later on I acquired a Xerox Diablo removable cartridge hard drive (5 MB fixed, 5 MB removable) but still no boot card, they were still expensive. Eventually I picked up a Qbus box from where I worked (they used the cards in their own custom backplanes and boxes) and found a full set of 11/23 cards for $5 each (!!!) at some surplus place up in Woburn. There was even an AMD 2901 based math coprocessor which had a guaranteed maximum speed of 1 Mflop. Picked up a NEC spinwriter real cheap due to being only for 230 volts (big deal, sit a $5 autotransformer behind it).

Wrote my own checkbook balancing and accounting package, ran a small business from the system for years.

Switched to an IBM compatible AT clone at 10 MHz when I needed to run a PC board layout package (don't remember the name but it had a dongle) and this machine was slightly faster than the 11/23. Almost went Mac route but it was the availability of software that I needed that made the decision.

Check out the weddingmobile ...

[Dlugar]

http://daveandvalerie.com/pictures/weddingcar/wedd ingcar-Pages/Image3.html [daveandvalerie.com]

Atari 2600 Basic Programming Cart

[SoCalEd]

Ok. It wasn't really a computer, but that silly little cartridge was the initial hook that got me interested in computers back in 1980. Sure, you couldn't do squat with like 128 bytes (IIRC)and you couldn't save or anything, but that first taste of programming was a peek at the man behind the curtain. After that, I couldn't get enough....

Did I mention I still have that machine?

Mine was paper - in about 1962

[akc]

When I was 11 (in 1962) my Father started reading books on computers and what they could do. I did too and started teaching myself what computer languages were and I started writing small programs on paper. I could't of course run them.

In 1968 he got a Honeywell 516, a machine the size of 2 washing machines and a microwave (one washing machine box held the processor, the other the memory and the microwave on top held a paper tape reader and punch). There was a standalone teletype. He set out to prove you could automate a coal mine with it (he worked in the research department of the UK Coal Board). I went to his office in the school holidays and wrote programs for it.

Re:You made me a programmer

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, here! :-) As a canuck, I bought a TimexSinclair as well. Plugged into a TV for a monitor. 2k built in, but was I blown away when I could add a 16K memory module! :-) "...more than enough memory for anyone! ;-)..."

This was rapidly followed by a c64...

But my first exposure to computer programming was in high school on a keypunch machine?! (Anyone here familiar with those?) We'd punch in cards in Fortran or Ibm360 assembly, send the cards into the mainframe, then wait for a week while they were put in the cue for the card reader at the University of Waterloo mainframe. Then they'd mail back the green and white lined print outs to the school. We eagerly awaited those printouts...full of errors, though they were ;-)...then back to the keypunch machines to punch out new corrected cards in classic Hollerith code. With luck, we'd get a 10 line fortran loop program running correctly after a month! :-) Ah, those were the days, long before these young whippersnappers today with their diskdrives, monitors, etc. Heck, I remember the first 5 meg harddrives from Ibm. 5 megs!? How am I going to use all of that?

Atari 800, oh yes!

[Mad-Bassist]

I started playing around with the mainframe at the college where my dad was a security guard. I was the only nine-year-old with a user account. Heh heh. From there I went on to hanging out in Radio Shaft and playing around with the TRS-80 Level I (before they called it the Model I.)

The first computer of my own was the Atari 800. Apple was nice, but I avoided it because Atari had the best graphics and sound hardware in its day. Besides, Star Raiders was the killer app, and I still play it with the free Atari800Win Plus emu every now and then.

I did a little hacking too, thanks to Omnimon. It was a circuit board that plugged into one of the ROM chip sockets, and it filled the unused $C000-$CFFF block of memory with a program that allowed one to interrupt anything with a press of Select and System Reset. It was now possible to take the machine code of a program that's running (even game carts) and do some simple disassembly. It also had a mini assembler that worked one instruction at a time. The Omnimon board also had one wire patched into the ROM that held the top of memory (to $FFFF) which is how it interrupts the boot process. (The last few bytes were pointers used by warm and cold starts.) There was also a three-position toggle switch that I added to the case. If I remember right, one setting allowed interruption, one restored the original ROM pointers, and the last position made the $C000 block disappear so the machine looked unaltered. Unfortunately, the later models used that memory area (probably for the rainbow logo and that sophisticated "self-test.") I think I saw a mention of a version of Omnimon designed for the newer machines, but I had the original.

Oh yeah, I also added a little switch in the bottom to silence the internal speaker since I would be writing programs through the night. At one point I upgraded the beast from a CTIA to GTIA chip and enjoyed the extra graphics modes that were in the later models, and I took out the power LEDs and replaced them with green ones. Ahh, the memories!

I remember being in awe of the bank switching technique used in the macro assembler cartridge I owned. I wasn't to shabby at speaking 6502 and Antic display list instructions. Heh heh.

That old computer died eventually. The keyboard needed to be replaced, and by that time they were impossible to find and cost over $100. After using a driver I wrote that made the escape key a space bar substitute (unless shift was pressed,) the computer was fried by a power surge. It died slowly over the course of a month, and towards the end started rebooting spontaneously. I laid it to rest and got myself a 65XE. A few years down the road that computer was stolen from storage, but they didn't get my carts and disks. I hope they had fun with it, and the high-pitched whine my poor old 13" TV had. Heh heh heh.

360/67

[rssrss]

Using a terminal (TTY Model 33, IIRC) to connect to an IBM 360/67 at U Michigan in 1970. The computer had 1.5 megabytes of core memory (little electromagnets for you newbies) and cost $14 Million (maybe $70 Million in 2006 money). It occupied two floors of a building.

My first PC was an IBM PC XT, 8088 with a 5 meg hard disk. Green monochrome monitor. I bought it from my employer around 1988.

Re:You made me a programmer

[droopycom]

Dude you're so out of date, I have a 16K upgrade on my ZX-81.

The only problem now, is that the power plug is somewhat loose, and I'm missing one of the rubber pad at the bottom, so the whole thing tends to tip around when I type, so I'm lucky if I can finish writing a ten line program before triggering a power failure...