What was your first computer?

philologos

This may have been done before, but I'd be interested to hear about what computer people used first, and what was it like

The first computer I used was a 1992 Acorn RISC OS 3 system that my dad had bought. It had a ribbon printer, a handful of games and the basics. Everything was on floppy.

alwaysadub

We got an Atari 500 when i was younger. There used to be a programme on it to read out your text-used to frighten the crap out of people .

EDIT:i've just been informed it was actually an Amiga 500. The Atari we had before that-actually,still have it, i wouldn't quite class as a computer-it had that tennis game,Pong, that consisted of a couple of White lines on the screen for the tennis bats and a white dot for the ball. Had hours of fun with that!!

silvervixen84

An Amstrad that Santa brought us, but turned out to really be our cousin's hand-me-down.

Got loads of games with it though, Impossible Mission, Mummies and Rainbow Island ftw!

Hank_Jones

It was an Amiga. Can't remember the exact number, possibly a 500.
I honestly don't remember much about it, other than that there was feck all you could do with the thing.

I was only a wee lad at the time. Think it was around 91/92.

My name is URL

Mine was an Amstrad 464plus.. I used to spend days on end typing lines of BASIC to be able to play games.. those were the days

The Pontiac

Atari 800XL. The games were mostly on cassette and took an eternity to load (when they actually worked), and made all sorts of noises in the process.

Biggins

Sinclair ZX81

SomeGuyCalledMi

Sinclair Spectrum 16k ram and 3.5mhz cpu. Got it with confirmation money around 1984.

Jesus Wept

Commador 64.

Later, a Wang. lol.
It was a 386. Amazingly I think it had 16mb hard drive if memory serves. Crazy stuff.

peasant

This

Sharp MZ 700 ..still have it

Overheal

Damned if I remember. It was old and it ran Windows 3.1

cynder

cant remember weve had a few,

sinclair zx spectrum 16k
sinclair+2
amstrad 464
some games could take 45 mins to load.... remember writing in DOS and doing commands, we could make small games by doing 100 lines of code.

yoshytoshy

Olivetti 286 was my first proper machine ,even managed to run a bbs off it for a while:)

3hn2givr7mx1sc

Jakkass wrote: »

Everything was on floppy.

But then they invented porn..

AARRRRGH

Sinclair ZX81 - 1Kb

Yes thats 1Kb.
When you ran out of memory as you typed letters used to start disappearing off the screen.

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/ZX81-doorstop.jpg

cynder

AARRRRGH wrote: »

Sinclair ZX81 - 1Kb

Yes thats 1Kb.
When you ran out of memory as you typed letters used to start disappearing off the screen.

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/ZX81-doorstop.jpg

Now used as a door stop. priceless.

cant say that was a waste of money at least its still of some use.

donkey balls

sinclair 128k spectrum, games took for ever to load via cassette i think my parents still have it stored in the attic someone.
would love to show my mates kids it there so use to psp, nintendo ds lite etc

robby^5

We had a PC and a Mac G3 when I started using computers.

I always had access to both but the first computer I ever actually owned was my dads old Macintosh 128K. It was about to go into a box to be stored in the attic but we were addicted to playing Glyder and Smashing Windows (space invaders where the invaders were winodws logos and you were the apple logo!) and wanted to be able to them when my Dad was using the G3.

The first computer I actually bought myself I also built myself with mostly standard parts of which I can only recall the graphics card, Radeon 9200SE.

ChocolateSauce

The first computer in the house I couldn't name, but it had a 230 MB HD, 8 MB ram, and started up in DOS, so you needed to manually launch windows 3.x. This would be 1992?

The first computer that was mine was a power PC mac with Mac OS 7, 800MB drive 16MB ram and it weighed a tonne! This was 1994. It was with this computer I first discovered internet porn around 1996, but it took like an hour to load a single boob....

biko

Amiga 500

mailforkev

Atari 65XE back in the late 80's. I had it and my two best friends had a Commodore 64 and an Amstrad CPC464, so we had all bases covered.

We had an Apple II in the house at some stage too, wish that hadn't been chucked out before eBay was invented. My first PC was an early Windows 95 machine, can't even remember what brand or spec it was (I just remember Weezer's Buddy Holly video being on the Windows installation disc).

It's been Macs since 2004.

RayM

I got a Commodore 64 when I was nine. Loved it at the time. Although I kind of tarnished my memories of it by digging it out of the attic a few years ago - and being thoroughly horrified at how crap it was.

frodos63

First one was a speccy 81. My first one was a wang that was bought from the ESB 1990 or so had a 32 MB hard drive and was only 16mhz speed cpu. How it all has changed now lol

pikachucheeks

The first one I memember was an Apple iMac G3 ...
Sweet computer!

Using a crappy Acer laptop these days just doesn't compare

mike65

First in the house was a something that loaded BASIC from a cassette tape with integrated monitor (70s brown), my first PC was a DX100/8mb Win95 v1 BSOD jobbie.

Spear

Like quite a few here, an Amiga 500, Kickstart/Workbench 1.3 and all the Guru Meditations you could want.

donmeister

Mine was a Gateway something , couldnt even run windows 95, BSOD was quite a regular occurrence!

OutlawPete

RayM wrote: »

I got a Commodore 64 when I was nine. Loved it at the time. Although I kind of tarnished my memories of it by digging it out of the attic a few years ago - and being thoroughly horrified at how crap it was.

Same here, can't for the life of me remember what the fuck I was doing all those hours when not playing games on it.

I remmeber a book came with hours with programmes in it that when you typed them into the computer (took hours) stupid things would happen, like a baloon floating.

The slightest mistake typing in the code meant starting all over again also.

Anyone old enough will remember the classic War Games which made us all think we could hack into banks and the CIA's computer system and cause WWIII.

Then Ferris Bueller made us believe we could change our exam grades .. damn liars, the whole lot if 'em :mad:

kraggy

Amstrad CPC 464. Green screen. 1984 I think.

Used type basic code to draw triangles and pyramids on the screen.

Games were on cassetted tapes and took anywhere between 5 and 20 mins to load.

Favourite game was "Monty on the Run".

dilallio

A Commodore PET.

I remember when the pope came to Galway in 1979, people walked up to 15 miles to see him. I lived close to Galway and couldn't be arsed - I only wanted to play Lunar Lander on the PET.

ejmaztec

Atari 800XL for big bucks. I even got an Atari printer for more big bucks, where it took 27 keystrokes to produce a £ sign - a problem solved by cutting the rubber $ and £ off with a stanley blade, then swapping them round, and gluing the feckers back on again.

Sea Sharp

My brother got an Atari 2600 around 18/19 years ago and we all got to play with it. Pacman for teh win.

First Windows PC would have been around 97/98.
I was told it had 128mb and I remember thinking "wow, that means it's 4 times better than the playstaton"

itsallaboutheL

Got an ancient Amstrad when i was about 5, so 17 years ago and it was free afaik, no idea what it was called, it used cassettes and took about an hour to load hangman, i don't remember any class of an OS and my parents hadn't a clue how to use it... twas gas my primary school teachers used to bring me in when they couldn't work DOS lol


I can now barely remember how to turn on a desktop.

ejmaztec

Anyone ever used the emulators, which allow you to play ancient games on your modern-day pc for old time's sake?:o

spider guardian

Digital Venturis FX
Pentium 120Mhz
16MB Ram
2GB Hard Disk
Windows 95

I remember being amazed that a CPU could be clocked over 100Mhz, thought it was a supercomputer. Never bothered to reformat the hard disk + reinstall OS as it came loaded on about 20 different floppy disks. Also I remember installing IE4 with active desktop, all them useless widgets used to crash the computer.

Fixed a computer with Windows 95 loaded, those were simpler days!

PeterGriffen

First one was a Spectrum 48K, colour clash heaven. Then a Spectrum 128k, then an Amiga 500. Did anybody ever play Beneath a Steel Sky on the Amiga? It was about 32 floppy disks and involved 8 disk swaps everytime you walked to a different room.

dcmu

Atari 800 ........ http://www.ensode.net/roller/dheffelfinger/resource/Atari_800_Alone.jpg

WIZE

Texas Instrument

Duggy747

ejmaztec wrote: »

Anyone ever used the emulators, which allow you to play ancient games on your modern-day pc for old time's sake?:o

There's plenty of us guys who do
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=94

The 1st PC we got into the house was back in '98 and was a Gateway Pentium II 350Mhz with 64MB of lightning fast RAM. The giant steel bucket cost £1600 but it remained in use until a year or 2 ago when the parents were giving a Dell by the brother.

Ah, glorious memories!

time42play

Most Haunted wrote: »

Texas Instrument

Thank you!! I couldn't remember what it was called, but that's it. With a 14" television for the screen and a cassette recorder/player for storage.

Voodu Child

Apple IIe was my first PC, but embarrasingly, I got it as a hand-me-down some time in the 90s :pac:

My first console was the Sega Master System.

jayteecork

Computer:Commodore 64.

Console: Sega Megadrive

Handheld: Gameboy.

ejmaztec

Duggy747 wrote: »

There's plenty of us guys who do
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=94

The 1st PC we got into the house was back in '98 and was a Gateway Pentium II 350Mhz with 64MB of lightning fast RAM. The giant steel bucket cost £1600 but it remained in use until a year or 2 ago when the parents were giving a Dell by the brother.

Ah, glorious memories!

I'll get me anorak and have a look at that forum. Goodbye After Hours.:P

Amalgam

An Oric 48K. I wanted a Spectrum, took years of therapy to get over that..

staker

peasant wrote: »

This

Sharp MZ 700 ..still have it

Ditto.
Loved to chew the 'aul tapes so it did.
And Painful Man, what a game:P

friendface

Commodore 64 with the Tape Deck attachment. I'll never forget the games on it;

Paper Boy, Bubble Bobble, Gemini Wing....

Ah the memories

It's still sitting in a press at home, must dig it out some day for old times sake.

ejmaztec

If it weren't for all of the old crocks leading the way, we all wouldn't have PCs in front of us now. A friend of mine, whose father had more money than sense, bought an IBM PC in the early 1970s for £4000 Sterling:eek:. It had two floppies, a green screen, no hard drive, and did nothing apart from accounts and word-processing.

Bob the Seducer

Commodore 64 myself, the good old days of Paper Boy, Outrun, Green Beret etc. I don't even want to think how much my dad payed for the Commodore 128 with 2 (5-1/4 inch) disk drives...

Tobias Greeshman

Commodore 64 here too, ah the memories Terminiator 2, streets of rage!

jayteecork

ejmaztec wrote: »

If it weren't for all of the old crocks leading the way, we all wouldn't have PCs in front of us now. A friend of mine, whose father had more money than sense, bought an IBM PC in the early 1970s for £4000 Sterling:eek:. It had two floppies, a green screen, no hard drive, and did nothing apart from accounts and word-processing.

We don't know how lucky we have it right now. People will complain about everything.

These days you can get an absolute supercomputer laptop for about 400-500e.

Even in 2001 a laptop with 800ghz processor, 128MB ram, 20GB harddrive and sh|tty GPU would cost you £2000 Irish punts.

jayteecork

Tobias Greeshman wrote: »

streets of rage!

Streets of Rage was the megadrive m8.