What was your first computer?

philologos · 2010-03-13 14:55:05

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.

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#32 13-03-2010 05:44PM

Sea Sharp

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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"

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#33 13-03-2010 05:49PM

itsallaboutheL

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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.

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#34 13-03-2010 05:49PM

ejmaztec

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

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#35 13-03-2010 05:49PM

spider guardian

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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!

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#36 13-03-2010 05:51PM

PeterGriffen

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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.

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#37 13-03-2010 05:53PM

dcmu

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

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#38 13-03-2010 05:55PM

WIZE

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Texas Instrument

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#39 13-03-2010 05:56PM

Duggy747

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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!

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#40 13-03-2010 05:58PM

time42play

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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.

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#41 13-03-2010 05:59PM

Voodu Child

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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.

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#42 13-03-2010 06:00PM

jayteecork

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Computer:Commodore 64.

Console: Sega Megadrive

Handheld: Gameboy.

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#43 13-03-2010 06:02PM

ejmaztec

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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

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#44 13-03-2010 06:03PM

Amalgam

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

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#45 13-03-2010 06:05PM

staker

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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

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#46 13-03-2010 06:07PM

friendface

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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.

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#47 13-03-2010 06:08PM

ejmaztec

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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.

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#48 13-03-2010 06:19PM

Bob the Seducer

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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...

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#49 13-03-2010 06:23PM

Tobias Greeshman

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

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#50 13-03-2010 06:24PM

jayteecork

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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.

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#51 13-03-2010 06:24PM

jayteecork

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Tobias Greeshman wrote: »

streets of rage!

Streets of Rage was the megadrive m8.

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#52 13-03-2010 06:27PM

jahalpin

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My first computer was an Amstrad 6128. It had 128k of ram, green monitor and a floppy drive. This was in the mid-80's

I had a few games for it, but it was difficult to get games for because;
- most software for the Amstrad's was on tape
- my dad didn't really want me to use it for playing games.

Mr first real pc was my dad's old 286 with Windows 3.0. It was a huge box and had a tiny hard disk and 3.5 and 5.25 in floppy drives.

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#53 13-03-2010 06:27PM

TPD

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First in the house was a Windows 3.1 job. I can't remember the specs, but it was pretty dire.

First computer I bought myself is the one I'm at now. Holding up suprisingly well.

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#54 13-03-2010 06:28PM

stovelid

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Atari 800 XL.

Nifty tape job with it for loading "games".

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#55 13-03-2010 06:28PM

red_ice

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amega 500
then we had a pentium (something or other)

my own first was a p2 350mhz. srs bsns.

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#56 13-03-2010 06:33PM

Andy-Pandy

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An Amstrad CPC 464, long long time ago.

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#57 13-03-2010 06:33PM

ejmaztec

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stovelid wrote: »

Atari 800 XL.

Nifty tape job with it for loading "games".

Has your first game finished loading yet?

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#58 13-03-2010 06:34PM

CrazyRabbit

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A Commodore 64 unless you count the abacus I got as a present when I was 2, or the 'Pong' game system my dad got in 1982 for us (2 colour bat n' ball game with twistie knob controllers)

I had hundreds of games for the C64 and wrote 7 games myself. I even had 1 published which brought in a good bit of pocket money for me!

I had everything possible for it...dot matrix printer, Action Replay IV cartridge, Floppy Disk Drive etc. I was the 'cool' one among the geeks for a while.

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#59 13-03-2010 06:55PM

Crazyivan 1979

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Got a ZX sinclair spectrum 48 K around '84. It had a cassette player, you'd have to type in "Load", then press play on the cassette player and hit enter at the same time, then sit back and relax for 5 mins while it loaded, only to be told "loading error" :mad:. But some of the games were class: manic miner, cyclone, knight lore.

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#60 13-03-2010 07:00PM

dlofnep

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Commodore 64 = First computer.

Sega Master System = First games console.

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#61 13-03-2010 07:04PM

mudokon

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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

That was my first computer too, had the memory expansion though which took it up to a whopping 16k. :cool:

Classic gaming like this was available back then. :pac:
http://www.retrogamingtimes.com/rtm65/pioneertrail.jpg

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