Your First Computer - what was it ?

[Matt the Czar]

Windows 95 Office Edition. Windows still came with a free Encyclopedia Brittanica back then.

 

[kiwitt]

^ Wasn't that Encarta.

 

[CivCube]

My family's first was an Acer Smith-Corona preloaded with a buncha games. One of these was D/Generation, a sadistic puzzle shooter that my 7-year-old self had no business playing.

 

[Atticus]

C64 in the 80s.

Then I bought 386 laptop with Win 3.1 for a text editor in 2001.

PII desktop with win 2000 in 2004 was perhaps my first real computer.

Pentium 286? Can't really remember it. It did have Civ though!

286 isn't pentium. The numbers x86 changed to pentiums after 486. I think it was because AMD could sell processors with the same names as long as they were numbers, but am not sure.

 

[mrt309]

My first pc was a rattletrap with 386 cpu, 1 mb ram and 40 mb hdd. But i was able to play some old games like lotus and prince of persia on it. Then bought a pentium 133 and played civ 1 for the first time.

 

[Matt the Czar]

^ Wasn't that Encarta.

you're right.

 

[Disgustipated]

My first computer that was truly mine (and not my brothers) was a Commodore 64C. My brother already had a regular commodore 64 years earlier.

My first PC was a Packard Bell around 94 or 95. Crappy store bought computer, but I didn't know how to build my own PC back in those days.

 

[Iranon]

Commodore 64. So many weird games, so much awesome music...

 

[Glassfan]

Click on.

This is the second machine I ever used, a C-93B Avionics Diagnostic Computer, circa 1978. I was an Avionics technician in the Marine Corps and have no pictures of the original C-93, which was the size of a small car.

You plugged-in black boxes from the aircraft - Phantoms, Intruders or Skyhawks in those days - and the reel-to-reel metalic punchtape simulated signals and voltages to test and troubleshoot the avionics equipment.

Then we would have to tear the box appart and melt and solder transisters, diodes, resistors etc, and rebuild and repair it and send it back out to the flightline.

In the background you can see the pub library, where we would have to lookup scematics and diagrams - no screens.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

I got to play some IntelliVision (Sea Battle) and SpectraVideo (Armored Assault, Rocks'n'Snakes, etc) before I got, I think it was a ZX Spectrum, which was exchanged for a Commodore C64 pretty quickly.

This is the second machine I ever used, a C-93B Avionics Diagnostic Computer, circa 1978. I was an Avionics technician in the Marine Corps and have no pictures of the original C-93, which was the size of a small car.

You plugged-in black boxes from the aircraft - Phantoms, Intruders or Skyhawks in those days - and the reel-to-reel metalic punchtape simulated signals and voltages to test and troubleshoot the avionics equipment.

Then we would have to tear the box appart and melt and solder transisters, diodes, resistors etc, and rebuild and repair it and send it back out to the flightline.

Even ancient technology makes me depressed.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Pentium 486. It had a 2MB memory capacity, IIRC.

 

[duckstab]

IIRC, the first computer I actually purchased was a Dell desktop with a Pentium processor running Windows NT, circa 1997.

The first one I actually used? That would be one of these:

http://www.cs.cuw.edu/museum/PDP11.html

 

[Glassfan]

Well, prices sure have gone down...

 

[kiwitt]

Well, prices sure have gone down...

My last 3 computers, I have bought recently me cost about $4,000. However, each one lasts me about 6 years +

1: Pentium 133 Mhz, 16 MB RAM, basic video card (upgraded RAM to 64 MB)
2: Athlon XP 1800Mhz, 512 MB, Geforce 4 Ti-4200 (Upgraded RAM to 1.5 GB, and Video Card to Geforce 6600 GT)
3: Core i7-920 2.6 Ghz (4-core + HT), 6 GB of RAM, ATI 4870. (No upgrades required as yet, after 4 years)

 

[Disgustipated]

I didn't mention my Atari 2600 which while technically a computer, isn't really a computer you can program, so I didn't include it.

Same thing with my electronic football as a kid. That's technically a computer too.

 

[da dick]

"fake" computers: a mini abacus i used for some abacus lessons, or my dot matrix scientific calculator(forgot brandname)

"real" "modern" computer: a hand-me -down pentium 486 acer notebook.

 

[Dale]

My first computers in order:
1. Atari 2600
2. Intellivision (sold as Dick Smith Wizard in Australia)
3. C64
4. PC's

the glorious Commodore VIC-20
The VIC-20 was the first computer of any description to sell one million units

I call BS on that one. The ColeboVision sold 2 million before the VIC-20 hit the shelf! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_games_(second-generation_systems)

 

[Birdjaguar]

Dale, your link goes nowhere relevant.

 

[Zelig]

Well as a mod you could have fixed that for him.

 

[Atticus]

I did.

Can you really call that a computer of any descriprion?