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Community Center F.A.Q (Last Updated: 2024 Nov 26 7:01 am)
Subject: OT - what was your first computer
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Well it's a decade this May for me and my first was an Amiga1000 that was given me by a friend who had just made a massive jump to an SGI workstation for a SoftImage animation and was never gonna need it again. I originally used it for transcribing my music into a communicateable form for a bunch of the young folks here who were doing a full night of my songs and needed scores to work from. Within 8 months or so tho I had found my first 3D app[Imagine3D], gone as far on an Amiga as I could with it and forunately Imagine had just ported over to pc so I got a 2nd hand P90 with a HDD im MegaBytes and some awesomely small size of RAM, LOL...how did I ever get anything done then....been nothing but upgrades ever since, heh heh heh...that's the way of it apparently...LOL
Once
in a while I look around,
I see
a sound
and
try to write it down
Sometimes
they come out very soft
Tinkling light sound
The Sun comes up again
Attached Link: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=1042
This was mine first... the philips... But i had a Bcc , zxspec, vic20 Com64 com128 Amiga500,1024 ,atari500,1024 st ste etc etc A pc 8086 and all pc spec's upto now. And a MAC ! ;}Chris
IF YOU WANT TO CONTACT BAR-CODE SENT A PM to 26FAHRENHEIT "same person"
Chris
The first computer I ever worked on was an IBM system for which I never learned the model. It was owned by our county school corporation, and each of the five public high schools in Evansville, Indiana hade one time-share terminal connected to it. That was the one I did my very first programming on, in about 1976.
The first general purpose computer I ever had was a Commodore VIC-20, which was really just a "toy" version of the C-64. That was in 1982, or early '83, as I recall.
The first real computer I ever owned that could actually accomplish something was an AT&T 7000 series personal computer that ran Unix with a monochrome monitor and a whopping 20 Mb hard drive. That was in 1986 or thereabouts.
Ah, the good ol' days. 
Atari 800, back in 1983. Which I bought because of 'Star Raiders' - which had what is still one of the best gameplays I've seen. I even got into programming the thing in 6502 assembly language, which I don't think I could do again! Subsequently an 800XL, then an Atari ST, then a variety of PCs. Who knows? Once day maybe I'll get a Mac...
Steve
Mine was a Commodore 64 with all external floppy drives and eensy beensy memory with a 1200k modem. :) Then took a home based Computer Communications course with NRI and went to a 386 with DOS 5, 8mb memory, Windows 3.0 and a 2400k modem. Next was a 486 running Windows 95, a Pentium and Win98 and now I'm on an E-machine with WinXP and 512mb memory and broadband.
Let me introduce you to my multiple personalities. :)
BluEcho...Faery_Light...Faery_Souls.
Acorn Atom, back in 1980 or '81 (.5KB RAM, .5KB video RAm though we added extra to take it up to 5/6, and a colour board offering two four-colour palettes (that never worked well) and a maths chip). Then a gap until an Atari ST (520STFM, but ended up with 4MB of RAM and various external drives) followed by five PCs to date.
Aha, it's on the same site: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=80
Attached Link: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=263
I started with this baby... the ZX81 featuring 1K of RAM extensible to 16K !Owned after that :
- Amstrad CPC 464
- Amstrad 6128
- Amiga ST <------ started digital art and 3D here
- (used.. not owned... Sun Sparc Workstations and SGI)
- Pentium P133
- Pentium 4 and above....
- agiel - www.linfa.net
Thinking about it, I had something similar to that in the early 80's - the keyboard was the same but I can't remember the brand. I recall hooking it up to my portable TV and all I could do was play games on it. Got bored very quickly and only kept it a couple of months before I sold it on.
Quote - I started with this baby... the ZX81 featuring 1K of RAM extensible to 16K !
Owned after that :
- Amstrad CPC 464
- Amstrad 6128
- Amiga ST <------ started digital art and 3D here
- (used.. not owned... Sun Sparc Workstations and SGI)
- Pentium P133
- Pentium 4 and above....
Gill
Well, my family's first computer was by AT&T. It had:
Intel 486 50MHz
4MB RAM
330 MB Hard Drive
2400 Baud modem
256 color 640x480 SVGA display
Windows 3.1
This was back in '93/'94, about a month or two before the Pentium came out. I know, I know. I'm a young'un.
¤~ RadiantCG ~¤~ My Renderosity Gallery ~¤
Ann Coulter?
Run Screaming
You have succeeding in insulting me more than anyone ever has by even implying a comparison.
Touché Nancy...Well executed.
8 )
"it's something up with which we shall not put."
I've always loved that line you use.
I think I deserve to at least borrow it, after that Ann Coulter smack-down.
Limps away wounded
8 )
Tom
“The fact that no one understands you…Doesn’t make you an artist.”
My first real PC computer?
Pentium 1, 200mhz cpu
32mb sdram
1mb Trident video card
2gb HDD
No sound card, no cd drive, no modem, no printer. all for only $800, lol.
Oh, yeah...it's funny now. but, some of the first Bryce renders in my gallery were made with that glacier slow-rendering dino computer.
Contact Me | Gallery |
Freestuff | IMDB
Credits | Personal
Site
"I want to be what I was
when I wanted to be what I am now"
I started with a Sinclair Spectrum 48K too.
I ended up writing a "complete" graphics suite for it, in Spectrum Basic...not to mention a MIDI step sequencer for my synth.
My first PC was a 486 DX 40 with 8 Mb of memory, a 340 Mb hard drive, and a 15" monitor.
The upgrade from 4 Mb of memory to 8 Mb was £120.00 and a Soundblaster 16 plus a Panasonic CD-Rom drive cost another £249.00. Toss in £99.00 for a hand scanner (256 gray scale of course) and £129.00 for a 250 Mb tape streamer and the whole setup clocked in at £2440.04.
That was in 1994.
The liver is evil - It must be punished.
It must be destiny....just posted today over at Wired.
**"**Commodore Returns to PC Gaming"
Read about it at the link;
Contact Me | Gallery |
Freestuff | IMDB
Credits | Personal
Site
"I want to be what I was
when I wanted to be what I am now"
Quote - I started with this baby... the ZX81 featuring 1K of RAM extensible to 16K !
Owned after that :
- Amstrad CPC 464
- Amstrad 6128
- Amiga ST <------ started digital art and 3D here
- (used.. not owned... Sun Sparc Workstations and SGI)
- Pentium P133
- Pentium 4 and above....
Hah! ZX81? I started with a ZX80, built from a kit.
The next one was a Dragon 32, with a massive 32K of RAM (you can still get emulator software to run on your PC for these). It really is time I upgraded..
A Compac Portable II - which was surpringly NOT portable - thing was actually pretty deep and heavy!
(used my dad's Macs whever I could get to his office - an advertising agency)
During college, a Mac II with 3 linked external HDs giving me a whopping 65MB of storage - can't stop me now!!!
After college I bought a used 386, then a 486 running Win95 and a truly massive 530MB HD!!
Started making more money and from then on it's been Pentiums (2-4) and now AMD Dual-Cores.
-Lew ;-)
I got my first computer in March 2000.
AMD K6 processor
300 something speed.
Onboard sound and graphic card
8 gigs hard drive (sales guy told me that it would last me years and years, LMAO)
Windows 98SE
64MB SDRAM
It came with peripherals:
Acer Scanner
Epson dot matrix printer
Speakers
The computer was a total lemon and crashed all of the time with blue screens of death dozens and dozens of times per day. It ran great post reformat, but add anything to it and it started to crash.
The scanner and printer while new, were 1997 models based on a sticker on the scanner that said "Get ready for Windows 98".
The only thing I still have from that system is the keyboard and the speakers. I haven't heard sound from newer speakers, but the sound from these to me sounds pretty clear so I still use them.
"It is good to see ourselves as
others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we
are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not
angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to
say." - Ghandi
My first was an Atari something or other. I can't recall the name. I think it was an ST4. People still use them and like them. 64K memory with a slot for an extra 64k memory card. Everything was on floppies. Mega 10 meg hard drive. the modem was one of the ones you put your phone on, and waited till the next day for it to connect. Of course, the net at that time was nothing but BBS's and flaming. I still participate in newsgroups, and there's still flaming lol. My first PC was a 90 with like 15 megs of memory or some such. I still have it, and the sucker still works lol. I also have a 250, a 350, a 500, an 800 and an 850. None of those work actually lol. Mostly cause they're sorta in pieces. The computer I have now is a piece of crap too. It shouldn't be. It has everything it needs to be a decent computer, but the guy that built it did something wrong so it has some serious problems. Then he died.
Talent is God's gift to you. Using it is your gift to God.
I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't laugh but the last 3 words of your post had me in stitches!!
Quote - My first was an Atari something or other. I can't recall the name. I think it was an ST4. People still use them and like them. 64K memory with a slot for an extra 64k memory card. Everything was on floppies. Mega 10 meg hard drive. the modem was one of the ones you put your phone on, and waited till the next day for it to connect. Of course, the net at that time was nothing but BBS's and flaming. I still participate in newsgroups, and there's still flaming lol. My first PC was a 90 with like 15 megs of memory or some such. I still have it, and the sucker still works lol. I also have a 250, a 350, a 500, an 800 and an 850. None of those work actually lol. Mostly cause they're sorta in pieces. The computer I have now is a piece of crap too. It shouldn't be. It has everything it needs to be a decent computer, but the guy that built it did something wrong so it has some serious problems. Then he died.
Gill
I can't remember the name of the first one my dad bought. Guess it would have been around 1981 or 82, when I was 8 or 9 years old. The company went bust the week after he bought it. It was called something like a "newline" or "newbook". I never met anyone else who owned one or had heard of it. We didn't have any games for it but I loved learning BASIC and keeping my little sister endlessly amused with "Guess the number I'm thinking of" games. (I used to put in some random quotes when she got it wrong, like "Higher, you nitwit" and "Lower, smelly-bum"!)
When I was about 11, we got a Dragon 32 with a whole 8 colours. I had endless fun relearning all the BASIC syntax and teaching it to beep in different tones. I think we owned two games for it: Pong (of course) and a text-based adventure game called "Haunted House" or similar. My dad and I programmed a very complicated routine to work out league standings in our regional sailing championships. We used to take the machine to sailing meets and set it all up for the day, enter all the race results in and let it work out the points, then break it down at the end of the day again. Since it had basically no storage and the audio tape system was dire, I would have to re-enter all the data from the previous week's printouts.
Then a couple of years later, we got a Amstrad CPC 664. This was the same as the 464 except it had a built-in floppy drive instead of a tape drive. Wow! now we could enhance our routine for league standing and effectively make it a database. Now that we could collect and store names and address, we even wrote a mailmerge function! I was known as "Karen, the Computer Girl" and I had the supreme power, LOL
The Amstrad had some good games for it, the Roland series being a particular favourite. We used to get "Amstrad User" magazine every month (fortnight?), which frequently included code for games... so whereas today you would get a cover disk, they would print like half a million lines of hex code which you could enter into your machine and end up with a fairly crappy and basic game. That is, after you'd gone back through the code 48 times trying to figure out where you'd transposed "C24DR3" for "C42DR3"...
Happy days... :biggrin:
Then BASIC went out, and I couldn't be bothered to learn a "real" programming language, plus I was starting to get interested in lusting after cuties instead, so that was the end of my involvement with computers for a decade or so!
"you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love." - Warsan
Shire
I struggled like hell trying to learn visual basic. The Atari could do some cool stiff with VB. Unfortunately, my brain just does not work in a logical manner, so I've been a complete failure at learning anything that requires logic, like programming languages and math.
Talent is God's gift to you. Using it is your gift to God.
Ah, yes - my favourite game on the Amstrad was New Zealand Story .... that involved a little chicken-like character travelling around in a balloon. I wasted hours of my youth playing that - not only on the Amstrad but they also had it on a machine in my local pub LOL! I played it there while waiting for my turn at the pool table ;-)
http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/articles/newzealandstory.htm
Quote - The Amstrad had some good games for it, the Roland series being a particular favourite. We used to get "Amstrad User" magazine every month (fortnight?), which frequently included code for games... so whereas today you would get a cover disk, they would print like half a million lines of hex code which you could enter into your machine and end up with a fairly crappy and basic game. That is, after you'd gone back through the code 48 times trying to figure out where you'd transposed "C24DR3" for "C42DR3"...
Happy days... :biggrin:
Gill
I started with a CPC 464 produced by Amstrad, selled in germany by Schneider Computer Division.
It uses a cassette tape drive, works with Locomotive Basic 1.0 and has 64 KB of memory.
By the way: my first game on that computer was "Werner"
X-PaX
→ [ www.3dspots.de ] | [ www.cwhp.de ]
Let's see here... the personal playthings, in order: ============= Heathkit 8086 kit (that only worked half the time due to a faulty memory bus). TI-99/4A (eventually w/ the floppy and RAM expansion kits) Commodore 64 (eventually got it up to 512K w/ expansion cassette) Commodore 128 some No-Name IBM Clone XT 286 (4MHz w/ 1MB RAM) - came with a busted Power Supply Amstrad 2286 PowerCurve 68K (a used Mac Clone) Home-built 386 DX-40 Apple Powerbook 540c (a buddy has it now, but it runs MacOS 7 just fine). Home-built 486 DX2-100 Home-built AMD K6/2 400 Home-built Dual/SMP Pentium III 500 Home-built P4 1.4 GHz (the early RAMBUS-only model) Home-built P4 2.0 GHz Home-built P4 2.4 GHz (still have it, albeit in another case, w/ another mobo, etc) Macintosh Cube G4 500 (later bumped to 1.2GHz) Home-built P4 Celeron (still have it - it's a file server now) Macintosh dual G5 PowerMac Next up... a PowerMac dual Quad Core when it comes out and I can save up the pennies for it. >:) /P
Built my first PC in 1975 (same year Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft), after reading about a kit in that year's Popular Electronics magazine. I built the next kit available after the one Bill & Paul first built (an Altair). My kit was an Imsai 8080. All parts had to be soldered to the motherboard, along with all the LEDs and switches on the front panel. 64 memory chips in all.
No video monitors existed for PCs back then. Most of us used the ASR-33 teletype as our "console". It used punched paper tape for storage. If you wanted software, you wrote it yourself in machine code. I bought Bill's first program, MS-BASIC, 24KB on a fat roll of paper tape. I had the first or second PC in my county. And no pre-built PCs existed then, only those 2 kits.
There was no BIOS or other firmware chips. You booted the Imsai 8080 by entering a few lines of startup machine code - setting the left 16 switches, then hitting a switch to store that in the one of the Intel 8080 registers and repeating the process.
The ASR-33 teletype had a serious "carriage return"! It rang a bell and made a big bang. The floor shook and my house-mates would not let me compute after 10pm.
Hi!
My first : Atari 800 XL with Datasette in 1984
And the the one and only (not alone for Kids) Amiga 500 up to Amiga 4000 in 1993
At work MAC, SGI and PC and at home only PC (with an Amiga Emulator in it ;o)))))))).
Thanks to the Amiga. If I never had this computer I would not do what I do today. I made
Computergraphics and Animations on Video (oh wow this is nearly 20 years ago) at
home in times the PC´s had only a beeping sound and 16 colors together on screen. ;o)
Regards
Jochen
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Attached Link: Amstrad 6128
Well, semi OT anyway :)A friend recently said it was the 10th anniversary of buying her first pc and gave us what now seem ridiculously small specs.
Well, I realised it's 20 years since I got my first and the specs were even smaller - an Amstrad6128 that is now catalogued as a 'museum piece' eeehhgads!! Click the above link to see the specs ;-)
Just curious if there's any older, or just what your first was
Gill