What was your first computer by brand.

[Thebobo]

Acer Aspire in 1996

Where is "Acer" in the poll?

Well, I had an Apple Mac Plus or something before that and a TI-99/4A before that, but those were already obsolete when I got them.

Where is "Texas Instruments" in the poll?

Forgot about them and I cant add any more.

 

[shortylickens]

Yeah, it looked like a Kaypro II. But I'm not sure if that was the brand. There were a lot of similar computers back in the day.

 

[BurnItDwn]

1st one was a Cyrix, as soon as I had saved enough $$$ I built a cheap machine in 1996.
I replaced the mobo + CPU with a K6 in 97, and kept the k6 until BH6 + Celeron 300A OC fest.

 

[sdifox]

Very first computer I played with was an Apple IIe at school. The first I really learned to use was my dad's Kaypro II, a CP/M machine. As an old prof put it, "IBM didn't do anyone any favors by adopting DOS over CP/M."

It propped up MS...

 

[sandorski]

Commodore Vic20, although I used a TRS 80 before that. Voted Other due to poll fail.

 

[Blackjack200]

Xerox, I believe it was an 8086 or an 8088. It didn't have a hard drive, you had to put a 5.25 floppy disk into the a:\ drive before you turned the computer on, I don't know if the OS (DOS) resided on the floppy or on the bios chip, but if you didn't have a formatted disk in the drive, you would get some kind of boot error.

It blew my mind when I saw my grandparents' computer and they turned it on without putting a disk in it first.

Our word processing program was called "Celebrity". you booted the PC with the program disk in a:\, and you could also save your files to the same disk, but best practice was to put another disk into the b:\ drive and save them there. We each had a box with a handful of floppy disks in it. We also had a few PC games like Striker, Paratrooper, Centipede, Wheel of Fortune, some kind of weird forest fire fighting game, and one called bouncing babies where babies fell out of burning building and you had to catch them and juggle them all the way to the back of an ambulance. Jesus Christ what a weird ass game that was. There was also a precursor to minesweeper called either land mine or mine detector or something. You didn't have to detect all the mines, just make it from one side of the board to the other.

We weren't allowed to have Nintendo so those games got played A LOT.

 

[SearchMaster]

I started with a VIC-20 as well. I spent a whole summer at the age of 13 working at our local swimming pool as a "yard boy" (cut grass and such) for $1.65 an hour to pay for it. I later upgraded to a C-64 and that sufficed until I got out of college and could afford a 286 (as I recall).

 

[DAPUNISHER]

So long ago, it is hard to remember accurately. I am fairly certain I started with this IBM PC 5150.

Then Amiga 500 - Amiga 2000 - Packard Bell Pentium like this pic

All DIY after that, first another Pentium 100 overclocked to 133Mhz using a jumper and dip switches iirc. Played around with a Cyrix in there, then built a K6 2 500 system on super socket 7 I think.

 

[Chaotic42]

C64 when I was four. I remember making programs so long that I ran out of memory for the actual program.

 

[JeepinEd]

Commodore Vic-20 --> Commodore 64 --> Amiga 500 --> Amiga 2000HD --> PC. I'm actually in the process of restoring my Commodore computers. I received a replacement PLA chip in the mail yesterday, so I'm hoping I'll get the C64 working this weekend. Had to recap it, and build a new PSU. Once it's working, it's on to the Vic. My Amiga is back up and running, after removing the battery and cleaning the mess it made when it leaked. The sound of that 5 1/4" 20MB Seagate Hard Drive firing up for the first time in 20 years was glorious.

 

[Nashemon]

Mine was a VIC-20, but we literally only ever played games on it. We didn't use it as a computer in any way, shape, or form. For first real computer, Tandy 1000, which I also used for games, but also used to type papers for school until like 1996 when I upgraded (my dad gave me his Packard Bell computer) so I could use the newly fangled Internet.

 

[Thebobo]

Commodore Vic-20 --> Commodore 64 --> Amiga 500 --> Amiga 2000HD --> PC. I'm actually in the process of restoring my Commodore computers. I received a replacement PLA chip in the mail yesterday, so I'm hoping I'll get the C64 working this weekend. Had to recap it, and build a new PSU. Once it's working, it's on to the Vic. My Amiga is back up and running, after removing the battery and cleaning the mess it made when it leaked. The sound of that 5 1/4" 20MB Seagate Hard Drive firing up for the first time in 20 years was glorious.

Yea I belong to a couple Amiga retro groups and its amazing the how strong the Amiga tinkering is still going with some new products and some games cases ect. Unfortunately I threw away my Amiga, toaster, 030 accelerator, memory card, TBC, SCSI video capture when I moved about 10 years ago. There was no market then but now Amigas are capturing pretty good price considering the age.

 

[Kyle]

First was an IBM running a PAM os...after that we had Gateway's for the next decade or so.

Wow actually surprised to see they're still selling PC's - thought they were long gone - or looks like now a part of Acer, but didn't know the brand was still going.

 

[SearchMaster]

Oh, I also had one of these bad boys as a junior/senior in high school...helped me cheat on a ton of exams since you could program formulas and such in.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Heathkit

 

[JeepinEd]

Yea I belong to a couple Amrig retro groups and its amazing the how strong the Amiga tinkering is still going with some new products and some games cases ect. Unfortunately I threw away my Amiga, toaster, 030 accelerator, memory card, TBC, SCSI video capture when I moved about 10 years ago. There was no market then but now Amigas are capturing pretty good price considering the age.

There is a whole Retro Computer thing going on right now. People are paying good money for old computers and game systems. Someone offered me $500 for my Vectrex, which I declined, but still....

 

[DietDrThunder]

I should probably start a different thread, but my software experience started with IBM Mainframes writing Assembly language programs on punch cards, then Fortran on punch cards, then COBOL on punch cards, then Assembly language programs on DEC VT100 terminals, on and on and on.

 

[Rifter]

C64

 

[Humpy]

Someone bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000. Stored data on cassette tape and the display was an old TV. I felt I got pretty good at BASIC programming and could make blinky shapes and patterns appear on the TV. It set me up for making blinky shapes and patterns in color with sounds on the Tandy 1000 in my dad's office.

These days all I know how to do is Okay Google. Okay Google. Okay Google! OKAY Google. Okay GOOGLE. OKAY GOOGLE YOU DUMB BITCH YOU BETTER NOT MAKE ME HAVE TO TYPE. Fuck you Google.

 

[Mayne]

This sounds like an episode of Halt & Catch Fire.

 

[dasherHampton]

The first PC I bought for myself was a Compaq Presario.

It was awesome. Still is - it's sitting at my parent's house and it still runs like new.

 

[Thebobo]

Heathkit

Didn't realize they had computer kits makes sense though. My father was a big HAM and a lot of heathkit gear.

 

[boomerang]

Had a VIC-20 that didn't do a whole lot for me. First x86 based computer was purchased in '97 and had a Pentium 266. I sprung for the much zippier 266 instead of the 233. I don't remember any of the other specs. It was purchased from a shop that built computers. I do remember the whole shebang including a printer and monitor was like, $2700.

I built my own from that point forward but exclusively use laptops now. Don't own a desktop at all.

 

[William Gaatjes]

I had an Atari 600xl. Then a Sony MSX2 and after that came an Amiga 600(with 60MB 2.5"HDD). Then years later a N64 for games + cyrix 686 pc for work/internet. After that stayed with the pc.

 

[ultimatebob]

You shoulda split IBM from the PC clones. Those high rollers rocking the PS/2's didn't want to be associated with the Compaq and Leading Edge crowd back then