Your first ever computer + an embarrassing story

[theknight571]

First Computer we owned was a Kaypro II (http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html). My dad had it, and it worked, up until a couple of years ago.

First Computer I used was a Commodore PET (http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html). We had one of these in elementary school that would get shuttled from room to room and we would get to play games on it. Math and typing games and every once in awhile Lemonade Stand.

I've been pretty careful/conservative with my hardware... The worst thing I did was I dropped my Mac SE/30 and it shattered. I had to go computer-less for awhile after that. lol

 

[SagaLore]

Commodore Vic 20

My first as well. :wub:

I would literally wake up, code until late in the night and go back to sleep for weeks at a time. I kept filling up all the memory with my programs so I would have to rewrite them to be leaner each time.

 

[Possessed Freak]

The first computer in my house was an Apple II e. Now I was little at the time, like 2 or 3. Later in life I inherited that computer along with its partner in crime an 8086 IBM clone that my dad used for work at home. I remember fondly playing decathlon or MS Flight simulator on the 8086 and playing Wishbringer and other adventure games on the Apple.

So anyways, back when I was knee high, I am told (I don't remember) that I decided to pull ALL the keys off the Apple keyboard and hide them throughout the basement. Well eventually my parents found all the keys except for a single letter, the E. Every day it was the same question, where is the E Possessed, Where is the E? Well I certainly didn't remember where I put the E. So for a long time the E was missing. Well, we had a pool table in the basement. One with an automatic ball return. I guess I decided to place the E in one of the pockets. Eventually after so many games, the E was pushed down the track (it kept getting pushed aside after the initial whack from the ball) and appeared in the return area. There is the E.

 

[WiseUp216]

My first PC was a 486 DX2-66. Around 1993? I would have been 12 at the time. I used to play Rogue on my grandfather's 386 but the DX2-66 was the first one that was mine. I remember that behemoth fondly.

One time I was on IRC and someone was posting some ASCII art. Nothing offensive. My mom happened to be walking by and I said 'Hey, check out this text art'. As soon as she looked at the monitor, an ASCII depiction of Bart Simpson having sex with Lisa appeared. Hahaha.

Remember when internet access was charged by the hour? We used a local ISP instead of AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve, but we still paid something like $25/month for 20 hours of access and $1/hour for overages.

 

[NutBucket]

Back in the mid 90's I can recall the hard drive of my 386 failing (120MB Conner). I can recall opening the sucker up thinking I could somehow fix it (The Knack?). Then I remember having to tell my dad the sucker needed to be replaced followed by perusing Computer Shopped to find a suitable replacement (420MB Maxtor!).

Yeah, that's the dumbest thing I can remember offhand.

 

[Jeraden]

My first was a Coleco Adam. I wanted a C64 but my dad bought me an Adam instead since it had more memory. I was like 12 or something and very disappointed because I only wanted the C64 because my friend had one so we could play games on it. At some point I bought some game that was on a tape (it had a tape deck) that was sort of like a moria/nethack type game. It literally took half an hour to save your game - as the tape drive apparently had to rewind and fastforward several times to write everything.

I remember getting this basic programming book. Where you type in all these lines of code in whatever language it used. No idea what any of them were for, just blindly typing in hundreds of lines of code to make some stupid text battleship type game. Tons of "peeks" and "pokes". Then after all the hours of typing, the thing didn't even work, lol.

 

[Saint Nick]

My first PC was an IBM PS/2. 286 with a monochrome monitor. Ran Windows 3.0 or 3.1.

 

[Jeff7]

First computer was a 33MHz 386DX, 4MB of RAM, and an ISA videocard.



Later, I once managed to mix up a floppy drive power connector with the CD audio cable, back when they were a few different types of CD audio header on most sound cards.

That cheap ESS1869 sound card nobly died to save the 486 motherboard.

 

[Raizinman]

First Computer: Radio Shack Model II. This had 32K, monochrome monitor, and 8 inch diskette drive. This was about $6000. The word processor 'Scriptsit' was another $400. The daisy wheel printer set me back another $2500. The dictionary disk, was $125 more. I was well over ten grand for this system. It was a very solid system that lasted me 10 years of usage. My embarassing story? Buying this comptuer!

 

[SlitheryDee]

All I remember about my first computer is that it had an AMD k6-2 3DNOW! processor. I think the motherboard was a baby AT form factor made by shuttle or some other company of that ilk.

My embarrassing story is how I plugged the power cables in backwards (black wires facing out instead of in) and caused something to smoke on the motherboard. I had read in a dozen different publications that I should never ever ever do that, but it all slipped my mind in the excitement of the moment I guess. Strange thing is that I turned them around and the motherboard worked just fine after that. I guess I burned out something that wasn't strictly necessary, though I can't imagine what that could be.

 

[Schfifty Five]

My first computer that was considered mine was an Acer desktop (not tower), olive green colored w/ matching 15" CRT and keyboard/mouse. It cost $1,499 from Best Buy and it was only 100mhz. I thought I was getting a 100mhz pentium cpu, but nope....it was one of those IBM 100mhz and the computer ran like shiet LOL. Couldn't even run diablo 1 or C&C red alert very well in windows.

I tried upgrading all I could: RAM, video card, on board video memory, etc. Nothing helped.

Embarrassing story: I deleted the system files in DOS from the c:\ folder on that computer mentioned above. I don't know why I was in DOS to begin with (did a command prompt through windows). Ended up getting help from a friend to fix it up.

 

[_Rick_]

The first computer in my household was a 386SX with 1664Ks of RAM and a 14" CRT.
That one was kept for quite a while (we even hooked up a 2400 baud serial modem to it once...sadly there was a problem with dialing into the University).

But the first one that I could call my own by some measure was a Cyrix "P150+" based system (120MHz 6x86 CPU), with an S3 Trio with 2MB VRAM (woooow 1024x768 at 16 bit color!! Couldn't go true color, or I'd run out of frame buffer) and all that shebang.

But even with that one I had no really good story. The best one came with my P3 500 based system (with DVD-ROM!!!). Eventually the computer would develop the most common of issues, a weak/bad power supply. Got it swapped one day, by the dealer, because the thing was still under warranty.
Later that week, late at night I wanted to go to bed, and power the thing off with the hard power switch of the PSU. Funnily, there was no switch there, only a kind of slider.
Oh well, I thought, fancy new unit has a fancy new sliding power button.

Turns out the fancy slider not only turned off the computer, but also made it blow out sparks and a bang, and blew the fuse. Well, I unplugged it, put the fuse back in, tried again, but bizarrely it was dead. Luckily, they replaced the PSU again, under warranty, and this time with one that had a power switch on the back.

That was one of these moments where I learned, that often it is better to not expect everything to just work the way it always did.

 

[Imp]

It was a 286, 386, or something else crappy in the early 90s. I remember the monitor was mono-color in yellow only. You needed a 5" boot disk to get to DOS. The games weren't all that bad!

Then we didn't get a new computer until Pentium came out. Then we settled on a $2k Pentium 150, 16 Mb of Ram, and 800 Mb hard drive that was too small to install Half-Life on. Modem was 14.4 and the ISP wouldn't let us online past 8pm. And the monitor was some POS nameless thing that didn't work at 800x600 -- the manual said it could, but the refresh rates were non-standard. Piece of shit...

 

[MotionMan]

I bought my first computer with the settlement money I received regarding a head-on auto accident I was in when I was 16. I got the money when I was 18 and a freshman in college. I bought a Mac SE with a 10 MB HD and 4 MB of RAM with an ImageWriter II printer. With the Student Store Discount, the whole package cost $3,500.

The HD died when I was in law school and I bought a "huge" 80 MB external drive that I used as the boot drive.

When I bought a new Mac (a "Pizza Box" model), I found a computer store that bought used computers. From the day I bought it, the image on the screen was tilted at a slight angle. I never thought to exchange it and I stopped noticing it soon after I bought it - and was only reminded of it when, after they booted it up, both of the owners of the store crooked there heads a little to the left. I think it cost me $20 in resale value.

MotionMan

 

[bigrash]

Think my 1st computer was a Sony VAIO around 1997 or so. Don't remember the specs.

 

[ch33zw1z]

First family computer was some crappy emachines. After building my own, some time later I was pd'ing a ram issue. I was also eating candy. I drooled on the mobo, but everything worked fine in the end

 

[unokitty]

First office computer was a Cromemco CP/M machine with an S-100 bus. Can't remember the model number.

Went to work for Heathkit/Zenith and got an H-89 CP/M machine with a hard sectored 5 and a quarter in drive. Wrote the operations manual for their first IBM PC compatible computer on that machine.

Both CP/M computers used Z-80 processors.

Prior to that, I had worked as an operator on an IBM System 370/Model 158. But that one wasn't really mine.

Lots of stories.

Uno

 

[cronos]

Sinclair ZX81

I'm going to have to think hard about the story. I'll come back when I remember something.

 

[TechAZ]

My first ever computer was a Tandy (can't remember model) with a cassette tape drive.

Embarrassing computer story came years later. In '92 I had become immersed in the BBS world and decided to create my own. Spent a lot of time setting it up, making sure the ASCII looked cool and had text RPGs and some games to download. Within a week someone had formatted our hard drive remotely and my mother was pissed. She spent months at the computer setting up her recipe organizer and putting everything in it.


Years later I found out one of the local BBS gurus who was famous for hacking got busted. I didn't find out what it was for until I read a news clipping. He came to our house to get a Doom level maker. Turns out he's doing 13 years for terrorism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Konopka

 

[SaDiZTiKStyLeZ]

My first custom build:
I replaced 2 DFI boards that weren't turning on. I didn't know why. After second board, I requested a refund & purchased an ASUS board & it worked.
Come time for my second build, I decided to give DFI a try again, since they were still top performance boards at the time.
The moment I had it altogether to test is moment I realized my mistake with the first build... I didn't even try turning it on with the power buttons on the board itself. Shit!
So those first 2 boards I returned were more than likely fully functional with no issues.

Edit:
Oh. I misread this as first computer build or something like that.

My first computer was just some DOS machine (I think?) The whole green text on black background. I practiced spelling & typing. But given how young I was, it was all gibberish. And I didn't need to practice spelling or typing a whole lot & didn't have applicable use for it at that time anyway.
Wasn't until a second computer with a ton of crappy games, did I begin learning command-line inputs.

 

[crownjules]

My first computer build was my freshman year in college. I don't remember all the components except for a P3 800 MHz for the CPU. I think maybe it was an Abit mobo of some sort.

Anyway, embarrassing was at that time, there were two different CPU socket types for the same processor. And of course, I bought different sockets for the CPU and motherboard. So that set me back a few weeks for shipping one part back and getting a new one.

 

[PingSpike]

My embarrassing story is how I plugged the power cables in backwards (black wires facing out instead of in) and caused something to smoke on the motherboard.

I forgot about this idiotic power cable design on the AT power supplies and the associated saying "black on black" to remember how to install them. It didn't seem weird at the time, but the rest of the 1980s awful power plugs at least were keyed now that I think about it.

 

[PingSpike]

My first PC was a Tandy 1000RL. It was used, I think the 486DX2 was top of the line when we acquired it for $400. Despite being limited CGA graphics much of the time due to poor support of Tandy 16 color and insufficient ram to use it (I paid $75 to upgrade the ram to fix this) and being hindered constantly by the low density 3.5" floppy drive (games usually showed up on high density 5.25" or 3.5" necessitating me to recopy them at a friend's house before I could even play them) I learned a lot with that old pile. Like others here I accidentally wiped out the OS while during a del *.* while being unaware of what my working directory was and had to learn to reinstall everything from disk on my own. Farted around with QBASIC and played a lot Eye of Beholder. Tandy sound was similarly poorly supported meaning most games featured awesome beeps and boops for sound, except for "Mean Streets" which used software to play sound card quality sounds through the PC Speaker.

Later the family bought a Packard Bell 120mhz pentium with Windows 95. I had a lot of fun on that old crap box, it was the first machine we had that got on the internet using its 14.4 modem so of course I downloaded a lot of porn with that machine. Embarrassing story regarding that: Downloaded an "IP Spoofer" tool during my "pretend I'm going to be a hacker" phase and ran the executable. Flashed the image of a demon face on screen and PC failed to boot. Then I got to learn how to reinstall everything from disk on that machine as well.

 

[SunnyD]

Trs80 model 3

 

[Braznor]

My dad got me a Sinclair with a tape deck from the UK back in 1984. I live in India and for some reason was very popular in school.