what was your first computer?

I got the idea for this thread from Count Demony's post in the Mac Air thread and I thought it would be interesting. And the question is which did your personally own, not which did you use at work or whatever.

This was my first real computer, the Compaq Portable III. It was totally badass with it's 12MHz 286 processor, 640k, and 40MB hard drive and a gas plasma screen. It cost $5800 in the late 80s.

I think we had one of the first macs in our house before that (might have just been a loaner as I really don't remember it that well), but the Compaq was what my father had for real work (and what I had for my Sierra adventure games). I can't remember doing anything useful on mac. I vaguely remember messing around very briefly in some paint application or something. Macs never were good for much.

I played all the "Quest" games on the Compaq up until KQ4, which was the first sierra game that needed VGA iirc. I can still remember the switch to VGA. It was beautiful. Long after I stopped using it I had intended to hold on to it for posterity's sake, but when our house got cleaned-out by burglars it was gone forever.







My best friend had the compaq portable II (our fathers worked for the same company).

I had a DEC 286 back in the late 80s.

I don't recall the specs. But of course it was a dinosaur by today's standards. DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was a quality company, but they are long gone.

It was also expensive by today's standards. Like $2500-3500!

Originally Posted by rnoldh

Click to expand...

I had a DEC 286 back in the late 80s.

I don't recall the specs. But of course it was a dinosaur by today's standards. DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was a quality company, but they are long gone.

It was also expensive by today's standards. Like $2500-3500!

My friend's dad eventually got the upgrade to the Portable III. We were playing Sierra's Manhunter one day and he got so pissed at the game that he punched the plasma screen and broke it. I never found out how much it cost to repair, but you'd have to figure it wouldn't be cheap on a computer that was nearly 6k. His dad was PISSED. Damn computers were expensive back then.

A Tandy TRS-80.

I think it was a Pentium II 450mhz.

Absolute first was a little Sharp PC-1210 that was programmable with BASIC via a single-line LED pixel display. I saved my programs by connecting it to a cassette recorder. It docked into a little 3-color line plotter. I used it for years, even into high school, instead of a regular calculator. Second was an Apple ][+ with 48k RAM I think. I still have it and it still boots up, although floppies are impossible to find these days. I learned BASIC on the Sharp and assembly on the Apple.

I can't remember the brand or the processor speed. I think it was a Tandy (Radio Shack) but know it was not a TRS80 as we had those at school. What made my machine "special", was I had dual, yes dual, 5 and 1/4" drives

My second was a PacBell, a sizzling 386 16 mHz, 2 meg of RAM and a 20 meg hard drive. What made that one special, was a 9600 baud modem that also sent and received faxes.

Edit: Egregiously over-stated the RAM in my PacBell..but 254 meg, lol

Boys, boys...you're really dating yourselves! Here's the first computer to take residence in the Rube household: Texas Instruments TI-99/4A Note the specs: CPU: 3MHz Memory:\t16K RAM, 26K ROM

Originally Posted by Piobaire

Click to expand...

I can't remember the brand or the processor speed. I think it was a Tandy (Radio Shack) but know it was not a TRS80 as we had those at school. What made my machine "special", was I had dual, yes dual, 5 and 1/4" drives

Yeah I was always envious of people that had two drives, and didn't have to switch disks all the time.

Apple 2+

I still have my very first computer and the day I purchased it - is one of those things that most would remember - August 31st 1997 (Diana's death in France) I picked it up early in the day, then went to a friends wedding.

Completely computer illiterate at the time, I had no idea how to use it, but I was in the process of purchasing the company I run now, and was somewhat "forced" into learning how to use one. I remember spending the next week, 18 hours a day - clicking on all the buttons and boxes to see what would happen - and basically learned how to use one by trial and error [and a lot of "crashes" and reboots !]

In a sea of beige and tan coloured processors - the IBM Aptiva stood all alone. It was Black, it was loaded (even with a remote, voice-command learning feature, and had a videophone. It was, well, nasty looking. The uber-cyber styling was quite beautiful [I still think so, as I can't part with it] It reminded me of Darth Vader. I think I paid over 5K for the whole bundle.

It has a Pentium 1 with 4 Gigs memory and 32 megs Ram.
I have no idea what other details it has, but remember that most computers at that moment in time only had 1-2 gigs of memory.
The Monitor is a 17" which cost a fortune then, and still produces one of the very best resolutions today - not even Apple seemed to compare.
I can still do basic work on it (if the wait isn't too long!) but really, only good for playing Solitaire now.

This same computer was featured in-use during the last 10 minutes of the film "Contact" - You will see James Woods and Angela Bassett communicating via some sort of high-tech government interface via a webcam. (the IBM videophone feature was never that smooth when used in reality) I guess all that really mattered then was the product packaging - and they were the best at that then...

Nothing like having to swap out disks while playing. Actually, I guess technically this would be my first:

Anyone know if stuff from the late 70s and early 80s like Commodores, TRS 80s and such have value as collectibles or are they scrap heap material?