Brad Feld asks, "What was your first computer?"
Mine was a Commodore 64, complete with a Commodore 1541 5 1/4" Floppy Drive and a 300 bps modem. The whole thing was bought used in about 1985 for a couple hundred dollars.
I went from there to a comparatively gigantic Commodore 128D before I made the jump to PC land. Once I got there, I couldn’t believe that there was essentially no graphics support, no sound support, and you had to run some goofy program just to get BASIC working! (Commodores booted up into a BASIC interpreter.)
Those Commodores were great computers, though. I learned BASIC and 6502 assembly on them, and learned how to use a debugger with the add-on Warp Speed cartridge. I still remember the rush from signing onto my first BBS at 300 baud.
Anybody else?
Sinclair Spectrum with 48k RAM expansion and thermal printer (1983)
Didn’t have many games, learned BASIC by spending many many hours copying code from computer magazines. Had the computer on so much my parents had to get it repaired twice due to heat damaged chips.
Then I moved on to a 512kb 8Mhz XT (dual 5.25″ floppies, no HDD). I remember squeezing as much RAM as possible out of with with QEMM and obscure config.sys settings. I enjoyed writing TSRs (in Turbo Pascal) using tricks such as declaring variables at the same memory location to save a few bytes.
ZX spectrum, 1992
(C) 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd
Same as you, my first was a Commodore 64. It was probably right around 1983 or so when they first dropped the price on them. I think Bruce Lee and Impossible Mission were my favorite games.
Aah, the games. I had a Coleco Vision at the time, and I think I got an original Nintendo at about that time as well. The Commodore had some of the best entertainment of the bunch (although nobody could touch Zelda or Metroid!)
I recall liking Top Gun, and there was some crazy racing game that I liked, based on Formula 1. I’m sure there were more, but I actually wound up leaving gaming for BBS land within a few months, and I’ve really never gone back.
CP200s Sinclair
As I hadn’t a K7 recorder in order to load games, it was just me and BASIC manual. It was that way that I learnt how to program. After that, I upgraded to a MSX (a lot of games).
the first one i used was a gateway 2000 in the early 90s. forgot what was in it being so long ago and me being young at the time. i know it had win 3.1
the first one i actually owned was this toshiba i got a year ago that ive had nothing but trouble with.
First one was a Sinclair ZX81, guess ‘82. One evening, my father called for me, and there I saw my name written on the TV screen. My question was of course “HOW??!?”, and then I was sold to the computer community
Learned BASIC on that computer. Later had a Sinclair Spectrum, BBC Micro Mod. B (long time). Then Tiki 100 (Norwegian made CP/M and Z80 based computer), where I started programming with Turbo Pascal 2.0. Next step was into the PC arena with a 8088 computer with a whopping 32MB harddrive and EGA graphics. And I have stayed with PCs, except from a period with Acorn Archimedes, where I got the joy of learning RISC based assembly language on the ARM CPU.
Now I am wondering how my kids can get such a pleasure
I went the opposite direction… PC to Commodore 64. My first computer was a Tandy 1000 (man, was that a stupid purchase). After realizing that it wasn’t 100% IBM-compatible, and that I got ripped off by Radio Shack, I moved to a C64. Man… those were some good times. However, I was always envious of my friend across the street. He had an Amiga 1000 and it just blew everything else out of the water. Anyway… back to work. Cheers!