Ask Slashdot: What Was Your First Computer? – Slashdot

Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!
Nickname:
Password:
Nickname:
Password:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
8085 based S100 bus single board computer. No case. Got used, replaced the power transistors. After a couple months it went bzzt. Oh well. I *really* wanted a TRS-80, by my parents thought it was a waste of money.
Second computer that was mine was Amiga 1000, several years later, no need to have one in the meantime since there were school computers to use.
Built my first computer out of TTL in 1970.The most troublesome challenge was the linear power supply, which was enormous and difficult to find components for. The TTL boards, wire-wrapped for the most part, took up most of a basement room in my house. I used a Baudot teletype as the terminal. I had 512 bytes of surplus core memory to play with, oh yeah.
My first commercial computer was a SWTPC 6800, purchased in 1975. Then a GIMIX 6809. Then a hiatus due to actually working for a living and having zero spare time; then an Amiga (several Amigas, actually), and finally PCs, then Macs. A Mac is where I’m at today, though I have Windows and linux VMs and a Windows laptop.
There were a couple of single board computers in there as well; an SC/MP, a COSMAC, etc. Just fooling around.
ZX80 for me.
That and the successor ZX81 were cheap and not very useful, but still historically significant because they started the home computer era.
First computer I owned was a Commodore VIC 20.
That one came with the only consistently reliable cassette drive, the ones that came with the C64’s were of much lesser quality…
Vic 20 was my first one as well. My first PC was a Tandy 1400 LT. I was in the Navy at the time and I bought the Tandy and a copy of Borland Turbo C++, then spent the next six months floating around the Persian Gulf teaching myself to program from the Borland manuals that came with the program.
The first computer which I owned was the Commodore 64. However, I was a young kid in those days and I spent almost every day at the local Radio Shack and department stores using their computers which were on display. I would program different things on them, spending hours at a time doing it. It was stuff like drawing things on the screen to writing an adventure type text game. At high school they had PET computers and I would write programs on my C64 at home and then modify it to work at school on the PET
And I should have a Commodore 65535 by now. Stupid Intel and IBM ruined everything!!
Bought at the Lawton/Ft Sill OK Radio Shack, using per-diem money from my time at Ft Sill. I’ve owned a computer continuously since.
But the first computer I used was a TOPS-10 terminal, followed by several programmable desk calculators, in 1971-1974.
TI-99/4A 16k ram, used an audio tape recorder for storage and a TV as a display.
Same. It started my love of computers.
Xmas of 1981, and when it was discontinued we picked up the expansion box, memory expansion card, acoustic coupler 300 baud modem, speech synthesizer, two floppy disk drives and probably something else. From 1983-1987 we ran our family’s regional video rental chain from the computer; keeping track of inventory, rentals, sales and our movie description catalog, which would take all night to print just one copy.
Oh, the printers were S L O W back then!
In 1987 we got an Amiga 1000 which was to replace the TI,
As my dad was at IBM there was no way a Commodore or any other brand would enter our house. So it was a PS/2, 80286 processor, 1MB RAM and 30MB HD. And a 1st or 2nd gen Type M keyboard
.. it was a combination of pong clone (bentley), C64, tandy computers before the atari/NES/mega drive era during the 80’s.
In the 90’s my first real PC would be something along the lines of a 486 DX33.
Either way the 90’s alive, modern PC is on the way out because of trusted computing and the overwhelming forces against text based executables and the mass theft the game industry has done to PC games by rebranding them mmos/f2p.
It was some type of 286, had the amber screen. It ran DOS 3.0? I was pretty young. I remember using an art program called “TPaint” that I can’t find anymore but this is reminding me to look again. Also used a word processor called “Professional Write”
The more relevant computer for me was about a sometime later we got a 386SX 25MHz, VGA color monitor, 2MB RAM in SIMM slots, 40MB Conner brand HDD, 5.25 and 3.5 floppies. Eventually added a Soundblaster and 6MB more RAM. Had a lot of good memories on that,
Because it makes a difference. Many of us first learned about computers in school or at a friend’s house long before we could afford such a thing…
First used computer: Apple IIe, learning basic programming, logical thinking, math, and coordinates with Logo.
First owned computer: PackardBell 486-66 (whooo-hooo, turbo mode) with a monstrous 8 MB of memory and a 200MB harddrive, what would you ever do with so much space?
Bet most of you have never heard of it, but my first computer was a Telmac 1800, built from a Finnish kit. Loosely based on RCA’s Cosmac. Running on a RCA 1802 processor, with 2kb of memory (and room for another 2kb, if someone can use so much), audio cassette tape for storage, a lousy keyboard, and using an old TV for display, all of 64 pixels wide. Me and my dad soldered it together somewhere around 1975. Later we got an extension board with 16kb memory, and a better display, 16×64 characters, and a Tiny
Don’t remember the Telmac, but do remember the super elf. Dad ordered it as a kit and we assembled it (I mostly put keys on the keyswitches) I remember all the goofy stuff he did with it. Started off just making LED’s blink, but later on he got a monitor attached and programmed one of those cowboy games from printed sheets of paper. Later he figured out how to get a cassette tape working to save/load programs.
Not long after he got a Timex Sinclair, and would have each computer race each other in math op
It was a great value at the time, I’ve seen a few replicas, I should look into getting one…
I also had the Pentium 90 with the FDIV bug. First CPU scandal in history. (Of course it was a non-scandal but it was a bug nontheless).
serial # 32,000, 48K, cassette player I/O, Sony TV monitor. Turned out it made my career.
Manufactured by an OEM. Basically a rack for Q-bus cards, including the CPU and RAM cards. Ran the RT-11 OS, UCSD Pascal. Brought it home in 1977. It was a chore to get the box into the car and then into my apartment.
and I still have it … My second was the TRS-80 Model 3
And I still have it in a box.
Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer.
Followed by the Color Computer II and III.
Then, Amiga 2500.
I started off with the Sinclair ZX81. I still remember magazine articles outlining how to build an EEPROM blower for this machine. I later “graduated” to the TRS-80 color computer after driving my dad crazy begging for one. Found a machine language cartridge for cheap (the seller had NO IDEA what he’d gotten himself into and just wanted to get rid of it).
I’m actually quite happy to have come into that generation of computing: there was almost no ready-made software to buy for these things. If you wanted to
I bought a TRS-80 from Radio Shack in Feb 1978. Cost me $630.
I programmed it for Kepler’s equations using the onboard BASIC-A. When I chopped the power, all was lost. I documented my code and retyped it when I powered it back up. Then, they came out with an interface to a tape recorder using the Kansas City method of modulation/demodulation. I had to get the volume just right and still it was flakey.
I dove into the Z-80 microprocessor using machine language and, while it was much faster, it hurt my brain sh
I ran (and programmed) a TRS-80 for the music store I worked for in high school; plus I was in an advanced placement program where we had access to a PDP 11/70. Then I went to work in a research lab, where an HP 1000 was the workhorse. The lab paid something like $600+ per month for maintenance on that thing; so when PCs came out I talked the boss into replacing it with something that had an 8086/8088 in it (I forget what brand) – I rewrote all the software and had to do some significant modifications to th
Commodore 64, while a Navy brat overseas. Made a small fortune repairing them for $20 guaranteed or you don’t pay. The other option was mailing them somewhere for $99 and praying.
Then Commodore moved that $0.15 fuse tied to the ungrounded serial port from inside the computer to the power supply and ruined my fun…
My first computer was the ZX81 made by Timex-Sinclair. So had the monochromatic screen on the Sears television, with the 16K memory pack. Programs were stored on audio cassette, and if anything jostled the computer you can bet it was foobar’d. The small computer with the plastic McDonald’s chiclet keyboard would overheat yet usually the cat would knock the power cord out and that program you spent 3-hours typing in, *poof* without a cloud of pink smoke.
I started entering the programs in BASIC from David Ahl
Expensive as hell at the time. Was able to save and buy an additional 5 1/2 drive for $300 to allow database sorting. Loved that thing.
Had a book contract, with a dated bonus of $1,000. This thing would cost me that much, but would guarantee I met the bonus deadline. Net zero cash, but I had my first personal computer after it all. Still runs for weeks on 4 AA batteries.
I used lots of computers but the first computer I can remember that was 100% mine had a 486 SLC/33 CPU. With the exception of a HyperRace 586 upgrade chip (only AMD CPU I have ever owned) and a 300Mhz Cyrix part (which was a mistake) every CPU I have owned after the SLC was an Intel CPU through to today where I have a Core i5-9400F.
The first computer(s) I actually owned were not particularly interesting. The first was no more really than a toy, given to me as a Christmas present. I cannot remember its name, but it had no capability for storing programs or data. You had to enter everything manually, and everything was lost when you turned the “computer” off. I did not own another until the early PC days when I had a Compaq running MS DOS4.0
More interesting was the first computer I was able to use personally hands-on. This was in 1968 a
I’m older than most here.
My first personal computer was an Intel 8008 (precursor to the 8080) which I hand wire-rapped. 256 bytes of memory. Built an octal display and keyboard. Eventually a cassette tape interface.
Wire wrap. Nice.
Still have my Slit-n-Wrap tool and the 30 gauge self stripping wire.
My first computer, a gift for my 13th birthday from McDuff’s clearance table. It was seriously outdated even at that time, but worth it.
Intel (AMD-manufactured) 8086-2 / 8Mhz, 512k RAM, 5.25″ 360k and 3.5″ 720k floppy drives. DOS 3.3 on ROM.
Eventually I had various upgrades gifted by friends and family. Updated the CPU to an NEC V30 / 12Mhz CPU (capable of most of the 286 instruction set) and 640k RAM. It was able to play Wolf3D at that point. Eventually a 5.25″ full height 40MB MFM Seagate hard d
First used: IBM 370/168 as a CS undergrad.
First owned: IBM PS/2 Model 25. I kept it for years as a host for PIC and Basic Stamp programming tools.
…laura
About 1970. CP/M. This one had add-on 8″ floppies (almost wrote “flippies”, and I did do some of that) and an add-on hard drive. That drive weighed a ton! I used it heavily until I got a 286 about 1982.
… but I had to share it with other people.
First computer I owned personally was a Zenith Z-100 which was an IBM PC “work-alike”. Not a clone as it had its own version of MS-DOS.
Upgrades included bumping the RAM from 256Kb to 1Mb ($1,000) and adding a 10Mb hard drive ($1,000).
My parents had a TI /94 and a Macintosh, version 1.
my first computer was a paper notebook where I wrote my programs hoping to type them into an actual computer one day. My first electronic computer was a soviet ZX Spectrum clone Electronica https://tinyurl.com/3ehw57mv [tinyurl.com] my real useful first comp was a 386 though.
When the logo had many colors, and the screen only one.
Not just a TRS-80, but the TRS-80 MC-10. It was a Christmas gift, and I loved it until I quickly outgrew it.
First computer I used: IBM 1620. First binary computer was a Wang 3300, and also a PDP-8 at about the same time.
The first one I actually owned was a PDP-11.
About the Wang 3300. Most people would never have heard of it but it was the progenitor for Wang’s series of dedicate word processors. Also, my friends got acquainted with Adam Osborne who before founding Osborne computers made money be writing and running programs on his own Wang 3300 for customers. His system had 4K (not 4G, not 4M, but 4K) of core RAM.
It was “portable”! Played lots of Castle Wolfenstein and the original MS Flight Simulator….
Look in Byte Magazine Issue 1 and you’ll find an ad for the Sphere 1. 6800 based with 4K dynamic RAM and a monochrome 32×16 video interface that came as a kit. Almost worked after one replaced the memory chip that was pretty much guaranteed to fail in the first few hours. Monitor was a black and white TV that you injected the video signal into just past the video signal rectifier.
Second computer, that worked better and lasted longer, was the IMSAI 8080 S-100 computer. Pushed that to 16K static memory, 2
The first computer I purchased for myself was one of the first LSI-11/73s. I added Emulex controllers and a Fuji winchester drive. Had an 11/23 for work. Did my own port of the 22-bit Q-Bus stuff and gave it to the 2.9 BSD folks. Used it to finish classwork for my MS. The school had a student VAX-750 with 4.2 BSD. My 11/73 was just about the same speed as the VAX and I didn’t have 20 students competing for my CPU. The software was mostly compatible and UUCP over a 2400 Baud modem gave me connectivity. Still
Built my first computer from scratch in 1972/73. All it did was run an 8×8 LED matrix of Conway’s game of life. I modeled it after the PDP11 with internal microcode to control the gates and registers. MuCode was burnt into fused proms. Life code was coded into an EPROM. The very little bit of ram was sequential using register chips. Nothing off the shelf. Had to build the prom and EPROM burners. Sigh. The chips were very cheap except for the EPROM. Went to run it after a few years in stora
Way back when, Apple hadn’t yet established relationships with public schools. School administrators didn’t know how to classify computer equipment, anyway. The Bell & Howell company came to the rescue: they were vendors of audiovisual equipment like film projectors. Bell & Howell agreed to let Apple use their connections with school districts in exchange for the computers being rebranded as Bell & Howell equipment, in Bell & Howell livery.
This is why the first computer I ever got time on
a VIC-20
My very first computer was an IBM 780 downtown (I never saw). The next year we got an IBM 1130 which I could see through the glass window. Both were programming by punchcards mostly in FORTRAN II. Later I used IBM 370 in FORTRAN IV and WATFOR. Most interesting was an interactive (!) IBM 360 running APL through paper TTYs (selectric IBM 2278). After 1980 we started using glass teletypes like Hazeltines for TSO, often with acoustic couplers.
My first owned machine was a Philips PC with an 8088 to which I
I bought the 64K model of the CoCo 2 with a cassette drive and a 300 baud modem in 1983 to use as a terminal for accessing my college’s mainframe. As a sophomore in Computer Engineering, I didn’t have access to the room with real terminals. They were reserved for graduate students. This computer connected to a television for a display to achieve 16 rows by 32 columns of text. It was decidedly cramped, but much preferable to waiting hours at school to use a card punch machine.
The 6809e inside also provided m
zx81 crew represent!
It had BASIC built into ROM, a massive 64k of RAM, beautiful styling especially for the time, and I was able to connect it to a variety of things like modems of various speeds, a disk drive for which I got many, many games, printers, all kinds of things. This machine taught me to be a programmer. Plugs straight into the TV. I still have it, it still works.
Check out this beauty: https://www.atari65xe.com/atar… [atari65xe.com]
It was a Sanyo IBM compatible. Only had a floppy drive and booted MS-DOS. I started out playing “The Original Adventure” (Colossal Cave Adventure), which was on its own bootable floppy. I was hooked from the first moment.
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Mine was an IBM AT, a 286. I kept that thing going, upgrading one component at a time, for a long time. I think the case ended up with a Pentium 60 in it.
Intended for a robot, but ultimately never used in one. I eventually sold it to buy a Commodore PET. See also “How to build a computer-controlled robot” by Tod Loofbourrow.
I also made many digital circuits of increasing complexity with ICs from Radio Shack (including chips like flipflops, timers, and demultiplexers).
And I built an analog lunar lander system (a sort of computer) from a magazine article (using meters for readouts, potentiometers and switches for controls, and capacitors and such for numerical
TRS-80 model II, bought used from my dentist when she upgraded. I got the Model II, the DWP and Scripsit. Beat the tar out of my gramma’s Underwood for writing school papers and such. I guess I got it late 1985.
First thing I wrote that did something useful was a BASIC program to print shipping labels for mail.
TRS-80 Mod II and Mod 3 were the very first computers I used, I just kinda gravitated to the Radio Shack computer displays in the mall, and … I liked it. That was ’82? What was my hobby then bec
My first computer was an Atari 800 [oldcomputers.net], which was a pretty sweet 6502 system with two floppy drives and an Acoustic Couple Modem. It took ROM cartridges and I had a Basic interpreter and a few games.
The next one was a secondhand IBM PC “Convertable” [oldcomputers.net], which was one of the first “laptops”. Laptop in quotes because it weighed over 12 pounds and would easily put my little kid lap to sleep. This was definitely a pretty rocking computer and a pretty big deal for IBM:

The Convertible comprised many firsts for IBM –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… [wikipedia.org]
In 1968, computers were classified as “scientific” with memory organized into 32-bit computational “words”, or as “business” in which memory was organized as 6-bit bytes. The 1410 was a business computer. Main memory was implemented as arrays of small iron rings called “core” and external memory was reel-to-reel magnetic tape. Much data, including all of the software, was stored on Hollerith cards.
Two years later I encountered my first hard disk, the IBM 2311. It was the siz
First computer in the household was a Laser 128, an Apple II compatible machine from VTech. My dad bought it at Sears along with a 10″ monochrome (green) CRT, extra floppy drive, tractor-feed dot matrix printer, and a copy of GEoS. I learned BASIC and LOGO on it and used AppleWorks for homework. Pirated games from school (yeah I copied that floppy whatcha gonna do about it?)
Still have it, too; Hooked up and ready to go, though it’s not been powered on in over a decade but AFAIK it’s still usable… well the printer probably needs a new ribbon I suppose 🙂
=Smidge=
My first owned were kit built Altair and later a Polymorphic Poly-88. I still have both, and an unused B-stage Altair power supply upgrade. I was at First World Altair Computer Convention in Albuquerque. I had Microsoft Basic on paper tape, but had to drive my machine to a site with a 35 Teletype, because the 33 tape reader could not competently read the tape. Don Tarbell’s cassette interface was a godsend. Cromemco came out with a primitive A/D and D/A board. I wrote assembly code to process audio realtime and add disorienting echo effects.
First used: Wang programmable calculator with “hanging chad” program store. Then IBM 1620, 1401, and 370.
Mom worked at IBM. The first computer I used was a PC, which was a loaner.
The first one my family owned was a PC jr. There was, apparently, a hacking culture among IBM employees at the time. Mom’s work friends made sure that our jr was fully decked out, complete with hacked memory expansion.
Then we had a PS/2. I think model 55 SX.
The first computer that was fully mine was a 486, built from parts by some local builder advertising in the IBM Credit Union Swap & Shop.
I had a Kaypro II. I did the Micro Cornucopia magazine II to IV upgrade and ended up with two 2/3 height DSQD floppies.
The Kaypro company was owned by the Kay family. I heard a description of Kaypro’s demise as being caused by “Too many Kays, not enough pros”.
When I was 15, my sister bought me an Extended Basic TRS-80 Color Computer model 1, with 16K of RAM. It got me started in computing. I eventually upgraded it to a whopping 64K of RAM (!!) and a floppy drive.
I learned 6809 assembly language on that machine and loved it. I was appalled by x86 assembler when I first learned it; the 6809 was a much nicer chip.
I ended up buying three books that listed and explained the disassembly of the CoCo ROMs and also bought the hardware manual. That set me on the road to a degree in Electrical Engineering and a long and profitable career in the tech industry.
Today, near the end of my career, my excitement has been reignited by the cool SBCs like Raspberry Pis that bring again the feeling of limitless possibilities that I first felt with the CoCo.
I was in college and needed a prerequisite course in order to get into another mandatory course for graduation, and had tried for five semesters to get into that perquisite class. I was not going to graduate because the university placed math and engineering majors in front of the line and the closest I ever got was 73 in line, meaning that if 73 people dropped out of that class in the first two week of class then I could get in, but would have to make up for two weeks of lost time in that class. I can tell you that any class where 73 people drop out in a two week period doesn’t even sound like a class I want to be in.
So I forced the university to allow me to take some alternate classes and still be able to graduate, because it was their policy keeping me from graduating. That class? It was “Introduction to Computers”. I didn’t even know what a computer was and I had already been screwed by one, so I figured that regardless of my open path to graduation I really needed to figure out what a computer was and how to use one. Luckily I had been bored out of my mind with the classes I was taking so I had started teaching myself electronics in my doom room. I had a number of magazines on do-it-yourself electronic projects and wouldn’t you know it but one had an UK advertisement for a Sinclair ZX80 build it yourself computer, and if I didn’t eat lunch for a month then I could afford to buy the kit and have it shipped to me in the US. My money was in the mail the next day.
So I receive this kit and opened the box and started soldering things together, plugged it in, figured out the video RF transformer for the TV display needed to be reversed, and bingo I had a cursor flashing on the screen. Great! But what the hell does it do? I had no Idea, so I went down the hall in my dorm banging on doors until I found someone that actually got into that class, took him hostage, and dragged him down to my room and said “show me what it does”. He played with it for a minute or two to figure out the keyboard (he used punch cards in class) and then he showed me how to type in a four line program in BASIC that printed out my name three times. I then freed my hostage. I then reverse engineered the keyboard and rewired one from a surplus electronic store, added a 48K memory module, and added an IO interface board for controlling things with the computer.
After my graduation I went into electronic manufacturing and found that computers were really good for solving production problems. I built a rudimentary CAD system that stored production PC board layouts and punch press data on the mainframe. I then wrote drivers for the mainframe interface board in my PC which then allowed me to pull data off the mainframe and solve problems that the data processing department was saying was impossible for more than 5 years. After writing a Turbo Pascal library for controlling all the mainframe applications, via emulated keystrokes and scraping the video buffer memory, I wrote a long needed report program for the managers in half an afternoon, and the DP department when forced to do the same took 6 man-months to write the exact same program on the mainframe in COBOL. I then realized solving problems with computers was much too much fun to not be doing it for a living, and I never looked back.
I worked for DoD, NASA, and JHU Applied Physics Laboratory to name a few. That all started with a UK version of the ZX80 kit in my dorm room and the drive and determination to understand something that I was denied the possibility of doing in my coursework in college. Don’t tell me what I can’t do.
Last I checked I still have 2 working ti-99/4a (when last tested 10 years age).
I wrote a lot of basic and assembler , I learned to hate one of the function key combinations that was close to an often used key and caused an immediate reboot.
OMG, so you okayed so many video games you ruined your eyes?!?
My mom always said that would happen, but I never believed her…
Played, not “Okayed”
Yep. Sir Clive really kickstarted home computing in the UK.
There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead.
Copyright Concerns Make a Film Festival Pull ‘People’s Joker’ Movie
Apple’s Satellite-Based ‘Emergency SOS’ Prompts Speculation on Future Plans
egrep -n ‘^[a-z].*(‘ $ | sort -t’:’ +2.0

source