My First Computer

[Mike S]

I figured I better start a new topic as the other one was getting a bit off topic ..... it was about computers but seemed to spring a life of it's own .... :attention: anyway been sick for a few days so please bare with me .....I bought my first computer back in the 80's from Radio Shack ..... I remember they had a special sale on them as they had just come out and I had my income tax check back so I spent the whole thing and then some on it ...... I don't remember the exact price but it was over $1000 and that was a lot back then to pay for a personal computer ..... IBM and a few more had been around a while but they were way outta my reach ..... so I settled for the Tandy EX 1000 ..... in the sale it came with a monitor and printer and I was off to start on a life long romance with the nerd herd ..... :) or geek crowd ...... I remember all my friends were laughing at me and smoking their dope and drinking their wine .... and I was the only Triumph chopper hard tail riding .... long haired .... bearded sob .... in the crowd (but that's another story and off topic) .....I remember as I stuffed my 51/4 floppy disk in (no comments Jake) the drive "wow .. what blinding speed this thing has" I could do simple math ... write letters and type them and all kinds of other good stuff .... do inventories (this was the reason I needed it ..... so I told my wife at the time) and would save me a bunch of paperwork and keep more accurate records .... (little did I understand the saying "garbage in ... garbage out ... but I learned as I went along) and when in a few months they came out with the external 3.5 in a hard cases instead of the paper ..... I thought I had died and gone to heaven ..... now remember there were no HD's in these early machines so everything was stored on disks and then in file boxes ...... MS-DOS was the OS and Basic was the program .... I did try to write a program in Basic but it was way over my pea brain .... however I did make the bubbles appear in the champagne glass ... so I was successful .... anyone remember that lesson in Basic ..... :hystery:I found an early add on the web and also a picture of the Tandy 1000HX which was the model after mine ... the only difference was it had a 3.5 drive built in ..... but looked the same and this picture shows the set-up I had except mine was a 1000EX ....... enjoy a bit of nostalgia .... :attention:

[Curley]

I also started with a Tandy, getting on for 30 years ago, I don't remember the model no though.

[Jim Sibbick]

Ah!You got a floppy drive!My first computer, the hard drive was a cassette player. Programmes were stored on music cassette tapes. Then played into the computer.I can remember the advertisement outside the store.

A big 2 kilobytes of memory

Regards: Jim

[Candyman]

My first real computer was a 386 with a 5.6 GB hardrive and 8mb memory. Also got the keyboard, monitor, mouse, and an Epsom printer I got no change out of $3,000 at the time. That computer was soon upgraded to a 486, then to pentium 3, and the memory went way up to 64mb. That was not that long ago, and I conducted a world wide business on that machine. I have lost count of the ones I have had since, and the upgrades to them now !

[OldUgly&Cranky]

i remember my first computer was a commador vic 20 and i remember the feeling when i opened the xmas paper and seen it wow !!! i was 13 at the time and since then i have had several computers and laptops my new computer is i5 2500k overclocked to 4.2 , asrock z68 mother board 16 gigs of ram i have a corsair h50 watercooler for the cpu 1000w psu and 2 gtx 285 in sli 1 tb hard drive and a 80 gig hard drive windows pro 64 bit , this thing is a beast i get anywhere from 60-80 fps in battlefield 3 on medium or low settings , on microsoft flight sim x im getting 40-200 fps depending on the addon scenery , adobe after effects is smooth like butter in rendering my videos also sony vegas pro renders my videos soo fast too i went from a 9 minute hd clip on my old computer would have taken 1 hour-2 hours now its done in 20 minutes i will post some pics and also a quick video when i get a chance !!! ohhh my old monitor died on me too so now i just use my samsung 42 lcd as my main screen LOL i know what jake is thinking now !!! :)O-U-C

[bows00]

Don't really like bragging about this, only because it reveals how old I am, but my first computer was the original Apple MAC - black and white screen, 128K RAM, no hard drive,it was first computer to come out with a 3-1/2 disc drive and MOUSE! The signatures of the original apple team were engraved on the interior of the casing. My pops spent over $2000 for it back around 1984-85? I was the envy of all my fellow engineering college geeks, but Apple computers were still regarded as toys back then. IBM's were the serious business counterpart. If I only knew better and bought some Apple and Microsoft stocks back then!

[FlyAway]

First exposure was with a Comodor 64. Joined the Air Force at 17 so I did not have much time to do anything constructive.4 years later purchased a Zenith Heathkit PC with dual 5 1/4 floppy's 640KB memory and an amber monochrome monitor. I had to assemble everything. I think it was an 8088 processor.I still have an old Pentium 83Mhz Overdrive processor new in the shrink wrapped box. Anyone remember those?Now I have an i7 Hp dm4 laptop that does everything I need to do.

[Jollygoodfellow]

I'm still using my old faithful :chickendance:

[Steve & Myrlita]

My 1st computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. Level 1, 4k memory with 12" B&W monitor and cassette recorder for data storage. This was in 1980. Cost me $600. Next was a Commodore VIC20. Next was C64. Added 5.25" Floppy. Then IBM PC XT 4.77/10 mhz w/ amber mon. Worked my way up to Duo Core 3.0 Ghz.