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What Was Your First Computer?
The first machine I owned was an Apple IIe. I remember my neighbor was jealous because, unlike his Apple II, my computer could handle lower case letters :-) Fancy! I learned to do basic graphics programming using the Apple IIe's awesome palette of six colors, one of which was spandex magenta. I was also exposed to computer porn for the first time when my friend got his hands on an ultra secret copy of "sex olympics". In six colors, it was all very... abstract, but its easy to get excited when you are thirteen.
After a brief affair with an Apple IIGS, I moved on to the Amiga. The Amiga was absolutely amazing for the time. It could display 4096 colors and had advanced sound capabilities. The fact I could use the "SAY" command in AmigaBASIC to get the computer to talk was a never ending source of excitement. I used a program called Deluxe Paint to do everything from digital paintings to designing self contained ecosystems (a long running obsession dating back to junior high - I was a weird kid.) The Amiga was the first computer I used to compose music. I used a MIDI interface to connect my Korg T1 keyboard. I lost quite a few hours in the basement writing music with this setup. I convinced many of my friends and parent's friends to bet on the Amiga as the computing platform of the future. Oops! How was I to know? It was so friggen cool!Here is the full progression of computers I've used going back to grade school:
TRS-80 -> Apple IIe -> Apple IIgs -> Amiga 2000 -> Amiga 3000 -> Various Macs -> PowerWave (Power Computing's Mac clone) -> Various Intel Boxes Running Windows -> MacBook Pro (today)
What was your first computer? How about your first programming language?
Tags: amiga, apple, apple ii, computer, first computer, mac, power computing, powerwave, trs80
Comment
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Comment by Russell Castagnaro on April 26, 2010 at 3:04pm -
I had a friend who had a TRS-80 and I got an Apple 2 plus. I also got an analog modem for calling BBS's and "The Source"
Ha!
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Comment by Gus Higuera on April 25, 2010 at 3:53am -
My first computer and thinking how odd would these computers we are talking about here would look like to a 12 yr old who grew up using a macbook.
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Comment by Reichart on April 25, 2010 at 12:22am -
My first computer I built from transistors...
Later I built an S100 based system (Altair).
Apple II first rev.
...I can't even remember all my first computers... I still have my Lisa (it works). I have all my computers in fact. I have the "original" IBM... PC.
I have a lot of proto types I worked on, Compaqs, Kaypros, etc.
Timex Sinclairs were fun custom jobs. Made a primitive voice recognition system for one that controlled my office door. It was good enough to stop most people from getting in, except for the smart people that recorded my voice.
I have both the B&W and Colour NeXTs.
I co-designed the first set top box for Commodore, CDTV, which was way cooler than anyone understood at the time.
One of the saddest things is I designed a small piece of hardware back in the 80s which cost me about $5 bucks in parts that would allow any configuration of computers to talk to each other using off the shelf telephone wire with runs of up to 500 meters at speeds up to about 50K/'sec. I was an idiot for not building it into a company. My mistake was assuming that AppleTalk would grow fast, or Ethernet would get much cheaper. Neither happened.
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Comment by Carl on March 30, 2010 at 1:48pm -
This is an old thread and sorry for dragging it back up again but I had recently come across an example of my first computer and it brought back memories so I thought I'd post.
Mine was a Timex Sinclair TS-2068 back in 1985. I had always wanted a TRS-80 but it was out of my reach while in high school. By 1985 my dream machine was a IBM PC/XT. But even that was too expensive for me to justify to my significant other.
Anyway, I got to learn programming in Basic on the Sinclair. I think it had a 3mhz or so processor, 48k ram, if you wanted to save anything, you had to save it to cassette tape. I hooked it up to my home stereo to do so. There wasn't no monitor, instead I had it hooked up to a spare tv set that we kept for that purpose.
Ahh good times those were!
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Comment by Tom Bigelow on January 10, 2010 at 10:06am -
The first "computer" that I owned and used was an Atari 400 with 16K of RAM and flat membrane keyboard (not even real keys). This was in Fall of '81. I can't believe the number of hours I spent writing assembly code until I finally got a BASIC cartridge. I didn't have enough money to buy the $1000 disk drive, so everything was stored using a cassette drive. Took 20 mins. just to load a program. All in all, good memories though.
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Comment by Delon Tanaka on November 2, 2009 at 10:15am - My first computer was a Tandy 8088 with a 20MB hard drive, it locked up one too many times and it died in an act of excessive percussive maintenance. Now I work with a Macbook Pro that I'm much nicer to.
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Comment by Dan Starr on October 27, 2009 at 11:27am -
I realize this is an old thread, but we had a couple 8080s at home. I liked the Corona Portable 8080, it had a handle for carrying it 40 lbs bulk around. The green screen was maybe 8 inches diagonal.
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Comment by Brian Bueza on October 2, 2009 at 1:18pm -
I can't go that far back, so mine will not be as interesting. I had a Mac Quadra 610 which I bought when I attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. It had cost me around $5k, and I had used it in conjunction with the old Syquest media discs (45 megs for a 6 inch diameter disc) and drives before Iomega Zip discs took off. Photoshop at the time wasn't as advanced I believe it was version 2.something, and when I digitally painted with it, the hourglass would come up after every operation, probably too much for the floating point math processor at the time, which was supposedly a "blazing fast" 25Mhz. It's interesting that, at that time, the school pushed Macs, but they had SGI machines for 3D, and after school, I found it was rare to work on a Mac since most places just bought PCs for the economics of it. I had this until Mac Clones like PowerPCs came out.
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Comment by Crystal Chen on October 2, 2009 at 12:42pm -
I only wish I could have the history that some of you have (anything before C64 breaks my brain). My first computer:
An Apple IIe with dual floppy drives.
Captain Copy helped us enjoy games like Gemstone Warrior, Ultima, Kareteka, Lode Runner, Castle Wolfenstein...and so many more...
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Comment by Ken Berkun on September 30, 2009 at 12:58pm - Scelbi and Mark 8, I'm impressed! Hey did you know Jon Cirone at the Microsoft Museum?
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