Welcome to the Computers Board!

[Wingnut]

I changed from that denomination years ago.

The First Church of Appliantology is hard to shake.   Good for you.

[Just_Victor]

First I think someone should define computer. I have heard of these newfangled devices but figuring out what a baud is might be beyond me.

DOS is all the rage, right?

VAX/VMS is totally the future of computing.

[Ghost Bear]

First system was an Atari 800.  Actually a pretty good learning platform at the time because the memory was directly accessible and it came with a module that allowed you to learn how to write assembly code (assembly is basically the last level of human-understandable code; actual machine code comes next).

My wife's first computer was an Atari 800. My roommate during my first year at college had an Atari 400.

My wife's first PC (and by extension, my first PC) was a Compaq "Portable". She paid extra to replace one of the 360 KB floppy drives with a 20 MB hard drive, and for an add-in memory card to bring the memory to 640 KB. We shared that for the first four years or so of our relationship. Nothing like playing CGA-graphics games on a 9" sixteen-shades-of-green screen!

[Crazieman]

Does my first computer count as an Atari 800 if I was 2 and playing with it on my dad's lap?

[Doug Loss]

My first computer was an IBM 1620:



After that (not counting the programmer/test station for the Pershing missile I helped run in the army) it was a TRS-80 Model I, with a cassette drive and 16K of RAM.  A few years later I started a home computer software store, so I acquired one of each common home computer of the era: a TI-99/4a, a Timex Sinclair, a VIC-20, a Commodore 64, a Radio Shack Color Computer, and an Atari 400.  I got the Atari 400 because it was functionally similar to the Atari 800 and allowed me to demonstrate all the software, but was cheaper.  I modded the 400 and Radio Shack CoCo to have actual keyboards rather than the membrane and chiclet (respectively) ones they came with.  I used these machines with used TVs I acquired as demo units for all the software I had for sale.  The business lasted until K-Mart (among others) realized that there was a market for 3rd-party software for these machines, at which point they undersold my small business on the popular titles, relegating me to the harder-to-find (and therefore less in-demand) programs.  Realizing the business was going away, I closed it gracefully and moved on to work in a ComputerLand retail store.  This was around 1985 or so, I think.

[Bigun]

[Oceander]

My first computer was an IBM 1620:



After that (not counting the programmer/test station for the Pershing missile I helped run in the army) it was a TRS-80 Model I, with a cassette drive and 16K of RAM.  A few years later I started a home computer software store, so I acquired one of each common home computer of the era: a TI-99/4a, a Timex Sinclair, a VIC-20, a Commodore 64, a Radio Shack Color Computer, and an Atari 400.  I got the Atari 400 because it was functionally similar to the Atari 800 and allowed me to demonstrate all the software, but was cheaper.  I modded the 400 and Radio Shack CoCo to have actual keyboards rather than the membrane and chiclet (respectively) ones they came with.  I used these machines with used TVs I acquired as demo units for all the software I had for sale.  The business lasted until K-Mart (among others) realized that there was a market for 3rd-party software for these machines, at which point they undersold my small business on the popular titles, relegating me to the harder-to-find (and therefore less in-demand) programs.  Realizing the business was going away, I closed it gracefully and moved on to work in a ComputerLand retail store.  This was around 1985 or so, I think.

Sweet!  I remember all of those systems, although I was too young to buy any of them (parents bought me an Atari 800 in 1984).

[Mom MD]

My wife's first computer was an Atari 800. My roommate during my first year at college had an Atari 400.

My wife's first PC (and by extension, my first PC) was a Compaq "Portable". She paid extra to replace one of the 360 KB floppy drives with a 20 MB hard drive, and for an add-in memory card to bring the memory to 640 KB. We shared that for the first four years or so of our relationship. Nothing like playing CGA-graphics games on a 9" sixteen-shades-of-green screen!

Hubby and I bought our first computer in the late 80's.  It had 20 Megabytes of memory on the hard drive, and we upgraded to 40 Megabytes.  We had no idea what we were going to do with all that memory....

[Oceander]

Hubby and I bought our first computer in the late 80's.  It had 20 Megabytes of memory on the hard drive, and we upgraded to 40 Megabytes.  We had no idea what we were going to do with all that memory....

My first "real" system was an IBM PC "luggable" I bought for college at $1,700 in 1986. It looked like one of those old sewing machine cases, weighed what felt like a ton, had a tiny little orange on black screen, and 640k of memory (supposedly Bill Gates didn't think anyone would ever need more than that).  In today's dollars that would probably be about $2,500 to $3,000.  The level of computer I could get for that money now would blow most computers away - we're talking a 17" mammoth notebook (a desktop replacement) with two dedicated graphics cards, a huge solid state drive, at least one other internal hard drive, the highest resolution screen available, .....