What was your first computer?

My first was a Kim 1 ( keyboard input monitor) with 1.0k of program memory; program input by numeric keypad, model 74 teletype, punched {paper) tape or hi-speed magnetic tape (audio cassets) at approx 2400 baud.
Expanded unit to 8k and added video output

The unit still works but I no longer have the teletype console.
this unit was replaced with an Apple II

The first computer I made/owned was an IMSAI 8080 from a kit. It was blown out to 64K(!) of RAM, and had no BIOS to speak of. To boot the thing the first time, I loaded a 37-step bootstrap loader (in hex) into memory via the 16 front panel "Data Switches", which made it look to COM1 for data, attached to which was my portable cassette player that had a PCM-encoded copy of CP/M 1.2 on it. Push Play, load the OS into RAM, and tell the computer to jump to zero, and boom!, it's CP/M. Once CP/M was up, I could read the 2 Shugart 8" floppies I had, and crank-crank away running a home-brew inventory management software package written in Basic (CBASIC perhaps, I forget). It was eventually replaced with an IBM AT with a hard drive (oooo!).

The good-old days??? I'll take my dual-core Athlon64 with 4GB any day.

Thanks for asking. I love threads like this.

guygo

At the time, 1978, if you owned RS stock you got a 10% discount. The total price for 16k, keyboard, monitor and a floppie drive was around $1800, so I bought 2 shares at 9$. Later, I bought the expansion module and a second floppy and memory to fill the sockets. They cost around $120 for 16k. I filled it out to 64k,4 5-1/4" drives, telephone modem 300 baud, gold connectors for connecting keyboard to expansion module, Started with MS BASIC on ROM that used around the first 10 or 12K, Dos 1 thru 2 was Radio Shack DOS writen by Randy Cook. Cook couldn"t debug DOS and tried to copywrite DOS. that pissed RS off so they fired him and handed it over to MS around late 79 or early 80. I wrote payroll, inventory and construction estimator all in BASIC. MS sent me a compiler that was supposed to convert BASIC to machine code. but because the Z80 chip had been clocked down. It would take a day or more to finish with so many error lines made it useless. Electric Pencil was the first word program and the dictionary was on a floppy disc. My printer was a Centronics dot matrics @ 15 cps.

My first computer was a homebrew Z80/S100 system
running first SOLOS, then CP/M, which I started building in
1978. Cost by the time I was donw was about $4000
including peripherals. I used it for going online (BBS's and
internet)m, for keeping personal records and a couple of
databases and for word processing, and general hobby stuff.
I kept it until about 2 years ago, though it hadn't been used
much since I got my second computer (a Z80 SBC from a
small Toronto manufacturer) in the mid-80's,

My Very First Computer Ever Was The Atari 2600, Laughing Well Seriously It Was A Commador 64 in the early 80's however i was taught in the mid 80's on the APPLE II,IIE & IIGS i never used a windows machine until 2000 i started on webtv in 98 and pc in 2000 my very first computer was custom built windows 98 64 mb ram not sure about the hard drive im guesisng 2 gig it was nothing fancy lol hehehehe

my second pc ever was a HP 540n which had in it P$ 1.6 256 mb pc 2700 40 gb hd cd-rw win xp home In 2001
Then in 2003 it was a dell 4600 ,P4 2.4 40, GB HD, 256 PC2700 DDR,Windows xp home cd-rw/dvd rom paid 900.00 for it, still amking payments lol

2 weeks ago built myself an amd sempron 2800 with windows xp home 1 gb pc3200 100 gb hd dvd-rw combo floppy 8 usb 2.0 ports optical mouse keyboard speakers all for a fee of 350.00

before that built a socket 775 Pentium D 2.8 with 1 gb DDR2 Memory 80 GB HD DVD-RW Windows XP Pro Cost Of 550.00 Sold For 1000.00 Not Bad Huh I Played With It For 2 Months Before Selling It

My first computer was a Timex z81, cost $49.95 bought it at a supermarket.

Next were:
Timex-Sinclair z100
Tandy Color Computer
IMB PCjr
286
386
486
Pentium I
Pentium II
Pentium III
Dell (don't remember the model)
Dell Workstation
2.8 gig Build myself

Darn just sat here adding up how much I have invested in computing since 1982, and I could buy a new car.....

Oh well, life goes on for another year or two and then another computer? Probably.

use vs. own!!

It had TWO High Density Floppies, no hard drive, it had 1 Meg memory and that above 640 KB was a pain to use. I had the CAD/CADM high desity Black and White monitor.

I got the AT&T dot pin matrix printer too. High Impact but lasted next door to forever! I am still on my replacement printer an HP laserJet 6L!! (( Slow to upgrade? had way more computers than printers. ))

I had Battle chess back then too.

2nd computer was a self built 80486 machine and I WISH it had the dirty bit for memory refresh like the 80586. I STOPPED writing assembler code with this machine.

First machine I ever touched and programmed on in High School was a TSR 80 Model 2.

Enough!
DBD.
...

* with the memory expansion.
* from a "white box" store.
* $ - don't remember
* programming, word processing, BBS, early internet, games
several years. turned it into a lugable unit when I replaced it with an:
Amiga 2000. and eventually a 3000.

Judging by the posts so far looks like mine might be the oldest. It was the IMSAI 8080 in kit form. Basic kit was about $550 and that was without any memory. The memory was three 4K Static RAM S-100 boards made by Processor Technology and cost $130 each, again in kit form. Eventually got it up to 60K with serial I/O, dual 8" FDD (running CPM Ver 2.2), TeleVideo monochrome monitor and a Diablo 1620 printer. Took about 3 years to get it to the final configuration. Total cost for this project was over $10,000. Used it to play and write games and do word processing. By the way I still have it and it is still operational. Eventually replaced it with an IBM clone 80286 with 640K RAM and a 10M hard drive

TI99/4A
Wonderful machine! 4 KB RAM, cartridge slot and external audio-tape cassette drive.
And a 26" colour monitor! Okay, it was the living room TV.
My dad bought it so I have no clue as to price.
"Hello World!"
Eventually got replaced with a Tandy Trash80, which eventually got replaced with a clone 386 with 4 MB RAM and a 203 MB HDD when I got back into them again.
Oops, forgot about the PC w/20 or 30 MB drive AND dual floppies. that was short lived and forgettable. Great for playing Galactic Empire on Shoreline BBS though.

Was an IBM 286 with 256k of RAM and a 5 meg hdd

Used for wordprocessing and playing a green and black golf game. Happy days!

Cost a bloody fortune, about 6 times what I paid for this new all singing and all dancing model.

Had it for four years, replaced with a home built 486 with 8Meg of RAM!!!!! Seemed like a supersonic fighter in comparison. (Now I've shown my age, it's time for others to fess up.)

What model was it? Texas Instruments TI-99/4
Where did you buy it? Mail Order (snail mail)
How much did it cost? around $500.00
What kind of stuff did you do with it? Mostly goofed around, wrote games and small utilities.
How long did you have it? 6 months
What did you eventually replace it with? Can't remember

The interesting thing about the TI was that it used a cassette recorder for storage, the TV for a monitor, and it only had 16K RAM of memory. The only thing nice I can say about it, is that it was my first (you always remember your first 8-; )

IBM-compatible PC actually a 486 DX with a huge 32 Megs of ram, 400 MB hard drive, Sound Blaster 16 and a "Turbo" button. Got to love the Turbo button it just looked cool.

my first was a ibm 286 and a 5plus inch floppy . what a snail by todays standards can't even remember what else it had. i know one ols one had a 512 hd as thats still around the house loaded with dos and win 3.11.
infact i still have the ibm os1 discs floating around also. they may have come with the 286 machine

These days I hear alot of people who say that "I HAD A COMMODRE 64" immediately after everytime I tell them I had a VIC20. It's like they are bragging about how they found money on the street AFTER I did it! Well, anyway I was happy with my VIC20, and my brother and I filled its 20K RAM one time after another. We made programs that were too advanced so we were dreaming of putting more memory in it, which at the time cost 150 dollars for 8K. We were dreaming about the extension card that had 8 slots in it and putting 8*8=64K more RAM in it. We were dreaming, but didn't have the money. Eventually we sold it, which I regret sometimes, but it made a career for me, and here I am in this business making well over 150K per year on something I love. Thanks Commodore!

My first PC was the IBM 5100 that I borrowed, lugged really, from work for a project. Used it for about 10 months to run APL and Basic strategic planning work. Was replaced with an IBM 5120 then with an IBM PC1 with a 5 meg 'hard card" drive.
The 5100 was a wonder for its time - well ahead of other early systems.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_2.html

My parents won the computer. I was in second or third grade and the envy of my friends.

The first computer we purchased was my starter for college. An 8086 with 1MB of memory and a 20MB hard drive.

Sperry PC bought in 1985. No Hard Drive, 512K of ram. Very Crude 12 inch color monitor. Used Volkswriter for my Word Processor. Didn't have many other programs for it. Dot Matrix Printer. Those sure weren't the "GOOD OLD DAYS" for me. I have a 200 gig sata drive and 2 gig of ram, 19 inch Samsung LCD monitor with a Intel 930 processor now, and that isn't even top of the line. I also have two Epson color printers!!!Thank god for Technology!!!!!!

I read your story with rapt attention! I guess I could relate a little. When I got started with computers, I was always using computers owned by someone else. Neither I nor my single mom could afford them. This was in the early 1980s. It took a while, but eventually they came down in price to the point that we could actually buy one for me.

I also had some mishaps with typing in programs on an 8-bit computer, whether it was an Atari, or C-64 (my friend's) and then losing them when I tried to save. When my friend first got his C-64, he didn't have a storage device. He just played games on the cartridges he got with it. Eventually he did get a 1541 disk drive, but before that I wanted badly to see some C-64 type-in games run. I knew I wouldn't be able to save, but what the heck. I spent a couple hours typing in the BASIC code, played the game for a while, then turned the computer off and lost it all. I seem to recall having some mishaps even after he got the disk drive...

I really enjoyed this part:

"The first program that I downloaded was back in November 1981, with my cassette recorder pressed against the speaker of the TV, and it was from BBC's Tomorrow's World. Not that it worked, but it was fun ..."

Wow! You know I had a similar experience. Back in the 1980s we used to get a LOT of UK pop music here in the U.S. One of the groups I used to hear a lot, and kind of liked, was Information Society. I can't remember how I heard this. I either was listening to someone else's Information Society tape or their CD, and it's last track was some digital data converted to analog! I listened to it and it sounded like a 300 baud carrier signal, followed by modulation representing data. I never got the chance to try and pipe it into something, like a 300 baud modem. I remember imagining how I could do it, like play it through someone else's stereo, have them call my modem on my computer with their handset phone, and see if it came out with something intelligable. I used to wonder what the heck that last track was. Was it some message? Maybe it was supposed to be loaded into a TS or a BBC Micro at the time.

"Compute! magazine was great as well. There's probably so many people who got inspired to program through this magazine."

I don't remember the bouncing ball program from the Vic-20, since I didn't have one, but I was an avid subscriber to Compute! while it published type-in programs. I was a subscriber to their multi-platform magazine just called "Compute!". They stopped publishing type-ins in it in 1988. I remember I was so depressed, because this magazine was the only one IMO at the time that published good type-ins and descriptive technical articles for the Atari 8-bit. They said most of their readers weren't interested in type-ins, but just wanted to be educated about how to use PCs. They continued type-ins for their platform-specific magazines, until it became infeasible to keep them going. Later I discovered "Antic", another magazine that lasted for a bit longer, which published type-ins for the Atari.

Compute! was a part of the inspiration for me to become a software developer.

Is there an equivalent of this experience today? I haven't seen it. For me, having to type in the programs was more educational than just reading the code. There was quite a bit of the code I didn't understand, but as I typed it in, some of the routines used in the code would "sink in", and I would understand what they were intended for and what they were doing. Secondly, at least in "the early years", they published descriptive articles that outlined the parts of the code, giving summaries of what each part did. I never quite understood this, but frequently they published type-ins that had bugs in them. Didn't they test them first? Every month they had an errata column called "Capute!" (pronounced "Ka-put") where they published corrections to prior months' published programs.

In "the early years" the acompanying articles to the type-ins were very descriptive, with technical information. Later on they didn't do this so much and that watered down the experience. The artwork for the magazine was great, too. It helped give it a friendly, inviting touch.

What they published more and more towards the end were machine code programs--just raw numbers, which were utterly useless in educational value as far as I was concerned. I never understood why they didn't publish them in assembly. At least then I might've had a chance to get something out of them besides just typing them in to use them.

Compute! passed through a few different hands through its life. Richard Mansfield, one of the former editors for Compute! wrote for DevX.com up until a year and a half ago. He wrote an article that raised a lot of hackles, "OOP Is Much Better in Theory Than in Practice" http://www.devx.com/opinion/Article/26776/0.

He's also written around 30 technical books, many of which he wrote after leaving Compute!. As best I can tell he's only written about Microsoft technologies since.

Incidently, Tom R. Halfhill, one of the editors at Compute! back in the day is still around. He has a website at http://www.halfhill.com. He now writes for Microprocessor Report and Maximum PC.

Doing a web search I happened to find an article on Robert Lock. I forget, but my impression is he was the founder of Compute!. Maybe he was editor-in-chief as well. Anyway, I found an article about him on a non-technical subject, "Magazine publisher goes back to his roots": http://news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051113/NEWSREC0104/511130305/-1/NEWSREC020401

One of the other major figures at Compute! was Charles Brannon, though I could not find a website for him.

Ah. Neat stuff! :)

Our computers in 1955, when I started, used punched cards and were programmed by plug boards. IBM 602A calculator, 407 tabulating machine, 082 card sorter, etc. It was a big improvement when we went to an IBM 650 with stored memory (4,000 words) on a magnetic drum, then to the 1401 with a massive 8,000 bytes of core memory and 4 tape drives, but still no disks. (They were also available with 16,000 max.) In 1960 we were in heaven when we got an IBM 360/30 with 64,000 bytes and 4 disk drives that held 7 MB each. We ran payroll, inventory, cost accounting, accounts payable and receivable, personnel, and a bunch of other applications on it and felt like the kings of the world. We programmed in assembler languages and really knew how to use the internals of the machines then. Three shifts of operators kept it going on a 24/7 basis and we couldn't use it as a typewriter as it was too expensive for that. Yes, I've seen a few changes, but some of the problems that I read about in these discussions bring back memories. The more some things change, the more others stay the same.

Timex Sinclair 1000. My Mom saved up $50.00 in grocery reciepts from the local Pick-n-Pay and got it for free. I joined the "Sinclair club at school" and my History teacher gave me a thermal printer for it. I remember typing a program in for eight hours straight and having a very basic clock for all my effort.

Joe Nimrichter

My first computer was an Apple ][+, that I purchased through a friend who worked at Apple. (He owned Apple ][ SN: 768!) I had it fully loaded with 64K of memory so that I could write my Master's Thesis in the Pascal language editor, and use an "in house" (from Apple) print formatter.

In those days, the Apple only had upper case display, and in Pasca, showed capital letters with inverse video. I added the "one wire shift key mod," then later a display chip that did upper and lower case. Because we bought it to do my thesis, we also got a Qume Sprint 45 daisy wheel printer (huge!).

Along the way, I wrote programs in Apple BASIC to do statistics, including an Analysis of Covariance program, which graphed the results, then printed the hires graphics to my daisy wheel printer. (If the pixel is on, type a period. If not, move over 1/72 of an inch, and look again. End of row? Drop down 1/72 of an inch!)

I think I had the first computer based Master's Thesis in the Health Sciences at University of Washington. While other students were paying $50 per page for professional typing, I'd use cut and paste to rearrange content, then just hit the print key to produce the next draft.

I kept the computer for about 4 years, then moved up to an Apple IIe, to match the machines at work (the plus had a non-standard keyboard), then to an Apple IIgs, and a Mac IIsi. I still have both of those: the gs is a "Woz machine," one of the first 5000 produced with "Woz" on the cover!

My first computer technically was a Kim I, which was a motherboard with 8K RAM. It had a calculator keyboard with calculator display. Dad fastened it to a wooden box he built, which contained a power supply. There was a pair of 1/8" plugs to connect it to a tape recorder, for mass storage. I only used it a teeny bit, and I still kick myself for not learning assembly and taking advantage of that incredible opportunity.

My first modern computer was a "Fat Mac": a Macintosh with 512K RAM. It cost $3000, and I bought it in December 1984.

The Commodore 64 @ $600 had more memory than the floor filling, air-conditioned, no transistors with dedicated motor generator set IBM 704.

Are you sure that was a III? The one with the CPU, CRT, and keyboard all in one cabinet? I wasn't aware that one was sold without a floppy drive.

I had one, with floppy, which was my workhorse. I added a few enhancements, though: A green-phosphor CRT in place of the black/white (or rather, gray/gray) original; an improved OS (L-DOS, as I recall); a third-party enhanced version of Scripsit; my first HDD (External, $1,000, which bought me a whopping 5 MB! Thought I'd never fill it! (and come to think of it, by the time I might have, I'd switched to a PC).

One additional enhancement was because of my cat. Tigger liked to sit on top of hte monitor, where he could keep me company and keep his belly warm. When he stepped down, he'd invariably hit the red button (power? reset? I forget which), and I'd lose my unsaved work. The button was in a recess, but his paw was just the right side to go in. So I made a guard flap from a file folder, and taped it over the recess. Problem solved.

What model was it? Commodore 64
Where did you buy it? From a friend
How much did it cost? Bargin price $800
What kind of stuff did you do with it? Wrote every dam program i could get my hands on. Even wrote a few of my own.
How long did you have it? 4 or 5 years.
What did you eventually replace it with? Sega Console + games & eventually back to Pentium 3 866.

S-100 Z-80 CPU kit from Itacha Audio with a 4K RAM board I built and slowly added RAM as I could afford it. I started with 1K. I/O was a serial TTY terminal that I gimmicked with an EPROM to read and write ASCII. I programmed the EPROM with a set of switches since I didn't have a way to program EPROMS. I think it was a 2708.

My first programming experiences though was in 1968 in Fortran on a Univac 1108. Lots of punch cards. Lots of wait time until the batch job with my card deck in it ran. Tons of frustration when the printout would reveal where I screwed up each time I submitted the program deck! It was enough to make me swear and swear-off a career as a programmer!

Yep, XT 86 with the green monochrome monitor, I was cheering, had Dos 3.3 on it. :)
WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus Spreadsheet, about that was on it. 20MB Hard drive i was cheering.
I replaced it with a 286 board so I could use a 3.5" floppy drive instead of my good old 5.25" Double Density drive. Then moved up to a 386 SX, I think by this stage I had a 80MB Conner hard drive.
Then I jumped to a PI 75Mhz, with 400MB conner HDD, then moved up to a PII 450Mhz, now I have a P4 3.0Ghz HT PC.
Mind you it was the year 1994 when I first got my XT PC, it was great. I would have to say, if it wasn't for me getting that old computer, I wouldn't be in the I.T. Industry today. :)

Mine is IBM-compatible PC

What model was it?
model forgot, Epson PC, 8086 CPU

Where did you buy it?
Epson store

How much did it cost?
around 20k hk$

What kind of stuff did you do with it?
play games, do some "logo", "basic", "MASM" programming

How long did you have it?
5 yrs

What did you eventually replace it with?
another PC whith AMD CPU

Gee, remember when back in the days of 300 baurd modems and Compuserve forums. You could read hundreds of responses on any given topic in about an hour. Today I have a Broadband connection and I'm lucky if I can read 50 in that same time with all the other junk that has to be redisplayed on my screen. PROGRESS!

Back around 1981 I purchased an Atari 400 with a membrane keyboard. It wasn't too long before somebody came out with a "regular" keyboard that you could wire into the 400. Shortly, I got ahold of an Atari 800 (Whopping 48k RAM), so I could run this "Spreadsheet" program... (A what ??? at the time... lol...) The spreadsheet was Visicalc... the first for the home I believe.... I mainly used the machines for home office odds and ends, and of course, games. Can't remember what the first, the Atari 400 cost but the main component of the 800 cost 500 bucks. After getting a couple floppy drives, a 300 Bps modem, and the data cassette recorder I had about $1400 tied up. I used Atari's in different "flavors" until about 1987 then it was like the old warnings of the progressive use of drugs.... 286, 386, 486... ad infinitum....

I'm not sure what model I had, but there was no hard drive. I'm thinking of digging through my parents basement to dig it out.
Does anyone remember Dancing Demon?
We upgraded to an IBM PCjr.

Pentium 1 - 133 Mhz
HDD - 5 GB
RAM - 64 MB
FDD
CD-ROM - 8X

Printer - HP Deskjet 690C

Bought it in Kuwait for ?935 in 1996

Sold in 2001 for ?153!!!

Loss = approx. ?700! OH SHIT!

Then, in 2001 , bought a DELL 2350 for ?600. DELL was and is still shit , so upgraded it.
P4 2 ghz
512 MB RAM
80 GB HDD
NVIDIA FX5200
LITE-ON CDRW

Although I've been a user(abuser) of PCs since '78, I never flet the need to buy my own home system till '98. A budget PC that I was so disgusted with when I found I couldn't upgrade the cpu after 6 months that it prompted me to learn to build my own... and now look where it got me... 8 years later, an A+ and staring at the N+ study books! LOL

What model was it? Cyrix MXII 300MHz
Where did you buy it? PC WOrld.... urgh!
How much did it cost? Too much
What kind of stuff did you do with it? Word processing, surfing, games.
How long did you have it? Still got it 8 years later...
What did you eventually replace it with? I build a 1GHz system using an AMD Thunderbird on an ABit KT7a mobo with 512Mb Ram.

My first PC was a PCJr as well. I too used it to play games and learn dos and GW Basic. I was 5 years old in 1984 when my dad bought it for me. I still thank him to this day. After my dad donated the PCJr to my 4th grade class at school he bought me my second computer, an Epson Equity I+. So neither one of my first two computers had a hard drive.

What games did you play on the Jr? My first game was Kings Quest II Romancing the throne. I also loved Demon Attack.

Hi,

I run a Retro Gaming Entertainment bbs located in Bayonne, New Jersey. You can check it out at any of the following addresses:

http://retrogames.servebeer.com
http://classicgames.servebeer.com

or

Telnet:retrogames.servebeer.com
Telnet:classicgames.servebeer.com

Btw, nice site you got here.

-Brian

well after the VIC-20 and the Sinclair? lol These were difficult to run and program, so I count my first computer as the Tandy 1000ex 256k ram? luxury! 1 5 inch floppy and 128k ram and a vm1 mono monitor which set me back 600 dollars.

What model was it? Apple ][+
Where did you buy it? Wichita Kansas
How much did it cost? not a clue
What kind of stuff did you do with it? games, school
project, programming
How long did you have it? 1987
What did you eventually replace it with? We also got a
128k Macintosh when it first came out I can still
remember how impressed my teachers were with my
school papers.

Those were my family's computers. I personally bought a
Macintosh SE with my own money from my first Summer
job. That job was were I created my first database
application to track nuclear waste in teaching laborities
for the US government. That program ran for 15 years.
That same year I created and published as shareware a
computer game called Minitorian which is still on the
Macintosh Garden.

Bought September 1980 for $199+SH from an advert in Popular Science. It came with 1K RAM and a phenomenal tokenized BASIC language. Still, four lines of coding ate up 1K in a heartbeat. Thus, I learned how to program in assembly language on the Z80. Two months later, I bought the 16K RAM expansion module for $99; with it and a cassette tape recorder, I developed a program for Dungeon Mastering an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role playing game. I still have the computer, which was eventually supplanted by a Commodore 64 computer, monitor, and diskette drive in 1982 for $1200--again programmed for Dungeon Mastering and various lotto wheels and statistical programs. It was a dream machine for assembly language programming as Commodore published an excellent user manual documenting all the kernel routines, including manipulating its fantastic SPRITE graphical system. The 64 was replaced with a LaserTurbo XT epanded to 1.6 MB RAM in 1988, which was replaced by an IBM AT in 1994, then an Acer Aspire Pentium 120 in 1996, followed by an IBM 550MZ Pentium in 1999 that was supplanted by an HP Athlon 1200 in 2003 leading to my existing HP Athlon XP 3800 with 4GB RAM and 1TB disc drives, 480W power supply, ATI 1800XT graphics system, Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 4.0, two ItechCD DC300 150 CD/DVD carousels, Xitel adapter connecting audio stereo system for converting cassettes and LPs to MP3s and subsequent burning to CDs and DVDs, Logitec surround sound system, wireless headphones, wireless broadband Internet access, wireless interface to TiVo box, wireless networking with two desktops and two laptops and Lexmark printer, Seagate 10GB tape drive backup system, local Epson RX500 photo printer, Logitec camera, cell phone interface, wireless camera surveillance system running the Windows XP Pro, Windows Ultimate Vista, Linux, and BEoS operating systems as well as the capability to run multiple virtual operating systems with VMware, all firewalled with Windows Firewall, ZoneAlarm, and D-Links' router firewall and monitored by the Snort intrusion detection system. Woo-hoo.

I know it did because when I started to print something, the neighbors downstairs would bang my floor with a broomstick, thinking I was tapdancing or hammering something into the wall. The noise was surely annoying to say the least. Eventually, the entire unit crapped out and I then went to an IBM XT clone at a whopping 8Mhz in speed with dual 5 1/4" inch floppy drives and no hard drive. Those were back in the 80s', the good ole days.

That thing was located in the library and had nothing but problems constantly. It also didn't help when some malicious students were constantly infecting the machine with boot sector viruses.

I still remember using some of those old 8.5" inch disks as frisbees when they'd go bad.

It was more fun to watch the chess pieces killing each other than to actually play chess.

The first one I ever used was an Apple IIc. The teacher liked me so I got to use the state-of-the-art Apple IIe with dual floppy and ::gasp:: color monitor. Gotta love programming with Apple Basic.

Many years later, I bought what I could afford. I also qualify this by saying that I was not working in IT at the time and had no intention of an IT career. I'm ashamed to admit that I had:
Packard Hell, 75Mhz, 1GB HD, and 8mb of RAM
Purchased at Best Buy
$2k
Homework,work stuff, Solitaire, Internet
It's still sitting in a closet 11 years later
Custom built PC, then another better, custom pc, and now my 2nd laptop.

What model was it? 1988 Tandy HX something or other.

Where did you buy it? It was a gift. Radio Shack is likely where it was purchased.

How much did it cost? Unknown.

What kind of stuff did you do with it? Not a lot! :D Good amounts of word processing, some spreadsheet use. This was one of the first 'small' floppy drive machines. It had no hard drive and I loaded a minor gui called DeskMate Pro from floppy to ram, then placed a blank in the drive to store my files. The good? I had to get comfy with spreadsheets and formulas with a program that didn't offer 'autosum'. The bad? No mouse, access and navigation via arrow keys and keyboard shortcuts (things which I had no clue about at the time!). No games, no internet. Um... no hard drive.

How long did you have it? 10 years.

What did you eventually replace it with? 1998 - eMachine, Win98FE, crappy, crappy, crappy Cyrix processor. This is where the learning truly began!

Compaq Portable II

The size of a sewing machine
Weight about 50lbs
286/12, 640mb ram, 20 meg hard drive
9" green screen
Cost only $1950 (was a demo model, normal cost was around $2700)

Ran the wonderful all-in-one PFS First Choice combo word processor, spreadsheet, address book. Also had a early copy of WordPerfect. Would use it's internal modem to dial into CompuServe as well as those amazing BBS services, including viewing the first Internet porn pictures, which did not look good, even on the external CGA monitor attached to the machine.

Was sooooo cool as I brought this to use for group projects in grad school.

Had it for about three years; was able to run Windows 286 on it.

Later upgraded to a desktop PC which was an IBM PS/2 model 50Z with an aftermarket 120meg hard drive (woo-hoo), another 80286 processor, that could now run Windows 3.0 and had the amzing IBM 8514 VGA monitor and adapter.

Unfortunately "drive 0" was bad, so it did nothing but spew errors, so it went back to the dump

Til I got fired, but that's another story...

back on my dinosaur IBM XT clone machine. Yesm, it was an 8 bit bus machine and viruses were plenty back then but they were primarily the boot sector infecting kind. It wasn't until the 386 or so came out that we saw our first nasty case of a BIOS embedding virus that would fry the motherboard. I forgot what that virus was called but it originated from Russia.

Wow. You had the upgraded Super Elf.. I didn't ever get the ASCII keyboard and I always had trouble using my cassette tape player to save and load a program. Most of the time I would have to key the program in manually on the hexidecimal keypad and verify everything on the 4 digit hex LED display.

After soldering the whole thing together and having to call the company to find out the printed circuit board they had sent was flawed and I had to cut a particular foil .. the computer actually worked. I played with it for a few months, including the huge program (machine only had 256 bytes of memory) of 243 bytes which caused a block image of the USS Enterprise to slowly crawl across a television screen, after which I sold it for enough to buy a TRS80 model I with a whopping 4K of memory!!

Those were the days.

Bought it used for $50.00. Then bought a whole box of the things for $100.00. Thought I'd really hit the big time when I got a working Commodore 128. Boy, that really dates me!

I started on a C-64

Glad a few others can remember these. I feel so old :)