[colonelkernel8]

Apple II at the age of 5.

 

[hempcamp]

My mom worked at a community college and got a great deal on an Apple IIe sometime in the early 1980s. That was the first computer I used. I became obsessed with Oregon Trail, Logo, and Fredwriter.

I remember for my 7th or 8th birthday or so convincing my dad to spend nearly $200 on the Apple Mouse for it. That computer was the main computer in our household for almost a decade.

Then circa 1992 we bought a Packard Bell 286SX (the SX meant you could push a button to *turbo* mode to get a whopping 16Mhz instead of the standard 8Mhz). It was a crappy computer but lasted until we got a Hewlett Packard 486 or Pentium (I forget) right after Windows 95 came out. This was the first computer I put Linux on (from a set of Slackware floppy disks I ordered on the fledgling World Wide Web), and I never really went back to Windows after that except for required college software and such.

For college I bought a Gateway Pentium II, 266 Mhz I believe. When I quit computer engineering as a major, though, I quickly sold it and went back to Apple for my everyday computing, going through a wide variety of used Performas and early PowerMacs, along with a Sun SparcStation IPX (running Solaris) and an IBM Thinkpad with Red Hat Linux (and sometimes FreeBSD or Debian).

Not till I went to grad school did I get a modern Mac, a white G3 iBook. Since then it's been a G4 iMac (Sunflower kind), a PowerMac G5, and now the MacBook.

--Chris

 

[ingwe]

I used a FourPhase Point-of-Sale system at the Pacific Stereo store where I worked circa 1983. Ancient crap.

 

[socrates63]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx /img/forum/go_quote.gif Mine was the Timex Sinclair 1000. Saved up and bought it just to have my friend Matt break it. It was the end of our friendship. 3.25 Mhz processor, 2K of RAM Baby! Timex Sinclair 1000 Introduced:July 1982 Price:US $99.95 How many? 500,000 in first 6 months Weight:12 ounces CPU:Zilog Z80A, 3.25MHz RAM:2K, 64K max Display: 22 X 32 text hooks to TV Ports:memory, cassette Peripherals:Cassette recorder T/S printer OS: ROM BASIC

My friend's dad bought a Timex Sinclair 1000. It didn't turn out to be much more than an object of curiosity. That family was a tech early adopter... VCR, microwave, you name it.

 

[braillediver]

Some monstrous beast with Punch Cards running Fortran. They'd take the jobs to the University in the evening to run so we didn’t really get close to the actual computer only terminals to punch the cards. Large boxes of punch cards for each program- max bummage when someone dropped the boxes.


Mitch

 

[grawk]

 

[pianomav]

commodore64

 

[krmathis]

Tiki 100 in 1984-85.
* 4Mhz CPU
* 64KB RAM
* Dual floppy drives (200 or 800KB)
* 16 colors

 

[jules650]

An Amstrad 8086. Good times...

 

[Webrider]

Commodore 64

 

[lini]

Quote:

Originally Posted by krmathis /img/forum/go_quote.gif Tiki 100 in 1984-85. * 4Mhz CPU * 64KB RAM * Dual floppy drives (200 or 800KB) * 16 colors

Nice! Looks like a Tandberg Data design. They used to make great keyboards - Siemens used to sell OEM-Tandbergs with a lot of their mini computers and early pcs like the PC-D. 4 MHz ring the Z80 bell, so I'd assume the Tiki ran some CP/M variant...

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

 

[JMcMasterJ]

Probably a Commodore 64 at school. I remember we used to own an original IBM PC and later an updated model. My brother got a Mac LCII when we were pretty young and I spent a lot of time playing with that.

 

[Ingo]

The first computer I used was a Macintosh 128K in first grade (1990).

For Christmas in 1992 my parents bought a brand new Packard Bell with a i486DX2processor and 4mb of RAM stock. We added another 4mb of RAM the day after we bought it. I remember my uncle setting it up and the first thing he did after the necessary tasks was to load Wolfenstein 3D.

 

[rxc]

I remember using DOS on an old IBM.

 

[EnOYiN]

The first one I used was a Atari I think. I am not really sure about that.

The first computer we had at home was a 486 with 4 MB RAM and a harddrive of 250 MB. (and that was HUGE for the time) It ran on DOS 6.0.