[Arainach]

Apple IIe. Still one of the greatest machines ever.

 

[MCC]

Mine was a Packard Bell Legend 486-T50. 50MHz i486DX, 12MB RAM, 220MB HDD.

Dad purchased his first machine in 1985. It had a massive 10MB HDD and a LaserJet 1 (more expensive than the IBM computer!). People wondered how he got the typewriter aligned so perfectly on their tax returns.

 

[craiglester]

A PDP/8 at my fathers office sometime in the late 1970's (i think 1977, but memory is a bit fuzzy back there)

 

[Duggeh]

I kid, I kid, I wasnt even sperm when the Altair hit the market. My first computer (not just some games machine) was (dum dum dum):

The BBC Master computer. Good for word processing for printing on the daisywheel dot-matrix printer. Good for Chuckie Egg, one of the finest games ever made, and good for the Prestel network (like the UKs first internet system, run by the post office).

 

[philodox]

A 33mhz 386 with 8mb of ram, also the first I owned. My Dad gave it to me when he got a new computer... it was the beginning of the end.

I got bummed out when friends at school got 486's, and though he couldn't afford a new computer, he did work in the business and brought home a whole whack of memory for me [very expensive at the time] and maybe a new processor, can't remember. So everyone else had 486's with 8 or maybe 16 megs of ram and I had a 386 with 64 megs of ram that was tweaked to the ****.

 

[003]

The 486 architecture was still a huge upgrade in performance and efficiency compared to the 386 architecture, though

 

[lini]

CBM4016 - the school I visited then (Gymnasium Oberhaching) got several of these around 1980. Including some of those wonderful CBM datasette drives, that would produce errors if one knocked the desk whilst saving - bad for the teachers' pets, as they were practically never able to successfully save any of their Basic creations.

But those 4016s had a very limited lifespan anyway - killer pokes, anyone?

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

 

[Gabriel Possenti]

Apple LCII.


The last computer class I took used punch cards.

 

[philodox]

Quote:

Originally Posted by 003 /img/forum/go_quote.gif The 486 architecture was still a huge upgrade in performance and efficiency compared to the 386 architecture, though

Yeah, but that RAM was pretty much worth more than any of their computers.

Since it was borrowed from work, I couldn't exactly sell it...

This was before everyone was benchmarking everything, but my 386 rig was pretty 'fast'. I eventually got a 486 [or maybe an early Pentium, can't recall] and threw the memory in it, but that wasn't for a while.

 

[socrates63]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GAD /img/forum/go_quote.gif For me - Commodore Pet:

Me, three. I was in sixth grade, and my middle school's computer class was full of them. The computer class (intro to BASIC programming) wasn't open to sixth graders, so I just hung around the computers after school and made a nuisance of myself to the computer teacher (Mr. Kaschner, where are you?).

A single Vic-20 sat in the corner of the class. I didn't do much with it, but it had a color display which was cool since the Pet had small green monitors.

About a year later, my dad bought me an Atari 800.

 

[3DCadman]

My Dad's RadioShack TRS-80

I remember my buddies and me and our feeble attempts at BASIC.

I could only get my name to endlessly repeat line by line by line, etc. The extent of my programming expertise.

 

[blessingx]

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

 

[nick danger]

First is unknown at UICC for physics practice. Dark room green phosphor CRTs.
First at work was an Apple II.
First one to use at home was a Sinclair (2K or 16K)

 

[lini]

Quote:

Originally Posted by philodox /img/forum/go_quote.gif (...) This was before everyone was benchmarking everything, but my 386 rig was pretty 'fast'. (...)

Maybe you just didn't have any benchmark apps - I remember at least the good old Coretest, and I think the Sytem Info (si) app of the Norton Utilities and the counterpart of PC Tools both contained some processor related benchmarks. The time needed for rendering a standard Mandelbrot in Fractint always was a nice benchmark, too.

Greetings from Munich!

Manfred / lini

 

[philodox]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lini /img/forum/go_quote.gif Maybe you just didn't have any benchmark apps

Maybe... I was 13 and not even into the whole BBS scene yet at that point.

I used to love messing around with fractals, though I was doing it for fun rather than to benchmark.