
Ask YC: What was your first computer? - altay
I've been reading <i>The Soul of a New Machine</i> and it's made me feel nostalgic.  My first computer was the Coleco Adam (<a href="http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html" rel="nofollow">http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html</a>).  <p>What was yours?
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alex_c
A ZX-Spectrum Z80 clone. Something like 32KB of memory, and audio tapes for
storage. A game would take 4-5 minutes to load, during which time the border
of the screen would have funky coloured lines, and you could "hear" the
program loading (similar to modem sounds). There was also a way to "compress"
programs, which would make the lines thinner and the sound more high-pitched -
I guess it simply recorded everything twice as fast and tried to deal with the
error recovery as well as it could.

This was back in Romania almost 10 years after the original Z80 came out in
the rest of the world. It was a big hit for a couple of years because it was
so affordable, and many people got their computing start on one (or on a
Commodore 64), before graduating to a 286 or 386. One TV station actually had
a show where they broadcast games and programs - since it was just the audio
signal, you could easily record them off the TV. So you basically had an
entire TV show with the funky moving lines on the borders and the modem-like
sounds. Looking back it seems a bit surreal. :)

~~~
plinkplonk
I had one too! Just as in Romania, The ZX was a long time coming to India and
was insanely expensive, but I learned programming on it, mostly by writing
simple games.

. Once you got your head wround assembly, you could do anything with it and I
was fiddling with that machine 12 hours a day till Mom took it away in an
attempt to remind me of "normal" life. Damn I feel old now :-(

------
SwellJoe
I got a Commodore 64 in '82 when I was eight, with disk drive and dot matrix
printer. By the time I was 12 I was going to garage sales with my mom (an
antique dealer), buying old broken C64s and other machines of the era (by high
school I'd already owned several Spectrums, an Apple Lisa, many TRS-80s, a
Coleco Adam, a Commodore Plus 4, and other assorted weirdness), and fixing
them for resale (fixing computers back then meant soldering iron and a meter
and lots of trial and error). So, my first business sprang from my experience
with my first computer.

I also ran a BBS on my C64 through middle school and early high school. So, it
gave me experience with computer networks, too. ;-)

I also loved Soul of a New Machine. Fantastic story, and reading it back in 97
or 98 lead me to research and buy Data General stock, which turned out well
when they were acquired by EMC.

------
jojoleflaire
Apple II+. That machine ruled -- simple enough for a 11 year old kid to fully
understand, programmable from the get go (it basically thrust a BASIC prompt
at you after turning it on) and kick-ass games like Wizardry and Ultima to
boot. Brings a tear to my eye.

~~~
projectileboy
Right on! What a beautiful machine that was. And I, too, wasted many, many an
hour playing Wizardry. Other favorites were Castle Wolfenstein and Aztec.

And remember how it cam with the green Basic programming book to get you
started? I don't know if I've ever loved a product as much before or since.

~~~
ratsbane
Apple II+... My school had some of them for a year or two before I got one. I
wanted my own copy of that book for a long time before I finally got it. There
was a local computer store that sold Apples. I finally saved up the $20 to buy
a copy of that book from them. I still have it. Fond memories.

------
brk
I learned to Hack on a Commodore PET that was owned by my elementary school.
It was far more fun to modify the learning programs we were supposed to be
using, than to actually USE the programs as intended.

Then the school got a Commodore 64. Oooh! Colors!

Then the first PC that was mine, and located at my house was a PCjr (but I had
the "real" keyboard). A lot of people slam the jr, and I've never understood
why. I wrote thousands of lines of BASIC on it, learned to interface with
various peripherals, hand-soldered a memory expansion card, and other fun
things.

Then I built an IBM PC from parts (and by PC I mean a 5150), followed shortly
by an XT, and then about a year later an AT (and I overclocked it from 6Mhz to
8Mhz, IIRC).

Next was a PS/2 Model 30 (bought), Model 55 (built), Thinkpad 700 (built), and
a couple of other IBM machines. If it's not obvious by now, my dad worked for
IBM, so I had access to a lot of IBM parts. The PS/2 Model 30 talked to the AT
and jr over a parallel-port LANtastic network. Then I got actual LANtastic ISA
cards. There was PCNet broadband network in there somewhere also.

After the IBM's was a whole slew of built clones, from a 486sx, up through
Pentiums.

------
bootload
With computers also come books, languages & OS's. My journey goes like this:

First machine was a Sinclair ZX80 with 1K ram, a bubble keyboard that hooked
up the television. No sound, basic for language (using peek/poke for accessing
h/w) and tape deck to load programs. Very simple and fun to play with. Hooked
ever since. Heres some photos of it ~
<http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/sinclair>

\- ZX-80->81 | 30 programs for the Sinclair ZX80 1K | Basic | weird Sinclair
OS

\- Apple][e clone | Apple II Assembly Language | Apple Basic, Basic, Assembly
| AppleDos, CPM

\- IBM clone 8086 | Data Structures using Pascal | Pascal | Dos

\- HP11 calc.

\- IBM clone 486 | C Programming for PC, Learning Perl | C, Perl, Delphi,
Fortran M77, SQL | Dos, WIn31, Win95, Linux, Internet \- Various Pentium
clones | Learning Python, White book, OnLisp, | VB, Asp, Python, Php, Lisp |
Linux, OpenBSD, Win2K, Web

\- AMD64 | Phillip & Alexs guide to Web publishing, SEIA | Javascript | Linux,
OpenBSD, Web, Internet, Symbian

\- Internet | ??? | Javscript, web api's | Browsers

Couple of things to note:

\- never really into cars as every $AUD2K I'd spend on new hardware (because
s/w I always thought of software as free)

\- always bought clones because the real one items landing in Aus where so
incredibly expensive. The best clone story was getting a mate of my dads to
take an entire Apple 2e clone from SE Asia in bits because he worked for
Collins Radio then watch it be re-assembled.

\- language choice is becoming more interpreted

\- books and operating systems always followed along with hardware so I have a
graveyard of both

\- though you might still call it client/server I now consider writing apps
for the Internet, web, browser using languages plus markup and data as opposed
to just the web only.

The funny thing is I run a lot of my old systems as virtual machines on my
current system.

------
abstractbill
ZX81 (3.25 MHz Z80 cpu, 1KB of RAM, cassette tape storage). I used it to teach
myself Basic when I was 9.

The funniest thing about it was "fast" and "slow" mode. The Z80 was actually
used to generate a TV signal, so you had two modes for running programs: In
fast mode, the screen went blank, and the cpu just ran your program. In slow
mode, the cpu got interrupted regularly to update the screen (which made your
program run a lot slower!).

~~~
arhar
Yes!!!

I had the same thing. I also used it to teach myself BASIC... Just because
there was no other way to communicate with the computer, really.

My "favorite" part was how long it would take to load a program from the
cassette drive. At least 5-6 minutes, during which the screen would go weird
colors (with time, you learned to distinguish - white/red means nothing
happening, blue/yellow means program is loading) and make really weird
sounds...

~~~
euccastro
MSX (Toshiba HX-10, 64Kb RAM). Z80 based too.

------
Xichekolas
Honestly not sure what it was... featurewise it only had RF out and did
everything from a tape drive... so I'm thinking an Atari 400... but don't
remember a membrane keyboard, so may have just been something similar.

First computer I really used a lot was the 486DX2-80 my family got in 6th
grade. I was so excited to play X-Com on it!

------
chandrab
TRS-80 Model III (1981).

I collect old computers and now own: Kim-1 ('75), Apple II ('77), Commoodore
PET 8K ('77), TRS-80 Model I (78), Apple Lisa-1 (83), Osborne-1, Atari
400/800, Heathkit H89, Northstar Advantage, Next Computer Nextstation. I even
own a reproduction Apple-1 and manuals to the Xerox Alto.

------
DanielBMarkham
A PET 8K. I wrote my first contract program on an Apple II about the same
time, so it was a tie.

We had one PET in the high school library. The other nerds and I used to fight
over who could program it. There was a sign-up sheet but the rules weren't
strictly enforced. One guy named Roland kept using teacher's notes to jump in
line. So I wrote a program called "Kill Roland" that all the other kids loved.
As I remember, little "R"s came down from the top of the screen and you
maneuvered a gun to shoot them before they got to the bottom. Very simple
stuff, but the game got so popular that Roland never came to the library
anymore.

Mission accomplished.

I miss that little PET. I think I still remember the POKE statements used to
control the screen. Geesh -- those brain cells should have been recycled a
long time ago.

------
pistoriusp
Sinclair ZX Spectrum Z80.

I just used it to play games. I couldn't wait to get a new copy of "Crash"
magazine each month! Dizzy, Manic Miner, Jetpack, Dizzy and Commando were some
of my favorite games.

I just noticed that the new Apple keyboard has those "spongy" buttons like the
ZX Spectrum.

------
MuddyMo
Tracy Kidder's book is what got me into computers! Love the part where they
can't figure out why the motherboard isn't working and the project leader, and
old grizzled veteran, just grabbed the board without warning and shook the
hell out of it, giving all the young whiz kids cardiac arrest. But it fixed
the problem!

Home-built from mail-order box w/ Intel 386SX chip, 1024K ram, 40MG hard
drive, VGA video 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy drive. I really wanted the full 386
chip, but couldn't afford that and VGA. Figured I could always add the i387
math co-processor later.

------
ALee
Commodore 64 (from my Uncle)- the fantastic black (actually floppy) disks, a
TV for a screen, and the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons RPG- Curse of
the Azure Bonds!

------
pg
That I programmed? IBM 1401. That my family owned? TRS-80.

~~~
anaphoric
Ahh the old 'Trash-80'

------
CPops
My first computer was actually a Packard Bell. ;)

When I got it, it was nearly top of the line.

It was a Pentium 60 Mhz, had 8 MB RAM, 420 MB HD. 14.4 Modem. I think it also
had 1 MB Video memory and a 2x CD-Drive. I later upgraded it to 16 MB Ram. I
built the next few computers I owned and have since switched to Macs.

I actually did my first programming on that machine. I used QBasic to make a
simple game where you moved a car around the screen.

I think I still have it in a closet somewhere.

~~~
sspencer
Ha, sounds just like mine!

The only differences were that I upgraded mine from a 486 to a Pentium 90(!)
and bolted an internal Iomega Jaz tape drive to the outside of the case for
more storage. It ran Windows 3.1, which allowed me to wile away the time
playing SkiFree when I was young.

My QBasic game was a word guessing game. It was fun to write, and not fun at
all to play.

------
cheponis
IBM 1401. 12K of characters (BCD-coded), card I/O, fast printer (600 LPM!) and
a 1311 disk (2e6 characters, random access, with removable disk packs. About
the same capacity as a floppy). Fortran IV, COBOL, RPG, Autocoder (assembly)
and more. And the Computer History Museum has one that is operational! See
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401 and <http://1401.org>

------
Novash
I am afraid I entered the game a bit old. My first computer was a IBM 386
whose clock I fail to remember now. It had a green monochromatic monitor, and
two 5.1/4 floppies and a 80 MB HD, but I might be mistaken about the capacity,
it was probably less. I wasn't really knowleadgeable about computers by that
time to really understand what those meant so I don't remember.

------
jamiequint
Apple II, lets hear it for hypercard programming!!

~~~
neilk
Wow. I had no idea HyperCard was available for the II, but according to
Wikipedia, a version existed for the IIgs. Was that it?

~~~
danteembermage
Yup, we were actually assigned hypercard presentations in grade school on the
IIgs (although I was more into getting it done quick to play Oregon Trail and
Number Munchers than hacking at the time)

------
mynameishere
Apple II. I had no disks, so the computer had to stay on if my BASIC programs
were to be retained. I remember thinking how exotic and exciting the 5 1/4
disk was when I finally got one. Yes, I still remember the brand:

<http://images.google.com/images?q=Elephant+Memory+Systems>

~~~
chandrab
I used to work for Leading Edge...they owned the Elephant Brand. It was my
first job and I couldn't believe they actually paid me to work there!

------
tx
Nice thread! Apparently I am not too old for this forum :-) My first was a no-
name Japanese box with NEC clone of Intel 80186 processor, shortly followed by
a luxurious _real_ 286 machine with 40MB hard drive!

My first IDE was debug prompt in MS DOS :-) Typing assembly language commands
one by one was something...

~~~
tx
Oh! An it had "Turbo" button, how could I forget?!

------
arvid
My HS had a PDP-8 (<http://www.pdp8.net/>) with line printer terminal and
paper tape for storage. The programming language it had was FOCAL with a tri-
branching if statement (<0, =0, >0).

------
chaostheory
IBM PC JR - it was nice that it was EGA at a time when CGA was more popular.
Since it wasn't very popular, there wasn't much in terms of software for it
(My mom got it when it was discontinued); so I just spent a lot of time
messing with BASIC

------
gibsonf1
My very first was a Commodore Vic-20 with tape drive, followed shortly by a
Commodore 64 which, when disk drive and modem were added, opened up a whole
new world of computing. (moondog bbs)

------
queensnake
First one I lusted after, ZX-81; first one I programmed, TRS-80; first one I
owned, Commodore 64. Ah the nostalgia! Buying computer magazines, and each
computer was a whole new thing...

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I remember many nights down at Radio Shack lusting over and programming the
TRS-80.

The technology was so new, they even had a deal -- if you wrote a program,
they would publish it in a catalog they mailed to all of their users. There
simply wasn't any software available! A guy I went to school with wrote some
kind of shoot-the-cannon-at-the-target program and made over a thousand bucks
with it.

------
german
Mine was a 486, but my first programming experience was my father's HP 11C
caluclator (<http://www.hpmuseum.org/3qs/11c3q.jpg>)

;)

------
cellis
Commodore 64. But it wasn't really mine, I had to fight with my two sisters
over it ( Oh for the days of dig dug ). My second was a Performa 476. Also had
to fight.

------
herdrick
First to program were TRS-80s at school (actually, first was a programmable
calculator at school), then my parents bought an Apple //e. Great computer.

------
jkush
Two actually, my dad had a Macintosh SE in his office and we had a Tandy 1000
at home. Man, I LOVED that game "Bugs!". Does anyone remember that one?

------
martin
Tandy 1000TX. 80286 @ 8MHz, 640K "should be enough for anybody" RAM, 20MB hard
drive, both 360K 5.25" and 720K 3.5" floppy drives, MS-DOS 3.2. 1987.

------
Zak
The first real computer I owned was a Powerbook 140 (16 MHz 68030, 4M memory,
40M disk), but my parents had an Apple II and a Mac LCII before that.

------
piers
A BBC Micro. With a tap drive. Ahhh the days of Repton

------
catalinist
A HC(Home Computer) made by Romanians with Spectrum ZX processor and 48KB of
memory. It had a ROM with BASIC. That's what I've programmed first.

------
aaroneous
A Mac 530c that I got to use only on weeknights after 7 and weekends (when my
Dad took it home from work). It was love at first sight.

------
diamondtearz
Commodore 64 with the tape deck for saving my programs. I'll never get the
three hours I would spend loading pong back...ever!

------
mpfefferle
I used to play Space Invaders on a TI-99 my dad got when I was in
kindergarten. My first real computer was an IBM PS/1.

------
sosuke
386, Windows 3.1 was my first computer. A hand-me-down from my uncle when he
got a new Windows 95 machine.

------
dazzawazza
Oric 16k can't say I liked it but I learned to program in assembly on it which
was fun.

------
yrashk
mine were SURA PK8000 (<http://rk86.com/frolov/sura.htm>) and ES1840
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_PEVM>)

------
ajkates
Apple IIe...more stable on this POS I'm currently typing on, running Windows
Vista.

------
nostrademons
Mac LC. I was a late-bloomer.

------
jgrahamc
First computer I used was a Sharp MZ-80K. First computer I owned was a BBC
Micro Model B.

John.

------
mironathetin
Atari 260 St, that I upgraded to 2,5MB RAM soon after the purchase.

------
mrevelle
Apple IIe.

But programming foray was on a 386SX running MS-DOS with QBasic.

------
puneetht
Commodore 64 (circa 1984) an assembled i386 circa 1994

------
nextmoveone
I had an IBM, it had like 800mhz of processing power!

------
injesus
IBM ps/2 1992 .age 10 (Lots of Basic Programming)

------
amichail
vic-20

~~~
cubicle67
Me too. Funny thing is, I don't ever remember learning _how_ to programme it,
just that I always have been. Still have it too. Oh, and +10 points for the
Vic=20 manual, complete with schematic and entire list of memory addresses and
their uses.

------
falsestprophet
some 286. i still keep it around, i've been meaning to pull my killer qbasic
games off it for years (coming on decades).

------
vincentliu
A Wang laboratories IBM-compatible clone :)

------
edawerd
Macintosh LC...and then I got a 486DX2!!

------
kmt
Apple ][

------
blader
An abacus.

------
kirubakaran
Apple //c, my first love.

~~~
rjb
Same here! I still remember going to the mall pleading my case to Santa.

~~~
bockris
At my house, an Apple //c was way out of reach for Santa. I had to wait until
I was in high school and had saved enough money ($1200). It was another 2
years before I saved enough to buy my first car. ($1500). I still have my //c
and have booted it up occasionally. About 4 years ago I bartered some computer
parts to someone in exchange for him making image files of all my disks. They
run great on an Apple emulator. It definitely holds alot of great memories for
me.

------
kobs
Compaq Presario (~400MHz)

------
thomasswift
TRS-80 Color Computer 2

------
Tichy
Sinclair ZX Spectrum

------
wensing
IBM XT (8088)

------
alaskamiller
MacBook Pro.

------
timbar
IBM PCjr

------
edw519
Kaypro II

------
brintoul
An Atari 400.

~~~
anaphoric
Me too. Remember the membrane keyboard? And storing the programs you wrote on
cassette tape. Those were the days.

