What was your first computer?
What was your first computer?
Mine was the Apple II Europlus. Bought it in 1979. Loved that thing.
VIC-20 still going strong in 2025 with a MegaCart from Denial.
I think my parents bought it for me in 1983. 42 years.. crazy.My first computer that I bought myself was a Dell Inspiron laptop that I bought in 2000. It was about $1,500 if I remember correctly, and had 256 MB of RAM. Sounded like a plane about to take off every time you turned it on, the fans were stupid loud.
The first computer my parents bought was in the late '80s/early 90s that ran MS-DOS. I don't remember the brand name, but my brother and I used to play "Castle Adventure" on it. We drew maps of the screens on paper notepads to make our own cheat sheets.
Macintosh 128k, followed by an Apple ]|[
We were poor, but my mom got me one of these. Ran into the mem limit multiple times, but those were good days banging on that. This thing and C64 magazine.
Mine is a bit embarrassing. The first computer that was actually mine was an ACER desktop computer that had Windows Vista on it. The memes about Vista aren't exaggerating. It was quite possible the most unstable OS I've ever used. The concentration of blue screens is unmatched to this day and it was a horrible RAM hog
ZX spectrum.Fucking loved it.
Apple IIs were in my school but my first computer at home was a 486 sx 33mhz from Midwest Micro
I had 386 pc with ms-dos and windows 3.0 but soon I switched it to Amiga 1200 and I must say, it was stunning computer compared to pc.
I still have my first PC. It's not the first one our family had, that was an old Macintosh and a DOS after that. But this is the first one I bought and built. It still runs, on windows XP. It's a nice time capsule. It still has Medal of Honor Allied Assault on it.
I honestly don't know what kind of computer it was. It was something my dad brought home from work when they were going to throw it out, so it was old even when I had it in the early 90s. It ran DOS, had a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive, and a lovely orange monochrome monitor. I used it to write my little stories and play crappy console games. Good times.
Mine was a ZX Spectrum, my father bought it for me when I was 12 years old, good times haha :D
Had a random desktop from a mall computer shop that ran Windows ME!
Before that we had some 486 machines with 40MB HDD and Windows 3.5 and IBM DOS...
My first computer that was mine though was a Dell D610 I believe. Lasted 8 years.
Gateway 2000 with Windows 95. I do not know which specific configuration (I was too young). I do remember the games I had though: Tyrian 2000, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, C&C, HoM3, I-war, Flight Simulator 95, LBA 2 and Jersey Devil. Half of them were copies I got from a neighbour that owned a cd-r.
I first had an old (forgot which year) Dell Latitude:
Commodore VIC20
Commodore 64
Texas Instruments TI/99a
Timex TC2068. It's a Portuguese revision of the Timex TS2068 which is itself a bad ZX Spectrum clone.
First at home was dad's IBM AT in 1983 or so. Then in 1985 it was one of early Macintoshes, later upgraded to 512kB RAM. Then a Mac SE.
My own first was a Siemens 80386 around 1988 running Windows 3.
First one I used was a Commodore 64.
First home computer was an original Macintosh.
First one I bought for myself was a Performa 6290.
It was some packard bell PC with windows xp, and a 1.9 GHz pentium 4
Intel pentium 75mhz
Commodore 64. I fell in love with Wizard of Wor before we got the family computer, and I felt pretty lucky for having a floppy drive. I also used to play a good bunch of Atari 2600 clone at a family member, if that counts.
Vic 20
My dad had something even older, but the first computer I got to use was our Wang 286
Commodore 64 with the tape drive. I was always jealous of my cousins who had the floppy disk drive. Later we had a Tandy 2000.
An Atari 800XL. Custom OS loaded into a BASIC interpreter at startup unless you put a bootable floppy in the external 5.25" drive. We would load up DOS on the external drive and then boot whatever games my dad had pirated from his buddies. Played bootleg Ultima IV, Castle Wolfenstein (the original original one, not the 3D one) and a bunch of others. We had two cartridges (Pengo and Galaxian), but we also had 100s of games in a big shoe box of floppies.
I also learned BASIC on it at a pretty young age, which helped push me into technology as a career path, though I had to unlearn a lot of that when I got to high school and took real programming courses.
A Timex-Sinclair 1000 in ’82.
Commodore 64.
I grew up without any sort of home computer. Still went to school for computer graphics and 3D animation, taught myself programming in the computer lab in the evenings. Only after getting my degree did I get my first computer. I've been a professional developer for the last 15ish years.
I did have access to school computers most of my life. My first memory was learning LOGO on an Apple II in elementary school. Making that turtle draw fractals. Good times.
My brothers had an Amiga 500 that I was glued to. But I have vauge memories playing games on the Spectrum ZX
IBM 386DX with a 'turbo' button.
I used Apple II's in school and older "IBM" PC's but my family never got one. I had to buy one myself once I moved out.
I remember learning to write BASIC and Logo programs in grade school. I even went to 'computer camp' during summer school, but that was more 'play Oregon Trail/ Carmen San Diego and print out basic ass ascii art' than learning.
Weirdly, after 6th grade the whole 'computer literacy' thing at our school quietly disappeared. In 8th grade I learned to type, on an actual typewriter. Maybe they thought the whole 'computer' thing was a fad, or they could have just been cheapskates. Idk.
I feel less old, thank you all :)
Some Acer laptop I got handed down, 300 MHz Celeron with 64 MB / 4 GB. Looking back, I can blame a lot of how I ended up on that PoS. I have fond memories of playing around with Win 9x and DOS on that thing, clumsily trying to keep it from breaking apart and my parents from taking it away.
The first computer I actually fully bought for myself was a shitty MSI "gaming" laptop with a first-gen i5. That proves that I learned nothing. It would overheat like crazy, the hinges broke after 2 years, had a custom Ati-Intel dual GPU setup that would not play nice with Linux... ah, memories...
Next one after that was a used Elitebook 2540, because I was done with shitty hinges.
The Epson action note
It was a little powerhouse for the time, ran w95 without issues and connection to the internet was, within reason, acceptable for the time as well
Throw in a cd recorder, some good headphones,QBasic, and you were set for a long time
IBM PS/2. Got it for free along with an original HP Deskjet printer. It originally ran MS-DOS until a family friend gave us an old floppy set of Windows 3.1.
The PS/2 was ancient by that point but it probably helped convince my parents that a PC was a worthwhile investment. Creating documents in Word was a lot easier than using a typewriter.
We had "Darth Vader" Apple IIs at school, but I had an Atari 800 at home.
I can't tell you the exact made and model, but my first computer was an old one that was a hand-me-down from my dad. It ran Windows XP and looked something like this
I played of lot of educational CD ROMS on that thing. Good times.The Leading Edge Model D. An 8088 from the late 80s that we got 3rd hand
It had 2 double density 5.25" floppy drives and 256K of RAM! If I let it warm up 10 minutes it could even run Print Maker Pro.
I saw the US version. I knew I wanted to mess with it. Asked my parents for a computer for years. Finally got one in 1990. Love my super old IBM XT
My first computer was a ZX81, but I think it was a custom build between my father, a carpenter, and my uncle, an electrician who fixed arcade games.
It was housed in a wooden case with a proper keyboard. The 16K RAM pack had been soldered on inside, so there was no case of it ever crashing due to a bad connection.
Simple black and white graphics with no sound. I loved it to bits.
Apple ][
Got the extended memory to 128k, 80 character screen, and a real tank of a printer
Some mid-late 80s IBM from a flea market. Came with no OS installed. But along with it came a set of 5in floppies. DOS 1 and a copy of Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator. I eventually got DOS 3 from a family friend and upgraded it. Being able to change the background from black to blue blew my mind.
A custom pc, with a Sempron 3000+, 512mb of ram, no dedicated gpu and with Windows XP
Commodore 64
Fuck, I'm showing my age here but it was a Windows CE with a blocky CRT monitor
The first one I knew the model number of was the Macintosh IIsi. It had Mac OS 7. The only games were SimCity, and a few free games we got from a 1 hour free trial of AOL. The only programming language was Apple Script, and it didn't work right (the sample programs didn't run).
Had something that was an Apple II or IBM clone....ran floppy floppies.
I couldn't even save my documents, as I had no spare floppies and my parents didn't understand we need blank ones as media lol.
Yet they were able to record TV to blank VHS's....
But I learned
BASICon it. And played Garfield and Spiderman and Oregon Trail a lot.Our second one was a Compaq, with a Pentium III, onboard motherboard GFX. 56k that never went beyond 4100 on the best of days, 1200 when raining. It fried eventually after a botched RAM upgrade by my brother.
It did run Merchwarrior III, FFXI and Tribes 2 swell when we got it a PCI graphics card before the botched RAM incident.
Off topic:
My brother coached me in PC building in ~02. Most recently built a 5950X3D system. Thanks Microcenter. And R.I.P. my brother.
Probably that one Asus Laptop i remember putting Windows 10 on it but decided to downgrade to 7 cause it was faster
I was a child, so Sharp Hotbit (Zilog Z80 processor) and a PC-XT, both basically for games. PC-AT 386 when I started college.
Commodore 64.
Commodore Pet 4016
.Then a Commodore 64. Loved that machine.
Commodore VIC20 from a garbage dump, it was older than me.
We grew up with various windows and DOS computers, then my first computer that was mine was a used computer with Windows ME and a massive 20gb hard drive.
After that I bought an iMac with Mac OS X tiger and have been using Macs ever since.
I’ve also frankensteined a few Linux machines together from yard sale parts over the years.
I'm young, mine a Macintosh IIci!
My first computer was an eight-bit system running the CP/M operating system on an Intel 8080 processor, in about 1980. The system was some $900. I bought a Whitesmiths C compiler for it for about $300, and it came with the Wordstar text editor.
First that I worked on was a DEC pdp8e. First that I owned was a Commodore 64.
Some old dell I don’t remember was the family computer. 8gb HDD. my first computer, the one that belonged explicitly to me, was my sister’s hand me down powerbook G4 - still got it!
Was a Mac user (Linux baby machines for fun) until a few months ago when they royally fucked me on my Mac Studio. So I built a PC and installed bazzite on it lol never going back. I miss MacOS tbh. I think a lot of the haters really don’t appreciate how elegant the whole ecosystem is and how next level the interplay between devices can be. I mean it’s truly remarkable how smooth the experience can be. It’s like entering a flow state in a good video game. But yeah, I’m out. They lost that customer experience a long time ago that made them exceptional.
Edit: actually I do remember some old Apple that belong to my dad and playing Sir Addalot/Math Blaster/Number Munchers on it. But I was so young I didn’t quite know what I was doing, so that old Dell was probably the first computer I used on daily basis
@danishdude1944@feddit.dk my parents bought my brothers and I an Apple IIc a year before the first Mac made it obsolete. We had a Commodore 64 with a cassette tape drive for games.
The first computer I bought with my own (borrow student loan) money was a 120MHz Mac 8500. I bought it before I graduated, took it to the graphic design lab and cloned one of the lab 8500 drives with all the software onto it. A few years later I ended up working at that same university and disposing of hundreds of worthless 8500s.
I was still paying mine off :(
A pentium 100 shitbox hand built by my ol dad
This was well into the pentium II era of PC mind
Acer Aspire.
100 MHz Pentium, 4 MB RAM, 14.4 modem. 4x CD-ROM.
Some shitty HP Laptop with Intel Core i5 (don't even remember the gen number but was around like 2014-15), something like 256GB or 512GB SSD, 8GB RAM, 1366x768 resolution, webcam, intergrated graphics. Also I think it had touch screen but the grease from my fingers cause it to randomly activate. And even wiping it off still sometimes had those issues.
It had windows 8 but then I updated to windows 10 for free.
(I did mess around with Ubuntu later on)
Its capable of running Skyrim at lowest settings with at least 30 fps, GTA V with 30-50 fps.
It already doesn't have the DVD thing that I saw some older laptop have.
I used a USB-A dongle wireless mouse with it.
Gen Z btw.
Edit: Reading these comments make me feel like Lemmy is a club I'm too young to join lol
An Acorn Atom with 2KB of RAM because 12KB was too expensive. Good little computer, and the journey from the tiny Acorn Computers company to today's ARM processors is a pretty amazing one.
Computer - Commodore 64
Mainstream - Macintosh Performa 450
Windows - Packard Bell piece of shit
Atari 520ST with the monochrome monitor. Motorola 68000 I think. 1986.
I was a student and paid for the computer plus most of my tuition by typesetting essays using a word processor named Paper Clip. Started a bad habit of independent geeky gig work because of it.
Atari 400 with a cassette tape drive and a 300 baud modem.
I had a Tandy TRS-80. I loved that thing. It was affectionately called the trash-80, but I used mine until it would no longer boot. It booted into BASIC and had 16 colors, and with the expansion module it had a voice synthesizer and a 5.25 inch floppy drive.
I think I used an Apple ][ through the gifted program before we got a used Commodore 64 at home, but I spent more time on the C64. Taught myself to type and to program in BASIC.
First Used: Tandy Model IV (Learned BASIC, Pascal, FORTRAN and COBOL on one.)
First Owned: Tandy 1000SX (It carried me through my first stint in college)
Was a Dell running windows xp 4gb of ram, 160gb hard drive, and a Celeron with an orange light
First one I used? Either a ][e or ][gs at school. First one our household owned? A 286 (not any particular brand). First one that was "mine"? A mac LC2. First one i paid for with my own money? Uhhh I just remember it was a Dell, probably a pentium 4?
The Compaq Persario
First Used - Apple II
First Owned - Commodore Vic 20
TRS-80 Color Computer 2
For high school graduation I got an Apple IIe with all the bells and whistles - the color monitor, dual floppy, ram/80-column card, 1mb ram extension, even the 5mb hdd, it was great.
Some bulky 486 with a huge red on/off switch. I bought it for 10 bucks from a friend. It ran DOS and later Win 3.11
Zx Spectrum 48k. But my second will always be the one I love the most. Commodore Amiga 500.
First one I used was an Apple II at school. First I used outside of school was my buddy's Laser Apple II clone. First one I owned was an Atari XEGS, with the caveat that we didn't get the disk drive, so all programs had to be typed in when I wasn't playing Bug Zapper or Missile Command or failing to learn how to play Flight Simulator 2. Still learned a lot of Atari BASIC.
Eventually we got a Tandy RSX with DOS 5.0 and "Tandy Deskmate"
Sharp MZ-700 with integrated plotter
First I used was an apple II at the public library mostly just for games like Oregon trail, first I programmed on was in a school library using an IBM PS/2 using Pascal, and first I owned was a Packard bell Pentium 2 family shared computer.
Some Dell with a Pentium 3. I didn't use it much and eventually got a Compaq laptop with a Pentium M of some sort. Also didn't use that too much. But eventually we got an Asus G50v gaming laptop and I used the shit out of that thing.
Acorn Electron.
Our family had a 286 PC-compatible running Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS, built by someone at my dad’s job; I think he built and sold computers as a side gig. Looking back I strongly suspect all the software he included was not paid-for, or he bought it once and kept reinstalling it.
I had this but an Apple ][ clone. I added two 8in floppy drives for “big” storage.
Timex-Sinclair 1000, that my grandparents got for sitting through a time share pitch. Had the optional ram extension pack. No storage so you would have to type in your whole program every time but it was mine!
I cut my teeth on trs-80s, kaypro 8088s and the first apples though. i like computers!
first that I used was an IBM PS/2 dual booting OS/2 and Windows 3.1. first that was actually mine was a NEC made Windows 98 laptop.
Sharp PC-1211
Dell dimension
Don't remember the brand at all, but it had to have been running either one of the last of the windows series in the 90s or very early 2000s windows. Standard family computer that I'm pretty sure belonged to my grandpa but was a family computer in the end.
Pretty sure there was one that came before it, but that's extremely blurry in my mind, so I can't count it if I can only vaguely remember it. Don't even remember what windows version was on it.
Our first computer was a Macintosh, not sure of what model, as I was pretty young. I played many hours of StuntCopter on it!
Tandy 3000
Remember playing heroes quest, lemmings and Prince of Persia.
My family's first computer was an Amiga 1000. The office was across from the bathroom and my dad would type in stories for it to speak while I played in the bathtub. Good times.
My first computer was some random 386? my dad found in the trash. I think the power supply was dead and all that needed replacing. Who ever threw it out left a HDD full of cga dos games for me to explore. Only one I remember liking was elite, which I played the crap out of. Felt cool to be the only kid in town with their own PC in the mid 90s.
Very close! Mine was the Apple II plus. I remember using that before I could read. I memorized how to spell catalog which did a directory listing. I eventually learned some Apple basic on it as well.
At home: a hand me down Apple ][e At school: apple ][ systems At my dad's work (spent lots of time there): IBM PC
Used computers at school (BBC B), uni and work (beige PCs); and had video game consoles (Intellivision, NES, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Philips CD-i, etc) but didn't my own first home computer until relatively late, bought in 2000.
A Dell Inspiron 7500 "desktop-replacement" laptop, with:
- 15-inch 1400x1050 screen (shit hot back then, still higher resolution than many laptops today),
- 6GB HDD
- Intel Mobile Pentium CPU (can't remember exact specs)
- 128MB RAM (a significantly expensive extra back then)
- ATI Rage Mobility M graphics
- Windows 98 SE (I tried out BeOS R5 PE on it, so much more stable but the only available graphics driver could only give 800x640)
And I've been cleaning out my mum's shoddily built shed and just found it in this sorry state!
The hinge was always super stiff, and after 4-5 years snapped. I kept it alive for a while by rigging up some brackets to hold the screen. Eventually I put it away, and after a few moves it ended up stored at my mum's. Now wIth a fair bit of opossum crap on and around it, and rainwater from the leaky shed roof.
I wonder if there are still any episodes of The Sopranos downloaded from Dalnet IRC on it.
486 DX 66 MHz with 8 MB RAM.
I also bought the memory upgrade to 16k
Apple Mac LC, retired from my father's office. 20MB HDD and 256 color monitor. The PRAM battery ended up dying, so afterwards it would always boot up in grayscale and you would have to manually change it to color. Prince of Persia was awesome, though I could never get to the end.
Some form of Gateway PC that was still running Windows 95 until my grandpa had me update it to 98. My other grandparents then got an early Apple iBook which was pretty awesome at the time as well.
Commodore 128, won by my parents at a contest, back in the day, guessing the price of a pallet of 'Zwarte Kat' coffee.
1977, original Apple II with 8k, integer basic, and "the big red book".
Surprised I haven't seen any mention of the Commodore PET.
