CrunchBang Linux Forums - What was your first computer?

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (craigh) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:52:25 +0000

My first computer was a pentium 1 pc when i was 6. I can't remember the specs of it but i know it ran windows 95.

Re: What was your first computer?

smshdglss@gmail.com (SmashedGlass) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:52:14 +0000

i was not fortunate to grow up in a tech-savvy (nor affluent) family; my step-father's idea of "high tech" meant me getting up to turn the television dial for him. so in my earlier years my only computer experiences were at the homes of friends who were luckier, and all i remember are Apple IIe's and C64's (and LodeRunner and Ultima haha).
---fast forward from the mid-80's to 1998--
my own "first computer" was a desktop that i picked the parts for with the advice of computer savvy co-workers. as i remember, it was a blazing fast PII or PIII packing 800Mhz, with a hugantic 128Mb of RAM, a Creative Soundblaster audio card, and a 3Dfx Voodoo video card. adequate for it's era running first Win98 and then WinME, and #! probably would probably work a charm on the same rig today.

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (theworldisnormal) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 11:12:39 +0000

at the age of 7 my first computer was a commodore c64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64). today, it has a spacial place at my basement. i am convinced it would still work if i pushed the button.

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (shy_guest) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:37:44 +0000

First computer I ever used was an ICT 1904 in 1965.

It was as big as a dinosaur & lived in a room of its own with a double door to prevent dust getting in.

It was programmed in an assembly language called PLAN & fed programs on punched tape by its keepers (or operators). There was no operating system - just operators who switched stuff around, loaded & unloaded magnetic tape reels & fed it. The console was a tty - screens didn't exist until a lot later.

It was surrounded by lots of tape drives that turned constantly, as its programmes (it was one of the first multiprogram computers & could run 4 programs at once !!!) were constantly being swapped in & out of the computer's 24-bit word 32K word memory (that's 96Kbytes in today's jargon). & there was an entire huge floor full of perforators/verifiers who typed on keyboards to produced & check punched tape.

Many years later, I got to play with the Apple II some friends had been given by the engineering company they worked for. & then there were a lot of different machines for work (DEC with Fortran, Pascal & Prolog), HP3000 & Cobol, Unix on ???, something ghastly on IBM, DOS 3.1 on PC, until I finally got my own computer around 2000.

Currently have a desktop, 2 laptops (1 Mac), & 2 Asus Netbooks.

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (tip184) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 04:33:02 +0000

TRS-80 Model 1, with Expansion Interface and a disk drive. Manufacturer never expected anyone to use it for anything but math/numbers, so they wired the character generating chip to display ONLY upper case. A simple mod (soldering a wire to a chip, or something similar) allowed it to show lower-case, but they had purchased defective character generators, so some letters (lower case e, I think) floated above the baseline. There were no true-descenders - the tails of letters like y, j, etc. did not descend below the baseline, so these letters also appeared to float.

Computer was maxed out with 48 K of memory. I wrote my PhD dissertation on that machine, with a wordprocessing program called NewScript. Soon after that I switched to PC-Write.

Fun times!

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (AlexMex90) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:14:11 +0000

I can't remember what computer was, but it had Win 3.1 and I was 3 years old, I only knew how to run NASCAR Racing and play (and crash hehe)

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (NWAdawg) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:37:44 +0000

If i can remember that far back, a Packard Bell 286 25mhz running win3.11.

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (Lorcav) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:18:57 +0000

Either a Sinclair ZX81 or a C64. Can't quite remember which we had first.

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (Kyte) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:58:27 +0000

Timex Sinclair ZX-81 as above.

Kyte

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (Awebb) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:07:47 +0000

My first machine was an 80286 with 12MHz. One day, i found a strange slot on the mainboard and after some research I learned that it could hold an 8085. So I had my 12Mhz CPU supported by a strange 8MHz coprocessor. It was running fine as a basic office machine until 2001! I had alot of fun with it. Things like doublespace (compressed my 40MB HDD to give me about 70MB free space) and later a 14,4 kBit fax modem from US robotics minted my interest in technology. Besides my laptop, I never ever bought an out-of-the-box computer.

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (moralfallacy) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:48:53 +0000

Mine was a Tandy trs-80 bought second hand.
Link the for curious

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (IgorP) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:52:24 +0000

Commodore 128 [1987.] -> Amiga 600 [1993.]-> Custom PC (Athlon 2200+, Windows XP) [2003..present]-> Fujitsu Siemens S7020 [present]

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (jackbang) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:42:26 +0000

charlie01 wrote:

jackbang wrote:
My first computer was a sinclair zx81 borrowed for a couple of months when I was a kid. .
Thats awesome,,That was my first too,,Heres a link,,,I can remember trying to program a basic pong game on it,,Lets just say i never got it to work,,,lol
http://oldcomputers.net/zx81.html

Cool - those were the days. I love the doorstop functionality in your link ... that's about all you could do with them if you didn't try and program it, although I seem to remember one of the computer magazines ran an article about how you could "run a power-station" with your zx81. Never did try that out.

Some Acorn Atom details here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~fjkraan/comp/atom/
What a great machine (at the time) for learning about computers, with it's fairly easy 6502 cpu, and built-in assembler.

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (charlie01) — Sun, 31 May 2009 00:09:05 +0000

jackbang wrote:

My first computer was a sinclair zx81 borrowed for a couple of months when I was a kid. .

Thats awesome,,That was my first too,,Heres a link,,,I can remember trying to program a basic pong game on it,,Lets just say i never got it to work,,,lol
http://oldcomputers.net/zx81.html

Re: What was your first computer?

dummy@example.com (cmay) — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:09:29 +0000

my first computer is still in use. its a fujitsu siemens that came with windows ME and it has 600 mzh intel and 300 mb ram. and a 20 gigabyte harddisk. it runs debian using openbox and lxde as windows manager, i learned to like use that by using crunch bang and i was happy that lenny comes with a small lxde + xfce iso image.