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What was the first computer you worked with


cooper

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Emphasis on worked. I'm not talking about the machine you slot some type of media in, grabbed a joystick and started playing. I mean the computer that you actually tried to get to do stuff which required a little effort to get going.

My first computer in that sense was an Ericsson clone of the IBM PC/XT that my dad bought somewhere around 1987. Had an 8088, a staggering 512 kb of ram, a 5.25" floppy drive and a whopping 20 MB harddisk. It ran DOS 3.3 and WordPerfect 4.2. Best of all, it had a CGA graphics card that would allow 4 different colors on the screen, but an EGA monitor so on top of black I could either get white, blue and cyan (pinkish red. I think that's called cyan) or yellow, red and green.

My mom used it a lot for her work as she was a typing instructor for the old typewriter at that time.

On top of just playing games on it, I wrote a menu system in GWBASIC, configured another menu system for DOS that my much older neighbor had (don't recall if he made it or copied it. He should've been capable of both) and 'ported' BASIC games from my friend's Commodore 64 to the PC where my limited skills would allow it.

Originally it came with a dot matrix printer that was determined to let the whole street hear it was putting ink onto a piece of paper. Eventually it got replaced with a HP DeskJet 500.

The machine lasted until about 1998 when I realised that Linux for pre-386 machines was both not getting anywhere, and a useless endeavor even if it did. I binned it, even though it still ran WordPerfect 5.1 and was absolutely rock solid. It was just too slow by then.

The HP DeskJet lasted about 2-3 years beyond that. By then the bar across which the ink cartridge slid had become so rough that lines wouldn't line up anymore, and it was getting noisy. By then the cheap winprinters were around and my dad's work stopped using that type of printer so he couldn't snatch a cartridge every so often allowing us free printing...

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My first computer was an Acorn Atom, I was given it as a charismas present in 1982 after harassing my parents for 6 months.

Looking back on my Acorn Atom with it’s 1MHz CPU, 12KB of Ram and 12kb of Rom, it really was a piece of shit but back in the day it was fast and it gave me my first experience with programming. It had built-in BASIC and Assembly code could be included in a BASIC program and I spent hours a day reading books on coding and trying everything out, and for that I loved it.

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My first computer I had to tinker with to get it to work at all was a ZX Spectrum. But that was all tinkering for the sake of getting spy hunter and wizard's lair to run :P

The first computer I really played about with was a 486 DX2 66Mhz, with 4mb of ram and a 512mb HDD. My dad bought us it for when my sister moved up to high school in 1994. I was about 7.

I got a book on QBasic out of the library and started off making programs that would ask your name and age, play a tune, change the screen colours about and then tell you how old you'd be in 10 years time :lol:

I then broke the computer one day and had about 4 hours to re-install windows 3.11, all the applications we had, and get program manager layed out the way it was before. At the time, my dad didn't want ANY settings changing on it at all, and got pissed if my sister or I had moved the icons about :roll:

So I learnt. Purley out of necessity. I pulled it off, and I definately learnt a lot about computers in those 4 hours. How to install an OS, confiure drivers and IRQs. I also learnt that my sister's "101 Dalmations Print Studio" slowed the computer down more than anything else. I bitched at her for weeks afterwards to let me uninstall that.

After that, a friend and I spent 6 months saving our pocket money / allowance and pursuading out parents to take us to computer fairs. We eventually built up a 486 with 8mb of ram and a 512mb HDD for us to tinker about with. I carried on with QBasic, making programs with simple graphics and conditionals. I learnt that proprietry CD interfaces really suck, and saved up for about a month to get a creative soundcard that had an interface on it for the CD drive I bought.

I eventually got a 586 "Overdrive" processor and an extra 16mb of ram and installed windows 95. Life's never been the same since :)

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Mine was an Atari 400 with a whopping 16k of ram and a membrane keyboard.

Oh the flat fingers from hours of typing.

Didn't get a cassette recorder for it till a couple of months later.

So when I was done with any basic programs, had to write them down and shutdown the box. :(

Before that, I used to hang around the local Radio Shack and write little basic programs that displayed info about the computer, so they wouldn't kick me out. TRS-DOS FTW

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An Apple IIe in school. All thoes hours pating orgon trail! Good Times!

Same here. My class got so bad that my teacher had the tech take that game off every computer. Little did my teach know that I had the install disk in my hands the next day and was back to dying of snake bites while crossing the rio grand.

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Some kinda IBM 286, used to draw pictures on it as a kid. Also used a range of ancient apple's, Acrons and bbc micros at school, mainly just played with them righting silly basic programs than insulted the teachers when they ran them, but were imposible to read if you looked at the code. But mainly, i used the to draw on from an early age.

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I played on computers and did school work, etc, for a long time, but I never really did real work with a computer until I got my first computer job in middle school to which I used my Macintosh Performa.

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The first computer I ever used was probably an old Apple (I think Apple IIgs, the ones with the big 5" floppies) and that was in elementary school where we would play math games on them and stuff, the first computer i ever owned was an old IBM 100Mhz desktop (the kind that lay down under monitor) not sure what the model was but i used it til i broke it lol

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An Apple IIe in school. All thoes hours pating orgon trail! Good Times!

Same here. My class got so bad that my teacher had the tech take that game off every computer. Little did my teach know that I had the install disk in my hands the next day and was back to dying of snake bites while crossing the rio grand.

The way the computers were set up I think (this was back in 2nd and 3rd grade) you had to run the game off the disk. We raced to the big box o disks to get or hands on one of the three copys.

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The first PC i got was ran windows 3.1 or Dos (cant remember what version) you could either choose to go into Dos where there was a simple menu to play games (aaa pacman and astroideds) or into windows 3.1 which for me was a pile of crap, i didnt do anything usefull apart from the word processer which was pointless seeing as i didnt have a printer untill a few years later. I got that when i was about 7, fell in love with it and all computers.

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atari 65xe

It is where I learnt basic (well as much as a ten year old could) and general concepts such as loops, general programming logic. Most of this was done by typing in program code listed in magazines.

Them were the days, huh?

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I had a Pentium 200 without MMX. 32MB of RAM and 4GB of HDD.

I can remember the day it arrived because I was ill off school and loaded some cool Indiana Jones game on it, all he would say was "Damn, I hate Nazis!."

Fond Memories.

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Commodore 64 'nuff said.

What kinda chip you got in there, a dorito?

Don't knock it the SID sound synth chip in there was used for years even in rolland equipment I think http://createdigitalmusic.com/tag/c64/

Oh and it's not all about the pentiums just yet it's all about AMD :)

Conroe is another story (when it is launched) but then so is Cell lol

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i got it back at 1999 i believe

some intel pc with a pII runnning at 450 mhz

the ram i believe was at 16 mb dimm and a 4 mb vid card

with a 1.99 gb hard drive

the cost of this was like $1500.00 and i think it was a rip off

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Commodore 64 'nuff said.

What kinda chip you got in there, a dorito?

Don't knock it the SID sound synth chip in there was used for years even in rolland equipment I think http://createdigitalmusic.com/tag/c64/

Oh and it's not all about the pentiums just yet it's all about AMD :)

Conroe is another story (when it is launched) but then so is Cell lol

It's all about the Athlon, baby

Uhh, uh-huh, yeah

Uhh, uh-huh, yeah

It's all about the Athlons, baby

It's all about the Athlons, baby

It's all about the Athlons!

It's all about the Athlons!

(Yeah!!)

What y'all wanna do?

Wanna be hackers? Code crackers? Slackers

Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?

9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?

Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard?

...

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  • 7 months later...

Don't know if anyone remembers these, but this http://oldcomputers.net/aquarius.html was one of the first things we had that was considered a "computer" in our house. We mainly played games on it, but it could do some basic programming and came with a manual to teach you basic programming. Nothing special, but it was a start. I think I may still have it somewhere in my mothers attic or basement.

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