What was your first home computer ?

[VintageMike]

All I really rememvber about it is that is was an IBM model in the mide eighties.
My dad's company gave it to him for work. I played "rogue" on it but never used it heavily. I was happy to play games on whatver new system was out. Along those lines in 1999 the Sega Deamcast came out and I went online for the first time. Four short months later I bought my first real computer a low-end HP model. Somehow that lasted four years. Since then I've had to get a new one every two years and I'm due this year.

[jwyblejr]

My Dell Dimension L933r that I just retired last month. For some reason,Firefox 3.0 kept crashing it. It was one of the last computers to have ME on it. If I had waited about a week,I could have got it with XP on it.

[cjefferys]

I had that Epyx fastload cartridge, Epyx made some great games to man.
Funny story about those Tandys. Summer of 82 My parents saw that the Radio Shack near us was offering a summer class in Basic and other computer stuff over the summer. They signed me up, not realizing that Tandys Basic was thier own created thing, completly difrent than the basic every other computer used. They signed me up , and after about 2 days I noticed that it was useless to me. I wound up going thru it all anyways.
I sitll remmber having to put a P in front of everything = Pclear, Pset etc...
trey

Oh yeah, Epyx had some great games. I played the hell out of their Winter and Summer Olympics games.

Your BASIC story reminds me that we didn't learn standard BASIC in high school, but rather Waterloo BASIC (created by some guys at Waterloo University who later formed Watcom). It was close to BASIC but not 100% compatible, there were some different commands. I had to learn regular BASIC by myself later on.


My first computer as an adult was a used IBM Thinkpad laptop that I bought used for $250 back in 1998. That thing was a tank, and I liked the little "joystick" mouse in the middle of the keyboard better than the touch pad that other laptops use as a mouse substitute.

[Tothiro]

I'd insert "Realm of Impossibility" and go eat supper while it was loading

That's ironic = I still do that today with my copy of Photoshop.

We had an Atari 2600 from a yard sale. Pong. Surround - with the draw feature! Stunning 6 dpi graphic rendering!
Venture was like... I dunno... game crack. I'd play it over and over for as long as possible. I think the modern phrase for that behavior is "developmentally challenged."

Apple II e was our first "real" computer. We could word process but we never figured out how to save anything. Less than awesome.
Karateka in brown and yellow! woot woot!

I bought a PC with Windows 3.1 for college. I had to teach myself how to use it before I could do term papers.

...

Come to think of it I still feel like I don't have a "real" computer.

[D!n0-M@n]

Another one of those "Commodore 64" folk right here!

[JPkempo]

Tandy 2500

[vulcan2074]

My family didn't get one until after I went to the Military. I think they got a Compaq Presario. They just got rid of it about a year ago LOL. That thing sucked. My first computer was and still is a Dell
Sammy

[Joe90]

I got in to the game late and so I had a pretty high tech piece of equipment as my first home computer -- a Mac Classic. It had a massive hard drive of 40MB with an unbelievable 1 MB of RAM. I bumped mine up to 2MB after some hard questions whether all that RAM was necessary. And it was Warp Speed fast at 8 MHZ.

And Cheap!!! All that for just over $1,000.

Now, almost 20 years later...

[pmwasson]

Apple ][+ with 48K of ram (we got a card to bring it up to 64K). We even bought a lower-case chip so we could use lower-case letters.

[mego73]

My dad was an early adopter of home computers and we had a commodore pet computer in 1977:



In the 80's my father made video games for Vic 20 and commodore 64 (independent of the commodore company)

[sauce]

I ended up buying a minty mint MIB Bally Astrocade on ebay a while ago. It's in my archive. I have another one bought on the cheap for playing. You can't put it on carpet or it while overheat and fry the whole darned thing. :-)

After Astrocade, we went to something like you guys are talking about with the casette tapes that loaded for 20 minutes. And then the Apple ][e and life was never the same. Karateka! Yes! And Lode Runner! And Tai-Pan! Summer Games! Ultima! Zork!
Man, we had them all. I have also now downloaded the Apple ][ emulator and can play all the games again on my OS X computer. Waaaay coooool!

[cjefferys]

My dad was an early adopter of home computers and we had a commodore pet computer in 1977:

http://chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/filmi_sangeet/media/1977_PET.jpg

Very cool, that computer brings back high school memories. Except that we had newer PETs that didn't have a built in tape drive like that (our school probably bought theirs in 1981 or 82?). Instead they were all networked to one CBM 4040 dual floppy disk drive (and a printer)

Out of curiosity, do you know how much that PET would have sold for back in 1977?

[Hector]

Commodore 64.

[mego73]

Very cool, that computer brings back high school memories. Except that we had newer PETs that didn't have a built in tape drive like that (our school probably bought theirs in 1981 or 82?). Instead they were all networked to one CBM 4040 dual floppy disk drive (and a printer)

Out of curiosity, do you know how much that PET would have sold for back in 1977?

I don't have a clue as to what it cost. It would be interesting to find out.

[SlipperyLilSuckers]

I had a 386DX more years ago than I care to remember.