What was your first computer?

[Pinner]

How bout this baby 1979-80 tops..




It kept crashing and getting replaced until Dad told Radio Shack to keep it. (or something like that)




Programing these old HP calculators in those days for Dad would take my sister and I forever, hours and hours. The little slot on the side would take a magnetic strip to save the program. He would write a program on graph paper seemed like pages long and make us type it in for him. LoL

[Jagger]

My first computer was the ZX80 which I purchased in 1980. Looking back I don't know how I afforded it. I must have begged my parents for one.

Wiki:

The Sinclair ZX80 is a home computer brought to market in 1980 by Science of Cambridge Ltd. (until 1977 known as Sinclair Instrument and later to be better known as Sinclair Research). It is notable for being the first computer (unless you consider the MK14) available in the United Kingdom for less than a hundred pounds (£99.95). It was available in kit form, where purchasers had to assemble and solder it together, and as a ready-built version at a slightly higher cost for those without the skill or inclination to build their own unit. The ZX80 was very popular straight away, and for some time there was a waiting list of several months for either version of the machine.


I upgraded to the mega machine ZX Spectrum in 1982 which had a colour display and 16kb of memory.




My first true love though was the C64 which I think I got a year later in 1983. The Spectrum was shoved to the back of my shelf by this amazing machine.

[OBCT]

Anybody remember the educational games from the original Munchers series? Specifically, Word Munchers and Number Munchers? This would be from back in the early 90's.

I used to play these games at school all the time. I loved Word Munchers so much, I almost had every highscore entry on every 5.25" floppy disk of the game in the entire school by the time I graduated from elementary. Those were the days. Such zeal! :O

Honourable mentions go out to Odell Lake, Oregon Trail, and Cross Country Canada in this same genre.

Good times.


EDIT: I don't mean to derail the thread, but it seemed as though the "first computer" discussion had slowed.

[Shin Pad]

My first computer was an Apple 64, way back in around 1980. I actually used it as my business computer - LOL.

[DownhillGoat]

Originally Posted by OBCT

Anybody remember the educational games from the original Munchers series? Specifically, Word Munchers and Number Munchers? This would be from back in the early 90's.

Ha! Number munchers was great. As was oregon trail. I still play that one every once in a while.

[Redliner]

+1 for the Texas Instruments TI99/4A. We got that thing in '82 or '83 and it didn't even need a monitor - it just hooked right up to your TV! We never even had a mouse for it at all, and the thing ran on cartridges that looked like 8-tracks. I remember trying to program a game onto it once, and failing miserably.

Next was a 286 with a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive and monochrome amber monitor. I spend hours on that thing playing Hero's Quest and Police Quest - back in the day when you didn't load the games to your hard drive, you just played them from the disk and had to change the disks 500 times over the course of the game.

It wasn't until I moved out on my own that I bought my own first computer - a Dell Pentium 233 laptop with an 8 GB hard drive. That would have been sometime around 1999, and it's still gathering dust in a corner of my basement somewhere.

[Finny61]

My first computer was a 386, 4mb of ram. I remember loading Doom on it and it chugged a lot, I also played Commander Keen and a Robin Hood game by Sierra (Conquest of the Longbow?).