If you look closely at the keyboard, you will notice it only had left and right arrows, not up and down. This made playing games somewhat of a challenge at times, but I learned BASIC and made my own very simple programs.
I later got upgraded to a IIe and then a //c before moving on to PCs for a while, but I’ve moved back and forth over the years between Apple and PC. I’m currently using Apple products.
But back to the nostalgia. The other early computer I had was one my dad bought for my tech-minded grandfather who never really got into it, a Commodore-64.
I loved that computer and used it all the time when I was at my grandparents’ house.
Finally, there was the first computer I bought with my own money. An Amiga 1000 used for $300 including an A590 20 megabyte hard drive. I saved up money from a minimum wage to get it when I was a teenager and I used it to write terrible music.
What was your first computer? What are some of your early computer memories?
It was a PC with a 386 CPU, 5.25" & 3.5" floppy drives, maybe a couple of hundred megs of HDD space… Something like that. My parents bought it in October 1993. Can’t remember how much RAM we started off with, but that always got upgraded.
Mine was a 2006 Macbook Pro, though it technically belonged to either my mom, or my aunt. And the first public computer I used was (I guess) the Macintosh II during my Pre-K to Kindergarten years.
Yeah, I’m trying to think of the first computer I used. It may have been an Apple IIGS, or it may have predated that.
Also, my dad worked in IT (actually, that is present tense), so he would always bring home computers and hook them up to the TV so we could play around a bit for the weekend. Also, we had a random old Apple lying around.
A Tandy 1000 with two 5.25’’ disk drives. We played Space Invaders, King’s Quest, Space Quest and a whole host of other games on it. I also learned a little bit of Basic programming on it.
I had a friend in college with one of those, though he’d sprung for the dual floppies. Another friend there had a Model I with three keys missing on the keyboard, and he needed to resolder the edge connectors every few months (‘cuz Tandy built the Model I on the cheap, and didn’t plate the connectors).
Yes, I know it’s a punch card reader, but the IBM System/360 it was connected to isn’t very photogenic. My final project was stored on a deck literally a foot thick; two-thirds of the cards were comments because the instructor was very emphatic about properly commenting your code.
The first computer I owned was a Timex Sinclair 1000.
It was either an Apple IIe (with that sweet black-and-green Matrix monitor!) or a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, which I used to get my Hunt the Wumpus on.
