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Your First Computer

ForCheapnGood, there was Kaypro

First was a Kaypro II, later had a IV, a couple of 10's and a 2. First DOS cripple was a CLUB 286. Lousy chip and OS but great company. Instruction Manual said first get a screwdriver and take off the hood - it won't hurt. Refreshing versus typical IBM think of don't worry about what's in there, and if you must then call a geek to do it.

Still remember those massive spreadsheets we could build with only 64K before we "upgraded" to DOS and lost the ability to swap pages. 640K, my aching ....

And now we have windows (from Xerox to Apple to MSoft and not an honest payment anywhere) so we cling to DOS to get work done and welcome windows for the net. Is Linux really a hope for the world?

RememberGaryKildahlin your prayers

Hmm...

The first computer my family had was an 80-86 Mom used to do finances on. I played Amy's Primer on it for hours.

My first real computer, though, was a 286 running some flavor of MS-DOS (5.0, I think) back in 1992. I had a lot of fun with that machine. My parents got it secondhand, and it had a few games on it as well as a few documents. I loved that thing, and really wish that I had made them keep it around. I'd love to program for it today.

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Ubuntu is lame as a duck- not the metaphorical lame duck, but more like a real duck that hurt its leg, maybe by stepping on a land mine.

You old-timers are impressive

My first PC experience was with my dad's Apple ][, which he bought to run VisiCalc. An Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer and a 2nd floppy drive soon followed, as he got more software. But that was his baby. Business only.

(Amazingly enough, it included the computer's schematic diagram in the manual. No wonder there were clones.)

I didn't buy my own PC until 1992, right after Win3.1 came out. The thing about Win3.1 is that you were really supposed to run setup (including video driver setup) from the DOS level, but there was an applet that (supposedly) let you change video drivers from within Windows.

The day we got the thing home and set up, without knowing much of anything about it, I changed the video driver from within Windows and ended up with a black screen. Panic time! The wife's due back in 2 hours! What will she say? Time to reinstall! Uh-oh, that didn't work!

Some MS tech support guy named Ray stayed on the line with me for what seemed like an hour, and got it working just as my wife walked in the door.

That was the first and last time MS telephone support was any help to me -- but not the last time I borked a computer! Not long after that, my wife bought me a Mac. Smile

Apple II Clone Built on PC Boards in Toronto!

It was 1980 and throughout Toronto parts kits, pc boards and cases were available to put together Apple II clones. Down to the right keyboards. (Yes the power supply got too hot.)

I soldered mine together and it came up first time to the glories of Steve Woziak's Apple basic. Then I soldered the disk controller together and got Apple OS working and then a Microsoft CPM card was soldered together and got CP-M working.

Yes my wife of the time thought I was a geek soldering this thing together on the kitchen table and programing the Eprom's at my first engineering job.

Hasta Le Vista Baby!

Sinclair ZX81

Oh the joys of having a 2 colour, no sound and only 1K of memory computer. For Christmas I had a 16K expansion pack for it and a new game based on the Alien movie, pure bliss Big Grin

I then had a Commodore Vic20 (3.5K with 8 colours), a Commodore 64, then an Amiga A500, then an Amiga A1200 (had a SCSI internal hard drive and 1MB of memory), an Atari 520ST, then I sold both my Amiga's and ST and bought an Olivetti 486 DX2 66 which cost me £1300 and came with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 for playgroups Wink All this so I could play Day of the Tenticle (which turned out to be an expensive game as the PC had no sound card or CD, which I had to purchase at a cost of £200).

ZX Specturm 128K

The first computer I laid my hands on was the fantastic ZX Spectrum -- with massive 128K RAM Wink and my first useful program was a sprite animation one.

1982 ish?

It was a speccy! My brother won it in a raffle at school IIRC.

Atari 400

I started with an Atari 400 with flat membrane keyboard and cassette tape drive which I quickly traded for an Atari 800 and later an Atari 800XL and a 810 diskdrive. Later I added a massive 10mb MFM BTL hard drive system and ran a bbs on it.

1980

My first machine was a Commodore Vic 20 in 1980, then the Commodore 64 in 1982.

Then in 1985, I got the Apple II c with a 300 baud modem, but soon upgraded to a blistering fast 1200 baud modem... ahhh memories... we had Myspace then, it was just called a BBS. Anyone remember the Atlanta Penitentiary BBS?

good times, good times..

rel.

Don't remember what year it was

but my first was an Atari 800

This poll brought back memories

Yes it was 1988... I purchased a Commodore Amiga 500 for over 1000.00 CAD and that didnt even have a hard drive. But it had 512k of RAM. Great computer for gaming and general word processing. It lasted till 1993 when I bought my first PC.

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