What was your first computer?

[vsoch]

We all have fond memories of our first computers! Let's nerd out and share our first computers here. The older the model, the cooler you probably are! 💻

[vsoch]

My first computer was a DOS 286 PC, it looked something like this and I played a lot of games on it, always starting from DOS, from Vette to Indiana Jones (my favorites!). I can't say why my parents originally bought it, as neither of them were academic or working in a technical field, but based on purchasing him newer models as the years passed and signing him up for community college programming courses, my guess is that they wanted my brother to have the exposure.

[benfulton]

Commodore 64. Good for games and also spending lots of time typing in code from magazines. Later I got a cassette tape drive that allowed me to store programs even after the computer was turned off!

[BrendanKKrueger]

My mom had an Apple IIe, I think from when she worked in a typing pool. For my brother and I, it was a great way to play games. I had to do some Googling, but I finally figured out the name of the game we used to play all the time: Think Quick. I LOVED that game.

The first computer that was mine was a VTech Pre-Computer Power Pad, which was when I discovered I could write my own programs! I blame that for where I am now :-)

[vsoch]

Oh gosh I played that game too! I had completely forgotten! The learning company was great - I remember a game with a submarine (Operation Neptune?) Reader Rabbit, Treasure Cove / Mathstorm, and Ancient Empires (I think for some of these we had hit the early 90s already).

[BrendanKKrueger]

Reader Rabbit! We played that one a lot, too.

[namurphy]

IBM PS/2 Model 55SX! My most memorable experience was getting to the settings window for graphics, and then changing the settings to all the way dark, and then not knowing how to change it back so that the screen wasn't entirely blank for the rest of the history of the universe. I'm not sure how my parents got their way out of that one. 👀

[danielskatz]

I had an Apple II plus, which I played with and also used for high school papers with EasyWriter, I think. A friend and I used to swap cassette tapes with games like Lemonade Stand, and then diskettes with games like Castle Wolfenstein and Zork, Wizardry, and Ultima. Another friend at the time had a TRS-80, though I don't remember what games it had. And for some reason that I don't remember, at some point I borrowed an acoustic modem to connect to some server at my high school...

[vsoch]

I played Wolfenstein and the entire Ultima series! I think my favorites were The Stygian Abyss and Ultima VII The Black Gate.

[crd477]

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Most of the software I used and wrote was stored on cassette!

[vsoch]

I didn’t realize they made computers (I was most familiar with their calculators).

[tcooper]

The first computer I owned was a Macintosh SE but to appropriately date myself I will add that the first computer I wrote a program on in middle school was a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 Model 1.

[sandorspruit]

I bought an Acorn Electron in school, using money I’d saved. Things got a little out of hand, it eventually controlled my model railroad including security measures similar to real world trains, measured temperatures outside in the winter etc. Still have about half a dozen Acorn computers stashed away in my basement 😂

[vsoch]

That sounds amazing :) Link for reference 👉 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron

[sandorspruit]

It was a ton of fun, main reason I got to study electrical engineering and, later on, computer science.