Comments (22)

1. My first computer was the fabled TI-99/4A. I remember combing the electronic stores for the extended basic and speech synthesizer addons and spending a full year creating talking games. After that came our first PC, a “portable” Panasonic Senior Partner with built in thermal printer that weighed something like 30 pounds!

   posted by David on 12-11-2008 at 5:13 pm

2. My parents bought an Apple IIe in 83 or 84 so we had a computer waaaaaaaaay before anyone else I knew had one. I remember not only did it use floppy disks, they really were Floppy floppy disks AND to do anything on the computer, you had to put two disks in the thing.

   posted by Jen on 12-11-2008 at 5:21 pm

3. The first computer I remember using was a Commodore 64 (with a smokin’ fast 300 baud modem!). My mom’s friend worked over at the rich kids school and I would get to play educational games on it when we went over to help with projects after hours.

   I learned BASIC on an old Atari 800XL (which I still have) that was given to us once it became obsolete to the original owner. I also had access to an old trash 80 about that time…

   I actually got a job at Radio Schmuck when I was old enough to work just so I could tinker with the IBM clones after business hours. I didn’t actually own a computer until much later in life.

   The oldest computer I have that’s still somewhat useful is an old TSR-80 Model 200. However, I can afford to buy the nicer toys now…

   posted by Jason! on 12-11-2008 at 5:29 pm

4. I once had to use a Wang Office Assistant. It even made an electronic “clacking” noise when you hit the keys. I dunno, in case you were nostalgic for manual typewriters.

   posted by kscott on 12-11-2008 at 7:02 pm

5. I’m sorry, but the above ad does not make me want to buy a TI 99/2. It makes me want to buy pudding…

   posted by Jason! on 12-11-2008 at 7:04 pm

6. I bought my first computer in 1979. It was an Apple 2+ and it cost me a whopping $1200. It had 4k in memory and you could get programs for it on cassettes. You used a tape player connected up to a jack on the machine and ‘loaded’ the program. It required the tape player to have the exact volume for it to work, which never happened. No monitor, just connect to a TV. I was very proud of that computer. It was faster than a ‘Trash 80′. (TSR 80)

   Then I bought a Apple 2C. It had a very small monitor and a floppy drive and had 128k memory. WOW!

   posted by Owen on 12-11-2008 at 7:47 pm

7. Oh my. We had early Commodores and Ataris… I;m talking about Atari 400 with the bubble keyboard that looked like a McDonald’s cash register, 800 next and the 3200 after that. We had programs on cassettes and the big ol floppies. Eventually we got an early Apple (11c or e?). My mom was involved in BBS community long before the internet (or even Compuserve). Living in NY at the time I remember taking a trip into the city just to look through a window to see the very first MAC when it premiered. Basically all my friends were jealous because they had crappy pacman on their Atari 2600 and I had what looked like arcade quality Ms Pac-Man, Donkey Kong & Pole Position. Ah, nostalgia!!

   recaptcha: roots pretend

   posted by polaroidgirl on 12-11-2008 at 8:10 pm

8. My first computer was a Tandy 1000EX that I got for Christmas in 1987. It came with 512K (yes, kilobytes) of memory. I remember when my Dad upgraded the hard drive to 640K. I also remember playing games on it and having to switch out the 5 1/4 floppies every so often. It finally died after 10 years(!) of reliability. Oh, and we also had an Epson dot matrix printer. Complete with the fan-fold paper and the holey edges you had to rip off. Good times, good times. :-D

   posted by Amy D on 12-11-2008 at 8:15 pm

9. I had a Timex/Sinclair computer… 4KB of RAM, black-and-white only. It had a rather large add-on that I believe was 16KB of memory. In fact, I picked it up from my folks’ house earlier this year. I wonder if it still works?

   While I never had a Vic-20, I did go the Commodore 64 route with the tape drive, then the diskette drive after I saved up for it. It’s funny to remember playing a game like Zork, where you had to wait a few seconds after each typed response for the computer to access the diskette, find a response, and send it to screen.

   posted by Sandy on 12-11-2008 at 8:47 pm

10. I ran IBM 1401 card readers with keypunched cards (I was a keypunch operator before I was a computer operator). I also ran an IBM 360 with a data phone that was used as a modem when the receiver was placed in a rubber donut. There were MAI tape drives with the big reel-to-reel tapes that stored all the billing information for the phone company. That’s when it was Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, before it became Pacific Bell, then SBC (for Southern Bell), Cingular and now ATT.

    posted by Adrienne Kristine on 12-12-2008 at 2:31 am

11. My mom bought a TI-100 calculator in the late 70s for averaging grades (she was a middle school math teacher). She showed it to us four kids, let each of us push a couple of buttons, and after that we were NOT ALLOWED TO TOUCH IT!!!

    Because it cost $100!

    posted by So calculating on 12-12-2008 at 8:33 am

12. I remember when I was a kid and we had some computer system my uncle gave my dad. I have no clue what it was but to get it to work any programs you had to put in pages and pages of code. I think the program I wanted to try was 30 pages of code. I thought it was a gaming program. I spent hours and hours of time typing in the code and double checking myself. (I couldn’t even read at the time) And finally I put in the final word. The program was two guys on a seesaw. The only thing you could do was change it’s color. I was not amused.

    posted by Nathan on 12-12-2008 at 10:36 am

13. That is hysterical. We were just talking to our kids about old computers last night and how the originals took up an entire building! We were way ahead of the curve too when I was a kid, I think we got our first Apple in 77 or 78. Does anyone remember that Olympic Decathlon Game?

    posted by Sagey on 12-12-2008 at 11:04 am

14. I had an Apple IIgs was back in the mid 80s. It was high-tech, top-of-the-line. I used to play all those old Sierra games…

    and I had AppleLink, which became AmericaOnline. It was awesome to dial in (2400bps) and post on message boards and chat. I had NO IDEA how big that would become, but I was hooked from the beginning. (Oh, not to mention that when it got a busy signal, it called a different number… sometimes not a local one. My parents were less than thrilled with THOSE phone bills)

    Recaptcha: an oddly poetic ‘circling clock’

    posted by Josh on 12-12-2008 at 11:20 am

15. My Dad worked for Texas Instruments, so when they got out of the home computer business, he picked up every piece of peripheral equipment (floppy drive, memory expansion, RS-232 interface) that existed for a TI 99-4A, plus pretty much every program ever released for it (and a bunch that never were), plus every book that taught you how to program the thing. I did some low level programming, lost interest, and added a TV tuner to the color monitor and watched TV on it.

    posted by Anthony on 12-12-2008 at 1:06 pm

16. I have two IBM PC-XTs, recovered from other folks’ trash. They take so long to complete the POST that at first I thought they were dead. These cost about $5000 in 1983 dollars (quality stuff) and just might still be running when I can recover quad cores from the trash to replace them…

    posted by Michelle on 12-12-2008 at 4:57 pm

17. A TRS-80 (”Trash 80″) with twin 8″ floppy drives, playing Infocom’s “Zork” – where you have to pick up the lamp and light it before being eaten by a Grue!

    posted by John on 12-12-2008 at 6:22 pm

18. Beyond early video game systems, my first exposure to a computer-ish thing didn’t come until the Brother word processor that my parents bought me for Christmas back in 1991 for my final semester of undergrad schooling and grad school. That was also the year that one of my roomies had an Apple IIE on which I played a whole lot of Wizardry and some outer space smuggler game….

    posted by Steve on 12-13-2008 at 8:14 am

19. I was somewhere between 5-6 when I got my hands on a VIC 20. I’ve later had a C-64 and then an Atari 65XE. That was my main source of games which were copied from code in COMPUTE! Magazine. I used a tape drive mostly since cassettes were more readily available than diskettes.

    posted by D. Allen on 12-13-2008 at 11:39 pm

20. I’m loving this comments section! Our first computer was an Apple IIe. Sagey, above, mentions the Olympics decathlon game. It was AWESOME! Whenever the Summer Olympics roll around, I flash back to days in front of the old Apple trying to make the stick figure run really fast across the screen by pressing two buttons, then hitting the space bar to make it jump. When I think about what games are like nowadays compared to that, it blows my mind.

    posted by Shasta on 12-15-2008 at 1:21 pm

21. Shasta — we had that game for the PC! Decathlon. Crazy. In my memory, the stick figure was *amazingly* well animated. I wonder what I’d think if I saw it today. :)

    posted by Chris Higgins on 12-15-2008 at 1:31 pm

22. My first computer was an Apple ][ plus — I still have it, though I doubt that it will boot up from its 2 system floppy disks. I had learned Basic on Commodore Pet 2000 computers (with tape drives for saving your work — conventional cassette tapes were the media!) back in high school (early 80’s).

    I also remember programming in Basic on an old Sinclair PC. 100k of RAM. Basically (so to speak), your code had to fit on the visible screen — anything that scrolled off the top was lost forever…

    Even earlier than that, I took beginner Basic lessons at the Lawrence Hall Of Science in Berkeley after school when I was in grade school. We used teletype machines that were connected to a mainframe. We saved and loaded our code from paper tape — kind of like punch cards Jack Kerouac style. I even remember when LHS got a few of the very first touch-screen computer terminals — I think they were called “Xeno” or something.

    Ah, the good, old days…

    posted by Paul on 12-15-2008 at 7:31 pm

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