Yo, what was your first computer? How old were you, where and how did you get it, what did you do with it, etc.

My first computer was a brand new Commodore Amiga 600 that I got for Christmas in 1992. I was 10. It was glorious. It had 1MB of RAM with a built-in floppy drive (and no hard drive) and was paired with a lovely 14" CRT monitor at a time when most non-PC home computers were connected to TVs with RF modulators. The difference in image quality was immediately apparent when I went to my friends' houses and played on their Amigas.

My parents were convinced because you could do educational-type stuff on it, but really it was a games machine with a keyboard for me - we never had dedicated games consoles. I played the hell out of it for a few years until we got our first Windows 95 PC around 1996.

First computer of my own was a Macbook air (2013 I think) when I was in middle school. Before you ask my age, I've already graduated college with a bachelor's and could be any of your coworkers.

Tldr; daily reminder that y'all are old now

First one I remember was the Commodore 64.

We used to type programs into it from my Dad's books just so we'd have more games to play on it. When it didn't run, my brother and I would have to check the code again line-by-line.

Also, we didn't know how to write to disk, so if someone powered it off that game was gone.

Amiga 500. Best entertainment ever.

Commodore 64, probably around '86 or so. It had a tape drive and games would take like 20 minutes to load. Crazy to think about now.

Later on (probably around 1989 or 1990) I got an Amstrad 8086 PC. IIRC it had maybe 1mb ram (pretty large for the time) and a massive 20mb hard drive. I remember playing games like bubble Bobble, the Sierra adventure games and so on. A few years later I got a 386 DX PC and played a lot of wing Commander and privateer, dune 2, LucasArts games and so on.

Ahhh, memories!

It was an old Wang system

Don't make the obvious joke. Don't make the obvious joke. Don't make the obvious joke.

Also, Apple IIGS. Learned C and 6502 assembly. Now I am a menace.

Speak and spell. Learned to speak and spell.

Sinclair ZX80, built from a kit.

Mine was a Leading Edge Model D, an 8088 PC with 512k of RAM. It was the more expensive model that had a little metal switch on the back that could turn on EGA graphics. My family got it 3rd hand when I was 8 or 9. I mostly used it for making greeting cards and banners (on the tractor feed dot matrix printer) and copying basic programs out of Byte magazine.

Apple 2e I got from my next door neighbor at a garage sale. I spent every moment on the thing until I saved up enough to build myself a 486. After that I was the computer kid so people would give me their old stuff, had a 286 and a 386 that put together from a box of discarded office computer parts. Spent hours sorting through and testing individual RAM chips but was able get it working, I still remember typing up school papers on it and the horrible racket the daisy wheel printer made as it printed my assignments on green and white office paper.

Commodore 128, I was ~10 when we got it

I assume my dad got it at a computer store.

I used it to play games and check my math homework. I thought it was cool af.

Commodore 64 with the datassette cassette tape drive.

Went through the 64 instruction manual, got to basic, typed in

10 PRINT "HELLO"

RUN

Totally thought the damn thing was alive and taking to me.

That ended up kicking off a lifetime of coding and a career is development that in the last few years transitioned into DevOps.

But back then, even before I got my 64, I knew a dude who had one with a 1541 disc drive and with tons of games, so that got me hooked on the system. I spent so much time there before I got mine, playing GI Joe, Jumpman, Transformers, Agent USA, HERO, Montezuma Revenge, IKARI Warriors, etc.

Random memories of back then are fun..

RUN magazine, Byte magazine, Computer Shopper, Video game and computer entertainment... waiting for games to load lol

I think computers were a lot more interesting when they weren't all just windows pcs. Different architectures, different operating systems, interesting emerging technology that was actually exciting and not just higher capacity of this you already have. Local user groups. BBSes.

When I need to binge that nostalgia my goto is https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCVKDG2vK2FHmg4xYrsqnW2Q

TI-99

Ti 99 4/a. Got it for Christmas

That was a fantastic story. There are movie deals made on worse script treatments. Seriously, you could expand it to a book.

Mine was a Tandy TRS 80 in the early 80s, which had both a cartridge slot and an audio cassette drive. Most all the programs I had were bootleg tapes though I don't know where they came from, I'm guessing my father through work.

I can remember a few of the arcade clones, Zaxxon, Pac Man, Donkey Kong with a terrible 8 bit version of in the hall of the mountain king.

The two that stand out were a painting program I learned to glitch by fluttering the reset button while it was doing fills, and an ascii adventure game call Nahga or something similar that felt like the biggest world ever.

One day home sick I was using it and vomited an entire strawberry milk shake on it, it was an all in one unit w built in keyboard, and I messed it up good.

Taking apart and cleaning it was my first experience working on hardware and certianly left an impression in me.

Man I was maybe 3, and my dad brought home lots of weird equipment because of his job. Those big ole beige HPs with the phat CRT monitors.

I don’t remember specifically what computer I got first because there were several. Some of them down the line were pieced together by disassembling other systems, with and without help from pops.

I used it for lots and lots of unsupervised, unrestricted internet browsing. 2000s tor was a wild place. Saw a ton of shit I had no business seeing, talked to people I had no business talking to, did shit I had no business doing. Amassed a bunch of bitcoin very early on, got rid of the pc. KillMeNow.jpg.

I fully built my own customer with all new parts for the first time when I was like 11. Been on customs ever since then.

Mid 80's, Boulder, Colorado. I was 10 Years Old. My Dad worked Graveyard shifts at Coors. He rode a Bicycle to work and back everyday. During his commute, he'd ride right by the Crossroads Mall. One morning, he came accross a ton of electronics and electronic components out in front of the mall, that were there as a result of the Radio Shack burning down the night before. Several employess were sifting through the remains, seeing what was salvageble. Anyways, my Dad was able to nab a Tandy 1000 RGB for $20 (~$500 New), with minor smoke damage. It came with all the bells and whistles. An actual Audio Cassette Recorder for data storage, Joy Stick, and several carted games. The only game I really remember was "Dungeon Explorer". But I did get a few books from the library and learned how to write Basic.

This was a great read. Thanks for sharing your experience of your first computer.

Timex Sinclair 1983 Senior in High School. Mastered the shit out of that thing. Wrote machine language for it.

Some monochrome Mac that I could play Dark Castle on.

Mac LC. The family computer. Tried to "overclock" it as a pre-teen. I was a dumbass. Thing still works. But I credit that little tank for sparking the fire.

It was one of those early Gateway computers that were in a lot of households by the end of the 90s. No clue on the specs, as I was only in elementary school and was only interested in playing CD-ROM demos that came with the computer. But it did spark my interest in computers ever since.

Commodore VIC-20 with a tape drive, modem, and terminal software. My father used it to take distance learning classes from the local community college, learning COBOL of all things, back in 1982. He unfortunately never went anywhere with programming. I used it way more than he did to write my first programs in BASIC. I was 5 years old.

Now I build and run MPLS networks, code in 5 other languages, play lots of video games, etc.

My first computer that was actually mine to do whatever I wanted with was a 286 my dad gave me. I think I must have been 7 or 8 at the time. I mostly used it to play games and write short stories. I remember it had two big floppy drives, a turbo button, and was very noisy.

Radio Shack (Tandy) Color Computer 2.

I was 7, and dad gave me and my brothers a ton of reading we had to finish before we could use it.

It was also the last time he had us read the manual for anything because the first thing we did with it was fire up the BASIC cart and wrote out a program to spit out a never-ending stream of profanity.

Mine was a Sord M5. A rich family friend bought it for me for Christmas out of nowhere.

16KB of RAM. Absolutely nobody I knew had one. Still, it was an introduction to computing that would eventually result in a lifetime of love.

Timex Sinclair 1000; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000

I was in the 8th grade, I think. Z80 processor, 2k RAM, membrane keyboard. I loved programming on it, because it was a totally new experience. I wanted the 16k expansion so badly. I had to use a personal cassette tape recorder to save/load software; I recall having to find the right volume level, and using white-out to mark the volume knob.

I not only learned programming, but diagnostics. I still have fond memories of that $99 computer.

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I first saw one in school, and while the rest of the kids took a turn playing a snake game, I read the instruction card. Hit break, read the program, decided I could do that. Took a summer class (for adults, I was the only kid). Got my own. Programmed a lot. Despite (because of) the limited graphics: 64x16 chars, or 128x48 B&W pixel graphics, there were a lot of games on it, very low barrier to writing your own.

Couple years later got an Atari 800, which is still my favorite computer of all time, and I make retro games or demos for it.

Commodore 64. I had no idea wtf this thing was that my grandparents bought. They got a few cartridges and the 5.25 floppy drive. I put a cartridge in and a game came up. I was hooked. I slowly learned basic and how to use the floppy drive. A few years later, we got a Macintosh Performa 450. That was the first "real" computer I got to learn on. I quickly realized Mac wasn't for me and the next one was a Packard Bell with a 150mhz processor. From there I built my own and never looked back.

I have no idea of the specs on my first computer, it was built from parts in a random case, ran Windows 3.11, and had a CD drive.

I played Myst, The Gene Machine, Math Dodger, and Sim City 2000 on it.

The first computer I had that I remember some specs for was the machine I had around the time Half-Life was released, it was also built from parts, ran a 233mhz AMD cpu had 32MB of ram, 1,6GB HDD and a 16MB GPU (no idea of make or model, dad brought it home after one of his business trips). I remember being quite confused when I saw a PDA with a 233mhz cpu and 32MB ram, felt wrong that a mobile device should be as powerful as my entrie computer, it obviously used a completely different CPU and OS, but damn it, I didn't know ny better.

Thinkpad T60. A relative of mine got it from their employer, IBM, as a decommisioned machine that was only used by said relative. I was 4 years old. I played hours of GTA: San Andreas, then about a year later I installed Ubuntu which sent me down the Linux and C programming rabbit hole. I learned so much. Thank you, kind relative (whom I'll not name, not doxxing myself).

Atari 520ST. I was eight. My father got a good deal on it because one of his co-workers was upgrading to the 1040ST that had just come out. It had a beautiful paper white monochrome monitor that did 640x400 resolution, or I could hook it up to the television and do 320x200 with 512 colors.

IBM PC, circa 1982(?)

Vic 20. I used it to learn basic programing and play games.

I'm 41 years old.

My first experience with a computer was when I was 5 years old, playing Squirm on my granddad's C16 (from tape drive no less!). I got my first own computer - well, own-ish, it was our family's - at 8 when we got a C64, at that time massively futuristic because we had a disk drive!

An old 286 (I think) running MS-DOS. It was a pretty tall tower. Had the CD-ROM drive where you put the disc into a cartridge and then shoved the cartridge into the slot. My first foray into the internet was Prodigy.

eMac, age 7. i concerned myself primarily with clarisworks, making nested folders, and age of empires 2. my siblings and i argued about strategy in age of empires 2 a lot. i think i am the worst rts player of all time.

i was very good at deimos rising and otto matic and was the only one of us who could beat them

My first computer was an old Sinclair ZX81. It was my friends dad's old computer, I got to borrow it over school summer break as they headed to India during the summer. Spent most of that summer learning the basics of BASIC, but you couldn't really do terribly much with it.

I think this was 1982.

Got my own ZX Spectrum 48 couple of years later. Glorious times gaming and programming.

Commodore 64, carried it all the way through college until I could afford an Amiga 500.

commodore 64 with tape drive. later i got 5.25 floppy drive for it, which was the size of C64 itself.

then amiga, which i sold later to get money for my first intel/dos based pc (486dx2), but i regret selling that amiga to this day.

I am 40 years old. I inherited an IBM PS2 Model 70 with a 386 processor from my cousins. I used it to play games like Skyfox, Indiana Jones, and Prince of Persia, create birthday invitations, and write documents in WordPerfect 5.

I still have some commands memorized to uncompress stuff with ARJ.

All I remember is that it ran Windows 3.1 and had a 'Turbo' switch on the front. To this day I have no idea what that did, but was told not to touch it.

Ours was a hand-me-down power Mac, I believe a 6100, I don't remember the exact year but would have been no earlier than '95 or '96, making me about 5, maybe a couple years older.

Didn't have the internet on it at the time but did eventually get it after a couple years.

At some point we managed to turn on a screen reading function and never figured out how to turn it off, and it was on some sort of singsongy voice setting, there was an error that would come up every time we turned on the computer that is still sealed into my brain from hearing the computer sing it who knows how many times

The globalfax software has successfully installed, however, since no fax device control panels were loaded faxing has been disabled

We had a bunch of CDs with demos of various games, I'm pretty sure they were freebies from some magazine we acquired somewhere. In particular I remember having a demo for Bolo, a tank game, a warcraft -like game (maybe actually warcraft, I can't remember) and some sort of point-and click adventure game.

Other than that, we had mostly educational games, a lot of jumpstart type games, widget workshop, adventures with oslo

Around 2001 we eventually got a PC, a Compaq Presario, never really went back to Mac after that, but I do remember that old Mac fondly

First one I ever messed with was a TRS-80. Can’t remember what I did with it, but it was in a box & I figured out how to get it running. First one that was mine was a Commodore 64 on a Christmas morning long ago.

Can’t remember how old I was, but it was before we moved out of that state. That happened in the middle of 6th grade.

The first PC I used was a 400mhz Celeron running windows 95. Can't remember how much RAM, but at some point I upgraded the hard drive and I loved swapping out the GPUs on it for shits and giggles (my dad had multiple GPUs for some reason, two pci, one agp, and I wasn't even 10 yet and couldn't really tell the difference they made in my games, it just made me feel smart which was all that mattered). Mostly played Need for Speed 2 and 3, Age of Empires 2, SimCity 3000, Zoo Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon and some magic school bus edutainment stuff. By the time I got rid of it, it was running windows 2000.

SimCity 4 made me upgrade to a 3200+ AMD Athlon (socket 939, with an ASRock motherboard that supported dual channel memory, wow). Originally it had a 128mb Nvidia MX 4000, but by the end of its life it had 4gb of ram and an Nvidia 9600 GSO. It could play Crysis at 1280x1024@10-15fps with everything on low. At the time I considered that playable. Since I'd already been forced into sharing it with my sister, she took it after I upgraded again and eventually it got sent to Goodwill.

Now I have an old XP machine that belonged to my grandparents (2200 sempron w/ 2gb ram and the old Nvidia MX4000 I had put in it so I could play games at their house) and wish I hadn't let my sister get rid of my Athlon PC because I've been thinking about upgrading that PC to an Athlon.

Macintosh 128k. I don't remember a time when there wasn't a "spare/family" computer in the house. My father also had an Apple 3, and we had various 286/386/Pentium machines by the time I left the house permanently.

There was also an IBM 5110 in the barn that he bought from NYIT for $100.

Mine was the only legit Apple clone.

A Laser 128, a legit clone of the iic.

I was in late middle school/early high school (can’t remember exactly when we got it). My family had a dj business, and in addition to learning BASIC, I put the entire DJ music catalog into an AppleWorks database, played a TON of zork and Bard’s Tale, and attempted to write my own text adventure game in BASIC that was loosely based on Piers Anthony’s world of Xanth. (I read a ton of Piers Anthony as a kid. In hindsight, ick.)

Mine was a MC-10 with a tape drive. We ended up getting a 16K expansion module for it and it was great. Then got a TRS-80 and then a Tandy 1000. Oh those were the days. $800 for a 10MB hard drive module for the Tandy! My dad always made backups of the hard drive on floppy disk because he thought the hard disk was going to stop working if we lost power. Took a while to convince him that it won't lose the stuff on the drive . I unplugged the computer and he lost his mind that we lost everything and yelled. Plugged it in and turned it back on and all the data was there. Never apologized but at least I was right. Lol

First computer I ever used was my family's Gateway with Windows 98, which I mainly used to play educational CD-ROM games. My first personal computer was a Mac Leopard

It wasn't my first computer, but the first that was exclusively mine was a asus eee, I remember it was the smallest laptop I had ever seen, so small that I pretty much exclusively typed one handed. It ran some weird linux distro, I remember I mostly had it running with this tiled app setup rather than a more normal desktop environment.

A Tandy Color Computer 1. I grew up in a small town and my first ‘job’ was hanging out at the local drug store (it had a soda fountain, god Im old) demo’ing the new fangled contraption to local yokels (imagine trying to sell a personal computer to Lyle from Napoleon Dynamite).

The deal was i spent two evenings a week after school giving demos and then I could take the unit home on the weekend.

I got a double hand-me-down laptop (4th child) in 7th grade.

I watched stupid shit on albinoblacksheep, played stupid games on addictinggames, and looked at porn.

A lot of porn.

My grandmother let me use and play a couple of games on her Apple IIe.

But the first computer that was mine was a Windows 3.1 386. I think I remember it had an 80MB hard drive. I played games and eventually found qbasic.exe and wrote lots of toy programs and a couple of very simple games in the QBasic language. I owe a lot to that old 386 machine.

The Fat Mac (512k) my dad bought to run inventory for his store. I was probably 2 or 3 playing games like Count-on-Mac and version of the memory game called, I think, Concentration. I’d also mess around in Mac Paint and later got into Pinball Construction Set.

First computer, I got was via a trade. I was about 12. At the time I knew next to nothing about computers, with desktops being a thing at school (in one room). Something like this in a home… that’s rich people stuff. It ran Windows XP, and was almost certainly a Pentium (don’t know which).

I remember making several trips to transfer the monitor, desktop, and accessories home. That thing was HEAVY, for me back then. It must have been about 3 miles before I carried everything home. I connected everything, booted it up, and everything worked perfectly… Then five minutes later I found out the importance of the internet… optical games worked fine, but no porn… My next purchase would be a USB 2 mobile internet dongle. How else was I going to do all that valuable “research”.

About two years or so later, it wouldn’t turn on (the PC). There wasn’t any shops near me that could fix it, and I thought what would be the harm in opening the side panel, and taking a look. Suffice to say… I made things worse. Can’t recall what I did, but the power supply went bang, thankfully no fire. I ended up throwing the computer out, and selling the accessories and monitor. I didn’t want to own a desktop computer, again for years. That loud bang scared the living hell out of me.

I only later got back into computing, because I was kinda addicted to video games, heard PC gaming was better, and slowly aquired several games from relatives (Crysis, Total War Empire, etc). That computer I purchased, new, with cash I earned from trading with folks/shops (still haggle, to this day). My next computer was AMD, a A6-3600, I think. No graphics card, though I would later haggle for a GTX 960. This computer was where I started to get really interested in IT. I wanted to learn why my old computer bit the dust, and figure out everything I could. It was more than a porn and gaming machine. That computer taught me more than most IT lessons ever did (still can’t believe using Google Search, constituted as a “lesson”).

Vic 20

TRS-80 Color Computer with 4K of memory. (1982)

My first computer was a hand-me-down Toshiba T3100. I was around ten years old at the time, in the late 90's. The portable computer, was way far different from any computer I've seen thus far. It also came with a printer, but I don't think I managed to make it work. The portable computer only had a 20MiB hard drive, and memory that can be measured in kibibytes. Its hard drive has already been reformatted, and had MS-DOS 6.21, Windows 3.11, as well as some DOS‌ games installed in it.

I didn't really bother with the DOS‌ games, but I've had a lot of fun playing Chips Challenge on Windows. However, a huge chunk of time went into me just messing around with QBasic. Later on, when I had programming classes, I installed Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, and Turbo C in there for homework and projects.

It could have lasted far longer but I couldn't resist myself opening it up. I didn't have a lot of trouble opening it up, but had a bit of trouble putting it back together. It didn't survive my prying though, and it got shoved into the storage.

Just recently, a few years ago, I found out that it's a bit of a collector's item, and was even expensive back when it was new. I couldn't have known it at that time, nor would I have cared, but I still regret not taking care of it a bit more.

An IBM PCjr, when I was 4 (I was one of those kids that picked up reading very quickly).

I learned DOS, played King's Quest, and even picked up simple programming in BASIC from a book. Not sure if the book was a pack-in with the computer or if my parents got it for me separate. I didn't learn PC internals until a few years later, although I do vividly recall an ISA-slot 15MB hard drive that was the size of one of today's big video cards.

The first computer I remember using was my dad's IBM PC-XT, but the first computer that was mine was an Apple IIe that my grandfather gave me when he upgraded his own.

I don't remember how old I was, but probably around 9 or 10. I loved that thing, and I used it for all sorts of stuff. I played games, I made cards and banners with Print Shop Pro, I wrote stories and stuff. That thing was great.

The first computer I got regular use out of was an old Apple II (or Apple ][ for the real ones), which I used almost exclusively for playing Zork.

After that, I got some hand-me-down computer from my grandpa when I was about 15. Had a Pentium II, 1 GB of storage, and an whopping 256 MB of RAM. Used it to play Starcraft, chat on IRC, and post on forums back when those were still fun.

(what I now would assume) was a VGA cable.

Not in that era, no. That would have been "MDA", "CGA", or "Hercules", using a 9-pin DE-9 connector. EGA would use the same connector, but that was still a few years after that machine.

VGA uses a DE-15 connector with the same exterior shape and dimensions as the DE-9, but with a third row of pins.

Tandy Model 1 level 2. 2k RAM. Cassette drive.

Uh, well...I grew up in a technologically-backward household. So the tech I grew up with was behind the times, even then.

Examples: in the 1980s/1990s, my household didn't have a basic answering machine, when everyone else did. And our telephone was still the old rented-from-ma-bell rotary phone where you stuck your fingers in the holes and rotated the dial. Modern landline phones in the 90s were NOT rotary, and some were even wireless (the handset talking to the wired receiver on the wall attached to the landline). I think the rotary one we had probably dated to somewhere between the 50s-70s. Everyone else I knew had ordinary buttons on their (landline) phones, we were the only ones I knew with a rotary phone.

We absolutely didn't have a computer. We didn't even use the TV we had, it was banned.

My very first exposure to COMPUTERS was therefore at school. School had the big-floppy (that were actually floppy) type, the 5.25" ones OP mentions, and school also had the ones that used the smaller floppy disks.

But my first exposure to computers-for-fun were neighbor's computers. One neighbor, a grandpa like guy who I think at some point worked trades but was retired (maybe disability), showed me how to make holiday cards on his computer. Like, dot matrix printer type of graphics, very very basic. Thinking back, I vaguely remember the command line, so I think it was a Windows DOS computer we used.

And another friend, a boy 5 years younger than me, had DOS computer at home, so we'd play things like Commander Keen and Lemmings. Since there was no Windows GUI yet, we had to use the command line to launch the game executable. This was like 1993, I think?

I also had a different friend and she had an Apple computer, and I remember King's Quest.

The town library had computers too, and I played Oregon Trail and the first Sim City on it, before these computers had internet on them.

Later, by middle/high school though, the internet was taking off. And I was an 'early adopter' of that because I was a nerd and used it to find other nerds, and I would go to the library and basically do the then-equivalent of social media--individual niche message boards and email groups for my fandoms and interests--before I had a computer of my own. Those were usually Windows 98 or Windows 95 machines. I was even running a message board and website before I had a home computer or my own home internet, using library and the local community college computers to teach myself. It just sucked I couldn't do it at home.

Oh, and most teens used AOL to chat, although MSN and Yahoo messenger apps also had their crowds. And ICQ existed too and was very popular, although more with the nerdy niche-topic crowd.

Finally, at 18 in 2001, I got my own computer, and that was Windows ME (a SONY VAIO) with one of the early flat-screen LCD monitors which was super fancy for the time. A few years later I upgraded it to Windows XP.

But I didn't like that it was a propitiatory type that wasn't easy to upgrade. I was trying to play WoW with friends and doing Wrath-era Naxx would cause my FPS to become utter dogshit because the integrated graphics and the shitty amount of RAM couldn't handle it. It was a joke in the guild, me disconnecting in fights and my DPS being so spiky. So I eventually did away with that first computer because its poor performance would make me gamer-rage, haha. The first computer I BUILT myself in the early 2000s to replace it had an AMD cpu. I don't remember what video card I chose, but ANYTHING was an upgrade over the previous computer, lol. And I got a lot more RAM, upgraded from MBs to GBs.

But anyway, since then I've mainly had desktops I've built myself, although recently I got a backup laptop. It came in unexpectedly useful when I broke my foot and couldn't sit at my desktop without it swelling to high heaven, so while I still prefer a desktop, I give that laptop some grudging respect, lol. It saved my sanity.

The rate of improvement in computers has massively slowed down, it's stabilized, so I'm not as interested in continually upgrading as I used to be. Phones and tablets are the thing that took over in the "rapidly changing" niche...but I have something of a phone-phobia, and as a writer can't write effectively on a tablet, so I'm not much interested in phones and tablets from a tech perspective. They're underpowered and/or expose me to phone convos which I hate and avoid whenever possible.

Acer Aspire, knew all the specs then, can't recall now. Would take the best buy newspaper ads to my wall until parents agreed a year later

My family got a hand-me-down Tandy from one of our relatives. It would've been somewhere between 1992-1994, which was when I was like age 5-7. Looking at photos online, I'm thinking it was a Tandy 1000 SL. They gave us some games with it, but I really don't even remember them. I know my mom bought some educational software for me. I "broke" this one by trying to install one of the games to it, instead of just running it from the floppy disk. It just wouldn't properly boot to the OS (don't even know what OS it was) afterwards. My dad was/is an IT guy but went to school for CS. Using BASIC, he'd program little graphics things for me. Like he did one thing looked like colored laser beams shooting across the screen. Another looked like bubbles floating up.

Our first brand new family PC was purchased in like 1995 (I would've been about 8). It was a Packard Bell. It looked like this. We got Internet (AOL) not long afterwards, which blew my mind, even as a kid. I've basically had Internet access ever since. I once again "broke" this one, again trying to install some software to it that I found online. It stopped booting to Windows. So I didn't touch it for months. My dad is a mainframe and servers guy, so he wasn't much help (even today, he's not great with desktops) But I eventually found the Windows 95 CD that came with the PC and reinstalled Windows myself. In many ways, that was my first step into my current IT career.

My first computer, as in not the family PC, but my own, was in 2005. A high school graduation/going to college present was an HP Pavilion DV4000 series laptop. I specced it somewhat towards gaming, without breaking the bank, even though it was not a gaming laptop by any means. Was good enough that I could play Final Fantasy XI and WoW on it from campus or Starbucks or wherever. Priorities, am I right?

Permanently Deleted

I want to say I was around 16 when I bought my own pc? Pretty sure it had an AMD r9 390

My first computer was my brother's former Apple II+ when my dad got him an Apple IIe as a graduation present. I was only 6 years old (yes, my brother is that much older than me and no he is not my half-brother and yes we were both planned) and it was 1983. My brother gave me a ton of pirated games and I started learning BASIC and then computers got easier and I stopped being interested in programming. And now my brother is a wealthy coder and I'm not. Ah well.

Edit: Also, hooray for all the old people like me in this thread!

My father's laptop. I was like 2 or 3. I pretended to be working. I dropped it onto the floor and broke it.

The first computer the family had was a TI-1000 (don't even remember us having a tape drive for it)

My first, was a Atari 130xe 128 kb with 5-1/4" floppy drive! It was a huge deal.

1993 acer tower computer. I'm not sure of the model. It ran windows 3.1 or maybe it was 3.11. I had nothing but problems with that computer but it gave me the first real ability to look into how a computer was put together. I built my own for years after that.

My introduction to the world of computers was back in the late 80s when my stepdad brought home a Pravetz 8D. It was an 8-bit Oric clone made in Bulgaria. It hooked up to our TV and we had a cassette deck to load/save data. I was 13 or 14 at the time living in Ukraine. Playing games and learning BASIC on it got me interested in coding and started me on the path to a now 30+ year career in IT. Technically it wasn't mine though.

After we emigrated to the USA in the early 90s I went to college to continue studying programming. With my very first paycheck from a part-time job I bought my very own first PC. It was a 486DX2-66 with a ginormous 40 megabyte hard drive.

Windows 95. A Dell I think? It was in our dining room lol. Played a lot of Lego Island and Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver.

This was in the days I didn't know much about computers. I paid $1700 for a new 2017 4K iMac, with 16GB RAM and 1TB HDD. I was about 14.

I now regret that choice. The HDD made things slow and MacOS limited the games I could run. I could've gotten 3x the GPU power and 1.5x the CPU power plus expandability if I just built a PC instead.

I got it because my friend at the time had an iMac, my family and school almost exclusively used Macs, and I've never actually seen a gaming PC at that point. I even had no idea what a GPU was at the time.

Luckily my next computer was one that I did extensive research into and am very satisfied with. It's an Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition. For under $2K, it had a high end CPU, GPU, good battery life for a gaming laptop, and replaceable storage and RAM.

An 8088 compatibile system. It had a NEC v30 CPU which was a full replacement for a real Intel 8088, but clocked at 8Mhz instead of 4.77. I had 640Kb of ram and a CGA video card & monitor. I remember playing Eye Of The Beholder 2 (I had 20mb hard drive) toward the end of its life (after my father bought a mouse, which was novelty) and it was so slow (like 30seconds between movements) that on more difficult combats I had to copy the savegame to a friend 286....

I remember the upgrade to msdos 3.2....

I had both 3.14 and 5.25 floppy drives, but the latter I never really used.

While there were others before it that I don’t really remember, my first computer that truly fell in love with and obsessed over was an Atari 520STE with a Motorola 68000 @ 8MHz 4MB RAM (after market upgrade through a family friend). We didn’t have the monitor but our model had RF output so we could hook it up to whatever TV was free.

My father had a Macintosh Plus at the time which us kids were never allowed to use. To suddenly have unfettered access to an equally powerful computer with dual floppy drives, colour output, joysticks, MIDI input, and an operating system with a GUI was utterly unreal. My father swiftly upgraded to a Macintosh Color Classic and then a Power Macintosh (always trading in so the Atari was in use well into the mid to late 90s).

I learned BASIC, wrote games, composed music, made backups of games and software…(thanks dual floppy drives!), dialled into BBSs, browsed Usenet. It was such a step function up from older computers and in many ways offered a parallel experience to what we have today (Lemmy reminds me a lot of Usenet back in those days).

And when our school got Acorn Archimedes and RISC PCs in the years that followed, I became crazy popular as I ported several games I’d written (clones of Tron, Breakout, Pac-Man, and a very rudimentary clone of Rogue).

I have vague memories of playing a few games on my sibling’s ZX Spectrum but the Atari STE was what truly consumed me and made me the computerphile that I am today.

1 was 18 and bought a Commodore 64 and cassette drive, I played games, Fairlight, Psi Warrior and Elite (my god the hours I spent on elite, I've craved that experience ever since and never quite equalled it. Plus I dabbled with basic programming, quickly moved on to an Atari ST, WOW that was a quantum leap! Then the first PC computer a 386 DX40 and Doom changed my world forever......been a PC gamer ever since

My mom needed a computer for her job. Gateway with Window 95 on it. It ran Tomb Raider at like 5fps and I played the shit out of it.

I got an emachines tower and a bunch of secondhand peripherials. I was thrilled to have my own computer at the time, but in hindsight it didnt really meet any of the system requirements of the games i wanted to play. I remember getting a smooth as gravel 3 fps in Ironforge. Miserable, but i didnt really know any better

A friend of the family built it for us. I think it was '96 or so. I was maybe 13 or 14. I had used computers a little at school and at friends' houses.

It was a pc clone that ran win95. Cyrix p166 cpu (which actually ran at 133 mhz), 16 mb of EDO RAM, 800ish MB hard drive, a 4x cd rom drive and a 33.6k modem. I loved that thing and learned everything I could about how it worked.

We didn't have internet access at first, so I started dialing in to local BBSs. I eventually found a local board running wildcat that shared it's ISDN internet connection to users. And I would download pornographic images and save them to floppy disks to sell at my all boys catholic high school.

I have half expected that computer to come pre installed with Doom (since that was also released on 93). Wouldn't that be swell, though probably hard to find from DOS for a kid. Nevertheless I bet if you saw a folder called Doom, you would likely try to start the shit out of every file in that folder.

Zenith HealthKit z-89 , Dad built it, I played it. He bought me a “intro to basic” book and I never stopped making games for my brother to lose. He figured it out I mapped all choices to eventually lose. those were fun times

In the 2010s my family had a HP Compaq SFF with Windows 7.

A hand me down from my rich uncle, he paid 5k for it back in the late 2000s, but what I vividly remember was the humongus and ridiculously heavy gaming CRT monitor it came with. That monitor was one of the last gaming CRT monitors ever made, the Sony GDM-FW900, it was expensive as hell back then and still is these days. I remember playing for hours and sweating buckets, that thing would output so much heat it was unreal. The table it sat on would get so hot, i had to move the monitor somewhere else to cool it, huge bubbles formed under it. But man the colors were so crisp, the deepest blacks ive ever seen on a screen, OLED has nothing on that old CRT tech, it also had incredible refresh rates. That system was so powerful it could still run late 2010s game on medium, but eventually parts that couldnt be replaced started to fail and the monitor eventually broke, couldnt find anyone able (or willing) to repair it, apparently repairing it was already hard back then. Eventually i saved up and bought myself a very good build for ~1k, dont use it much for games now, mostly for 3D work.

First family computer I used was a TI99 4/a, this was around 1983 or so, with tape deck. Used to type in programs from magazines. I grew up using BBSs, Lan parties, freenet, and shared university accounts when the internet still wasn't publically accessible.

My first computer that was my own I remember well because it was unique, a dual Pentium pro which was the first i686 and that processor line went on to power ASCI red to become the first supercomputer to reach a teraflop. Dual CPUs in consumer hardware was very unique for the time, it was more classed a workstation then a computer.

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My brother's TRS-80 CoCo in 1983, at least until I got a TI-99/4A of my own the next year. But the real fun didn't get going until I got the 32k expansion cartridge and started assembly language. Now 40 years later and a degree and career in CIS...

1985 when I got to use the new computer. I was about 6 years old. Royal Alphatronic A60 PC. It's in my basement right now!

A PC running MS-DOS, 133 MHz. Mostly some text writing and a few games. It was my father computer.

386SX 33mhz overclocked to 40mhz 4mb ram 650mb hd Cirrus Logic VGA card Windows 3.1 No sound card or modem.

In 1998.

IBM 286 with that sweet CGA video adapter

Vic20. When I was 8 or so. It was a handmedown from my uncle. I remember writing some very basic basic while poking through the manual and playing cartridge and tape games on it. Good times!

Mine had 500 MHz AMD K6-2 processor + 256 MB RAM + Windows 98.

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Commodore 64 in the school computer lab. Huge floppy disks. They only let us use them for typing class, I don't think it was even connected to anything else. Good times.

First PC my house got (the family PC) was an IBM Aptiva. I'd eventually upgrade the OS (from Win95 to Win98), upgrade the RAM (I think to 64MB), and upgraded the modem (from 33.6 to 56k).

Used that machine for years.

A laptop in 2007. I don't remember the details. I believe it had 2GB RAM, since that was the main metric for bragging about computational power back then.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K in the early 1980s when I was 17. My parents agreed to buy it and I used to device to learn about computers, which I was curious about as I had played a bit with the Apple IIe and the Sinclair ZX-81 of some classmates.

1995, I was 4. Can't remember specs, but it ran win95. I had some preschool games like The Playroom and Math/Reading Blaster, which were pretty sweet. And Rugrats adventure game, which started my affinity for point-and-clicks. Aside from that I would just think of cool animals or other shit I wanted to know about and looked it up on Encarta. The fun lasted until shortly after we got the internet in 99, I had to build a new PC to get more frames in flash games on the Nickelodeon website and with bonzibuddy

First computer I toyed on was a friend's TRS80. The first one I owned was an Apple2e, circa late 1983 or 84 iirc

Mine was an aquamarine blue iMac G3 (the see-through, cathode ray one), which was already quite outdated at that point. My father got me it from work, they were getting rid of old machines.

I used it mainly for music, my brother shared his huge music library over Bonjour inside iTunes, some basic games like chess and sudoku. I remember him teaching me to use Gimp and Seashore and some basic coding in Smultron. It barely ran YouTube, which I remember vividly because I would play videos via Miro, and trying in Safari or Firefox could straight-up freeze the computer. I must have been 7 or 8 at that point.

My family got a shiny new computer for Christmas, the latest and greatest! Apple ][e with the Motorola 6502 processor and extended memory up to 128K. Color monitor high res to support 232 characters per line. It included 2 x 5.25” floppy drives and a dot matrix tractor feed printer. We even had a 300 baud modem.

I wrote my first game, downloaded stuff from remote sites, pulled my first all-nighter writing a paper, and helped my Math teacher when she couldn’t figure out something in the Computer Class she taught

IBM 386 played so much Counter Strike and starcraft on that bad boy

Also as far as picking, summer break at college dorms of prestigious universities are a fuckin goldmine

The first computer I used was (I think) a CP/M system that could run BASIC, and I used to use it to play Castle in the early '90s.

The first computer of my own was a Gateway laptop for college in 2002. It was the first Wi-Fi device I laid hands on. I immediately set it up to play music to wake me up in the morning, and I listened to the fans running all night.

Not the first I owned, but the first I used.

Back in 1990 I was 9 years old and my mom enrolled me in a computer class. By this time, the closest I had been to using a computer was playing my Atari 2600 and my NES. I don't remember what brand the computers at the lab where I took this class were, but I do remember my teacher (a young man, probably around 20) said they didn't have a hard drive, so in order to boot them up we had to load up MS-DOS with a 5 1/4 inch floppy. The monitors had green monochrome displays and sat on top of the actual PC which was placed horizontally, no mouse, just the keyboard and all this hardware was beige. I learned how to use all kinds of text commands to create/rename/delete directories and text files. The most fun thing I learned was how to use a program called Banner Mania to design and print banners on the dot matrix printers.

Amstrad PPC 640... I was in grade 8 and I saved up the $1000 myself.

I certainly enjoyed reading this. Kind of a time machine, I can picture everything you described.

We're the same age. Iirc my dad bought his 486 around 10 when the 286 became mine. Before that he booted into a menu app to separate our stuff. Think I broke through that by 7. This is why my kid will never be left alone with an unmonitored computer lol

Dell Inspiron M5040 my mom got me, possibly from QVC, probably so I could play Minecraft. Must've been around 12 years old. Loved that thing.

A zx spectrum 48k when I was maybe 5 or 6 years old.

It was an unwanted wedding present. One of my dad's mates was trying to give it away and my dad took it and gave it to me.

I played games on it, before learning basic and starting to make my own games. Probably the reason I'm a programmer today.

I remember the first games I played on it: jumping jack, death stalker, ninja massacre, rambo, green beret...

After that I had a load of cast off systems from various family and friends. Spectrum +2, +3, QL, Amstrad CPC 6128, eventually a compaq 486 (with a dx4 fitted!).

RCA cdp1802 based system. 10 switches for binary input. 2 hex digits for output. A massive 256 bytes of memory which I never managed to fill. No OS or permanent storage. Circa 1975.

TRS 80. Straight to tv plug in console was the first. After that was a 286 that cost over $5000 that my father had to purchase through a computer purchase program at his work to be able to afford. Took him years to pay it off.

My first computer was some random 286 with CGA graphics. It was 1994-1995 and I was a little younger than you maybe 7 or 8 and I didn't find it in the trash but my dad did. It had DOS and some GUI you could launch on top of it. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was but doing research I think it was Norton desktop. I knew enough to poke around the directories and found a gaming one that was stuffed to the gills. Most of the games didn't impress me as I'd seen graphics with more than four colors by this point but I got absolutely sucked into Elite and Gauntlet was pretty fun too.

There was a big push at the time for us to type everything up in school because computers were the future. We had a much nicer family computer with windows 3.11 and a 386 or 486 that I mainly used but would get kicked off when my parents were on call for work and had to remote in to fix something. I used my pc to type up my papers and transferred them over to the family pc for printing via floppy.

A few years later my dad and I pretty much rebuilt the trash pc with hand me downs from the family pc plus a few upgrade parts and got it running windows 95. I remember playing a ton of games on it in that form. Heroes of might and magic 3, warcraft, starcraft, diablo, baulder's gate, wing commander etc. The best was some weekends we'd roll an ethernet cable down the hallway and hook up the two pcs and my dad and I would play games together.

I used it in its windows 95 form all through high school in 2005. It never had internet as my mom wouldn't let me keep the lan cable permanently installed in the hallway but I played a ton of games and wrote every paper on it. Not sure what happened to it but it was by far my most heavily used PC and I was so happy to have it as no one I knew had their own PC just family PCs.

Great times.

First one I remember was a beige tower and similarly beige CRT my dad brought home from his office since he bought a new tower. It ran Windows XP, but barely. Spent a lot of time on homestarrunner.com, addicting games.com, and other flash game sites since I had no money for actual games and I already beat all the games on my Gameboy.

do any of y'all remember the colorful dell laptops from that commercial from the "lollipop" song? I'm pretty sure that was the model of my first laptop. I had a red one. it's in my closet soemwhere I think

A Commodore 128D(CR) that my family bought in probably late '86 or '87. It was our main PC, that I played all the SSI Goldbox games on, and had a 1200 Baud Modem, which I used to access local BBS all through High school. Later after going college, I finally got to build my own PC, a AMD 486DX2 80Mhz 12MB Mem, 600MB HD. I still own both of these, and many of the other PCs mentioned here, in my basement Antique Computer collection.

No idea what the brand of computer it was, but it was beige and had Windows NT on it, complete with one of those legendary loud mechanical keyboards and ... the big beige ViewSonic CRT with the 3 birbs logo. It was a computer for work that my pops got some years after the Apartheid ended and there were also loads of 90s PC gaming goodness - SimCity 2000, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, XCom Enemy Unknown and Apoccalypse, Jagged Alliance 2, etc. No internet or graphics to speak of, so no way in hell this computer was going to run Half-Life 1, Unreal Tournament or even Quake.

Oh and good old MS Paint.

Though at times I did get to go to my pops' workplace and experience the Internet and all these Flash games.

Macintosh LC II, also known as the "Pizza Box" computers. I think it came with HyperCard, which let me get started with programming. I was a little kid so I didn't have a clue what I as doing, but I was able to finagle it into doing some very simple things. My parents had a rule: 10 minutes of "All The Right Type", a typing tutorial software, before we could use it.

Dell Inspiron 15 3000

Apple II GS that I got used in 1989.

Some old Acer or Asus hand me down from my uncle.
Cracked Cinema4D and tried that out.
Worked kinda.

Are we talking first computer in your household, or first computer you ever bought yourself?

Our first family PC was a hand me down from my uncle that we got when I was 12 or 13. 486DX2 66MHz processor, a couple MBs of RAM, 700-ish megabyte hard drive, Windows 3.1 and DOS. AOL install disks didn't work on it because they needed at least Windows 95, and I was still clueless on how to set up a modem connection in 3.1. So it was entirely for games installed via disc only. We ended up getting a Windows 98 machine a year or two down the line.

First PC I bought for myself was a custom built machine from a computer shop that has long since gone out of business. I think I paid around $200 for it, so it was a fairly basic PC for 2004. Athlon 1.5 GHz CPU (with a loud as fuck cooler fan), 512 MB RAM, a video card that I forgot the make and model of, Windows XP. Lasted me about 3 years until I built one myself.

Hewlett-Packard, sub 100mhz, 5.25” floppy AND a 3.5” (I know, right?😎)

It was running windows 3.11. I think I was… 11?

My first computer was an Oric-1, and I typed a little bit of BASIC on it, and even managed to save to a cassette tape! (never managed to reload what I saved though lol) This first computer was traded to me by a friend for I don't remember what, but it made me interrested into computers for sure!

Next, with that same friend, I traded again and got an Atari 520 STE, that's where the story really begins! I was about 14 at the time. Since then, I stopped leaving my room, and started to read a 500+ pages book about GFA basic. I have so good memories about the things I could do with that computer, even to nowadays standards, it's the best computer ever! I remember I had a 30Mb hard drive in SCSI, and some accessories. It's still at my parent's house. I miss it.

386dx40 with 5MB ram and 42MB hard drive.

My first computer is like 17 years old and it's still in daily use. It is a custom build gaming rig that I paid like 1k€ for back in the day. It has since been upgraded with more RAM, SSD, and has a brand new GPU aswell. I may need to invest in a new CPU soon too as my core2quad is really starting to show it's age now. The main issue however is the RAM as it only supports DDR2 and finding compatible 4Gb sticks was really hard and out of the 4 one seems to be faulty and makes it crash so I only have 3 of them in use. After I upgrade the motherboard aswell I don't consider it the same computer anymore as it has almost none of the original parts.

IBM Aptiva 100 mhz Pentium 1 4 mb RAM 28k modem 4x CD ROM 3.5 in floppy drive 1 gb hard disk Win 3.1 / OS2

Home job out of parts, put together by my tech uncle and given to me when I was maybe 8. Had windows 2000 and was loaded with basically every emulator of the time up to and not including anything 3d. Load of hentai ROM hacks and dating Sims he didn't know where in there too lmao