What was your first ever computer?
Mine: ZX Spectrum 48KB, followed by a quirky Tatung Einstein 64KB.
IBM PC Clone (Boring)
BBC Micro, Acorn Electron or Archimedes
Sinclair ZX80/81
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
DEC PDP
Commador Machine (i.e. VIC20 or 64)
Apple Machine (i.e. Apple II or SE)
Amiga
MSX Based Machine
Atari ST
Tandy TRS 80
Oric
Dragon
Amstrad CPC
Other (too numerous to mention)
What was your first ever computer?
Mine: ZX Spectrum 48KB, followed by a quirky Tatung Einstein 64KB.
surpisingly enough, I got my first computer in 2000 (PC) and started programming in 2001 becuase I read in one of those dumb "How to hack" txt files you get everywhere and it said as one way to hack: "Learn a programming language and write hacking programs", and I can't remember where I heard of C++, i must have heard of it somewhere, so I started it not knowing a thing about programming...all I knew was that C++ was a programming langauge...suddenly everybody has lost respect for me...oh wait, nobody had respect for me in the first place. Damn.
My first computer was a 48k zx spectrum.The one with the horrible rubber keypad. My mate had a BBC model B which had a powerful assembler built right into the basic.I spent many hours at his house learning 6502 asm then I decided to investigate asm on the spectrum. I got hold of an assembler and a couple of books and I wrote some simple games. About this time my school filled a new lab with BBC micros and a couple of 128k BBC masters which were top of the range at the time. These were all linked on a rudimentary network called Econet. I got very interested in the things that I could do across the network in 6502 asm. Eventually I was given a life ban from the computer labs because at the time I was quite immature and did some stupid things like hanging other comps,remote controlling and the thing that was worst viewed was my server interceptor which rerouted everything sent to the file server and dumped it into a textfile. My comp teacher didnt like being totally outwitted and he was very unhappy when he found out what I had been doing as by that time I had intercepted all 3 of his passwords for his accounts.Hence life ban. He never did know asm and could never understand how my programs did as they did but he was silly enough to leave advanced econet programming lying around which gave me all the handshaking info i needed to intercept every command sent across the network.
Free the weed!! Class B to class C is not good enough!!
And the FAQ is here :- http://faq.cprogramming.com/cgi-bin/smartfaq.cgi
Whew my first computer my family got when i was 2, it was in 1982, it was an Apple II GS no hard drisk, if i remember it had 2k memory but we expanded it to 4k, had a 3 1/2 in floppy and a 5 1/4 floppy drives. First game I played was shark hunter, you were on a boat and shot spears and sharks which were swimming around. I think we have a copy of Lotus Works 1.0 for it somewhere, its just sitting in my closet collecting dust. Man those were the days, slow computers and slow printing on a dot matrix printer.
we had a tandy 1000 ex (an ibm pc clone, essentially):
640k (expanded from 256 k)
8.1mhz 8088 processor (cheaper than 8086, and less powerful...)
2 5 1/4 floppy drives (double sided!, 360k)
graphical memory for a cga but not quite enough for a ega... but many games supported the tandy graphics mode
this computer is older than i am... 1983. it still works, but the monitor went bust. (thank god for its tv output ability).
My first computer, although not quite vintage was an IBM PCjr
my fist pc was a Gateway 2000. It was a good ol' 486.
It had:
225 MB hd
8 MB ram
66 mhz processor
2x CD-ROM
1 3-1/2" floppy
1 5-1/4" floppy
Univac.
You young farts with your fancy keyboards, monitors, hard drives. When I learned programming all we had were ones and zeroes, and we didn't have any ones! If'n you didn't know how to flip switches and plug in cables, you were lower than dirt. You were lower than dog crap in the basement. Now you all got your high falutin' Fortran and Cobol, Cee plus plus, Java. If'n I wanted Java I'd go to Juan Valdez! You make me... aaaggghhhh!
Truth is a malleable commodity - Dick Cheney
Not exactly vintage but old by today's standards:
Compaq Presario 9546:
100-MHz Pentium processor
8-MB RAM (upgraded to 24 MB)
1-MB video RAM
1-GB hard drive
Microsoft Windows 95
4x CD-ROM drive
1.44-MB 3.5-in. disk drive
Trio 64V+ or similar video card
ES sound card
14.4-kbps fax+data+voice (19.2 kbps Compaq proprietary) modem
This computer now runs Debian GNU/Linux 2.2rev6. I lived with this powerful system until late 1998.
Salvelinus, you pusillinamous jackass! In my day alll we had was clay tablets and a stylus! We coded in cuneiform! You try coding a videogame while the clay is drying. Not to mention getting slaves to switch the image tablets 24 times a second. Many died in the attempt, but we were coders!
Me hear Babmaloo say he first coder. Uh! Me first coder. Me meet Babmaloo, me beat on head with club. Urg code with pictoglyph. Pictoglyph of buffalo same as #include <iostream>
Today man know nothing!!