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[dominique355]

My first home computer was a Sirius Victor with 2  5 1/2 inch floppy drives. 32 KB RAM.  It came with 2 OS on floppy, PC DOS and another, I think something like CPM86, not sure, too long ago.

I learned a lot, especially programming in Basic86.

Then I switched to IBM PC, also 5 1/2 inch floppy. Harddisks were too expensive, 1  MB for 1,000 Swiss francs! Imagine!

[USNret]

As google ads on my browser display "Get 1 terabyte of online storage -- free trial".  Back in the day, we were happy with 16K RAM, and a dual-floppy drive (so you didn't have to keep swapping the OS floppy & data floppy in & out.)

I think I had some kinda Zenith; all I remember is that the operating system was CP/M.  I found a very expensive word processing program for it, maybe $200, and used this on the Navy ship in Japan where I was stationed.  As far as I know, I was the only one on the ship with an actual computerized word processor.  The admin staff was lucky to have IBM Selectric typewriters with correction tape.

Some of your recollections brought tears to my eyes of happy memories, and amazement of how far we've come in our lifetime. We truly have a bunch of crusty old bastards on this forum.

[T_Dog]

For me... A Z80 followed by an AIM 65.    Nothing like running that code through the cassette recorder twice to run the assembler.

[Thighlander]

HP Vectra 286  8 mhz.  640 k   40 mb hd

[cdnvic]

Vic 20 at home, Apple II at school.

[dionys]

bino, on Yesterday, 00:09 , said:

macintosh.jpg

Ditto for me

[Javabear]

I had an Atari 800.  Played hours of Dig-dug on it.

[luciferbkk]

I know that I had a small home computer ( more like a toy actually) the brand and model I can't remember before I got my first C64.  It must have been in 1979 or so. My C64, never got a C128, used a tape recorder for storing programs and I think it used a 51/4 floppy disk later on. I then upgraded to various Intel processors starting with 8068 ( 4.7 Mhz?), 8088, 80286, 80386. I got my first HDD with 10 MB capacity which was a great improvement. I had green and amber monitors at the time. I also remember using a so-called mainframe in officer's school in 1980?. It was an IBM 360 with a whopping 64 kB Ram and it used punch cards as input. It filled up a whole room and needed air conditioning in the room so it wouldn't overheat. You needed a computer technician to use that thing and give him your punch cards to feed the monster. You got them back with a printout a day later more often than not saying there was a syntax error or other flaws and you had to start all over again.  It was so much fun!

[canuckamuck]

Well I guess it was a TRS-80 model II, because I don't think the Atari setup that played pong counts. My most memorable purchase was picking up a 486 with  60MB hard disk and  4mb ram for $5400.00. (yep it was leading edge and I thought I needed it). It was a doorstop within a year.

[grahamhc]

My first home computer  was a Sanyo with 2 x 5.25' floppies, one for the program and one which stored the data. It ran on CPM I recall. Bought it from Morgan Comuters in London "Reduced from £1,500 to £199" and used it to produce a club newsletter and membership details.

Next was an AST 286 workstation and monitor bought at an auction, not realising it had no hard HDD or OS. Paid £245 for a 40 Mb IDE HDD.

[Phil Conners]

Does this count?



TI59, late seventies.  Programmable in a sort of assembler language.  With the attached printer it was almost like a real computer

Othewise my first was a ZX80 in the early eightees, followed by a Commodore 64, IBM-PC (the original 8088 with a whopping 96KB RAM and two 360K 5.25" floppy drives and monochrome screen).   After a year with that I landed my first computer job as COBOL programmer on ICL 2900 mainframes, initially running DME (think paper card readers for program control) for a large corporation.  Oh yes, those days you could get a job in IT if you could spell I-B-M.



Those "washing machines" held huge 12" disk platters with a capacity of about a hundred MB each.  I think our total online capacity at the time was 900 MB as I recall "almost a gigabyte, wow".  It was so futuristic, like working in Star Trek.  Ah yes, nostalgia

Sorry if that got a little off-topic, obviously this wasn't my home computer

[NomadJoe]

[eeeya]

JSixpack, on 2012-05-25 22:21:49, said:

No time or money for game machines. The Kaypro II could run Wordstar and a Pascal compiler as well. W/ a 300 baud modem to connect to the Uni, got good use out of it. Eat your hearts out, Osborn I owners.

How far we've come.


kayproii.jpg

Kaypro II Released: 1982 Price: US $1595. Weight: 26 lbs CPU: Zilog Z80, 2.5 MHz RAM: 64K Display: 9" green phosphor screen. 24 X 80 text only Ports: Serial port Parallel port Storage: Two internal 5-1/4" SS-DD 195K drives OS: CP/M, SBASIC

We had a Kaypro II as well when i was growing up. My parents bought it to type there PHDs on it for university. Dad become such a good touch typer he used to spend weeks typing computer game programs out of a book he bought into BASIC..that were thousands of lines long

after that we had IBMs starting from an 8088 chipset throuht to 4 colour CGA, EGA, VGA... dot matrix computers, 1200 baud modems which i would connect to bullitin boards advertised in dads computer magazines..

we had so much computer stuff at our house and then dad retired and never touched a computer again...

he doesnt even know what you tube is.. he thinks its got viruses!!!

[Heng]

Texas Instruments TI-99-4a when I was 8 or 9.   Used a state of the art (at that time) tape recorder to load programs.   Average loading time was 10-20 minutes.  

:-)

[bendejo]

Coleco Adam.
I was trying to scrape up money for an electric typewriter and came across one at a garage sale for $50. 1985 I think.  No monitor, used a little b&w tv set.  Had a cassette drive for storage, took forever going backward and forward, just like the mainframe tape drives you saw in the movies.  Taught myself BASIC.

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