What was your very first computer?

[AdamRosauio]

The only thing I can remember is that it was a 386 probably in the early 90's.

 

Did any of you used Autocad and 3ds Max on DOS? I did

 

In school I learn with R12 which I believe was DOS, then my first internship was working with R11 and a digitizer, ah fun times.

[Tommy L]

Amstrad 128. Awesome. Most awesome was a game called 'Daley Thompson Supertest'. Involved hammering keys and wiggling joystick super fast.

[Stephen Thomas]

Amstrad 128. Awesome. Most awesome was a game called 'Daley Thompson Supertest'. Involved hammering keys and wiggling joystick super fast.

 

Ahh, the amount of joysticks I wore out playing Daley Thompson. I actually wore the print off the rubber keys on my Spectrum too! My brother and I had to do the 800m in a kind of relay which involved skillfully taking over the keyboard from each other mid-race once your hands started to cramp up without losing too much speed, haha.

[Tommy L]

Ahh, the amount of joysticks I wore out playing Daley Thompson. I actually wore the print off the rubber keys on my Spectrum too! My brother and I had to do the 800m in a kind of relay which involved skillfully taking over the keyboard from each other mid-race once your hands started to cramp up without losing too much speed, haha.

 

Same tactic. Problem was my brother is two years older than me so he way way better. So when he passed it onto me we always took a beating. Then he'd give me a beating.

[Scott Schroeder]

Apple IIe. Number Munchers is the reason I don't need to use my fingers and toes anymore to do simple math.

[jfgiroux]

My first computer was a TRS-80 coco1 that my dad bought at radio-shack some 25 years ago or so. You add to plug a tape/cassette recorder to make the simplest thing work, remember the time before floppy disks?. I remember spending day to code what was to be a kickass game, just to find out that it was just a bunch on Xs an Os running around.

[Ernest Burden III]

zx81...

 

One of my first pro jobs was doing a drawing of the Sinclair for a company that published games for it.

[AubreyM]

The first computer I bought was an HP, 256k ram, dual 5 1/4 floppies, amber screen and a 40 mb HD. They said I was crazy as I would never fill 40 mb. I had that computer up until about 15 years ago and I never did come close to filling it. I was addicted to Zork if anyone remembers that game.

I mostly used it to learn programming and do word processing. Had i not stored it in a damp basement and got rid of it I am willing to bet it would still run.

[Daniel]

The first computer I used probably was an robotron KC 85 or 87 in school. But the first family computer was actually an ATARI 130 XE (it had 128 kB RAM) with a Datasette (so software was loaded/saved sloooooow from/to normal audio tapes) in the late 80s.

Image copyright: Multicherry [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL ("]www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

I played with that thing a lot but it was also the one I wrote my first lines of software on using BASIC.

It was followed years later by a real PC with an i386 DX-40 processor and I still remember buying that math co-processor from a classmate when I got into rendering with POVRay. Then there was this copy of 3D-Studio DOS R4 ... and here I am writing plug-ins for 3ds max 2013 and need to get a new PC once again because 3 GB of RAM aren't cutting it anymore to write PSB files above 2 GB :-)

 

Daniel Schmidt,

Developer of psd-manager

[tmacbriar]

Apple IIe with an external hard drive. That was 1982 and took it overseas where my wife used it for word processing. My engineering office had no computers at that time so we designed everything with HP calculators, (hey you could calculate square roots... cutting edge!)

[Jon Berntsen]

My first computer was an Amiga 500 with 1 mb ram. I had a lot fun with Sim City and Deluxe Paint. Btw surpised apparently nobody else had an Amiga, as it was great for music and graphics =)

[ronll]

Texas Instruments TI44a. TV as monitor, cassette tape as storage. Wrote my own programs in Basic. Seems like that had to be in 1982 or '83.

 

Correction: it was a TI99-4a

Edited June 19, 2012 by ronll

[Ernest Burden III]

What was the very first computer you ever used...

 

Do I have the title to earliest use at 1973?

[Dan J]

I was just going to say- what about 1976?

My Dad built his first in 1976 in our basement and it was the size of a refrigerator. He built his own circuit boards with a uric acid solution- stunk like hell. He used punch cards for an i/o device and a monitor/keyboard for some of programming. At 12 yrs old, it was way over my head.

[Fran]

I used my dad's TRS-80 to type my college papers, which wasn't often. He had to show me how to turn it on whenever I needed to use it. When I started my first job at an architectural firm, they aimed me at their cad station (IBM 286), and I was a little worried, since I still didn't have that "on/off" thing down pat.

[deC9r]

I got a 386 with windows 3.11. Painting with paint was really nice

[Bruce Hart]

The first copy of AutoCAD I used could actually be run off a 5.1/4 inch floppy disk (holds 1.2Mb). It took about 2 hours to generate a hidden line view of St Pauls Cathedral (on a 286 with maths co-pro)