What was your first computer?

[Kev_B]

I recently reminisced about my first computer, an Amiga 600 in the mid-90s.

I'm sure you've all had some weird and wonderful systems over the years, but what was the first? What was good (or not so good) about it?

Personally I loved playing Settlers on the Amiga - I was only 8-9, after all - but I didn't enjoy the multiple disks or time needed to install it!

[TonyM]

A Tatung Einstein in 1984 £499.00 Then!

Xtal DOS

256 × 192 resolution, 16 colours

!!

[spgray]

Dragon 32

[MrHalfAsleep]

Einsteins were expensive...

[Bengie]

Just to show how old I am this is it:

Not really, it was a Tandy TRS-80 model 1.  I remember when I first plugged it in and didn't really know what to expect, and it said 'OK' 

so I'm thinking ok what lol - I later went really big and got the 16k expansion.  I did enjoy using the basic language and wrote quite a lot of things.

[Timwilky]

Cannot think which was actually first but all in the late 70s

General Automation mini configured as a programable signal generator that I set up with 999 cycles of a sine wave followed by 1 at double amplitude that was used as the input into an electro hydraulic ram simulating brake application and discovered multiple failures at were then acknlowledged in service but unknown to design.

A PDP11/23 programmed in Fortran  running the RT11 OS. (I still have all my code in the loft) used for data logging.

Since then.

GEC 4082, coding in Fortran, Pascal

Computer Automation naked mini and Scout coding in Fortran and Macro assembler.

DEC VAX in Fortran, Basic+, Macro 32

ComputerVision Cadds4x coding in Fortran. (we actually had the Cadds source so could enhance and bugfix)

Sun Motorola and later Sparc programming in Fortran and then C

I am still writing code 40+ years since my first steps. But these days, C#, Java and C/C++ depending on target platform, support model etc. 

[Michael_JK]

As a child I'd often dig out the old family Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2 and wait for the cassettes to load and crash mid-game.

First console of my generation I had was the SEGA Master System with Alex the Kid built in.

My first PC in the mid-90's was a Compaq ProLinera. It had 8Mb RAM which I later upgraded to 16Mb and felt mind blowingly fast at the time. 😂

[jbrennand]

This was mine, it was fast too !

[Roger_Gooner]

Somewhat off topic but when I worked for Saphir (a firm of fruit and vegetable brokers in Spitalfields) in the mid-1970s I was in a room with a number of all-female comptometer operators processing stock sheets. To my surprise they would operate the machines without looking at the keys. The machines looked like this.

[jbrennand]

Hey Roger... in the early 1970's I took Computer Science "A" level. It was back in the days before electronic calculators had become cheap and available, and so all of the students were issued with one something like that (albeit more "metallic")  to free us from the slide rules and Log tables.

I certainly had to look at the keys 🙂

[SpacePhoenix]

ZX Spectrum +2 which I'm guessing was a 2nd gen Spectrum. Programs were loaded from cassette tapes and took ages to load