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What was your first computer?

Kev_B
Community Manager (Retired)
Community Manager (Retired)

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!

Kev

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I find nostalgia to be heightened the older I get. Those good old days back in the '70s and '80s working on multiple mainframe OSs (IBM TV, ICL George II and George III, Univac Exec 8, ICL VME/B) using punched card input and PCs running MS-DOS.

Edit: for some weird reason IBM three six zero appears as IBM TV.

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Tudor
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

IBM 370 seems ok!


Tudor
There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don't and F people out of 10 who do not understand hexadecimal c1a2a285948293859940d9a49385a2


@MrHalfAsleep wrote:

@Sololobo wrote:

For those with a short memory 🤔 see this thread: https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Your-First-Computer/m-p/2193392


My nostalgia is slightly different in that thread... and the last post was over 5 years ago!


My nostalgia is different too, or my memory has improved from 5 years ago, in that I've now remembered I also had (have) a Dragon 32 computer with lots of game tapes. No tape deck to try it out with, though that's something I may look into.




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dannylau
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Very Insightful Person

The dragon 32 was always a bit of a niche computer compared with the Spectrum and the commodore 64, but from what I remember a nice piece of kit especially if you like green 

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nodrogd
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I started with a ZX81 with the extended 16k RAM pack. It was an absolute pain. A slight movement of the edge connector & it used to crash.

I also remember the computer studies classes at school. We had one teletype terminal with an acoustic coupler that we could hook up to Hatfield Polytechnic’s computer. Small programs in BASIC (& it was just that, basic) were very time consuming & invariably resulted in many SYNTAX ERRORS.

My first proper desktop was from Time Computers. Windows 98, 500Mhz processor, 64 meg RAM & an 8GB hard drive. That was 20 years ago now.

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'My first proper desktop was from Time Computers. Windows 98, 500Mhz processor, 64 meg RAM & an 8GB hard drive. That was 20 years ago now'

seems pathetic now. i remember going on a 10 day windows 3.1 course. i already had 3.1 at home so was forced to endure a whole morning of turning the computer on and login training at work. 

dannylau
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Learned msdos at work, I played with cp/m a little. Windows 3.1 was to me at the time very similar to the Atari St desktop though it didn't take me long to get that it was a lot more powerful, I've worked with all the incarnations of Windows done 100s of millennial bug checks on security (access) operating systems, most passed surprisingly. Played with a Mac and Unbutu  operating systems have an android phone and a ipad, latest pc has Windows 10 and I built it myself this year (cost me nearly 2k) never really understood brand loyalty when it comes to computers/CPU/graphics card/phones just get what suits you at the time 

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RE: Dragon 32/Tandy Color Computer

During the early/mid 1980's, I collected the INPUT series of computing and programming.  When I had the HP Pavilion 3240 it had QBasic with it, which was well hidden somewhere on a sampler disc.  I dug out an old binder and typed a program that drew a jeep with the PAINT command.  This worked, but the colours were different.


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Tudor
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'My first proper desktop was from Time Computers. Windows 98, 500Mhz processor, 64 meg RAM & an 8GB hard drive. That was 20 years ago now'

The first computer I worked with had 8K! You could do a lot in 8K in those days.


Tudor
There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don't and F people out of 10 who do not understand hexadecimal c1a2a285948293859940d9a49385a2

OK, you've got me. The first PC I used (an IBM) in 1983 may have had only 16 kB of RAM but my Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets were lightning fast compared to the mainframe sytems I was accustomed to as 1-2-3 was written in x86 and wrote directly to the video memory.

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