Ran across this Article on TRC-80. Interesting read, and it got me to thinking about my early PC days.
I believe my first was a Timex-Sinclair. Pretty useless, and it just made you long for a PC that actually did something.
Other early PCs that I tried were from Tandy, Altair, and an early Apple.
I'll admit to never really getting a handle on the whole concept, but I had fun.

A Packard Bell PB 1666CD that is still in service. Bought it in 1995 at Walmart for $1200 IIRC.

I still use it occasionally for an estimating program that I just can't part with. Finding another compatible printer a couple years ago was a pain......

When the old PC goes tits up it'll be a real hassle!

Mine was a Pionex bought at Sam's for ~$1300. It was a screamer with a 24 mb hard drive and 2 meg of RAM.

I remember State Farm's first computer at their Birmingham office. Had it's own room and a/c. Today's notebook would blow it out of the water.

A Laser 128 Apple II clone.

Commodore 64 that used cassette tapes for programs and utilities. The "64" came from the whopping 64 KILObytes of memory.
Second was the now-famous "Trash-80".

Ed

My first was an IBM XT back in 1985. I believe that it had something like 128kB of RAM and the 5.5" floppy disks. I don't remember the hard drive size, but it wasn't much. It could also be used as a dumb terminal to the companies main frame, which is the only reason they bought it for me. Wasn't long before the upgraded me to the IBM AT machine.

Assembled from components PC (at a computer store). When I turned it in ten years later the PC store owner looked in the box and said; "What is THAT!"

In high school in the late 1970s, I was trained on the Commodore Pet. In college, during the early 1980s, I also took computer programming classes. There we worked with IBM computers, I believe. After completing the first college level computer programming course, I purchased a Commadore 64, which was my very first personally owned personal computer.

I used one of the early PC's at work. It didn't have a hard drive so you booted it up with a 5.25" floppy (back when floppies really were floppy). With no hard drive, it didn't have a memory swap file so it was easy to overload the memory which wasn't much to start with.

1979-ish a Heathkit H8 assembled from parts from three others that friends had given up on. No way I could have afforded even the parts myself.

Then I used cycles on University computers and in 1989 a Mac SE/30 with 32 Mb of RAM. After that I've kind of lost count.

Currently a 2.4 Ghz Mac Power Book (dual booted to Ubuntu) , a 2.7 Ghz iMac (that ironically costs about what a full up Heathkit H8 would have cost back in the day) and of course an iPad. Picking up a PC at our corporate auction next week to build a dedicated Linux machine to start doing some home experiments on OpenStack.

An old IBM 80-88 machine, then got one of the PacBell machines at wally mart. Still running a Pent II machine with 528 megs of ram.

Me and my dad put one of these together as a kid. I'm not even really sure what the reason was. My dad didn't know anything about electronics and sure wasn't interested in computers. Maybe they got it to stimulate me as a kid or something. Pretty much stuck with working on computers the rest of my life tho and it paid my mom and dad divedends when I started building computers for my dad's company and teaching him how to use them designing stuff.

On Saturdays my dad and/or mom would drive me to a library an hour away to sit in on the computer club lectures when I was 8-10 years old in the late 70's early 80's. I'm not sure why but mom and dad wanted me to learn about things like that a lot if I was interested.



Altair 8800

A Kaypro. Actually wrote a book on it. Two floppy drives. Can't imagine using it today. It would be like driving a team of horses cross-country.

Had one of these early cordless computers.

the TRS-80 was da bomb!

I've used those before. Up until about 1995 both me and my dad used a Victor foot and inch adding machine similar to this one but had a column for 1/16ths and up to 12 for inches.

We had regular foot and inch calculators but they worked so good we kept using them plus they had a tape you look at. Only reason we quit using them was eventually the company that serviced them quit doing it when the guy who did it for 50 years retired.

Back in late 80's, our parents bought a Microbee.
Monochrome monitor, 5.25" floppy, and a dot matrix printer.
Don't ask me any more than that.

Commodore 64

They taught us to use slide rules back in the fifth grade, in 1958.

Our first "computer" was a TRS-80 from Tandy/Radio Shack. You had to manually type in the Basic program every time to use it, or buy plug in programs. IIRC, there was no way to save documents except to print them. When you turned the machine off, everything vanished.

Next was an IBM I got used. It had two 5" floppy drives. You had to put the program floppy in the left drive and could save to the right drive. Memory was 64 kb and a floppy would hold 128 kb.

Somewhere in my junk box, I STILL have not one but TWO slide rules.

One of my Dads old jokes.

"What did the constipated mathematician do??"


"Worked it out with a slide rule!"

Badum tsh!

mtrancher,

My first was also a Kaypro, purchased in the mid-80's when they were used by many writers. Didn't write any books on it, but did write hundreds of magazine articles over five years.

Got lucky on the books, kinda. Wrote my first on two typewriters. One died halfway through the book, so I bought another to finish it. Then graduated from the Kaypro to a Tandy (Radio Shack) before writing the next one.

Amstrad. Sold as a computer, but since it couldn't do anything but word processing, that was kind of a stretch.

After that was a locally-built 386, with a 20 MB hard drive.

Remember when there were independently owned computer stores where the owner would build you a PC from pieces-parts?

Commodore 64

The first computer I bought is the one I'm using right now.

A 2002 vintage Dell. It's still working.

Mac SE30, 1988 - -used it to measure distances and angles on radiographs with a digitizing plate. Truly, trouble free for years. I don't drive a Subaru. I would eat at Chic fil A if there was one around.

first computer was for biz, just remember it had a Seagate hard drive and was a 286, also recall it cost us over 5 grand and the computer guy that reco'ed it said it would be the only computer that we'd ever need for as long as we lived as it was way overpowered for our needs and uses and the software we used.

lol, a year later we had a 486, I don't believe that guy descended from Nostradamus

it'd be interesting to figure up what we've spent on puters over the years.


Flew to Houston TX late 80's to check out software specific to our biz. The guy had also put another fan on the box to keep it cool.

just the programs we've used, 2 of them now, have cost over 6K each

when my sis was dating a programmer I wanted him and I to build software for our industry and market it, early 90's

local kid here a few years later that worked for the local beer distributor built software for Miller brewing co. and sold it to them for 100K iirc.

he then went on to create the software that I believe both Regis and Supercuts use (same company)

at one time I think he was employing 50 geeks right here in our little burg. he's a sharp guy

My last two computers were built by the owner/operator of a small shop. He moaned and groaned when I insisted on a floppy disc drive, but I got it.

Tandy Color Computer with the 16K high memory option, 4K was standard. Cassette tape player for mass storage. The Color Computer was built around Motorola's 6809E processor which was a really cool CPU in those days. All Motorola parts inside and data sheets were available so they were a hacker's delight.

Funny, you wrote a nice letter to Motorola and some days later the data sheets came in the mail and it was better than Playboy. Now you can punch up data sheets on the Internet almost instantly for any part that was ever made.

mine was an IBM 360 used in my first computer course (1967) in college....ForTran....from there graduated to an IBM 370 running HASP...if you are a systems programmer, I guess you can say it's yours.....PC's didn't come around for some years yet.

That 370 had a whopping 8 Megs of core memory....no 8 bit words back then, we used hexadecimal....the memory was water cooled and would fill a medium clothes closet!

My first PC was a cobbled together parts one that a friend of a friend put together. It had 256K of RAM and a 40 megabyte hard drive. I remember my buddies asking me what I was going to do with all that space.

Computers only get obselete due to the software. I just recently retired my dad's main computer for business which was a 386 running at 25mhz which he used for an old version of AutoCad, but it worked and worked everyday for 20 years. We already had the programs to run with it for AutoCad so no need to out and speed $4k for a new AutoCad license and $20k for new versions of the software.

We have had lots of machines that run DOS or an early version of windows like 3.1 run for a decade or more running CNC equipment because the software doesnt' change.

When I was a kid my neighbor was an electrical engineer who liked to tinker with computers and he ran the local electric company. I got LOTS of hand me down stuff that ws the envy of about 99.9% of home users. My first hard drive was 5mb, everyone called them winchester drives back then and I used an 8" floppy at the same time I got as a hand me down. I got a hand me down 110 baud teletype modem and was "online" from then on.

In the late 80's I got a hand me down "demo" HP Laserjet II printer, prettu sure it cost more than my Trans Am I drove in high school. I retired that printer only about 4 years ago - so 20 years of service out of a free printer.

Nathan I really should have hung out with you a lot more when we were younger!


dayum, I been doing it all wrong! lol

I remember seeing a 1 meg platter from a hard drive hanging on a wall at Storage Tech when I worked there.

It was pretty cool at the time and larger than a vinyl LP record,

My high school had Apple 2E's but my first one was a C-64. Jumpman was the best game ever.

Yep the Commodore was my first with a tape drive and tapes that sometimes loaded.

Second was a generic 8086 with a 8087 chip that cost more than a new laptop does today. I remember AUTOCAD taking all night to do a regen.

Commodore 64

The Altairs are often cited as the first home computers. But IIRC, the Heath H8 debuted at the same show.

During about the same period, Tektronix was in the graphic computer business. Their claim to fame was a CRT phosphor technology that "remembered" where it had been written, so you could do direct vector stroke graphics without video RAM.

I worked there, and we were allowed to buy parts at cost +15%, and that was the source of my Tek 4051 in about 1975.

It had an internal tape drive. My friends were envious when I got an absolute killer deal on a pair of 8" floppy drives at just $300 each. 32K of operating system and BASIC in ROM, and 32K of static RAM.

a Swan XT10

All these Commodore 64s makes me wonder if they were before or after the wonderful Vic 20?