Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What was your first PC?

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!