First computer

[xelasnave]

For me was a Tandy 16k tape feed....just thought back about those days..

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Dick Smith System 80 for me which is a clone of yours.

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Texas Instruments TI-99-4A. With a tape recorder

[pluto (Hugh)]

My dad had an Exidy Sorcerer when I was born so that would've been the first I used. But my first, as in it was in my room when I was 7 or 8, was an IBM AT complete with an amber monochrome monitor

[torana68 (Roger)]

too long ago to remember, I started by making paper tape programs and running them on (I think it was) the ANU's computer, first PC owned by me was probbaly something like a 286?

edit, might have been punched cards, I do remember the computer was HUGE!

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

The things we could do with 16K. Flight Simulator 1 was a "3D" combat flight simulator with mountains and runways. The enemy plane was 1 pixel lol. Used to spend hours on that game. The tape took 3 minutes to load the program!

[Shano592 (Shane)]

Green-screened Microbee, with a tape recorder. Mine had a massive 32k of RAM!

I upgraded that to a 256k system, with a 3.5" floppy disk drive. I still have it too!

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

First one used - Sharp programmable calculator at a summer job.
First computer - IBM1460 with punched cards.
First one I owned - HP47 programmable calculator.
First desktop - Apple IIe with DuoDrive.

[AndrewJ]

Mine had a massive 32k of RAM!

Used to dream of that sort of RAM
I had a Sharp PC1500 ( still do and it still runs )
Basic unit had 2k ram
The "add on" 8k ram was 60% the price of the unit
( 127$ in 1983 dollars :-( )
Andrew

[acropolite (Phil)]

DSE System 80 16K, I upgraded mine to 48K by soldering a couple of extra layers of ram on top and connecting up a couple of extra addressing pins. Those were the days, it was either Basic or Assembler language if you wanted to tinker.

[wayne anderson (Wayne)]

My first computer was a Tandy TRS 80 model 1 it had a whopping 4kb ram z80 processor running at a fast 1.7mhz it had black and white TV monitor no sound and a cassette tape deck drive, you had to spend 100s of hours inputting basic 1 computer language commands onto the tape just to get a simple paddle tennis game. I really Dont miss those days.

[julianh72 (Julian)]

I built my first computer in early 1979 from a kit - as in, I soldered all of the components onto the motherboard, hacked a cassette tape player as the storage drive, and hacked a B&W TV to be able to use it as a monitor. (TVs didn't have HDMI / VGA plugs in those days!) The kit cost me well over $1,000 (in 1979 dollars).

It used a Z80 processor, and I splurged on the RAM to get the "huge" 16 kB upgrade instead of the basic 8 kB RAM. (That's KILObytes of RAM, not megabytes or gigabytes!)

The first time you booted it, you had to laboriously enter a bootstrap program in binary machine code, line-by-line, by flicking 16 switches on the front panel, load the 16 bits into RAM, then repeat until you had loaded all of the initialisation commands. Get any one of those 16-bit commands wrong, and you had to power down and repeat until you got a successful boot. Then the first thing you did was write the bootstrap code to a cassette tape, so that you could reboot from the cassette drive.

At this point, you could use the keyboard (also soldered from a bag full of components), but there was no Disk Operating System or programming interface as we think of it today - the only way of issuing commands was in machine language, so the next thing you did was to set about loading a BASIC Interpreter using line-by-line machine-language entry from the keyboard. This took MUCH longer than loading the bootstrap program the first time, but at least you could now save your work progressively onto tape, and pick up from where you left off. From memory, it took me a couple of weeks from first boot before I could actually USE it for something!

I then wrote a structural analysis program in BASIC from scratch (using the theory I had learnt in 3rd-year university), and used it during my final year of studying Engineering at university.

[omegacrux (David)]

An Amiga500
i thought the games were great
then dad got an Amiga1200 I was jealous
now my mobile makes those look prehistoric !

David

[Monstar (Johnny)]

Mine was the A1200, no memory everything ran from floppies. It had a great paint program that came with it and a word processor. Had games like Monkey Island and every time you went from one screen to another you had to use a different floppy.

The first games console was Sega Mega Drive to which I added the CD drive.

[xelasnave]

I remember one at the museum in harris st ultimo.
You played it 0s and crosses
I installed the trs at the office and started a little days base but folk didn't know or had not seen a computer so it was a good talking point and helped sales really.
I think I was the first to do a presentation folder in real estate ..I could deliver pages of personally typed stuff in so far as each page had name and address ...but it got me so many listings being more professional...hang on that was with an osborne little screen ...

[xelasnave]

Duplicate post deleted

[multiweb (Marc)]

Commodore vic 20

[dannat (Daniel)]

C64

[xelasnave]

I remember one at the museum in harris st ultimo.
You played it 0s and crosses
I installed the trs at the office and started a little days base but folk didn't know or had not seen a computer so it was a good talking point and helped sales really.
I think I was the first to do a presentation folder in real estate ..I could deliver pages of personally typed stuff in so far as each page had name and address ...but it got me so many listings being more professional...hang on that was with an osborne little screen ...

[Bassnut (Fred)]

Zx80, then Zx81,THEY started the revolution, much later, a VIc 20. Made memory expansion boards for all three and sold dozens :-). Then the 64 came out and that was the end of the beginning.