When did you get your first computer?

[WDWLVR]

My first computer was in 1985. It was an IBM PS/2 and I think had a 20 meg hard drive. It cost me an arm and a leg, but I had just gotten a major promotion at work and thought it would be a good investment.

 

[Broken8ball]

1981 (or early 82) I got an Atari 400. It didn't have a real keyboard, just one of those thouch pads like at the atm with the letters on them Very hard for typing. No disk drives either. You loaded programs using a cassette tape recorder.

 

[mickeyboat]

Our family's first was a Commodore 128. My dad fought like the dickens to get me to learn to type. I always thought I would be able to hire someone to do that for me. Boy was I mistaken. Why didn't I listen to my dad?

Denae

 

[LindaG4458]

My first computer was a DEC Rainbow in 1984. I went to work for rthe company and bought the computer 1 week later (they offered employee purchase deals). It had no hard drive but dual 5 1/4 " floppies. Talk about slow! It also had an amber monochrome monitor and ran two operating systems. Everything was text - no windows- and it had a dot matrix printer. It served me well for about 5 years until they offered a 486 windows machine for a replacement.

 

[Miss Jasmine]

I received a Commodore 128 from my parents as one of my Christmas gifts when I was 11 (I think that was how old I was, lol).

 

[jrydberg]

Early 80s, Radio Shack TRS-80 with a whopping 16k (that's right k) of memory. Also had the cassette tape storage like Broken8ball.

BTW, anyone else remember 8" floppies? Now those were really floppy

 

[gallaj0]

1982, I bought my first computer, a Timex Sinclair 1000.

It had a whopping 2K of RAM, but you could expand it to 64 with a snap on expansion pack.

There were no drives of any kind, including floppy. The OS started from a ROM chip on the board, and all programs came on cartridges you inserted into a slot.

I sprung for the printer, a tiny thermal printer that only used cash register tape size rolls.

There was no keyboard, really; the top of the machine had pressure sensitive buttons for keys.

It only cost $100.00 at the time, and program cartidges were 10-20 bucks, if I remember correctly.

I had a decent flight simulator, and taught myself BASIC with the thing.
The family eventually moved up to an Apple 2C, then when I went off to college, it was a Mac Plush for me.

 

[liznboys]

Neat thread.

My dh's family owned computers his whole life. But mine didn't. So I got my first one in 1997 when dh and I were living together, I was 20. It was SO exciting for me! An actual computer in MY house! lol Boy, can't imagine life without it now.

 

[caitycaity]

we got a trs-80 in 81 or 82.

 

[cajunmommy]

Apple IIC for my family as well in the early 80's (thinking 83ish).

Mom was an English teacher, so she was thrilled to be able to set up tests on the word proccessing software & print them out on the dot-matrix printer. (Of course, that meant no more purple copy sheets - I can still smell the wet copies now!)

At the risk of dating myself - I was thrilled not to have to do term papers on our old electric typewriter!

 

[Sandy V.]

Got our first computer in 1984, it was an ITT. Needed it to do seminar papers and resumes.

I remember that ours was "SO modern" because the word processor typed in amber letters/characters instead of the hard to see green back then. Can you recall typing papers with a black background?!

 

[Cindy B]

Originally posted by jrydberg
Early 80s, Radio Shack TRS-80 with a whopping 16k (that's right k) of memory. Also had the cassette tape storage like Broken8ball.

BTW, anyone else remember 8" floppies? Now those were really floppy

I remember those HONKING HUGE 8 inch floppies! My old job actually had some.. we laughed so hard about them!