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The first PC I worked on was PET 8K, which my high school acquired. Then we got a 16K! The tape drive on which we stored our work was amazing technology.
An insurance agent I dealt with had a luggable. He was tremendously proud of that thing, as he could do all his work while visiting your home. At the time, it was also amazing technology -- AND -- carrying it around eliminated the need to do regular workouts.
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Atari 400, 4k ram.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Good choice. Still have one sitting on the shelf, along with all the other Ataris.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I had the Atari 400 as my first computer, tape drive that took 45 minutes to load a game, upgraded to the SS/SD 5.25 floppy which made things a whole lot easier.
I hacked together an external keyboard from an old teletype machine and a LOT wiring, and ribbon cables to get a "real" keyboard for it.
I spent so much money on that thing doing upgrades, wish I had that money right now. 
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Atari 400 was my first, too. First program I wrote in BASIC, I ran out of memory. Upgraded to Atari 800 with 48K. I still have that one. Back in the day I would buy old game cartridges and unsolder the ROM and replace it with an EPROM and then burn games from magazines like A.N.A.L.O.G. to the EPROM. The EPROM burner plugged into the joystick ports of the Atari. My first foray into assembly language programming was with the Atari.
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Dick Smith in Australia put out a "Super 80" computer which was basically a Radio Shack TRS-80 model II knock off, but at less than half the price. Briefly owned one, smashed it to bits with a hammer (most fun I ever had with it) when I moved onto...
a Beeb (BBC Micro) with ISO Pascal ROM because BASIC was for weenies that couldn't write proper programs. (It was a real "structured language!")
after that briefly an "IBM-PC clone" - 8086, that was a real CPU with the huge 10MB HDD and 3.5" floppy (I mean 5MB just didn't cut it and 5 1/4 FDDs were just too, well, too floppy - not that they had anything on the flex of an 8".)
onto a celeron 386 (XP, multi tasking), i5 4650 (FreeBSD - Unix then win7 for doing work),
and now i5-8400 (linux because let's face it, win10 sucks and is a waste on a modern CPU)
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after that briefly an "IBM-PC clone" - 8086, that was a real CPU with the huge 10MB HDD and 3.5" floppy (I mean 5MB just didn't cut it and 5 1/4 FDDs were just too, well, too floppy - not that they had anything on the flex of an 8".)
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I will be buying my first computer at the end of my current project (when the client finally pays) and it will be the "Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 (14”) laptop"
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Netronics Elf II[^], a kit based on the original COSMAC Elf[^] from 1976. Build one yourself to find out why it was so much fun. The little graphics chip is almost impossible to find anymore, but the processor has still been in production until a few years ago.
This is a computer from the time when you had to solder if you wanted to have your own computer. The parts list is astonishingly shhort for the time and the little guy could do a lot, even without expansions. Ok, 256 bytes RAM were a little restrictive, but by adding the graphics chip (whopping 64 x 64 pixel resolution) you could already make something happen on a screen. DIY computers and kits often had no graphics at all, so this was really something.
Best of all: I still have it and it's still as good as ever. Ok, the bus connectors and the keyboards are worn out, but I want to keep it in its original state and don't want to rip it apart. Instead, I'm designing a new one. Overclocked processor, 16 Mb RAM, PIC32 based graphics chip. Lots of fun. Much more interesting than the antics of Mickeysoft and the like.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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What are you using to recreate the processor?
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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The real thing. I have a brand new CDP1802BCE for that, but maybe I will need a second one on the graphics card. I want 3D graphics on an 8 bit processor
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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The first computer I owned wasn't until after I left university, and had enough disposable income (after beer charges, natch) to be able to buy what I wanted when I wanted it.
Amstrad PC1640 (the twin floppy version), which I immediately upgraded with a Hardcard: a HDD and controller on a big long PC slot card. 32MB that I thought was amazing, even with an access speed measured in furlongs per fortnight compared to modern stuff.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: access speed measured in furlongs per fortnight
I still have that problem. The controllers basically were glorified parallel ports. You were lucky when the CPU did not have to access that port several times to bit bang the signals on the bus. That part probably was already done by about 20 pounds of TTL logic on that board. Still, fetching one 16 bit word after another over the ISA bus (or its XT predecessor) is a slow affair. Or did they really invest another 20 pounds of TTL logic in some DMA feature?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I have an almost identical story Paul
We can’t stop here, this is bat country - Hunter S Thompson RIP
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I think back now, and it had a seek time of what? 45ms? And I thought it was quick!
And it was, compared to floppies.
Ah ... "Kings Quest" in glowing EGA! Start generating a fractal, and go down the pub to let it finish. Play a game with no "save" and stick the KB in a drawer to keep the cat off it while I was at work! Them was the days!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Mine was a ZX Spectrum[^] 48K.
Although it nearly wasn't - when we got it home, the box was empty. They'd given us the display box instead of getting one of the real boxes from the back of the store. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard Deeming wrote: when we got it home, ... from the back of the store.
Now, that's dating you!
(And me, of course!)
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Ah, good old Sinclair. I was expecting to get the one with 16 Kb RAM, but instead got the 48K version. It was hard to believe a computer could have that much memory - it used all the 8-bit address space (16 Kb ROM + 48 Kb RAM).
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That's why I liked the HD64180 - it was binary compatible with the Z80, but included a bunch of peripherals, including an MMU which let you page in sections from a 1MB address space (PLCC pack only, the DIP was 512KB).
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Bought my first computer when I went to college back in 2010. It was a Dell Vostro 3400 with an i3 350M. Now, I have moved on to a desktop PC I put together with an i5 8400, Nvidia GTX 1060 Dual 6GB OC edition. I love my new machine.
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The company I worked for gave me and DEC LSI-11/23 running some flavor of unix, with the cc compiler and a vt100 to take home as it was destined for scrap. This was the day of the C64, Amiga and others.
This was entertaining until I got one of those new fangled 8088 XT PC clones from Taiwan - the ones with the flip top metal case that were seemingly everywhere and ran DOS 3.31.
In between the family bought a TI994a that had BASIC and went composite to the TV but frankly, that didn't count for much of anything. We made basic loops that send expletives to the TV. Ah-ha, see what we made the computer say. Today fortunately for everyone, our Echo Dot is hip to our tendencies and won't play ball.
modified 1-Aug-19 8:41am.
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At first there was the PET, 25 lines by 40 columns with character graphics and all the green screen fun you might want. I spent a fortune to increase the memory from 8k to 16k. Then I spent another fortune on twin floppy-disk drives. The equivalent of $2,000 for 1.02Mb Commodore format 5 1/4" floppies. Then I got a second-hand "business class" PET fairly cheap with 25 lines and 80 columns and a very pale green (they claimed white) screen. Amazing - except the lines didn't join vertically as there was a couple of pixels gap between lines, presumably to improve readability on lines of business stuff - but no good for games.
I then started a home PC rental company and supplied ZX-81s, Dragons, BBC-Bs, TRS-80s and the brand new ZX-Spectrum! We set up the option to rent before you buy and most people ended up buying, thank goodness. It didn't last long as a couple of friends of mine I partnered with wanted to concentrate on ZX-81s and I wanted to just do the BBC-B. They were married and outvoted me 2 to 1 so we got a bunch of ZX-81s (and Spectrums) which luckily sold quickly bringing almost no income or profit. At the same time we got dozens of requests for the BBC micro but we ran out after we sold both we had in stock and my partners didn't want to admit they were wrong so we didn't buy more - and closed down the business after the last PC we had, the one and only Dragon, sold.
Then, PCs, and the rest is history.
Note: We also had a VIC 20 but never had a C64.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
modified 1-Aug-19 11:10am.
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I was 16 during the 'price wars' of the early '80s. My parents got us (my brothers and I) a TI-994/a for Christmas of '82. (maybe '83?) I was the only one that took an interest in it aside from the few games that came with it and was soon using it to solve high school math homework. I still have it in the original box.
I took several CS classes at uni in the late '80s but got barred from the computer lab when I refused to give up a terminal to a grad student. I would not own another computer until my Dad brought home a couple of PowerMac 6100s (around '97) that were being scrapped at his work. (one of the baby bells) I got back into school and bought my first Windows system in late '98. What a wondrous thing it was to discover that the computer lab was a thing of the past!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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