Your first computer

i remember my first pc, it was an old grey box with a crt monitor, i watched so much pokemon on it and i watched alot of the first pokemon abridged series (this was like 7/8 years ago)the worst thing about it is how i lost it which brings back some bad memories.
i cri everytim

 

Well...at least none of us seems to recall using a computer that was based on a vacuum tube design. :lol:

 

Haha those were mean machines. Had to write a 50 page essay on those in school! *shudders*

 

commodore

I used to play count the jelly beans with my uncle, then later when I learned how to read I'd play where in the world is carmen sandiego? it was on about 6 floppys. lol

then I had something i bought out of the back of a van for 50 bux, it had windows 98 on it.
then I had an emachine with XP, then gatewayFX(the first model) which has only JUST been replaced with a dell laptop. (!)

 

My family had a couple of computers prior to this, but the first one that was my own was a Sony VAIO PCV-220.



Pentium II 266 MHz
6.4 GB Hard Drive
32 MB RAM
4 MB Graphics Card (Either Radeon or Voodoo, not sure)
Windows 95

What a beast.

 

The first computer I remember having access to was Apple, back in elementary school. But the first computer I had personal access to had Windows 95 on it. I forgot the model, but that sucker lasted for a long time.

Dial-up connections would wake up an entire block.

 

It was one of the most brilliant computer pioneers, Grace Hopper who issued an interesting report on the "first actual case of bug being found" inside those giant arrays of vacuum tubes, i.e. there was a "bug" in the system...

 

I hadn't heard specific details, but had heard the term "bug" dated to that rough era, and was due to real bugs.

Other fun: during the tube era, tubes would regularly go out. IIRC I heard one person say/suggest it could happen as often as every ten minutes. I suppose the working conditions were gruesome for tubes. They generate a lot of heat. An old time radio (with perhaps only 5 tubes) can get quite warm on top after running all afternoon. A tube might burn on touch, just like an incandescent light bulb might.

One of my "toy" laptops came with a real bug, too, in the screen. No idea what it was, but it didn't look like anything I wanted running around loose... Fortunately, it appeared to be long dead.

 

It was a Pentium II desktop with 32MB of ram, a 2.4GB HDD running Windows 95.

 

My first computer was a windows Vista XD

 

I think it was a big old Gateway computer that ran on Windows 95.

 

I think the first I can remember using had Windows 95- it latest a long time at least according to my young memory and I still remember some of the first computer programs I liked playing on. I can't tell you what it was exactly but I guess I've never really been without a computer in some capacity.

 

I had an old Compaq laptop when I was around 10. I played a Mastermind game and a maze game for a few months until it up and quit one day. I knew it was only a matter of time, considering Dad said it didn't have much life left.

And then I had a Toshiba laptop I got when I was 16. I made the horrible mistake of bringing it on my bike without a very good bag. Parts of it got ripped, and it was basically useless.

Then came another laptop that started with a W. My mistake: Going onto one of those cursor sites that infect your computer with a bazillion viruses.

Time passed, and I got another computer: A Dell Latitude. It did most of what I needed it to, but with great time. Rendering anything took hours. It barely ran Premiere Pro CS4, and it didn't run it very well, with a lot of runtime errors.

My parents saw I was doing better with the Dell, and I got for my birthday an Asus G74Sx. This computer was (and still is) amazing. Except for the optical drive, and the fact I can't update my graphics. But that's one of my main 2 computers.

The one I'm typing with right now is a Macbook Pro Retina 15". I got that because macs were mandatory for the school I was going to. So I've been going back and forth between that one and my Asus.

 

Packard Bell machine running Windows 98... ah the good old days...

 

An Atari 400, with 4K RAM!



Fun to play games on, and that was about it.

 

The first hand-me-down computer I received through my family had a pre-Pentium Intel 486 50 MHz CPU and 256 KB of RAM. My first brand new computer had a Pentium III 733 MHz CPU, a 10 GB hard drive, and 512 KB of RAM which I upgraded to 1 GB. Anyway, those are the specs to the best of my recollection. It's been longer than I'd like to admit

 

I imagine it was good for little more than games... I look at that keyboard, and shudder at the thought of having to type 5 pages using it! Although I suppose people do get by posting here using nothing more than a smart phone. And I suppose that Atari keyboard might have been argued to be a better match for around kids.

My first computer book might have been a buyer's guide I got used. I can't remember precisely who the authors were, but they obviously had strong bias for Atari. Every example seemed to involve an Atari. They did provide a check list in the back, comparing Atari vs. the other home computers, but Atari won just about every time. Interesting, I asked my science teacher--who had programmed for Radio Shack--about Atari vs. RadioShack. His answer was basically: if you have the money, it's better to buy an IBM PC clone.

I got a 1980s buyer's guide that I think is a later copy of the one I had years and years ago. Assuming I'm right, it was interesting to see how all the Atari enthusiasm had quietly gone away.

 

Sinclair ZX81 - I remember toasting the motherboard because I was trying to interface the computer and some electronic circuitry on a breadboard. This was way before Arduino :roflmao:

 

A Windows XP run desktop, back around 2006