Your first computer

So true! Now Dells are just bad along with their overpriced Alienwares.

 

Heh heh heh...
Well when my sister got her new laptop, I was gonna get her old one (a Toshiba, ran on windows 7 but upgraded to windows 10), but windows 10 has killed it (the bastard), so instead my dad found a dell at work (he lists things on ebay for a small group that supplies charities with most of the profits.) that runs on windows XP and is really. Really. Slow. At the moment he's clearing it out to make as much room as possible so that it actually works well (ish). Reallg expensive too... A whole £10!

 

My first computer was Windows XP.... well that was in 2005..

 

A Dell laptop that was a year older than me. It stopped working. I miss it.

 

I don't remember how old I was when I first got a computer. I've been using computers for a long time before I got home access to the internet. Hell, I still give nicknames to my computers. The first OS I used was either Windows 95 or Windows 98.

However, I do remember my first serious computer was a Compaq (well, mostly Compaq) desktop, that died of a hard drive failure when I was 15 or 16. The OS was Windows XP Professional.

 

My first computer was a shitty hand-me-down Win. 98 Compaq that had to have its modem replace 4 times. My first none hand-me-down computer was a Win. XP HP that I still have stuffed under my bed. Great PC.

 

My parent's old laptop. Had Windows 95, only the little red nub for a mouse, and not quite 32 MB of RAM - I remember because it didn't meet the minimum requirements for Age of Empires II. It wasn't useful for much beyond basic word processing activities, but it sufficed when I was young.

First computer I got for myself was an eMachines tower with a Celeron processor and 256 MB of RAM. Can't remember how big the hard drive was. I do remember it included a big ol' CRT monitor.

 

The speck to my Compaq were 96MG ram 19G HD my HP was 1G ram 250G HD its amazing how much difference 7 years make.

 

Some Dell. I know it has Windows on it... This was back when MSN had chat rooms and chat room games. Ahh, the good ole days.

 

Oh, you kids are so cute!

But Mr. Whale, I'm right there with you on programming with punchcards (slightly off-topic, but that's how we registered for college courses...had to walk around an auditorium and collect a "schedule" worth of punchcards, one card per class, to be fed into the computer).

Somebody also mentioned the TRS-80...that is the first computer I learned programming on (they had one at my junior high school)...the cassette tape drive was kinda cool, but wow, when we got an actual floppy disk drive, we were *so* psyched...suddenly loads that took a half hour would be done in mere seconds!

The first computer I had "real" access to was our "family computer"...hah...it was mine. A KayPro II with dual-floppy drives! It ran on a CP/M operating system, and had no hard drive...if it wasn't on the floppies, it wasn't there. And with 64Kb of RAM, who cared if one of those floppies needed to hold the OS?

Not only did my father purchase a KayPro and then end up effectively giving it to me, he also received a first-generation MacIntosh at work...and gave it to me (so I could figure out how to use it and then teach him). Mouse? Wow, so cool...and all these little windows that you could just drag and drop things into. Everything right there at the click of a button.

But the first computer I actually *purchased* was a 386 Gateway that I think I boosted to1Mb. It ran a Windows 1.0 operating system. When Windows 2.0 came out, a friend gave it to me (on 3.5in floppy disks)...I loaded it over 1.0, but it was *so* bad that I eventually deleted it and just ran MS-DOS until it died in 2000. Thus began the long Microsoft history of every other operating system they come out with totally sucking! (no issues with the Windows 3 series...particularly 3.11; then Win95 sucked; but Win98 was great...etc., etc., etc.).

 

A really bad HP which I spiced up with Ubuntu. It was an old school computer xD

 

I remember reading an article in a Macintosh magazine talking about buying a cheap PC laptop as a secondary/portable computer. Their recommendation was that the user just skip Windows, and use DOS. You can learn enough DOS to easily survive on the road, and DOS won't drive you as crazy! was the attitude.

This article might well have run in the Windows 2 era.

This reminds me of another point: laptops, at one time, were considerably less common than they are now. I don't ever recall seeing a laptop at my local college in the late 80s, for example. Technology was seriously limited back then. A cheap laptop was often only good enough to do the most basic tasks when portability was the only important consideration. When there were laptops that could actually replace a desktop computer, they cost $$$$. Apple's first Macintosh laptop--more like a battery powered luggable--was heavy, and ran much, much more than the cost of the same basic level of technology in a desktop machine. It wasn't until the 1990s that laptops reached a point where they had the power, and affordability (relatively speaking, at least) where some normal people might actually have one as a main computer.

 

My partner got her first laptop while in graduate school in 1995...issued by the school. It was a huge clunky thing with an 8086 processor (pre-286). I don't think it was state of the art for the year, but wow...what a piece of crap.

And yeah, DOS is pretty easy to use (and I was used to it), and the performance of Windows 2.0 was so bad it was definitely easier to get by without it.

I remember that after working with dad's MacIntosh (1986-ish), I was pretty disgusted by Windows 1.0 in 1989...it was so transparently a bad rip-off of the Mac concept, which had been pretty innovative.

 

Honestly, I don't remember what my first computer was. I feel like it was some kind of COMPAQ Presario horizontal case machine. All I remember was something about it being 1994 and playing Commander Keen: Goodbye, Galaxy!

~ Adrienne

 

I'm not sure "easy" would be my first choice of word. :lol: Indeed, one of the revolutions the Mac brought was ease of use. Some stores even apparently sold Macs just by setting it up, letting customers play with it. And they found they could use it, without having to consult an 800 page manual of basic DOS commands. So the sale was made.

But, at the same time, DOS wasn't probably as bad as some painted it. It wasn't Mac-easy, but it was learnable. I played a bit with some vintage word processors on DOSBox, and had no trouble with the very basics of starting the program. And once the program is running, that becomes the huge limiting factor.

This raises one point. A MacOS concept was that there would be certain consistency across the eco-system. Once you learned an application, you learned basics that would appear in every other application. Meanwhile, in DOS world, it was pretty much every company did what they felt like doing. As a result, learning new software was not a trivial matter.

As the joke went, Windows 95 was Apple 1986. There was more than a little truth in that joke, apart from the small factor that Windows 95 was in color, and the 1986 MacOS was in glorious black and white. Perhaps the joke should have been Windows 95 was Apple 1987 (the year the first color capable Mac, Macintosh II--once my dream computer--was released.)

Being fair, Apple didn't come up with 100% of the idea themselves. They were heavily inspired by a Xerox project. Although apparently it was only inspiration--seeing a working GUI. Apple created their own, and apparently took things much further than Xerox ever did.

 

Atari 800XL

 

I realize this is an old thread, sorry. My first computer was a Commodore 64C with a 1541 disk drive, a mouse, and printer. I ran the GEOS operating system on it (GUI) and it os amazing how it could do that with only 64K of RAM of which I believe was 38K was free! Not.megs or gigs..bytes!

I still have the system and fired it up late last year and it works perfectly! Believe it or not, the sloppy disks are uncorrupted and I was still a le to run GEOS! After that I went to the Commodore Amiga t00, then the Amiga 3000T.. still have the 3000T and it is boxed up. Went thru a Packard Bell, one Dell and jave been building my own systems ever since. I'll have to take some.pics of my 64C running

 

I can't remember the specs of it but the first one i owned was one of those "Indesdructable" laptops when i was around 10 or 11 (Though i wasn't allowed to test that indestructable theroy) and i'm not sure what happened to it, the first ever computer i used though was my late dad's Compaq Windows XP PC, when i was around 5 (I had Sonic Heroes on it (Not sure what specs though but it ran Sonic without any problems) unfortunatly the PC stopped working around 4-5 years ago. (Both were XP)