... An IBM PC III Clone. Amber Monochrome Monitor and a 5 1/4 Floppy!
I mastered the original "Test Drive" on that baby!
Ahhhh, the days of DOS .....

How about you?

I had a Commodore 64 that hooked up to a TV and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive.
I spent hours making programs and playing games on it. I think it is at my brother in laws, he never throws anything out. Too bad it isn't good enough to BOINC!

Mine was a Commodore Vic 20, a real power house of the time lol

RADIO SHACK COCO 3. @ 0.895 mhz (1.8mhz OVERCLOCKED) CASSETTE TAPE STORAGE, TV HOOKUP, 128K TOTAL MEM.
USED IT TO "SURF" THE BULLETIN BOARDS OF THE TIME ON A 300 BAUD MODEM.

NEXT WAS A 386 / 33MHZ W/ 8MB RAM AND A 40 MB HD , SMOKIN UNIT AT THE TIME.

hmmm - My first family computer was an IBM PS/1 486SX 33Mhz - I remember it had 4MB of RAM and a 170MB HDD, however, it was totally compressed to 300-something. - Did IBM do this at the factory, or did FutureShop try to cheat my parents? I guess I'll never know ;P

HOWDY JAMES. WELCOME TO THE TEAM. AS FOR YOUR HD COMPRESSION, I REMEMBER USING IT IN A VERY EARLY WINDOZE PROBABLY 3.11 BUT I BELIEVE IT WAS ALSO IN 95 AND PERHAPS EVEN 98. I REMEMBER LOOSING A PILE OF STUFF PLAYING WITH COMPRESSION SO I ALWAYS SHIED AWAY FROM IT AFTER THAT. I'M SURE A FEW AROUND HERE CAN EVEN NAME IT. ANY BYTES??

DR.Z

Hey Dr. Z! Thanks for the welcome! Thank goodness storage space is so incredibly cheap nowadays, eh?

Commodore Plus/4 back in 84.

Like flight I also had a Commodore Vic20 back when it was among the cream of the crop. We had the coveted tape drive add-on which was pretty cool at the time - simply throw in any audio tape and you could save your programs on it (took forever to save/load - but it was better than nothing!). I still remember programming stupid little animated stick figures on it to the annoying sound of various beeps and screeches that the Vic20 considered to be sound.

... less powerfull than today's calculator

Cant remember what it was actualy, maybe a Vic20 or a CoCo... All i remember is spending evenings typing code from a book to play Pong, or rather trying to, since by the time i was done, it was either bedtime or checking where i put : intead of ;

Speaking of Pong...I actually owned one of the original home versions. I picked it up in a garage sale many, many years ago and used to play it on an old B&W TV set I picked up at the same garage sale (I think I got Pong, TV and some star wars toys all for $10).

I think my Uncle still has a original Pong in his basement somewhere.

1981
Mine was an Osborne 1 with a 5.25 inch screen, a z80 processor at 4.77 mhz, two disk drives @ 90K each, 64k ram, plus s/w included C/pm 2.2 o/s, WordStar 2.3, Dbase II, Can't remember the spreadsheet prog, Basic, Fortran, Pascal.

Those were the days when you tried to suck as much efficiency in a prog that you could. Those 90k 5.25 disks did not hold a lot. But at 8k word bits well.....

2007

Well we have updated. Acer Aspire E700, Quad core 2.4ghz processor, Ram 4gigs, Nvidia (EVGA) 8800 GTS superclocked with 320 video ram, 750 watt p/s, Asus lcd 19inch flat screen, MS Vista Ultamate, etc. 10 gig internet connection with Shaw.ca.

Heavy on the wallet, but all is fast. Hey life is great and at 62 years still loving it!

Welcome sdgreen!!

HOWDY SDGREEN
IT SEEMS I REMEMBER SOMETHING ALONG THE LINE OF THAT OSBORNE KICKING AROUND MY BROTHERS A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO. I NEVER DID GET THAT THING TO BOOT RIGHT.
NICE UPGRADE
GOOD TO SEE YOU HERE
LATER
DR.Z

Welcome sdgreen! That looks like a great upgrade!

286 clone job. 8 meg ram. Back in the day when ram was $75 a meg. Ouch. Then I moved to a 386, 486SX, 486DX2 and then P1 120. Man that was a rocket. I remember migrating from 3.11 to Win 95. Thought that was the slickest thing ever.

Side note, my disk on key has 4xas much storage as all of those machines combined. LOL

canadar

Mine was a 286 clone with who knows what. I remember a 40meg HD. We ran the first copy of SpinRite to try and coax al the juice we could out of her. I paid probably double what I did for my last puppy: E6750 dual core, 2gigs RAM, x1950 Pro 512meg GPU, LG 22W monitor.

Win 3.1 - Diskspace.

Mine was a ZX 48k Spectrum - Data storage, Cassette tape- Monitor, TV. Microsoft even supplied programs for it. MS Calc.

Was this available across the water or was it a UK thing?

A Tandy colour computer 1. A tape drive and 300 baud modem for surfing the bbs sites, that thing rocked!!!!!! I am thinking around 1983, and if I remember right it was that or a new motor for my dirtbike ($550 bucks) , and I went for the computer and had to work all summer to fix the bike.

My father-in-law had a Sinclair ZX81. I remember playing a flight simulater on it, no visuals, just an overhead plot. He was a sailmaker and I coded some BASIC programs up for him that he would spend days on doing by hand. They took forever to type in, but they ran sweetly :D

I never actually owned one of these but I thought the story might interest some. First off, you should understand that I'm an old fart so the story goes back some years.

My first job that involved computers was with Bell Canada in the late '60s. They sent me off on a course on their Number 1 ESS which was a computer controlled switch (exchange). Not long after, I got a job with Queen's U. in their Computing Centre. The ex-Director decided to start up a company to build a "one user, stand alone computer" using the new technology of Large Scale Integration that a little known company (Intel Corp) had used to develop a single chip, four bit CPU designated the 4004. The term "PC" was still several years into the future.

The company was MCM Computers in Kingston and many of the employees came from Queen's and St. Lawrence College. We never actually built a 4 bit system but we did produce an 8 bit one with the Intel 8008 and eventually the 8086. It was designated the MCM 70 (1970 being the year) and had 2 Kb of RAM and no real OS. There was an APL interpreter in ROM and it operated similar to the initial Commodore and Apple systems that used a BASIC interpreter instead. The APL language was selected by the computer science types who considered languages like BASIC to be beneath them. The problem was that few understood or were willing to learn APL. Additionally, it was primarily a math language.

There was no monitor - such devices did not exist although we considered the possibility of using TVs - and we used a 32 character single line display like the orange plasma displays you used to see on some ATM machines. There was no disk drive of any kind - again because such devices did not exist in small size. Temporary storage was on two audio cassette tape drives. Eventually the systems had a monitor and floppy disks (8 inch).

Despite being 'first to the market', the MCM systems never became popular (perhaps APL had something to do with that) and the company eventually folded somewhere around 1980. I had left around 1976.

Despite working continually in the computer field ever since, I didn't actually own a PC until around 1992 when I bought a HP system (I worked for them at the time).

WELL IT MAY NOT HAVE BEEN MY FIRST BY ANY MEANS BUT IT HAS BEEN A FAITHFUL OLD DOG.
I AM RETIRING IT IN FAVOR OF A BIT BETTER 500 MHZ AMD I JUST SCOOPED UP FOR NOTHING.
THE PII 350 HAS BEEN MY SECOND AT HOME MOSTLY CRUNCHING SETI AND MY WORK TABLE TOOL.
WITH DOUBLE THE MEMORY THE 500 RUNS PRETTY GOOD.
THE PII 350 IS DESTINED TO GET A PUPPY INSTALL WITH A 4.3 G HD AND THEN DONATED TO A NEEDY FAMILY.
THERE ARE A COUPLE OF 166MHZ PII'S THAT ARE GOING DOWN THE SAME ROAD.
LATER
CRUNCHIN A WEE BIT FASTER DR.Z

My first computer my father bought for over 3000$ back in the day. It was a 286, just when they came out (early 80's.. not sure which year, I was fairly young). We opted for the most ram possible 2MB. I remember opening the case and seeing all the chips lined up on the motherboard for the ram, looked like a bunch of eproms. At the time we didn't have a HD for it, the first one we got I think was 10MB, the size of a brick. Of course we had the 5" floppies and the VGA screen.. fancy stuff. I remember when we got our first modem too, 2400 baud.. kick a$$.. after several phone calls back and forth between a friend we got it working were able to type things back and forth... amazing! Then the days of BBS'ing came along! whoa.

An old Radio Shack computer similar to the commodore 64 with a tape loader, what a heap of junk lol