What Was Your First Computer System?


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My first computer was an Apple Macintosh Quadra 605. I still remember the day I got that computer.

It was the late summer of '93 before my fourth grade year, I saw my parents get out the car carrying the box and walking towards the house and my first thought was my dad was going to upgrade his word processor . So as he walked towards the front door and I said, "Cool Dad you bought a computer. Are you going to use that instead of the word processor?" After I asked, he stopped where he was and and he looked at my mom and then back at me shook his head and said, "This isn't a computer for me son, this is yours." I remember standing there completely shocked and started crying. My mom hugged me asking what was wrong and I told her how happy I was and this completely surprised me.

I later found out that my grandmother had purchased the computer for me and it was to help me in school. Besides using the computer to help in school, I played games on there, of course, and it was the first machine I started programming on. I programmed in BASIC and my favorite project I made was a simple text based, random encounter RPG. It had no story it was just a screen with a character's name, hp, mp, experience, and options of moving in four directions. I remember the days I would play and constantly tweak stuff in the game. Man that was a great time in my life. :)

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I cannot remember my oldest machine - I remember the monitor could switch between green, white and orange. I do remember owning a 286 which was the first real machine that got quite a lot of use.

I also remember owning a 1x speed CD-ROM drive which was about 22" wide and just to put it into perspective a CD Player runs at 2x.

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Philips 286 10Mhz, 2.5 MB RAM, 40 MB MFM HDD, VGA graphics and Sound Blaster Pro

It was a hell of a beast back when I got it

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Quote taken from Wikipedia,

The Adam is famous for an incident connected with its showing at the June, 1983 CES. To showcase the machine, Coleco decided to demonstrate a port of its ColecoVision conversion of Donkey Kong on the system. Nintendo was in the midst of negotiating a deal with Atari to license its Famicom for distribution outside of Japan, and the final signing would have been done at CES. Atari had exclusive rights to Donkey Kong for home computers (as Coleco had for game consoles), and when Atari saw that Coleco was showing Donkey Kong on a computer, its proposed deal with Nintendo was delayed. Coleco had to agree not to sell the Adam version of Donkey Kong. Ultimately, it had no bearing on the Atari/Nintendo deal, as Atari's CEO Ray Kassar was fired the next month and the proposal went nowhere, with Nintendo deciding to market its system on its own.

lol

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I had some IBM 33 MHz desktop with turbo button for 66MHz. It ran DOS and Windows 3.1. I use to play Wolfenstien and Doom on it all the time. I remember helping my dad upgrade to Windows 95 because Y2K was coming :|

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Commodore 64 around 1988 to 1991, Mac computers 1991 to 1997, Windows 95 in 1998 for 2 years then upgrade to 98, and 98 SE, then ME in 2000 to 2002, then Windows XP 2002 until 2008, Windows XP 64bit Professional, Vista, and 2009, Windows 7. that is all. soon I will get Windows 8 someday.

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I had a lot of old computers, like apple iie, tandy 1000, various 286s, a 386 laptop with windows 3.1,etc..

But my first real computer was a bitter sweet experience. It was an acer 133Mhz with windows 95. The price was about $3000. I should have done my research back then, but I was a kid and my parents didn't know anything about computers. Turns out the CPU was an AMD 5x86 133Mhz, but what I didn't know was that it was comparable in speed to a Pentium 75Mhz. I didn't figure this out until it was too late for a return. All the games that my friends were buying for their 133Mhz pentiums would run so choppy.It really made a sad few years for me.

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Some of these computers never heard of before - man you guys are old :D

this was back in the '98 timeframe when I was still figuring out why am I growing body hair

I think mine was a PII maybe --- 200MHZ or so with a turbo made it 250 - dono, rest of it is a blur. 16mb ram maybe and 4?! or 40MB Hard drive - it ran win95 like a champ and had 98 on it as soon as i Upgraded the CD from 4x to about 52x or something to that nature

I remember I had actually GTA 2 - London - yeah taught myself from young years how to repay borrowed money :) ... then Midnight Madness (something with madness and car driving in the city - it had snow and was awesome) from MS .. that game was a BLAST!!!!!!

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If by computer you mean PC, the 1st one I bought myself was a Cyrix 6x86 PR200+ based machine I built on my own.

If not, my first computer was an Excelvision EXL100, it needed no monitor, could be hooked to a TV via a SCART connector.

exelvision_exl100_1.jpg

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290px-Amstrad_CPC464.jpg

I had the green monochrome monitor version.

Amstrad CPC464

I started with the Commodore VIC 20 but changed to the Amstrad CPC464 with the Green screen too :)

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Can't remember the name of my first one, was given to me by a neighbour. Tape drive with a cassette containing a poker game.

Got bitten by the bug and progressed to:- Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Amiga 600 (garbage), Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000 (brilliant piece of hardware). Finally went to windows in 2000, lost count of the machines I've built since then! :o

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Sinclair Spectrum - started with the modest 16Kb version:

Same here.

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Laser 386

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My first system was also a ///LASER, from Micro Center! Similar to yours except it had two 5.25" bays and a 3.5" bay plus an internal bay for the hard drive. No MHz counter or turbo button though, unfortunately. I maxed that thing out from a 486DX/33 to..

486DX2/66 Intel Overdrive

16 MB RAM

Diamond Stealth 1MB VGA card

1.2 GB HDD

Sound Blaster 16

2x CD-ROM

3.5" & 5.25" floppy

28.8k ISA US Robotics modem

MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11

600_vtech_laser_486_0700.jpg

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Great times back when, the real first computer i had was a Amd K6-II , 333 mhz, nVidia Riva TNT 2, 128 mb ram with 3gb hdd.

I owned a Zilog Z80 before, but that was part of another generation of computers...

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