so, what was it?!

[slipstreamsurfr]

So, out of idle curiosity........

What was the first computer you ever owned. As well as a memory of it.

And then, what was the first computer you ever used in school and in what class?

The first computer I ever owned was a Sinclair ZX81 with the 16K memory add on and the electrostatic printer. I remember seeing the adds for first the ZX80 and then the ZX81 in Creative Computing and ordering it from England.

When it got here I hooked it up to a 12" black and white TV and a cassette recorder I bought from K-mart. I learned BASIC on that little machine with it's membrane keyboard, the annoying habit of crashing if you wiggled it and the top-heavy memory upgrade would glitch out on you. I also learned NOT to store your cassette tapes with your programs stacked on top of your b&w tv, especially not on the side where the flyback transformer was. /grin

My first computer I used in school was a TRS-80 Model 1 and ModelIII. It was in our Computer Science elective we could take in High School. I think I was a Junior, so this would have had to been around 82 or so. The shielding in those things were horrible. You could stand across a 30 foot room and aim a bulk tape/disk demagnetizer at the monitors and thumb the switch and watch the display twist. That model 1 was the first disk based machine I ever used. On it I wrote my first program bigger than 16K, a variation on the colossal cave adventure. I remember the week it grew so big that it would only load/run on the disk based model 1, not the cassette based model 1's because of size. I was so proud of myself. :)

Anyway, that's my two earliest computer memories, what's yours?!?

Comments

[pat-trick.livejournal.com]

first computer my family ever owned: a mac se 30, black and white screen, purchased in 1986 (87?).

first computer that /i/ ever owned is the blue and white g3 that you've got somewhere around your house, purchased in 1999. ;)

i have no recollection of the first computer system we used in school, other than it involved the turtle widget program. it was used in a special topics class after school that i participated in.

[slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com]

your b&w has recently been upped to 768 meg of memory, two 17" lcd displays, tiger and is still running strong.(could do with a processor upgrade, maybe a cheap g4 600) :) It's turned into my primary home computer. Now all I need to do is find a cheap ibook to replace the dell laptop from the office. :)

involved a turtle widget.... hrmm... any idea of the year date? Could be one of any number of based systems from apple II's to ti99's. Being school based, more than likely an apple IIe or IIc if it was anytime before or near 1985.

a se30 eh? that was a hot machine for it's day. My roomate had a standard SE, I eventually had the plus and I remember Skip drooling over the se/30 when it came out. You can get an asante ethernet card for the se / se30's and run tcpip on them nowdays if you want a REAL retro experiance with system 7 and an early netscape I think?

[pat-trick.livejournal.com]

i suspect it was an apple ii of some flavor.

i also remember being completely awed by the simple shell script that my next door neighbor had set up on her dos box that always said, "Good morning, , I hope that you are in an excellent mood today!" whenever she logged onto the computer. it had amazed me at the time that the computer had been able to tell who she was. :)

my fondest memory of the se 30? playing dark castle and beyond dark castle.

[ariel817.livejournal.com]

Haha.. I remember setting my dos prompt to %andy so if I was on C drive it was Candy, or D drive and it was Dandy.. to poke fun at my friends (particularly the one that started this conversation thread!) who named their computers. :)