What was the very first computer you owned or used ?

[rrinker]

 There were actually a lot of 'holes' in upper memory you could exploit, depending on the hardware you had installed. When programs like QEMM came out, I became an expert at getting the most free DOS memory and organizing resident programs in the upper memory holes. I always took it as a challenge to get the most free memory in the lower 640K.
 And speaking of QEMM - their other product, Desqview, brought a pre-emptive multitasker to DOS. I was able to run my Opus BBS in college while still reserving enough of my machine to write reports and such with WordPerfect, or even run circuit simulations with pspice.

[Calambres]

One of those "holes" is what allowed the "Expanded Memory" I have in my XT-286 (2MB max) to be paged into real memory. It was only accessible via a resident program loaded in "config.sys"

[cowasaki]

My brother's VIC20 in 1982

My first computer was an Amstrad CPC464 followed by a CPC6128 - I was in 4th/5th year at high school 14/15 and wrote an expansion ROM which added 150 new commands but was also programming 6502 on BBC model B at school where I completely re-wrote the networking software making it quicker and fairer as it queued stuff (they were still using it 5 years later!)....

Then on to the Atari 1040STFM where I had my first hard drive £420 for 30Mb (they had no 20Mb left so did a 30 for the same price if I turned up with cash!)

Then onto The Archimedes range as I was then a component level service engineer for Acorn machines.....

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

1st an hp9830 in 1973..74, an hp65 1975, an Apple II 1977, TRS-80 1977 (but didn't like it), Compucolor II 1979  (but didn't like it), switched from the Apple II to a Mac in 1984, and then always Macs ever since. I've never had any "PC" nor any DOS/windows machine. Now I prefer Macs for the job, linux and small sbcs for everything else.

[skyshaver]

My first computer was a Vic20. I spent the savings bond my grandparents gave me to buy a tape drive and copied code from the back of magazines. Though my fondest memory of that machine is the text-based RPG "The Count"

[Bruce Abbott]

Actually the 640k quote is a well reproduced myth.

Actually...

"I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn’t – it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem." - Bill Gates

[ferdieCX]

I went in 1979 straight to repair Olivetti Audit 5 boards, it was my first job
First owned was a home assembled 8080 S-100. It took two years to get the naked boards and the chips to South America,
carried by mail (only 20 USD at month allowed)  or by relatives and friends who visited the USA
I still have the CPU board

[Gyro]

Used (in order):

Education:
ICL1902S
DEC KL10

Work:
PDP-11/44 2xRL02(10MB)
Dual headed VAX-11/780 (Altara and Krell), with all the toppings! 
MicroVAX 1 -> MicroVAX II Workstations
(a bit of a DEC theme there!)
...
PCs.

Owned (in order):

Science of Cambridge (Sinclair) MK14 (NS SC/MP)
UK101 (6502 based UK clone of the Ohio Superboard)
DEC PDP-11/05 (unibus, 32k word core memory), 2 x TU56 DECTape1 random access tape drives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtape). Later upgraded to 2 x RX02 dual 8" Floppy.
PDP-11/23plus, home built Q-Bus cabinet, RD52 (30MB) HDD, RX50 Floppies. Later upgraded to PDP-11/53 as handy bits became 'available'  .
...
PCs

[Mister35mm]

PSI comp80?

Was that this one?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/391977282124

I saw one at a computer show, I think. Powertran were showing off the TI9995 Cortex and this thing.

Z80 & maths chip.

[1audio]

PSI comp80?

Was that this one?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/391977282124

I saw one at a computer show, I think. Powertran were showing off the TI9995 Cortex and this thing.

Z80 & maths chip.

My first computer experience was a Bendix G-15. At a nearby high school in the mid 1960s.  I also worked on CDC computers in the early 1970s and built a z80 system in the 1970s before getting an IBM pc. At the time I was working at Four Phase systems designing peripherals for their computer systems. Too much early computer experience so I moved to Consumer Electronics.

Sent from my LG-H830 using Tapatalk

[Bryce]

The first computer I used was an MS-DOS based PC clone, a 286 of some description, that my father bought in the late 80s when I was a baby.  I think it was the second computer in the household, since my father had a TRS-80 MC-10 before that, but I have no memory of that computer and I believe it was sold prior to the acquisition of the PC. The PC had a modem, 9600 Baud I believe, which at some point Dad set up so that we could track the Space Shuttle on a map display.

The first computer that was mine personally was either an 8088 based "Eagle" PC clone (uncertain model number) or a Epson PX-8 Geneva laptop. I don't remember which was first; my father got both of them in state surplus property auctions in the mid-90s and gave them to me. Neither was my main computer though, I primarily used the family Macintosh (an 68030-based Performa that later got a 68040 accelerator card.) If you don't count family computers and surplus sale junkers, I got my first computer in '97, which was an Apple PowerBook 1400. I still have it, though it developed a bad LCD connection. (I still have the PX-8, too, I think, though it's been a long time since I've actually seen it and I am not 100% sure.)

[oldtubeguy]

I was hired at IBM in Poughkeepsie NY as a System Test Techician in 1965, worked on final test of IBM 7090 Series System.
http://www.computer-history.info/Page4.dir/pages/IBM.7090.dir/images/Picture.9.jpg shows some of an IBM 7090. In that image the four frames behind man standing is the actual processor and I/O contollers.
Also in pic are some tape drives, card reader, line printer and operator console.
Not in picture is Memory --initially discrete cores in an oil-bath, later air cooled. Also 'Power Convertor' which was a motor-generator set which  changed 60 cycle power to 400 cycle  (a noisy piece of gear).
Moved into programming in 1968 and spent years writing Assembler code, Fortran, PL/1 and other languages.
My first personal computer was a Radio Shack TRS80. Had many IBM PCs and home built.
Retired from IBM in 1999. At the time worked for IBM as technical consultant on large scale commercial  implementations of CATIA 3D design system.
After retirement went private and the last thing I did was software development on RS/6000 for Computer Sciences Corp.

[meeko]

In the summer of 1980, my Dad borrowed a Commodore PET (I don't remember if it was a 2001 or one of the later ones with a proper keyboard) from his school for the summer.  (He was a teacher.)  Then we got a C64.

The first computer I personally owned was an Apple III that was given to me by a friend of my Dad's.  It also came with a colour monitor and a broken ProFile 5 MB hard drive.  I rarely used it, though, as by that time we had an Amiga 500.

The first computer I bought with my own money was a Pentium 120, with I think 64 MB of RAM, 1.6 GB hard drive, ATI Mach64 video card, CD-ROM drive and a no-name SB16-compatible sound card, initially running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with Win32s and the Microsoft "Wolverine" TCP stack.  Wolverine didn't support dial-up networking, though, so I had to use a DOS terminal program to dial in and start a SLIP session, exit the terminal program without hanging up the modem, start the SLIP packet driver, then a packet driver to NDIS shim, before finally starting Windows.  And that was still more stable than Trumpet Winsock!

[intabits]

First used, all at Monash Uni in 1974/1975:-
DEC PDP-11
HP2100A
Burroughs B6700

Unless Wang programmable calculators qualify, then in high school, 1970

[bob225]

8080, hand built 8088, Ibm XT, 286 ps/2 - all very used in the mid to late 80's

zx81 > ZX128+2 > Commodore 386 16 with 8mb of ram > Amiga A600 >  486 dx33 upgraded to a DX4 100 > Amd 5x86 then it gets fuzzy for a few years > Intel P3 >


Now running X99 5820K with all the trimmings - 8th Gen I7 on the wish list but I'm happy with what I have now

Seem to have lost my passion for computers the last year or so, possible to do with no major jumps in tech


edit. there was the odd Mac (g4 and intel based) Acorn electron and Acorn Archimedes along the way too

[brucehoult]

8080, hand built 8088, Ibm XT, 286 ps/2 - all very used in the mid to late 80's

Apple ][, PDP11/VAX (not personally owned!), home built wire-wrapped 6809, 68k Macs, PPC Macs G3 - G5, Linux Pentium Pro 200 then Athlon 700 then Athlon 3200+, Core 2 Duo Macs, Hackintosh i7-860 then Linux i7-4790K, i7-6700K. Various ARM boards (Pi, Odroid) and Arduinos. Now RISC-V HiFIve1 (Arduino) and HiFive Unleashed (1.5 GHz Quad core).

Now running X99 5820K with all the trimmings - 8th Gen I7 on the wish list but I'm happy with what I have now

Definitely still a great machine, with no reason to replace it unless you want 10 - 18 cores (i9) or similar performance in a smaller lower power package.

I'm very impressed by my new 100mm x 100mm x 35mm NUC with an i7-8659U CPU. I can put it in my pocket and travel the world, it uses 15W, and the performance matches a 2.5 years old 65W i7-6700 desktop CPU! (and beats it by 20% on single-core tasks).

Seem to have lost my passion for computers the last year or so, possible to do with no major jumps in tech

Wow! Even at 55 years old I'm the opposite!

Clock rates have peaked, yes, but that makes things MUCH MORE interesting than any time since 1990! It's no longer enough for Intel to simply spend their billions on a new FAB process and lazily crank out the same design as last year but at 50% higher clock speed.

Now they have to actually *think*.

So far Intel have mostly been thinking "Lets put more of the same old cores on on chip". That's reasonably exciting. It makes tasks such as compiling software or video transcoding or responding to a lot of web requests much faster without a lot of effort, but it's a very interesting challenge to figure out how to use this for other things.

But even more exciting is that YOU DON't NEED TO BE INTEL to innovate any more. Basic CPUs aren't getting faster any more which means that speeding up particular tasks often now requires special hardware to directly implement the main part of the task, with a conventional CPU there as well to supervise and control it.

There is an absolute *explosion* happening in people building this special hardware inside FPGAs, and the successful and high volume designs migrate to custom SoCs. Sometimes this special hardware can be done as a co-processor with relatively loose coupling to the main CPU (and you can license ARM cores for that), but often it works better if you can hook your special hardware up to custom instructions in the CPU and incorporate it in the normal program flow in a much more fine-grained way. You can't do that with ARM.

Some companies are creating their own proprietary and customisable CPU architectures and that's exciting to see that happening again (like in the 70s and 80s). But even though gcc and linux etc are pretty portable it's still a lot of work to actually port them, and that work doesn't actually add any unique value to your company. So more and more people are grabbing an existing open-source and license-free processor design and customising that with their own special sauce.

Mostly now, that means RISC-V, which is getting very good momentum.

And so I've made my way to a RISC-V startup where our business is making customised CPUs and SoCs.  Exciting times!

[djos]

Seem to have lost my passion for computers the last year or so, possible to do with no major jumps in tech

I simply must concur with your sentiment, my 2012 i7 Mac Mini still does everything I want it to and if I want to pay games I use my dozen retro computers, particularly my Amiga's and Tandy 1000 EX. I find them to be a lot more fun than modern computing which is iterative and boring.

[rrinker]

 I'm not so sure I've lost my passion for computers so much as I just can't justify spending money to replace my current desktop, which is now something like 6 or 7 years old. It still plays the few games I play, and everything else runs just fine. It does have an SSD, and I did replace the video card a few years ago, I built it with a GTX480 and not have a 970. But it runs everything I need it to run just fine.
 I sort of satisfied it by building a new machine for my workbench, which I also built, about 2 years ago. On that one I went for small, a mini-ITX cube case, no discrete GPU, low power was the primary criteria. It's still plenty powerful enough for KiCad and various toolchains for programmign micros and runnign test equipment even with just the built in Intel graphics.

[MapleLeaf]

My first was a S100, Z80 i tried to build from pieces in the late 70s. It almost worked 
Then a working 8085 that i got MS basic running on. Used it for my Computer Science degree.
Ah the joy of doing home work in my dorm room instead of going to the CS building to punch cards for
an IBM 360 computer.
I am nearing retirement and have all the bare S100 boards and parts to make a working system. Will start
on it soon. It should be so much easier now that i have a complete electronic lab. The first time i only had an analog volt meter.
 Still can't figure out how i can use my spectrum analyzer in building this new system 

[stenbror]

My first that i owned myself was a Commodore Vic 20, but i did own 50% of a Sinclair ZX81 together with a friend back in 1982.

[Stavos122]

After a lot of articles and comparisons in PC Mag, first PC owned was a Compaq Presario - purchased is '93 or '94.  We laughed on the way home from the store that it was more expensive than the car it was being transported in.   

[precaud]

My first were in 1980/81, two Apple II systems (unbelievably expensive), one for the lab, one for the office. Both choices turned out to be a mistake. Replaced them with an HP 9845B for the lab and Eagle IIe (Z-80 CP/M) for the office. Both great choices. Never had a lick of a problem with either. Both still work today.

[Richard Crowley]

In the E-test (test wafer probing, measurement and evaluation) lab I managed, we had several Lomac LM80 automated test systems. They had a 40-channel (or 48??) switch matrix, and four SMU source-measurement units which could source/sink voltage or current and simultaneously measure voltage/current.  Perfect for evaluating transistors, etc.

The LM80 came with an S-100 bus CP/M computer with a full 64Kbytes of memory and two 8-inch floppy drives.  I got several Xerox 820 computers to allow users to enter test parameters for the LM80s (so that the LM80s could spend their time testing and the programming could be done off-line).  The Xerox 820 was a commercialized version of the Ferguson BigBoard (referenced in Reply #71)  Xerox (whose PaloAlto Research Center, PARC invented the windowed GUI with mouse control and local networking) took a giant step backwards and licensed this rather basic CP/M board from a small company in Texas (Digital Research, not the same as the CP/M people).

But we quickly outgrew the 64K Z80 computer that came with the Lomac test system.  So I reverse-engineered the control bus and the control software to operate the SMUs and the switch matrix, and wrote a driver for the HP 9845, a couple orders of magnitude more sophisticated machine than the little CP/M sytems.  The HP 9845 came with several plug-in I/O modules, one of which was a 16-bit, bi-directional  parallel port which was perfect for talking to the Lomac hardware (with only five or six 7400 series TTL "glue" chips in-between)




The Lomac people came to visit one day and were astounded that we had upgraded their system on our own.  Those systems were used during development of a couple generations of CPU chips (386, 486, Pentium, etc.)

[CatalinaWOW]

9845 was the dream machine of its time.  You could have purchased 50 or so big board based computers for the price they brought.  Best I could do in that era was limited shared access to one, so I threatened to bring my own big board computer to work.  My threat, with others was what finally started breaking the ice on the company actually providing computers for engineers to use at their desks.

[Peter63]

Commodore VIC-20, sold it 1988