What brand was your first computer?

Mine was a packard bell.
Which was your!!

Gateway. Had Earthlink internet setup, back when we had to use a phone line...*shudder* The one we have now isn't extraordinary, but I plan to build my own when I've finished school.

A customised set-up from a small retailer whose name I can't recall. That was in the day when you couldn't just pick one up from the shelf of a local discount store.

If I recall it was a 386 with 2M RAM (later upgraded at much expense to 4).

The first computer we had in the house was an Atari computer. It had a word processing program and a few games. We even had a book with computer code that we could enter and it would create very simple programs.

Packard Bell 486 processor running on windows 3.11...
Ugh that was a horrible computer... *Shudders* that was back in 1994. My dad bought it for 4 grand...

We had a BBC when I was very young, with such awesome games as PacMan (on cassette) and Granny's Garden. I'm not sure if it did anything else or not but I definitely remember those two!

I had a Tandy. They were sold at Radio Shack, iirc. I had a few games like Wheel of Fortune that was rendered in horrible day glow yellow and green. :lol:

Well, technically, a Texas Instruments TI-99, back in 1984. It ran BASIC, used a desk tape cassette recorder for data backups, proprietary cartridges for pre-bought programs, and plugged into a normal TV for it's display. I didn't do a whole lot with it, other than write a program that converted Fahrenheit and Celsius back and forth, but if you input "-40º" it gave you a custom smartypants response, as -40 degrees is the same in both scales. I really didn't have the knack for programming though, especially once line numbers were done away with. That's why I'm now in network administration instead!


But my first real computer (as in PC) was a Micron, a Pentium I 90MHz w/8MB RAM and a 540MB hard drive.
I really thought Micron would've been bigger, but the company is all but gone, beaten by Gateway and Dell.

Very first computer I don't remember. It was given to us by neighbors who bought a new computer with Windows and didn't need their old DOS only computer. We gave it back when they had a yard sale, though.

The first computer we actually bought was a Compaq with Windows 95.

I still remember getting my first non-dot matrix printer. "We can print things out that look like what the school prints out!"

I had to build my first one myself. It was a Z80 kit computer. The first brand name one I got was a Commodore 64.

An Apple... an old one. With the green font and black screen. So fun :P. Ran really well and is pretty well made.

Packard Bell 486 processor running on windows 3.11...
Ugh that was a horrible computer... *Shudders* that was back in 1994. My dad bought it for 4 grand...

Ohhh dear ol'Packard Bell :) I think right after my dad purchased it, Packard Bells were no longer selling in stores haha! Were computers really that expensive in the 90s? Insane in the membrane.

An Apple... an old one. With the green font and black screen. So fun :P. Ran really well and is pretty well made.

Haha! I remember that green font & black screen. Didn't you have to type Y or N?

The first computer we actually bought was a Compaq with Windows 95.

Ugh! I had a Compaq & it was the worst computer EVER. I think I lost hair because of the stress that computer caused me.

My first computer was... and still is... a Dell.

My first ever computer was a "Dragon 32 K" bought by my Dad from Dixons around 1982. It loaded games like "Wizards and Ogres" from a tape cassette player, and would frequently get distressed and shown "I/O error" when trying to load the game. My brother and I played "Wizards and Ogres" for about three hours one night over that Christmas.

Sadly a few years later it was trashed in a skip as by then it had stopped working altogether.

Commodore 64

Ohhh dear ol'Packard Bell :) I think right after my dad purchased it, Packard Bells were no longer selling in stores haha! Were computers really that expensive in the 90s? Insane in the membrane.


Oh yes indeedy. Back in 1992 my brother upgraded his 386 with an additional 2Mb (that's M not G) for AUD150.

Not actually my computer, but it was a rather generic 486 built by a shop named PC Shack back in '94 or '95.

:) Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2
We spent hours playing Blizzard Pass, if anyone remembers that game?

Ugh! I had a Compaq & it was the worst computer EVER. I think I lost hair because of the stress that computer caused me.

Good to know I wasn't the only one!

The first computer we actually bought was a Compaq with Windows 95.

Mine, too, was a Compaq (windows 98, though). It belonged to my father first for three years, then he have it to me. Used it for two years myself. Then one day it just broke down without any previous serious problems, :shrug:

My dad's Commodore 64. I remember having to wait 15 minutes to load Frogger from tape. (And more often than not, get a load error after that eternity. I cried.) That, and singing along with the Ghostbusters title-screen.

an IBM.

Oh yes indeedy. Back in 1992 my brother upgraded his 386 with an additional 2Mb (that's M not G) for AUD150.

And it didn't get much better for several years afterwards..
To add:
In 1996 I bought an add'l 8 MB of RAM for my Micron 90MHz PC, and it cost me $250 USD! Nowadays, both RAM and CPU freq are measured in GB and GHz respectively, and cost so much less.
That first system of mine, with 17" CRT monitor and a printer, ran me $3000.
It's probably not worth more than $100 now.

Dell.

Strangely enough, I suppose, I owned my first computer in 2001, despite being born in 1982.

My first was my dad's Compaq.
It was a hardy piece of technology... before it crashed.

My family had an old Macintosh II when I was really little back in the '80s. Our first computer with internet was a Gateway.

The first computer at home was an Atari computer.It had a word processing program and some games. There was even a book with the computer code that could enter.

Our first one was a really big one, I don't know what brand, only that it was a PC, no mac. And it was slow, veeeeery slow.

Hewlett Packard. But we don't have that one any more.

Mines was a Packard Bell desktop PC running Windows 98 :)

My first computer was a Packard Bell, followed by some custom-built computers, and then I've been with Dell ever since. :-)

:lol: My first computer was a COMPAQ - with state of the art 512K of memory! And a 10 MB hard drive!!!

Now I have a MacBook with gigs upon gigs of memory and space. :yuhup:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9d/Commodore64.jpg/320px-Commodore64.jpg

Our first computer in 1983 was a totally tricked out Commodore 64 -- we even sprung for the external 5 1/4" floppy drive and a dot matrix printer!! We even had a cassette recorder hooked up as even more external storage. Our "monitor" was a 13" color TV set.

But the biggest thrill was the blazing fast 1200 baud VICModem!! Woo-hoo, we were cooking with gas now!

64 Kb RAM, 6510 MOS 8 bit microprocessor, 1.023 MHz, VIC-II graphics chip supporting 16 colors at 320x200 resolution (you could hook it up to the TV for a portable computing experience), 512 bytes video RAM, 3 channel sound supporting 8 octaves.

No GUI, just straightforward DOS (well, Commodore's version). If you wanted the computer to do something in particular, you either had to write the program yourself in BASIC or sit and painstakingly type in a program from BYTE magazine. Or buy the program on a cartridge and stick it in the back of the computer, which was all contained in the keyboard unit and was about the size of a VCR. My cat always liked to lay on the top, above the function keys, because it was nice and warm there.

Those Commodores were pretty neat little boxes. They probably introduced more people to on-line community than most other brands. I hung out on BBS's for years before the World Wide Web became populated. Even thought about running my own BBS, but that was in the day when you had to have your own in-house servers to do stuff like that -- no online server space like now.

My first computer was a Seequa Chameleon. It was an old "sewing machine" style "portable" computer. Bought it around 1982 or 1983.

It booted from a 5.25" single-sided floppy disk (DOS 1.0), and was a monster machine for the time. It had a second 5.25" floppy drive, and 128K of RAM when most PCs only had 64K. It had both an 8088 chip for MS-DOS and a Z80 chip for CP/M (I never used this OS). The screen was a 9" black with green.

My husband used the PerfectWriter which came with the PC to write his dissertation.

We can still boot this old guy up and run Space Invaders!

My first computer brand is Hp...

My first computer was an Macintosh back in the mid 90's or so. My parents bought it as our first "family computer," but before too long I ended up being the one spending the most time on it. :rotfl: I now have a Dell with a ton of memory/hard drive space in it (and a 19" flatscreen monitor), and I'm considering getting a MacBook for school use later on this year.

I cannot for the life of me remember what my first computer was, I think it may have been a ibm. My first laptop though was a compaq.

well, first family computer was a Commadore 64 - my dad was supposed to use it for coding and etc, but me and my sister hogged it to play games all the time :D

My very *own* first computer was a HP laptop, which died last year :(

The earliest experience with a computer that I can recall was with an IBM mainframe in my dad's office. He showed me that "i 100" would make the computer count from 1 to 100. Much later, I learned that the "i" was actually an iota (no dot), and that the computer was speaking that most arcane of computer languages, APL.

The first personal computer we had in the house was a Commodore Pet, with the Chiclet keyboard and tape drive. It had 8 KB of memory, of which perhaps 15 percent (?) was taken up by the OS. I tried to write a D&D engine for this thing, but ran out of memory before I could get out of the first room.

The first personal computer we owned was an Apple ][+. It had 48 KB of memory, plus 16 KB extra on a language card that we later purchased. That thing was built like a rock--it never failed. I wrote public key encryption routines on it, and learned 6502 machine code. We later donated it to the local elementary school, much to my chagrin--especially as they couldn't possibly have used it for more than two or three years before it was hopelessly outclassed by a handheld device. Fortunately, there are emulators that will run all of my old programs. :)

EDIT: The Apple had a single diskette drive; you could get a second drive, but that was a bit extravagant for us. Lots of you may remember the 1.44 MB 3-1/2-inch floppies that IBM PCs lived on for a long time, but the Apple drives were for 5-1/4-inch floppies. They stored a grand total of about 125 KB, which meant that the physical size of a bit would have been about a tenth of a millimeter across--large enough to see, had the bit been a different color.

Just to give you an idea of how things have progressed in the storage world, a typical 2.5-inch hard drive these days can store about, what, 500 GB now? (I haven't really tracked that for some time.) At that density, each bit is nanometers in size, nearly five orders of magnitude smaller.

:lol: My first computer was a COMPAQ - with state of the art 512K of memory! And a 10 MB hard drive!!!

Now I have a MacBook with gigs upon gigs of memory and space. :yuhup:

Oh, I forgot to mention...

In 1991, I had a house fire. The COMPAQ was not in the part of the house that burned, but it was severely smoke damaged. Still, we decided to see what would happen if we turned the power on.

Even after massive amounts of smoke billowing down the halls blackening everything in sight, that blackened computer still showed a blinking green cursor.

Amazing. :)

I have to admit our first computer was an Amstrad!

Followed by a Compaq, Tiny and now a Dell...which I hope will soon be upgraded to something that can cope with family useage....

my first computer at home was dell...

I learned to use a computer on my father's old IBM PCJr, before it was stolen when our house was robbed in 1993, at which point we bought the Apple LC III. My elementary school used the Apple Classic until roughly 1997 before they upgraded to the then-latest version. In 2001 we had a custom-build PC desktop that was in the shop more often than it was in our home.

My first laptop was the Compaq Presario 2.0 back in 2005, which was replaced in late 2007 with a single-core Acer Aspire. Since then I've owned three Acer Aspires (the original Aspire netbook, a dual core notebook, and a desktop), and currently use a Toshiba Satellite.

The first computer I used... I can't remember, but my mom taught computer classes from the time I was four years old on up. I'd guess an IBM of some sort. My first personal computer was a Gateway laptop that my parents gave me when I finished High School. Three years later I bought another Gateway, because I didn't know much better. In Graduate school I had wisened up a bit and I made the best computer purchase I've ever made -- a Thinkpad. Thinkpads (of the X, T, and W series) are some of the computers I've ever used. Mine was worth every penny. A few years after that the school bought me a Macbook Pro 13 to use. It was well built and decent, but I needed to run various softwares in Windows and Boot Camp didn't work quite as well as advertised. The Mac OS was great though. My current computer is a Desktop that I built myself. I plan to purchase an X-series Thinkpad to go with it before much longer.