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Commodore PET, with chiclet keyboard and one of the first 1,000 made.



edit: in the event of winning any drawing I would also donate to an existing student since I live on the east coast.

Packard Bell ... believe it was 486 DX2.

I eventually had Windows 95 on it but I distinctly remember Windows 3.1 at that time as well. Maybe that was at school. Fun time when a lot of existing apps still required you to open up virtual DOS. I was a kid teaching my parents how to mount c c:\ , etc. Exciting time for home computers.

Ahhh... DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D, & Mega Race



Throw my name in the ring for drawing. I would donate to an incoming or exisiting student.

Commodore 8032 for me. That is the computer that flew the moon in "Space 1999"

Atari 130xe.

This bad boy...

The IBM PC


It played tic-tac-toe like nobody's business (and a little Dungeons of the Necromancer's Domain).

First one I bought with my money was an emachines T3985. You could plug your cable line in the back and record tv shows. Used it for almost 7 years. Still have it in storage.

Was 1986ish. Put together by mail ordering parts. Ran DOS 3.2. 186 processor. I still remember when you got your hard drive, you would format it and find out how many bad sectors you had. Your 16mb hard drive could lose a mb or two. 5.2" floppy disks.

I dialed into bulletin boards before AOL. Think we had a 386 or 486 by the time we had a modem.

Raptor said:

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First one I bought with my money was an emachines T3985. You could plug your cable line in the back and record tv shows. Used it for almost 7 years. Still have it in storage.

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I remember those early DVR setups. There were even add on cable & OTA cards.

Just recently watched a cool mini documentary by LGR on the eMachines. Pretty interesting story.



Anyone interested in retro computing or just technology history should check out that channel and watch all his Tech Tales series.

Fun to see all these.

My first was a Pentium with Windows 3.11

Apple II C

I still have it, and it still works

Compaq computer. Not sure which model, but ran Windows 95 and I just played minesweeper all day every day

Apple II+. I mostly used it for word processing and programming for school. Sold it to my HS Physics teacher about a year or two after graduation. I just wish I had gotten more use out of it.

Edit: now that I think about it, I had an Atari 800 for a while but didn't use it much. My sister worked for Atari in their heyday -- still have some Atari promotional sweatbands if you can believe that! Anyway, I think she got a 400 to try out and I didn't use it at all. Later, she got an 800 that I did use some but not a lot. I was still in Jr. High and had no real use for it besides gaming, and the 5200 suited me fine. 2 years later we got the Apple.

Tandon 386/25 with no boost mode. Played American Gladiators, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, Microsoft FS, and Madden II like a champ.

IBM 8088, I believe. My brothers and I played a lot of Microsoft Decathlon. I don't think we ever managed to successfully pole vault.

First one purchased was a Gateway 333mhz Celeron with a whopping 13 gig hard drive and 256 mb ram. It came with a DVD that had a video of madonna performing vogue live. :-)

A Timex Sinclair 1000, with the 16k memory expansion.

Tandy TRS-80 model 2 complete with cassette deck for program storage.

as a kid, family's TRS-80 Model I. first computer game I played was Raaka-Tu.

first i bought was one i built/pieced together and it could handle Ultima VII. jumped the first time the guardian said AVATAR!

First computer in my family:



We even had the rockin' tape deck instead of the floppy drive.

First when I went to college:



went down to the Compaq factory outlet in Houston for this bad boy.

Quest SuperELF, a CDP1802 base pcb computer system. .
Used the RCA CDP1802 processor which is still flying in things like the Hubble space telescope because it Silicon on Sapphire construction made it radiation resistant.

Atari 800 with cassette "drive" for storing programs. My first game on cassette was Temple of Apshai.

Sinclair ZX-80

TRS-80 Model 1 with lovely 80x25 B&W graphics.

Commodore VIC-20
followed soon thereafter with what was then my grandmother's Apple ][e


After that, I found an older Compaq luggable at a resale shop



A few weeks later, I found a Kaypro 2

Hagen95 said:

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A Timex Sinclair 1000, with the 16k memory expansion.

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Mine, too, but without the expansion.

nwspmp said:

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Commodore VIC-20

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I came across one of those new in box not that long ago. For $5 I figured why the hell not. No tape drive or any other storage though... honestly I haven't even plugged it in.

I don't remember the model, but the first one I bought with my own money was an HP laptop with a 600MHz Celeron processor, a 4GB hard drive, and 64MB of RAM. Slow....

Quote:

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first one I bought with my own money was an HP laptop with a 600MHz Celeron processor, a 4GB hard drive, and 64MB of RAM.

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First one I bought was a 386 40mhz with, I believe, 4 MEG of RAM and a 40 MEG HD. I just looked at a file in Logic Pro I'm STARTING on. It would already take up almost half of that HD.

By the way, the first computer I ever had at work that sat on my desk was a Xerox Star.

The Xerox Star is the computer that taught Apple and Microsoft about graphical user interfaces.

Power Mac

First one I ever bought was a Mac SE/30. That was an optimized speed demon in its time.

Actually the alto taught apple about gui's. The star was just a stripped down system so xerox could sell a few workstations on a network with a laser printer for less than $100k.
I probably have some vampire taps if you find yours star and need to hook it it to the ether.