Specs of your first computer

[XRubicon]

Mine was a 16 Mhz, 2 meg of ram, 20 mb hard drive running windows 3.0.

[Deja Q]

1. Atari 600XL

Introduced: 1983
CPU: 6502, 1.79 MHz
Memory: 16K RAM, 24K ROM
Operating System: BASIC in ROM
Atari XL operating system on diskette
Input/Output: 2 joystick ports, Atari cable bus
Bus: Atari daisy-chain cable bus, connects floppy drives, cassette drives, printers
Other Items in Collection: Full documentation, Atari DOS 2.5 & 3.0, various cartridges & games on diskette


Slick design.

Atari also had a cool trade-up program to get a 800XL for under $50 if I recall... I got the 600XL used at a garage sale for $10...

[flvegan]

2. Mine too.

I bought mine at a Sears outlet with the cassette drive. My best buddy had the TRS-80.

[qnr]

33. Those SIO ports were a precursor of USB, even so far as one of the Atari designers going

on to be one of the team designing USB.

[PBS Poll-435]

3. 133 Mhz Cyrix 6x86, 8 Mb Ram, 40 Mb hard drive

Windows 95.

[Swamp Rat]

4. Apple IIe, 65C02 running at 1.023 MHz, 64 KB RAM (upgraded to 128 KB)

DuoDisk, Monochrome monitor, and DE-9 Joystick. :)

[Jamastiene]

9. HA! My little Atari 800 XL was 1.77 Mhz

Mine wuz faster than yours. :P

[qnr]

34. If you ever feel nostalgic, just stop by my place:

I still use Atari 8-bits almost daily :)

[SacredCow]

67. I've got that exact floppy drive and tape drive somewhere...

My Atari was the 1200XL, though.

[Orrex]

5. I had a Commodore 64

My first PC-compatible was a huge non-name monstrosity predating Windows 1.0 with a 20 meg hard drive the size of a Harry Potter book.

It took about 45 seconds just to fire it up to get the DOS prompt.

[pscot]

14. 64 kilobytes and zero memory

with a tape drive. An hour of peeks and pokes and a dancing mouse would scuttle across the screen. I thought I was really cutting edge.

[Orrex]

29. The Bruce Lee game was aweome!

IIRC it took about 15 years to load from the tape drive, but after that it was pure heaven.

[mopinko]

23. me too.

had a cassette tape recorded for memory.

had an ibm xt after that. no idea what the specs were. do remember saving up the impossible sum of $500 for a 60 mb hard drive for computer #3.

[LeftyMom]

57. Same here. But I had two 5 1/4" drives and a dot matrix printer for it,

so as c64s go it was really kitted out.

I still have it, and last I checked it still works. :)

[WCGreen]

6. A Leading Edge dual drive 286...

No hard drive

[woo me with science]

7. Coleco Adam

Not sure it really counts as a computer....just a word processor.



Specifications:

The Coleco Adam, in word processing mode.CPU: Zilog Z80<4> @ 3.58 MHz
Support processors: three Motorola 6801s @ 1 MHz (memory & I/O, tape, and keyboard control)

Memory: 80 KB RAM, 16 KB video RAM; 32 KB ROM

Expansion: 3 internal slots, 1 cartridge slot, and a 62.5 kbit/s half-duplex serial bus called AdamNet. The stand-alone also has an external expansion port of the same type as the ColecoVision expansion port, on the right hand side.
Secondary storage: Digital Data Pack tape cassette, 256 KB
Graphics: Texas Instruments TMS9928A (a close relative of the TMS9918 in the TI-99/4A)
256 × 192 resolution
32 sprites
Sound: Texas Instruments SN76489AN
3 voices
white noise





After that I got a Mac 512K like Jerry Seinfeld had on his desk:

[Jamastiene]

8. Uhm, the OS was OS Rev. 2 - 16 KB ROM

It had a cassette tape drive capable of recording at 600 bit/s. BASIC was built in. It had a Atari SALLY 6502 chipset. It had a Parallel Bus Interface (PBI) at the back. The modem was optional and the highest you could get back then was 300 baud. RAM was 64 KB and monitor output was to a television set.

Here is a picture of what it looked like:


And here is a complete list of specs:
Atari 800 XL System Information
Announced June 1983
Released November 1983
Processor 1.77 MHz
System RAM 64k (expandable to 256k)
System ROM 24k
Operating System XL-OS (Atari BASIC built in)
DOS Version 2.0 or 2.5
Keyboard 64 Key Atari Keyboard (contains cartridge interface)
Function Keys Start, Option, Select, Reset, Help
Joysticks Two 9 Pin Connections
Sound 4 Channels (3.5 Octaves per channel)
Colors 16 Colors (eight different luminance factors per color)
Peripherals 5.25 Floppy Disk Drive, Cassette Drive

Source: http://www.aganazzar.com/atari-specs.html

I did NOT have the 5.25 Floppy Disk Drive.

I don't miss it. I can emulate the old BASIC if I want to on my current computer. I did have fun dreaming of what The Witching Hour (a game) would do after I spent days manually typing in 3000 lines of code from Antic magazine... only to find my version of the Atari 800XL wouldn't run it. I'll never forget that experience. That poor cassette machine learned to accept my stupid little efforts at writing BASIC programs just like they were real programs. It didn't laugh at my like my current computer does. I have to give it credit for that much.

[HopeHoops]

10. 1 MHz 6502, 64 KB, 170KB 5 1/4" floppy drive - Apple II+

[hobbit709]

11. Bunch of Johnny-come-latelys

[UndertheOcean]

15. Hmmm , can you play Alleycat on that ?

[Odin2005]

20. OMG, how does that thing work?

:wow:

[qnr]

31. Hah. I actually used an earlier one than that (though I didn't own it) the Mark 8.

built from a kit in Radio Electronics magazine, about 8 months to a year before the Altair. http://bytecollector.com/mark_8.htm To be honest, "used" is an exaggeration, I didn't know anything about computers in 1974/75 -- but he did let me 'play' with it.

Edit: s/that that/than that/

[YankeyMCC]

12. Commodore 64

with Cassette tape drive


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64#Software

[amerikat]

13. Radio Shack TRS 80 Color Computer.

1980
Motorola 6809 processor
4K of ram.
Cassette tape storage.
The monitor was a TV.
Slot for game cartridges.
2 Joystick ports.
That's about it. Oh i increased the ram to 16K by piggybacking the memory chips.


FROM WIKI:
Color Computer 1 (1980–1983)
4k TRS-80 Color Computer from 1981, 26-3001
Late "white" model TRS-80 Color Computer I

The original version of the Color Computer shipped in a large silver-gray case with a calculator-like "chiclet keyboard", and was available with memory sizes of 4K (26-3001), 16K (26-3002), or 32K (26-3003). Versions with at least 16K of memory installed shipped with standard Microsoft Color Basic or (optionally) Extended Color Basic. It used a regular TV for display, and TV-out was the only available connection to a display device.

The early versions of the CoCo 1 had a black keyboard surround, the TRS-80 nameplate above the keyboard to the left side, and a RAM badge ("button") affixed on the top and right side of the case. Later versions removed the black keyboard surround and RAM button, and moved the TRS-80 nameplate to the mid-line of the case.

Initial versions of the CoCo were upgraded to 32K by means of piggybacking two banks of 16K memory chips and adding a few jumper wires. A later motherboard revision removed the 4K RAM option and were upgraded to 32K with "half-bad" 64K memory chips as a cost-cutting measure. T

[question everything]

43. Some of us called it Trash-80.. (nt)

[begin_within]

16. This:

Created by Bell Labs, for learning how computers work. It actually did compute simple arithmetic, but you had to do everything of course. Someone recently wrote an emulator of it:

[hunter]

66. Me too! Bell gave them to the schools.

Thanks for posting this.

[NYC_SKP]

17. 1991: Cutting edge: 486-33mhz, 8 meg RAM, 200 MB HD, 21" Toshiba Monitor, $7,433.00

Still have the receipt.

That price included a 12" x 12" digitizing tablet.

1 MB of RAM was costing about $100, IIRC.

:patriot:

[Odin2005]

18. 1994 Packard Bell

8MB RAM, 800MB Hard Drive, SVGA graphics, x4 CD-ROM, Windows 3.2. Pentium processor.

$2.400 :)

[liberaltrucker]

19. Toshiba laptop 2001

IIRC: 64 MB SDRAM, 10 GB hard drive, Win ME (ugh!)
100 Mhz Celeron processor.

Much better now: HP laptop Turion 64 processor 2 Ghz,
2 GB SDRAM, 100 GB hard drive, Win XP Pro.

Funny, this computer cost $1000 less than the first, yet
is much more reliable. In 3 years of use, nary a problem.
Well, there was that one case of "user stupidity". :blush:

[Odin2005]

21. You had WinME? My condolences!

:rofl:

[liberaltrucker]

22. Thanks, I earned them

:hi:

[NYC_SKP]

24. Left hand, right hand, ten digits, ohhhs!

Twenty digits total if you count my toes!

:P

[PBS Poll-435]

35. I think you mean 21

:hide:

[NYC_SKP]

38. That's NOT a finger....

...and it's NOT a toe!

Doncha know!

:hi:

[Gidney N Cloyd]

25. Epson with dual floppies and no hard drive.

Amber monitor.

Couldn't tell you the processor speed. I could buy 3 comparatively kickass laptops for the same money today as what I paid for it at Ward's Electric Avenue back in the 90's.

[Crabby Appleton]

26. Xerox 820 with CP/M v2.2 OS

Zilog Z80 processor clocked at 2.5 MHz, 64 kb of RAM

[CatholicEdHead]

27. Tandy, 8086 4Mhz, 512K RAM, no HD, Tandy OS

[denbot]

28. Packard Bell 16mhz, 2megs Ram, running Lotus 1-2-3.

I installed a modem that was half the size of my motherboard and downloaded at the blazing speed of 1400 bods. Ah the memories.

[qnr]

30. 1979, Atari 400. 8K, 1.79 MHz MOS6502 CPU, monopanel keyboard. Followed by an

Atari 800 2 wks (gee, I must have been richer than I thought back then) later. 30 years later, they're still 2 of my favorite computers.

[EFerrari]

32. PC Junior (what else, lol)

General

* Type:
Desktop
* Bundled OS:
Other

Processor

* Processor make:
Intel
* CPU family:
Other
* CPU model:
8088
* Processor speed:
4.77 MHz
* Number of CPUs:
1
Memory and storage (basic)

* System RAM:
0.13 MB

[Redstone]

36. TI99/400. Specs? We didn't NEED no esteenking specs! Just a cassette recorder.

Redstone

[Mugu]

37. A Timex-Sinclair 1000 was my first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000

Then a Kaypro II w/dual single sided 5.25" floppies that held 171K each.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaypro

[TrogL]

39. a bunch of chips and a breadboard

I'm not going to count the digital to analog converter made out of a bunch of razor blades, nail and telephone wires.

8080 processor
555 timer (clock for processor)
I/O-RAM chip
bunch of diodes (boot ROM)
transformer, caps, diodes etc. for power supply
oscilloscope (for output)

It succesfully loaded a kernel, added 2 plus 2, then the power supply blew and fried all the chips.

I broke down and bought a VIC20.

[Kutjara]

48. You beat me. At least yours worked (however briefly).

I bought the Altair 8000 kit in the mid 70s and, after about five hundred hours of meticulous work, managed to produce a very impressive-looking doorstop.

[Capn Sunshine]

40. Compaq Deskpro 286 running DOS

[phasma ex machina]

59. +1 (close enough) nt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

41. Macintosh LCIII

I don't remember what its specs were, but when I upgraded to a computer that was expandable to 36MB of RAM, the 13-year-son of a friend scoffed, "You'll never need that much memory."

OK, here are its specs:

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP209

[question everything]

42. Osborne 1

All in one with a little bitty screen



Used the CPM operating system but had Supercalc and Wordstar and Basic.

Hey, it worked.

[XemaSab]

44. Mac Plus

[MilesColtrane]

45. Mac Classic II

16MHz processor, 2 MB ram, 40 MB hard drive, floppy drive, built in 9" monochrome display, running OS 7.5

[kid a]

46. apple IIc 128k ram

[pokerfan]

47. 1MHz, 1024 bytes of RAM, what's a hard drive?

[Sebastian Doyle]

49. Commodore Vic 20

Put up with it about a month and then got the C-64, but I didn't have the 1541 floppy drive until a while after that. Everything was either typed in from those damn computer magazines, or loaded from the cassette tape drive.



Got a lot of use out of that one. Kept it until I got a 386 in 1993 or so.

[Cleobulus]

50. I don't know how I would list the specs but here's a pic of it...

I'm really dating myself here. :)

[baldguy]

63. Um.. have you ever heard of WD-40?

[tk2kewl]

51. my first computer purchase matches yours...

i think it cost about $2000 in 1990

[guitar man]

52. 1999

AMD K6-2 350mhz, 64mb ram, 8gb hard drive

[mike_c]

53. original TRS-80 with cassette tape drive storage....

Hard disk? :rofl:

I think it had about 8K RAM. Uppercase text display only, no color. A BASIC interpreter, which was really all you could use to run programs, i.e. if you wanted to do anything except type words on the screen, you had to enter the BASIC code and run the interpreter. Once entered, however, you could store the code on cassette tape and reload it later. No compiler that I'm aware of although I'm certain there must have been an assembler for the thing.

[RoyGBiv]

68. There was an assembler ...

A friend of mine played with it all night long one time and managed to turn that little CoCo into a music machine. Put the cassette in the tape drive, start the little app he made, and the music came out of the television speakers.

I almost didn't have the heart to tell him he'd just managed to recreate the BASIC command SOUND(). Almost didn't have the heart. It was too funny no to. :)

[yawnmaster]

54. intel blue box

this is it.
8085 processor.
What's a hard drive??
2 - 8 inch floppies for a whole 1M of storage!

[Call Me Wesley]

55. This one, Toshiba T1200:

T0SHIBA T-1200
The Toshiba T1200 was a very advanced laptop for it’s time, being able to run many powerful programs only a proper PC could use at the time. It has an 8 Inch screen that can only use scales of Green and Blue.

Another Feature was the first “Resume” Feature, kind of like suspend or Standby on today’s computers. This laptop was the first ever to use this feature.
It outclassed the other laptops, like the Datavue spark because of it’s competitive price and lower weight. The buyer could choose between a standard and backlit LCD Screen.

Their were 2 Main Models available at the time, 1 With two 720K 3 ½ Floppy Drives (T 1200FB) and the other one with 1 720K 3 ½ Floppy and a 20MB Hard Drive (T 1200HB). It came with an official MS-DOS 3.3 floppy disk or with MS-DOS loaded onto the hard drive for hard disc versions.

RAM above 640 KB can be used as a fast, battery-backed RAM disk drive (Toshiba Hard RAM) and / or expanded memory (LIM-EMS).

[csziggy]

56. Apple II, 1MHz 6502 processor, 48 K of RAM, no hard drive

But it had TWO entire 360 K floppy disk drives and a color monitor! Having two disk drives meant you could have one with the program and one to save data. Saved a lot of disk swapping and gave us a "platform" to hold the monitor on top of the CPU.

[Truth2Tell]

58. Commodore PET

Commodore PET 4000

CPU: MOS 6502, 1MHz
RAM: 16K
ROM: 20K, including BASIC 4.0
Video: MOS 6545, 9" or 12" / 12" monochrome monitor, 40×25 / 80×25 character display
Sound: single piezo "beeper"
Ports: MOS 6520 PIA, MOS 6522 VIA, 2 Datassette ports (1 on the back), 1 IEEE-488

[Manifestor_of_Light]

60. Compaq Deskpro. 1985.

Amber or green screen, your choice; 20 meg hard drive. Running DOS. 5-1/4 inch floppies. 286 processor.

I used PFS:Professional Write for my transcripts. It had a 64K buffer, so I had to cut my transcripts into 55-page sections, each a separate document. I had a huge teletype terminal Diablo 630 printer. Tractor feed paper with 2 carbons(that means sprocket holes, like film) and a daisy wheel with type on it. Noisy as all hell.

I also used Sprint by Borland. It was a good word processor with great potential, but Borland abandoned it.

Then I used WordPervert and LOVED it for years. I really do not like Word.

Present hubby's first computer: Apple II, 1980.

ex-hubby's first computer: Kaypro luggable, 1984.

[madinmaryland]

61. IBM PDP-11/70 (Mainframe)...

Our programs were stored on punch cards. OS was Fortran 4. We also used assembly language, which is what we used the punch cards for.

:shrug:

[baldguy]

62. 20Mhz 386SX w/ 16MB and a 10GB hard drive running Windows 3.11

It had integrated video & sound, but I added a 512KB video card and a 16bit sound card. I also upgraded the hard drive to 30GB.

[Mutley]

64. A Tandy 2000

8 MHz Intel 80186
128kB RAM (expandable to 768kB, 896kB with motherboard and ROM modifications)
1 or 2 720kb 5-1/4" floppy drives
10MB MFM full-height hard drive (upgradable to two 32MB half-height drives, 2 80MB drives with ROM mods and 3rd-party low-level formatting software)
Proprietary parallel printer port (requires adapter cable to connect to a Centronics-port printer)
Proprietary serial port

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_2000#Specifications

[EOTE]

65. My folks had a few before mine, but my first real computer was a Tandy.

8088 4.77mhz I believe. 5 1/4 floppy, EGA monitor and tape backup. 640k total system memory. It had DOS 2 point something or other and Deskmate 1.0 (Radioshack's pathetic answer to Windows).

Right now I've got a custom built system with an i7 920 OCed to 4.2 ghz, 6 gigs of triple channel memory, 1.5 terabytes of storage in 2 RAID arrays, GTX 285 GPU (soon to be two GTX 285 GPUs) all hooked to my 24" Sony CRT (it may weigh a ton, but I love it). After picking up another GTX 285, my next upgrade will be to pick up a couple of decent SSDs and RAID them for my OS and a few applications. My HD subsystem is a pretty big bottleneck in my computer, hopefully a couple of SSDs will take care of that. I've also got an HTPC hooked up to my projector, but the specs are a lot less impressive. Things have progressed quite a bit in 20+ years.

[hunter]

69. My first computer was hand built around a CDP1802 microprocessor.

I later upgraded its memory from 256 to 1024 bytes. Then I transfered most of the components to a Quest Super Elf board because it had a hexadecimal keypad and display. Programming it using toggle switches took a long time. The memory expansion and video output on the Super Elf was my own design and I later adapted a tape interface from an article in Byte magazine.

The machine was similar to this:



http://www.computermuseumgroningen.nl/monoboards/superelf.html

After that I played with a few Z80 machines, until I met the Atari 800 and later the 800XL. Those were my favorite machines ever, there hasn't been any computer quite so magical for me since.

[HamdenRice]

70. IBM PC XT c. 1984 -- Don't remember the specs other than 20 meg hard drive

To load a 100 page paper in WordPerfect 4.0 and go to the end of the document, the computer would make a sound, like "cur-chunk, cur-chunk, cur-chunk, cur-chunk, cur-chunk, cur-chunk, cur-chunk, cur-chunk, cur-chunk, ..." and after maybe 30 seconds get there.

The first computer I programmed was an IBM 1620 with punch cards. I was in high school. I got into an after school program in which I was able to program an IBM 360 with Fortran IV with Watfor, to do things like calculating PI to 100 digits.