What was the first computer you ever used?

[timwilky]

Bet there are some real oddities in answer to this question.

For me.

GEC 4082, running OS4000 in about 1979 to run FORTRAN calculation code. I had been programming for about 2 years by then.

Fill in coding sheets and send them off, next day get back a typed listing, correct it and send it back. Get back an updated listing.

When happy, give authorisation to compile, get back error or run report.

How wonderful to be able to get my hands on a keyboard. No cost associated with compile/run.

[Luckypants]

Do you not count the computer at the data center you sent your coding sheets off to? I do, ICL1900 (I think).

[ophic]

Sinclair ZX81. I guess a totally bog standard answer.

[littleoldman2]

Foxborough something, it was 1976, it ran a chemical plant making Ibuprofen.

[timwilky]

Do you not count the computer at the data center you sent your coding sheets off to? I do, ICL1900 (I think).

That would be an IBM 370, but it took up a data centre and I never got past the reception desk.

[Mark_h]

RML480Z was the first real computer. Played with a few hex things before then, I think they were called Menta's or somethign like that. They looked a bit like ZX80s.

First one at home was a second hand ZX81 followed by a Spectrum which I upgraded from 16k to 48k myself with an internal RAM upgrade which was fun at the time.

When I started work as a field engineer at Datapoint I used to work on Datapoint 1100s which booted from a c90 tape and the fancy ones had a 128k 8" floppy disc or the real fancy ones a 5meg hard drive which was about 2 foot across.

[ClunkintheUK]

I can't remember exactly, Either an Amstrad something or other or an Apricot. I am pretty sure my dad still has both. Would have been some time in the mid 80's. Wrote a couple of Basic programs from a cookbook from the library. I don't specifically remember which I used first, my dad always had a computer at home as long as I can remember. He still has a 8" floppy drive, and I believe some disks that fit it.

[Richie]

ICL model 85, commodore pet, RML380Z, ZX80-81 ORIC-1, then BBC modelB

[Stinka]

BBC thing in school in the early 80s

[Stinka]

First one at home was zx spectrum, then my dad had an Amstrad dos thing in late 80s iirc. After that we had a Mitsubishi pentium 166 mmx in the mid to late 90s

I got big into PC gaming and built an Athlon (I think?) Dp 3200 rig then an intel e6300 followed by a q6600 water cooled beast that I still have, but it's died as of last month

Going to build a raspberry pi thing to replace it tho I think as its only used for kodi these days as I do everything else on my iPhone

[L3nny]

BBC Model B at school, first one I owned was a Commodore Vic 20. I remember copying the code for games out of magazines, kids these days don't know they're born.

[andrewsmith]

BBC model b in about 1996

sent with all the fury of a clogged drain!!

[punyXpress]

Acorn Electron
IBM PC XT
NEC APC twin 8" floppies, mono screen, weighed a ton!
When you switched it on, all the lights dimmed

[Bluepete]

Zx 80, the 81, then BBC B.

Pete ;)

[andrewsmith]

Acorn Electron
IBM PC XT
NEC APC twin 8" floppies, mono screen, weighed a ton!
When you switched it on, all the lights dimmed
And the turbine at the power station went critical

sent with all the fury of a clogged drain!!

[L3nny]

BBC model b in about 1996

sent with all the fury of a clogged drain!!

You were still using a BBC in 1996? Old school!

[andrewsmith]

You were still using a BBC in 1996? Old school!
Very badly funded school
They had 40 computers to a school of 500 that included the staff machines

sent with all the fury of a clogged drain!!

[dizzyblonde]

Zx spectrum when I was very young, then an Amstrad CPC464, which you loaded games by tape. You can just hear that noise as it took hours. Then told you it had failed.

The next computer after that was an Amiga 3000. One of my ex boyfriends was a weird geeky graphics programmer

[fizzwheel]

ZX81 or a PET, then BBC Model A, BBC Model B, BBC Master with the Cartridge slot on an ECONET network. Acorn Electron at home as well.

ZX81 my parents borrowed off a neighbour for me, I can remember the RAM pack used to work loose if it got to hot and then the whole would reboot itself.

[ethariel]

ZX80 (kit form!)

First PC was an Olivetti M24 with a 20Mb hard drive!!!!..... CAD work designing PCB's and an A1 Pen Plotter.

[Stephen McG]

What a question
my first computer usage was using the ICL computer at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh in 1969.
The programming was in ALGOL
The maths teacher at our school had been in my older brother's class and he advised me that computers were the way to. I was planning to study Civil Engineering.
In the course of my 40+ years I have used most computers and many codes and operating systems.
CP/M MS/DOS all the way till now.
Even the modern 'young bucks' are amazed when I go into a command prompt and do all sorts of things by typing commands - the usual comment is 'how do you know that'
anyway thanks for the opportunity to indulge in a bit of nostalgia
SMcG in Glasgow

[phi-dan]

First computer I used at school was the BBC A, then we got a Spectrum at home. I have traumatic memories of the time I bought a programming book, which came with a printout of corrections almost as big as the book itself, and even then the code was buggy.
First PC was a 386sx, for which we bought the coprocessor to turn it into a dx.
My daughter has a hard time believing that the old smartphone she plays with is more powerful than most computers I have ever owned.

[Shawthing]

Sinclair ZX81 with 16K (yes a whole 16K of memory) RAM pack.
learned Basic.
Then Commodore 64 where i branched into Assembly language programming.

[Amadeus]

Babbage difference engine.
Never got Doom working on it.

:-)

[TamSV]

ZX Spectrum as a kid and, when I started working, a Digital Equipment Corporation VT100.

The Spectrum was the superior machine.

[Bluepete]

Reading this makes me realise how old we all are on this forum!

Pete ;)

[Corny Gizmo]

God knows what it was called but my uncle gave it to me so I could teach myself the basics. It had MS-DOS and a floppy drive, He gave me Windows 3.1 on Floppy and told me to get it installed.

It taught me basic command line and other things that an 8 year old needs to know :) this was around 2000 I think. (I'm only 23 :P )

[SIII]

My uncle was a sales rep for Hewlett Packard (IIRC) and he had a home computer, circa 1980. We spent ages on it playing shoot the cow, in which you decided the angle of eleveation of a cannon, which then fired and if you hit the cow, a Moo sound was heard !!! Simple graphics but great fun.

Our first computer was a Spectrum 48k. My sister and I got it as a joint christmas present in the early 80's. Hours spent typing pages of basic before getting the message - Syntax Error ! Spent 3 days typing a game in and three days sorting the errors, before it didn't work !!!

Gave up on that and just bought tapes of games. Then sat listing to 'FAX' type sounds whilst shouting at anybody that slammed a door, or talked loudly - cos it would fail to load for any reason. Still think fondly of Manic Miner, etc. I had quite a little black market of copy games running at school !!!!!

[phi-dan]

ZX Spectrum as a kid and, when I started working, a Digital Equipment Corporation VT100.

The Spectrum was the superior machine.
Hard to believe, but at work our core system is used through a DEC VT100 emulator which is an absolute pig to keep working on Win7! :eek:

[punyXpress]

My uncle was a sales rep for Hewlett Packard (IIRC) and he had a home computer, circa 1980. We spent ages on it playing shoot the cow, in which you decided the angle of eleveation of a cannon, which then fired and if you hit the cow, a Moo sound was heard !!! Simple graphics but great fun.

Our first computer was a Spectrum 48k. My sister and I got it as a joint christmas present in the early 80's. Hours spent typing pages of basic before getting the message - Syntax Error ! Spent 3 days typing a game in and three days sorting the errors, before it didn't work !!!

Gave up on that and just bought tapes of games. Then sat listing to 'FAX' type sounds whilst shouting at anybody that slammed a door, or talked loudly - cos it would fail to load for any reason. Still think fondly of Manic Miner, etc. I had quite a little black market of copy games running at school !!!!!

Reminded me of my HP 12C in about 1982 - my sister worked for HP in the States, back then. Still got it, but not used it for about 15 years. Its claim to fame was that it had more computing power than the first US space runs.
What's more you can still get a new one @ $72.77

[squirrel_hunter]

Atari 520 ST FM. My Dad bought it for the family for Christmas with the money he got from the demutualisation of the Abbey National. I did some very basic BASIC on it before failing to get to grips with STOS. But it was enough to give me an appreciation for the byte. Played lots of game on that machine and it still exists somewhere in the family home. I maintain to this day that the greatest computer ever made was the Atari 520 and it help set me on the career path I'm on still.

[kaivalagi]

BBC Model B at home first with tape drive then with a 5 1/4 floppy

Learnt BBC basic and played far too much chuckie egg and elite

Now playing Elite Dangerous on the Pc :)

[Grinch]

ZX80, ZX81, Commodore 16, BBC Micro, Spectrum +2...

[Red ones]

ZX81 1k (yes, 1k until we built the 16k expansion module that didn't crash every 5 minutes)
Then Amstrad CPC664
Amstrad PCW8256

then moved on to IBM Aptiva with Intel 486,

Since then the worlds my oyster:
I now have 2x iPhones, iPad2 and 2 mini iPads and a touch screen laptop thing, which I think means I now have 160 million times as much computing memory than the ZX81 had when it was new.

[Heorot]

Like Timwilky, my first commercial programming was on a GEC 4082, in my case in 1980. I was programming in Cobol using a really buggy compiler although I did write some programs before that on a Commodore PET. On the GEC machine, we used green screen monitors with a fixed keyboard and the editor was a botched version of the ICL George editor.

[dirtydog]

Erm does a spectrum 48k count as a computer? If not then the first computer we had at home would've been the Atari 520 stfm. Was actually my brothers, he bought it with his first couple of pay cheques when he worked for Olivetti.
I only ever played games on it like Elite and test drive

[Sir Trev]

The first machines at my school were the Commodore Pets, then they splashed out on a (yes, just one) BBC Micro. As I did not take the fledgling computer studies CSE I was not allowed to use them... My brother got an Acorn Electron at about the time I went to college where we also used Electrons in our maths and stats module with very basic spreadsheets.

[Balky001]

I think it was ZX81, Apple II and BBC Acorn, then BBC model B at school but only a few people did computer skills.

My first home computer was a Dragon 32.

[daveangel]

My cousin's ZX81 was the first.
Vaguely remember the school computers in the mid '80s
Slight thread drift but still have the little brown fold open 'Donkey Kong' game and the bigger 'Donkey Kong Jnr' that runs on 2 'C' type doorbell batteries! Occasionally it comes out the loft for nostalgia and check it still works . .

[Richie]

Reading this makes me realise how old we all are on this forum!

Pete ;)


was just thinking the very same Pete.

my Zx-81 had the JRS 48K ram pack :)
and the Amiga 500 had a 200Mb HDD

Fav Game was Shadow of the Beast 1 and 2 :)

?v=w6Osnolfxqw

[L3nny]

Here are some graphics from the first RPG I ever played

csBkEO01idM

[keith_d]

I don't know what it was, but Fords donated some time on their mainframe to educational users (probably a tax dodge) around 1977. So once a week we would get a teletype with an acoustic coupler delivered to school and could dial up and write BASIC programs on it.

It also had a tape punch, so you could save them by writing them to paper tape, rather than retyping them every time.

Just in case anyone else remembers teletypes I'll add a reminder of the noise they made, "chugga, chugga, chugga, kerchunk, kerchunk, chugga, chugga...."

[Richie]

Here are some graphics from the first RPG I ever played

csBkEO01idM

this sucks my will to live.............................................. .................................................. .................................................. .................. :shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock:: shock::shock::shock::shock::shock:

[L3nny]

this sucks my will to live.............................................. .................................................. .................................................. .................. :shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock::shock:: shock::shock::shock::shock::shock:

Me and my sister spent hours on that game, I'd even drawn out a map of where all the rooms were and what was in them.

There were no instructions on what commands you could use so it was just random typing till something happened.

I feel I may have wasted my childhood :smt090

[Littlepeahead]

Can't remember what mine was but I'm working on an exhibition of cricket games, mostly board games but there's one on a floppy disc. Trouble is, we no longer have a computer at work we can run it on!

[kaivalagi]

chances are they'll be an emulator for it LPH....just need the floppy image in a file...

[ophic]

Me and my sister spent hours on that game, I'd even drawn out a map of where all the rooms were and what was in them.

There were no instructions on what commands you could use so it was just random typing till something happened.

I feel I may have wasted my childhood :smt090
A similar game on my Texas Instruments computer was even worse as it only accepted 3 letter abbreviations of each word and no spaces.

So to get out of prison... opetap

Took a long time to figure that out...

[Luckypants]

I don't know what it was, but Fords donated some time on their mainframe to educational users (probably a tax dodge) around 1977. So once a week we would get a teletype with an acoustic coupler delivered to school and could dial up and write BASIC programs on it.

It also had a tape punch, so you could save them by writing them to paper tape, rather than retyping them every time.

Just in case anyone else remembers teletypes I'll add a reminder of the noise they made, "chugga, chugga, chugga, kerchunk, kerchunk, chugga, chugga...."
Ha ha! Remember that well!

[Swin]

Commodore PET at school and a Dragon 32 at home

First experience with Computers in the working world was an old Messaging mainframe which ran on Marconi Myriads - apparently this system also ran the traffic lights in Glasgow for a good few years, and when they were being upgraded a couple of our "techies" were despatched up there to salvage what bits they could for our system

[timwilky]

Ha ha! Remember that well!

Worse teletype was one I had on a programmable function generator. For the life of me I cannot remember who made it. But it was old back in the 70s

30 minutes of entering the front panel switches to IPL it sufficiently to then read the bootstrap code from paper tape. Trouble was a pinch wheel had fallen off the high speed optical reader and we had to fed the one off old paper tape through the reader on the teletype.

watch what you did with that, push down hard on the keys, but if your finger slipped it tried to go through the gap between the keys. No way a touch typist could use one.

[Ruffy]

Here are some graphics from the first RPG I ever played

csBkEO01idM
Wow: "By Scott Adams" - could that be the same one that now does the Dilbert cartoons?

This thread triggers my memories too. My own experience started with a Commodore PET and moved on to BBC Micro (model B), with exposure through various friends to, in approx. chronological order ZX81, ZX Spectrum, VIC 20, Dragon 32, Acorn Electron, Commodore 64, Amiga, and Acorn Archimedes before PCs took over in anger.

(Of course, there are also the industrial machines too: Do proprietary PLCs and pre-PC SCADA systems count?)

[Mark_h]

Anyone else remember XYZZY as the "secret" code for adventure 1?

And why can I remember that but not the password for my email accounts?

[Heorot]

Nightmare scenario. A weeks program update on IBM punched cards (about 2 foot long) was dropped and the cards scattered all over the floor. It took hours to reassemble them in the right order. You had to read the numerical sequence from the punched holes.