What was the first computer you ever used?

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.

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

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]

Originally Posted by TamSV

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!

[punyXpress]

Originally Posted by 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 !!!!!

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