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18777

answers:

470

What was your first home computer? The one that made you "fall in love" with programming.


There are 300+ entries, many (most?) of which are duplicates.

As with all Stack Overflow poll type Q&As, please make certain your answer is NOT listed already before adding a new answer - searching doesn't always find it (model naming variations, I assume).

  • If it already exists, vote that one up so we see what the most popular answer is, rather than duplicating an existing entry.

  • If you see a duplicate, vote it down so the top entries have only one of each model listed.

  • If you have interesting or additional information to add, use a comment or edit the original entry rather than creating a duplicate.

+289  A: 
jinsungy
The commodore 64 was rockin'!
Dan Harper - Leopard CRM
Does voting up this answer as if it was a poll make sense?
Martin Beckett
Given my gravatar, I'd have to agree
Schnapple
Load "*" ,8,1
Penguinix
Extra points if you know what POKE 53280,7 does!
Steve Hanov
Did you know that you can program in Forth and in Lisp on the C64.. Why didn't I know that back then. Sad. :(
Flinkman
Check out an emulator like http://www.viceteam.org/ It takes you back. It also emulates other Commodore machines like the Pet (my first).
Don Kirkby
@Steve Hanov: Changes the color of the screen or border? Don't remember which or what color that was though. Man, back in the day when colors could be represented as one or two digits...
Schnapple
Wow you could program lisp on the C64!?I still have mine at my folks house(overseas), maybe one day I'll start it up and try that out.
Robert Gould
@Schnapple: you win, it turns the border yellow. Now if you can play the song "Lay down your head Tom Dooley" using only POKE statements you win.
Steve Hanov
Had these at school when I was 8. Anyone remember 'Logo' with the drawing turtle? First 'programming language" I learned. Things like functions, abstraction, loops. I told my Dad I waned to be a 'logo programmer when I grew up.
Ron Tuffin
Give me a Compute magazine and a Commodore 64 ... oh the memories!
mattruma
I feel bad I had to raise the vote count from "64" to 65. Oh well. I still have mine!
erickson
Never could figure out graphics, so I wrote an ASCII-art Centipede knock-off, all in BASIC, on my C64, which was attached to my dad's old 10-inch TV. If only I had that floppy disk still...
Ben Dunlap
My favorite, I'll never have so much fun with any machine as I had with that one!
superwiren
I was about ready to explode when my 1541 disk drive arrived! and nearly as big as the comp itself! I really was the envy of all my C64 owning - tape loading friends!
geocoin
@Schnapple: My mnemonic was, POKE 53280 changed the border because 0 looked like the border of the screen; POKE 53281 changed the background.
David
Anyone remember RUN magazine?
David
Computes! Gazette was the best, hammering out a dozen pages of assembly to get a new app was a such a chore, but worth it.C64 was probably the greatest computer ever built. So simple, so valuable. Introduced so many to computers. I dont see another computer ever being as influential as this one
Neil N
Although a friend of mine had a ZX81 on which we programmed games! OK, we typed them in from a magazine.
My first computer, made me getting into assembly code very quickly.
boxofrats
what about SYS 64760 ? ;)
Stefano Borini
Pricing in 1988Commodore 64 - $300Floppy Drive - $450 ?#$?
Damien
I loved/love my c64. I had a book full of code to make stupid little games. I used to sneak out of my bedroom at 2am when I was 6 and type in as much of the code as I could. I never got it to work, but I've been passionate about programming ever since.
Micah
ahh, the load, run combination was simplicity itself.Who here's played the guitar hero port for C64 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52gcC3Sn-Gw
Spidey
Still have mine too (at my parents house).. My cousin even had a "color" screen. Damn was I jealous! ;)
andyp
And a soft reboot was only a SYS 64738 away! I remember mine fondly. It took a few years until I got my 1541 .. and I never had an actual monitor, just used a small color TV.
Tim Post
Shift run/stop...
Pool
Another commenter!!! Stay awhile, stay forever..... Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!!!
Ash
Destroy him, my robots!
Erik Forbes
+2  A: 
Kris Kumler
Sweet. It looks almost portable!
Chris Farmer
Haha! Yeah, it required two people or a two-wheel dolly to move.
Kris Kumler
you had that thing at home?
Stu Thompson
Yes, my father put it on a large steel drum. It would have broken any table we had.
Kris Kumler
+103  A: 
Adam Tegen
I picked one of these up at a garage sale recently. It still worked.
Eric Z Beard
This was my first. My mom ended up frying it and felt so bad about it that we upgraded to the C64. Ah, good times. :)
Brad Wilson
With Bill Shatner doing the ads who would not have bought one?
Jim C
I vaguely remember having one of these when i was 4 before we upgraded to the C64
Jarod Elliott
I wrote my last big app on one of these in 1985 - a game with 9 different sub-games you wandered between, looking for 3 control rods to stop a nuclear reactor from melting down. All in 6.5k of RAM.
CAD bloke
My family had one of these when I was younger. My dad and uncle wired a reset switch into the side of it. I remember thinking of it as "the-little-red-button-of-death".
Jeremy Bade
and it's back!!! http://www.techgadgets.in/peripherals/2009/16/asus-eee-keyboard-pc-slated-to-ship-in-june/
m_oLogin
I've voted up both this and the C64 answer. Technically, the VIC-20 was my first machine, but I did prefer my Commodore 64 though since it took me through most of my "youth." Well, until the Commodore Amiga came along, of course! :)
CraigTP
I had the 16k ram pack too. It caused all the base addresses to move so if you had a program that poked to the screen written with out the RAM cartridge it didn't work with the cartridge installed. Prepared me well for PC extended and expanded memory under DOS.
jmucchiello
Got one when I was 5 - also got a programming-for-kids book with it (with files on cassette) - Programming with Gortek and the Microchips - so that was my introduction to BASIC.
Anthony
Jim Butterfly was my hero at this time ! I use it to learn hex and assembly - I remember having spend a summer at trying to type op codes at the command line ! I then discover Compute! (?) and tinymon. The rest is well know : I cannot sleep without having coded something in my day :)
Sylvain
Yessss, I had a Vic20 with the memory expansion board. I felt powerful .. !
egapotz
I adore my 64 (well, I did when I still had one). Man, those were the days. A simpler time for sure. i still find programming to just as fun today as I did then. Thank you Commodore!
Loki Stormbringer
Isn't that just a keyboard, not a computer...?
Coronatus
+12  A: 
Gero
Ours had 1mb of ram, and a 30mb hard drive. Looked identical to that though.
Wedge
one of the nicest looking family of PCs
Martlark
2MB of RAM? You showoff!!! ;)
ivan_ivanovich_ivanoff
Holy f*! I remember that mouse! xD
Arnis L.
It's the peanut!
CptSkippy
A: 

I bought a used Vic-20 with my own money and it even included a tape drive!

Kevin
+68  A: 
zigdon
Hey, that's an Apple III, not a II+.
zigdon
Looks more like an Apple II+ CPU with an Apple III monitor.
codebunny
Yes, I edited the picture to show an apple ][. Didn't notice it was an Apple III monitor though.
zigdon
I learned Applesoft BASIC, then 6502 machine language from the monitor. And, Integer BASIC, USCD Pascal, Graforth, assembly and maybe some others.
Mark Stock
Oh I loved monitor mode and 6502 and stuck with that until I learned C years later.
John Fricker
i also had a Profile hard drive - with an enormous 5MB of storage, it cost $5K and was the size of two loaves of WonderBread side-by-side.
Steven A. Lowe
Rocky's Boots! Robot Odyssey! That was an amazing machine.
dmo
I loved my apple 2+, that's how I got into bbsing.
crosenblum
This was my first computer as well.
DanM
+2  A: 
Galwegian
Man, that picture brings back memories :)
Frans Bouma
I had one of these too, with the external tape drive. Loved it. It's one of the earlier computers I used to learn BASIC programming!
Brett Rigby
+19  A: 

Amstrad CPC 464

alt text

JeeBee
Did you have a favourite game? Minder?
Joe R
I don't remember any of the games, but I used to love playing on this machine. I'd type in the long BASIC listings from the back of Amstrad magazine to play games and stuff. *This* is the machine that got me into computers. I had a friend with a CPC6128 -- I was so jealous!
Stewart Johnson
BEST. MACHINE. EVA. Mine was a green screen no less.
KiwiBastard
I had one of these, but I was always shocked by how slow the BASIC was. Much slower than the BBC Computer. No idea if it was the chip or the software.
Daniel Earwicker
Locomotive BASIC was faster than many others though! I think the large screen memory and complex display layout made it appear slower. Probably also why tools like the Laser BASIC compiler appeared (and Sprites Alive, etc).
JeeBee
Had one with a green screen too.
dwo
+84  A: 
Martin
Yes! (Check out my profile...i have a "Sinclair ZX-81 BASIC Programmer" badge. You can have one too.)
Stu Thompson
Mine had a 16K memory extension... hot machine, great keyboard ;-)
ThatBloke
I had the 16km ram extension too attached with velcro - and a funky rubber keyboard that kept peeling off.
Martin
I built mine from the kit! But I screwed it up and had to send it back to be fixed for $20.
Mike Powell
Ah yes, this is where I learnt to touch type.
dajobe
Ummm, is it just me, or does that thing not have a space bar? I'm sure it was fun, but yikes!
Matt
The space bar is the normal sized key in the right corner. It is not so weird when it is your first keyboard, seriously :)
Stu Thompson
Ahh, I remember when Dad brought one of these home, and showed me how to write a little etch-a-sketch program. Then how to fix it so the cursor would jump onto the other side of the screen when you went off the edge. It was AWESOME.
Daniel Earwicker
I eventually glued the memory expansion in place. What a ridiculous design - you could barely breath for fear of wobbling it! Clive Sinclair - genius!
Stewart
This was also the first computer that I ever over-clocked. It didn't take long to burn out...
Stewart
It even had intellisense!!!
Chris Needham
earwicker: Your dad sounds so cool! Yes this was my first too.
Preet Sangha
racing games in 1K - tell that to the kids and they don't believe you
MrTelly
Spent six months with a whooping 1KB, then I had my brother buy the 16KB extension. Then we fought and he took back his extension.Lesson learnt: always buy memory on your own.
Yann Schwartz
Lads and Laddettes - Programming doesn't need colour. Spectrum was just personal arcade machine made for jumping barrels.
Steve Perks
built it from the kit and worked first time. Ran hot especially with the 16k pack so my Dad made a stand/plinth with a cutout below the heatsink and you could leave a little battery fan running beside it to help cooling.
Kevin
I technically wrote my first ever commercial software on a ZX81 when I was a school kid. It was a 1K game that I sent to a magazine and ended up being published in a book (one of those 50 best ZX81 listings books by Tim Hartnel)
Dan Diplo
This was my first computer, I learned so much on it and yet it seems almost unusably small these days. yay I'm vote 81 on the ZX81. Well, it amused me :)
John Burton
A: 
gbjbaanb
+85  A: 

A 386DX, when I was about 4. It was state of the art, and cost about $1500 or something stupid..

alt text

Also had a turbo button (didn't know why it existed)

Alex Fort
turbo button: at the time the machine was lauched, there were slower machines on the marked and more importantly software build for slower machines. Also because of the commonly used turbo botton, every new customer would want one on his/her new computer.
Per Hornshøj-Schierbeck
I had one almost exactly like that one :')
ramayac
Wtf, exactly the same case as the one my dad had in like '91. 386DX-25.
Timbo
haha, we used to sell computers back in the 386/486 days and we HAD TO HAVE cases with a turbo button and a turbo MHz display ... the only thing the TURBO button did was changing the MHz display but the costumers were happy! :)
steffenj
Ah yes, took a 386 DX--TURBO BABY!--to university...by Packard Bell, purchased at FedCo (were you in So Calif in the 1980s and just went "OH Yeah"?)
micahwittman
I had forgot the Turbo button. OK, the next machine I build will have to have on one on it. :)
WolfmanDragon
This was your first PC?! Dude, I'm old.
ctacke
My first PC (not computer) was a 486 Dx2-66, with turbo button. I was shocked at how fast Doom was when turbo was enabled.
peacedog
turbo button: when cpu/bus frequency settings were "jumper" based, it was possible to place the turbo button on one of them and actually overclock your pc with this magic button.
MatthieuP
Ouch. Begining to show my age I guess.
asp316
Steve Wortham
@Hojou, from university: turbo button was invented cause of lack of synchronization between CPU and peripheral equipment frequencies (if i remember correct). Backward compability.
Arnis L.
@Arnis: Mostly the backward compability. The only reason to turn off the turbo was to clock the CPU down for programs written when 33Mhz was still not even a dream. Running a game designed for 4.77Mhz wasn't always fun :-)
Fredrik
This was my second computer. Before this was a 286 12Mhz.
BacMan
this one even has a cd-rom, very modern :-)
bandi
No way this is a 386 of the era. It has a CD ROM drive for Pete's sake!!!! No way. It would cost more than the complete machine. And it should be from Plextor.
Robert Koritnik
It's an early 486 but nothing fresher: The Mhz display has only 2 digits.
Pekka
386/2mb ram was my first, too :) Killed windows 3.11 about a bazillion times (and i keep counting). Later, we upgraded to 486/4mb or so, which was really expensive. Nowadays, my 3ghz quad with 4gb ram was only 500€, which makes me kind of happy and sad at the same time. Crazy world!
atamanroman
+1  A: 

A Bally game console with a BASIC cartridge in ca. 1978.

Check out that keyboard. There were plastic overlays for different games and the one for the BASIC interpreter gave you "color" keys -- basically three different shift/ctrl/alt keys that turned it into a "full" keyboard. There was also a "gold" key that provided whole words "print," "goto," etc to make things faster. Wow...what a drag. :)

clweeks
+13  A: 
StuffMaster
ooh, that image is a woz edition! i will be crying myself to sleep over not having mine anymore
Kris
Hypercard games!
MrDatabase
looks like the link is broken
Nathan Fellman
Ahahah, the "Mac" interface that you load from a floppy disk! Actually it was pretty lame compared to the real Mac.
Qwertie
+47  A: 
Chris Upchurch
I 'moved up' to programming in SuperPilot
Simon Munro
This was my second computer, after the ZX81. My setup looked exactly like the picture!
Barry Brown
Programming BASIC? But which one? Applesoft BASIC (yay!) or Integer BASIC (boo!)
Beska
My dad had this as his first computer (ever) and I taught myself Applesoft BASIC on there. It had Green on Black monitor too.
Brett Rigby
First computer, learned Apple then QBasic.
Kris.Mitchell
+34  A: 
Geoffrey Chetwood
That's a TRS-80 model I in the picture, not a color computer.
Andrew
Have you seen the mocha emulator? It's a full color computer 2 emulator with a bunch of ROMs, written as a java applet. Brings back a lot of memories. url: http://members.cox.net/javacoco/
Guy Starbuck
Fixed the picture now
Tall Jeff
Hell yeah! I miss my Trash80 CoCo2.
vfilby
Also the first computer I ever programmed.
mgroves
A: 
Skizz
+4  A: 
Ant
Sigh :'( I still have mine... the single piece of hardware that changed my life, I suppose... I was eight years old.
Manrico Corazzi
Officially the worst computer ever made. My mates dad worked on mainframes (Icarus Superbrain anyone?) when we were kids. He bought a Dragon for his son, and managed to persuade them to refund him when he pointed out all the flaws in the thing!
reefnet_alex
Dragon ... but not Naturally Speaking.
micahwittman
Rip off of the TRS-80 Color Computer. And not very subtle either, I think they copied the ROMs and got sued out of business.
U62
+22  A: 
Francis Beaudet
mine had an impressive 16k of memory. I used the cartrigde to learn ascii so that I could build better/fast games.
osp70
Me too -- my dad upgraded the RAM to 64k for $400. Have you seen the coco emulator? It's a full color computer 2 emulator with a bunch of ROMs, written as a java applet. Brings back a lot of memories. url: http://members.cox.net/javacoco/
Guy Starbuck
Mine had no external storage. It was a hand-me-down from some neighbours that saw I had an interest in computing. Every time I wanted to play a game I had to copy the BASIC from a book or magazine.
mlambie
while i had a zx-81, my best friend had one of these. it was fun too.
Stu Thompson
Had one with the multipack expansion and dungeons of dagorath cart
1.01pm
My dad taught me to program on this machine. He'd read out BASIC from magazines, and I'd type it in, and we'd switch up. One of the first games we copied was called "Crash". A little block in a maze you had to move through without hitting other blocks on the sides of the walls. I learned to modify things like the maze, the speed of the "car" and change the sounds. Awesome.
Richard Hein
@Guy Starbuck : My dad did too! I found the instruction booklet for soldering the chips to the board when I was about 18 and had a good laugh.
CptSkippy
@Richard - early pair programming. =P
Erik Forbes
+74  A: 
Bill the Lizard
That's what I started on too! And I remember having to be very careful where you started the cassette. If you started playing back the cassette in the wrong place, it wouldn't load correctly. Ahhh... the good old days.
Kevin
Do you know that the BASIC program to save to tape is smaller in RAM than the program to load from the tape? Eventually, you can't retrieve your program.
darron
The out of memory thing was fun though, it did AWESOME stuff when that happens. It had a green on the bottom third of the screen, light blue on top, a beautifully shaded red bar in 'sky', and the font was squashed like you typed into the distance on a field. Possibly the best graphics it could do.
darron
Isaac Dealey
The TI 99-4a had a built-in cartridge slot, AND a dedicated cassette drive port. (and many other options available for the breakout expansion chassis)
Matt Kane
@mkb: Unfortunately for me, I didn't have any cartridges for the cartridge slot. I got my system secondhand, and I didn't even find out until years later that there were many games released for the TI 99-4A on cartridge.
Bill the Lizard
My first "real program" was a Morse code practice tool for one of these.
JasonFruit
I wrote an INFOCOM-style adventure game with a VERY few graphics, and a lame English-language parser. I remember thinking how AWESOME it was the first time I ran out of memory.
mmc
speech synthesizer... Parsec, munch man ti-runner, etc.
Tim
Did any of you have a TI-99/4 (before the TI-99/4A)? Or did you wait until it was super cheap?
Nosredna
@Nosredna: I got my TI-99/4A super super cheap second-hand after it had been out for awhile.
Bill the Lizard
My second-ever computer - I bought it super-cheap when new, then TI decided to stop selling them one month later! I think the TI was the only home computer that came with the option to control *two* tape decks simlutaneously.
Mark Bannister
+16  A: 
pdavis
OMG! i never knew they did it in a base-station + kbd format. thought it was an all in one a-la Amiga 500.
geocoin
Oh yeah! I hoped it was mentioned in this thread!
furtelwart
How I wanted one of these!
Nathan Fellman
This one was weird-ass computer.
Nosredna
That was my first computer. I once spent 4 days in the summer after grade 5 painstakingly copying code out of a series of magazines, only to see a red circle bounce once across the screen.
S.Jones
This was actually my second computer (the 128D to be precise), but the first one I bought myself.
Daryl Hanson
+114  A: 

zx Spectrum 48k

Take that you 16k owners :D

Check it OUT! http://www.twinbee.org/hob/play.php?snap=jetsetwilly

ZX Spectrum ///

(c) 1982 Sinclair Research Ltd.
Aidan
That was my first one, too !
paercebal
And my first ever piece of software was JetPac, by Ultimate (they are now known as Rare)
Charles Roper
When you could type in programs from a magazine and get the 16/48 magazine on cassette.
Swinders
My parents got one of these when I was about 3 years old. And I learned programming on it when I was 8.
Bert Huijben
I begged and begged for one of these. My dad finally relented when I was in grade 4, but only after 10 gold stars at school and all my chores for a month with no slip-ups. (@Charles Roper - JetPac and Jetset willy).
Ron Tuffin
poke 35899,0 I wonder how many programmers have that as their first bit of memory manipulation :)
Aidan
@Aidan, infinite lives in Jet Set Willy. It was like black magic.
Charles Roper
ZX Spectrum :) It's been a long long time, hehehe. Loved it, started gaming on it, then entering tons BASIC game program from books and have it ran. Then created my own code using BASIC after I know enough of it. Excellent beginner's computer
Jimmy Chandra
Halls of the Things may well still be the most fun game I have ever played :) It was pretty unknown even at the time, though...
Joel in Gö
I have mine hanging on the wall of my office, so I won't forget where it all started. And I can still remember the day back in the early 80's when I got it upgraded from 16k to 48k... Wow!
Lette
http://www.flexiblefactory.co.uk/flexible/?p=26
spender
Where is the sound!!??? I used to love the sound in Willy ! :))LoL Aidan, good ol' times :)
Perica Zivkovic
Ah, that brings back some memories. My mum couldn't afford to buy me games for it when I was 8, so she bought me a book about programming games and I've been programming ever since!
BenAlabaster
Wasn't my first, that was a C64, but modded up because it was such a fun machine. I've still got the user manual and it has op codes and descriptions of each cpu instruction in the last chapter. How many computers can make that boast these days?
justinhj
that was my first too, good times searching for all those game books, keying in the 'draw and animate shapes' BASIC programs. I had the Zx Spectrum+ it had a different keyboard: http://bit.ly/DQ8ox
Steven Adams
Building hardware for my Spectrum helped get me my first job. It let me ask difficult technical questions to the panel interviewing me, who must have been at least a little impressed. (FWIW, it was about how to build circuits to arbitrate between hardware signals, and the solution is nasty and theoretically can fail to make any decision at all too. All of which explains why I couldn't build one with simple parts and a degree-level education.)
Donal Fellows
My dad had this one! He let me have it. It hasn't been run in years though. I need to get a power adapter for it!
Vivin Paliath
Ahh .. the sweet sound of a tape loading from cassette ... about 4 mins to load 48kB but then .... turbo load!! And then, after typing in a game or program from byte code, only to realize that you had missed a byte somewhere and the speccy had already rebooted.
nonnb
+63  A: 
Don
In particular, I remember BBC Basic's inline 6502 assember which used a for-next loop to provide multi-pass assembly.
vextasy
Ah, the fights with my brother in order to play Elite on our BBC B.. 3D graphics on a machine with no multiply and divide instructions. Braben is a real genius!
Jonathan Webb
Don't forget Ian Bell. He was responsible for the 3D stuff.http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/faq.htm#A3
slim
@slim: Thanks for reminding me. That's a great link too! :-)
Jonathan Webb
I remember the weird sounds that came out of the tape deck that you used to load programs into the BBC computer.
Benjol
And the way the machine would pause the cassette player during loading which ended up stretching the tape so that it stopped working. Finding programs on a 90-minute cassette was a pain as well.
Jonathan Webb
I remember borrowing books about basic programming from the local library and dutifully transcribing the code, with little idea what it actually meant. If it didn't run, my debugging didn't extend much beyond putting a REM statement at the start of each failing line.
Don
Though it was a Commodore PET 3032 that I really cut my teeth on, it was the BBC Micro that really triggered an explosion of enthusiasm for me. I've still got two in the loft, a BBC B in a Viglen split case and a Master complete with Z80 second processor. I love 'em!
Steve Morgan
They had these in my school. We learned to graph math functions on them.
Stewart Johnson
Last year, at school, we had to program this piece of machinery. Had quite the time with it :-) even though I didn't touch the real machine (we used http://www.mikebuk.dsl.pipex.com/beebem/ ). Ended up implementing a simple circle drawing algorithm which also used the multi-pass vextasy describes.
Jasper Bekkers
Not my first home computer, but it was the one I learned how to program on, as it had a half-decent BASIC interpreter. I had a Spectrum and later a C64 but their BASICs were too limited and I was never very good at translating large conditionals and subroutines to the GOTOs and GOSUBs that were available on those models.
finnw
My mum was a teacher in the 80's and got take home the Model B in the summer break (at my insistence!). Best summer holiday ever was playing Elite on a proper monitor with a floppy drive...
Dan Diplo
A: 

Vic-20 for me, too.

Dana
A: 

Apple II without floppy drive

m_pGladiator
+19  A: 
Ludvig A Norin
That is awesome, we have one of those sitting in storage still. We put it on display at our last training day to show the advancement of tech.
osp70
I wish I had it still. My older brother took it, and gave it away years ago. By the way, on the screen you can see the help screen of WordStar!
Ludvig A Norin
I still have mine but haven't tried to boot it in years.
David G
And, it's portable! lol
Chris Pietschmann
Ah! I borrowed one of these whan I was 14 years old. It had one floppy drive and one 300 baud modem. My mother asked me why I connected the "thing" to the phone, and my excuse was that it used power from it. Was a sad day for me when the phone bill came... :-)
Eigir
One of these was donated to a local college. We decided to plug it in and see if it still worked. The screen turned on and it seemed to be working ok, although after about 3 seconds smoke started to come out of it so we decided to turn it off at this point.
Callum
that thing looks like some military missile launching device
MAD9
missile commander .....launching 1..2...3... go
crosenblum
+16  A: 

Amstrad CPC 6128 Similar to the 464, but had twice the memory (128Kb!) which was paged because an 8-bit processor can only address 64Kb at a time.

Amstrad CPC 6128

Also it came with a 3" floppy drive instead of a tape drive.

No, not 3.5", 3"

Amstrad 3 inch floppy disk

Cameron MacFarland
I had a green screen 464 but saved up to buy an external disk drive which took these 3" disks - it was my pride and joy :)
Macka
I had a 6128 and seem to remember one of the first things I did was following the manual's instructions regarding the format command - on the CPM (operating system) disks. I never did replace them...
Alistair Knock
I also had one, learned my first English by reading and typing in programs when I ran out of games to play with. Then a year later we started learning English in school and I finally understood what the hell 'if' meant.
Andrioid
I talked my dad into getting one of these so I could program it. I convinced him it was capable of doing his accounts.
justinhj
Aww I haven't see a floppy like that in years! Here's to memories of changing the border colour of the screen in the first program I wrote in BASIC...
Kieran Benton
I have still mine (stored in the attic). I'm sure it still works fine.
Anthony
What about using this nice image http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Amstrad_CPC_6128.png ?
Wernight
A: 

Mine was a TRS-80, I eventually had the Model 1, model 2 and model III, as well as the coco 1 and 2. and my first program I ever wrote was a stupid tick tack toe program in Z-80 Assembly on that TRS-80 model 1.

stephenbayer
This is a duplicate.
Jeremy Stein
+13  A: 
Aardvark
Bought one of these for my daughter in 1982. This and Star Raiders was a great combo.
bruceatk
SCNR: That thing looks soooo ugly :-)
Nils Pipenbrinck
Without Star Raiders I doubt I would be a software developer today. Seriously.
Aardvark
16K of memory! So much more than my first mainframe -- a 1.4K 1401!
Ken Paul
...and the mainframe was at a local college, that was uphill from my house - BOTH WAYS! ...in the snow! ... carrying a huge stack of punch cards! ;)
Aardvark
Star Raiders is my favorite game of all time.
Nosredna
A: 
muriloq
+5  A: 

While not as cool as many above.

Packard Bell 486DX2, 4MB on-board RAM, few months later I upgraded with additional 12MB on three 72 pin simms.

px
I had the Packard Bell 486SX (no DX or DX2) and it had 2MB, which I had to upgrade to 6MB to run DOOM. At low detail. Good times.
Schnapple
Almost same thing.
Antoine Claval
You were so spoiled..
jlafay
A: 

Apple IIgs! I taught myself Apple BASIC. :-)

Matthew Cole
+2  A: 
WolfmanDragon
A: 

TRS-80 Color :) Classic.

Jim Ford
This is a duplicate
Jeremy Stein
You can't just mark every entry as a duplicate. a quick survey of the first few pages shows that my comment at 15:32 is only precluded by one other trs-80 reference at 15:27, which is close enough for the possibility of simultaneous entry. Also, why are you trolling for duplicates more than a year later?
Jim Ford
A: 

Apple IIe...taught myself BASIC and Logo, followed by a IIgs where I taught myself Pascal.

Erik Engbrecht
A: 
SumoRunner
+1  A: 

Apple ][E of course. In fact that computer is older than me (Built in the seventies) but it got me started and I used it for years claiming it as my own when the family got a 386.

I started programming on it when I was seven because my Dad had been teaching my brother how to code on it and I was jealous for the attention. It ended up that my older brother now does nothing to do with coding and it has been my greatest hobby ever since.

Vincent McNabb
+84  A: 
Paul Reiners
SWEET memories. Too bad Commodore couldn't market the machine. Otherwise, I think it would have more marketshare than Macs do.
Troy DeMonbreun
I'd forgotten what a good looking machine the old Amiga was. Yeah, it's a shame it never made it. The machine architecture was insanely good! 7Mhz CPU and 512K RAM - wow we've come a long way..
Jonathan Webb
Yeah those were the days. Of course, mine would crash several times a day even while idling. Remember guru meditations?
Gabriel Ross
I wished current operating systems learned something from the Amiga OS. Remember how you could alias the drive and when you referenced the name it would ask to mount it if it wasn't mounted. Multi-tasking OS on a 800k floppy with room to spare.
bruceatk
Guru Meditations? Oh yeah and reading Mapping The Amiga to find out why it crashed while waiting for the machine to reboot. Are today's computers as much fun?
Jonathan Webb
I still have mine in the attic!
Aardvark
ATARI rulez! No, just kidding :-) The AMIGA was a great machine. ATARI users were always envious about the graphics and sound engine.
Johannes Hädrich
I still have mine in the lounge room under the TV. About once a year I pull it out and play a bit of Speedball 2, Supercars 2, and SWIV. I've got about 100 floppies with games on them.I *love* this computer.
Stewart Johnson
Loved mine to bits. still have it in fact. the killing game show and anything made by psygnosis was the nuts :)
geocoin
It was an Amiga 500, but I had no idea what BASIC was :-)I used it only to play games.
haarrrgh
I first played Prince of Persia on this one... I remember extraordinary graphics and sounds! pfeeww... old times....
RVeur23
Adventure games on 10+ floppies, good times.
GvS
I started learning C on that awesome machine by creating a text graphics adventure game.
lothar
If memory serves me correctly then amiga basic was written by microsoft.
Dan Sydner
I remember my first encounter with the 500. I was 3 or 4 and my cousins had one. I was a bit young for programming, but I loved the games and it gave me basic typing skills at a very early age.
Kieran Hall
I remember those days that we were composing music on NoiseTracker with only 4 channels. Today we have at least 32 channels on a PC, but not that spirit. Those were the days...
Burak Erdem
+2  A: 
geocoin
+2  A: 

My first computer was the Timex Sinclair ZX81 as a birthday gift in 6th grade and I then purchased the 16 Kb memory module upgrade so that I could load the cassette tape based games that I had also bought with allowance. I remember loading and saving programs to tape and eventually writing a Farm Market Simulator game and playing that with all of my friends in the neighborhood. We'd all crowd around the old B/W television set and watch the random numbers generated for corn, soybeans, cows, and pigs and then we'd all pick how much we'd invest in the items each month.

It was my first introduction to programming and even though I couldn't get my hands wrapped around how the games I played worked, Flight Simulator and Maze, it started me down the technology path and shaped the patience I have for troubleshooting the issues I run into today. Thanks Timex/Sinclair...

Tim K
+7  A: 

Colecovision + Adam computer. This thing was inexpensive, came with a cassette drive, printer and Apple BASIC. I was able to upgrade to a Commodore 64 shortly after.

ADAM The COLECOVISION FAMILY COMPUTER

I had one of those. I remember being really good at the Buck Rogers game that came with it... I also did some graphics programming on it. I build a sprite map for the elevator from C64's 'impossible mission' and then hooked up the controller so it could go up and down. Fun times.
Jack Bolding
Buck Rogers! What a great game. I also had the Atari add-on, and a large selection of games for it. Cartrige and cassette based system...totally amazing.
Robert P
Cassette drives ftw :)
crosenblum
+9  A: 
Liam
AMOS! That was a great little development package.
Jonathan Webb
Holy crap, I remeber trying to figure out the seperate bob animation language they had. AMAL, I think it was called.I had the compiler for that as well.Later, I switched to Blitz BASIC. It had inline assembler. Fun times.
Internet Friend
Hey, Francois Lionet has put the AMOS source code online [here][1]. :-) [1]: http://www.clickteam.com/eng/downloadcenter.php?i=58
Jonathan Webb
Who remembers the easter eggs in the AMOS help system?
Liam
AMOS is still my favourite version of BASIC ever. Shame I discovered it so late (1995 I think, by which time the Amiga was well out of date.)
finnw
A: 

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k with a 3rd party keyboard upgrade

+1  A: 

Tandy 1000 A. Nothing like computers from the Trash Shack.

Flory
+6  A: 
I didn't have anything as fancy as a floppy drive, I had a tape machine with the perfect "loading" volume marked in tipex!
Antony Scott
So *you* were the person who bought the Dragon 32!
Dan Diplo
A: 

Challenger 2P. Floppies FTW.

Steve Duitsman
A: 

Apple II - no games available so I had to try and write my own....not very easily if I remember correctly

+52  A: 
Milner
I couldn't afford the fancy model with 16K or numeric keypad, so (eventually) found TRS-80 magazine and ended up hacking the hardware instead. That mag also led me to the lowercase mod, which was very nice.
Huntrods
I remember when my dad brought home this computer! I was 5 and it was the most fun thing ever! We started with the tape player and was THRILLED when they came out with the floppy drive!!! Ahhh... Good Times...
JFV
Along with our TRS-80 my dad bought an old 110 teletype to be a printer. At 110 baud it was easy to send it data via the cassette port. But it was so darn loud - I ended up 'recording' 110 baud data to tape and playing it back into the teletype at night. My first experience spooling!
n8wrl
'twas the model III for me. dual floppy drives! 48K ram!!
glenn jackman
ok, here's an SO question - how do I hack TRS-DOS so that it will believe me when I tell it the year is anything later than 1987? =P
JustJeff
I had to use these damn things at school. They certainly made me appreciate my Commodore 64.
Damien
Used to call these TRASH-80 because it was made so cheaply :-)
DJ
We had one of these in a cupboard in our house, bit it didn't work, so I can't really count it as my first computer. Still took it apart in a destructive way throughout my childhood.
optician
+1 because there's "Star Trek" on the screen.
rwmnau
I had the TRS-80 Model I, with 4k of ram and a cassette drive. No expansion interface for me! I went on to own a TI99 4A, Sinclair ZX1000, Apple ][+, Apple IIgs, many pcs and now I'm comfortably back on an iMac.
Jeff Paquette
Ah TRS-80. I had the model with the cartridge slot on the side and I could never get it to read tapes, so I just had the one cart of some really generic baseball game. It was more fun to watch the computer play itself than play that game.I'll never forgive my dad for making me throw it away when the audio jack stopped working!
SoloBold
My first home computer was a TRS-80 manual. I never got the actual machine but it was enough to get me hooked! :)
Len Holgate
A: 

Sinclair Spectrum 48K - Real programmers use rubber keys!

Garth Gilmour
+4  A: 

I had the TI-99-4A and the Extended Basic cartridge. Made a pretty decent Pac-Man knock-off at the time too. I think we even sold some software cassettes of it here and there.

I remember using the sprite animation to create little music videos - I mean if you were going to have a cassette player hooked up to the thing, you might as well pump some music out too!

+2  A: 

An Amstrad 464 with a green screen and a tape deck.

ShayH
+11  A: 
Vihung
Wish I could vote this higher.... ah chuckie egg....
thrope
+56  A: 
micahwittman
I had one of these! Thanks for the nostalgia moment
Graeme Perrow
Crap! I forgot all about that little thing. Thanks for the reminder!
Vincent McNabb
My brother had one of those! It would make an interesting 'circuit bent' project for music.
Jonathan Webb
Oh, wow...I remember this thing. Totally forgot about it...
Stu Thompson
Glad to know we were all under the auspicious tutelage of L. Professor. --Thank you for the stopping to comment.
micahwittman
Holy crap, I remember this thing! The buttons weren't attached at the bottom so you could stick your fingernail underneath the bottom and tear the button off! But you could still push it with your fingernail from the little button remnant that was left at the top! Yes, I did abuse toys.
Matt Gregory
More details on "Little Professor" (including device internals, product packaging) <http://www.datamath.org/Edu/Professor-80.htm>
micahwittman
Damn I have spent many hours with that!!
mslot
"while holding the Little Professor in my hand."I'm surprised you haven't gone blind.
Daniel Earwicker
I used mine for at least a year. Then I took it apart.
Barry Brown
OMG. I had one of those! Completely, totally forgot about it.
benjismith
+1 for gratuitous wikipedia link. "Ooooh, so *that's* what division is."
notJim
+3  A: 
James Muscat
Was that WORDWISE? The expansion ROMs were a great idea - instant loading!
Jonathan Webb
I still fondly remember typing games (in BASIC) into one of these and then having to go back thru a 'debug' (read find the typos).
Hamish Smith
+4  A: 

Commodore 16... parents did not want to buy me the 64k version... ahh miss those days.

Commodore 16

el_eduardo
Ditto - I also had this due to parental units not being willing to shell out for the C64.
Ian Nelson
What, the 64 just wasn't child friendly?:)
johnc
A: 

The first family computer that I was able to work alone on was a Tandy 1200 (an 8088 XT clone). Wrote many lines of GW-Basic code on it.

Keith
A: 
spoulson
I still have mine with 384k mod.
bruceatk
I had this thing decked out. ICD 1MB ram box, 20MB MFM HD, 2x ultraspeed 1050 drives. I left the ram box on all the time so I can boot off it, but it eventually overheated and died, killing my HD interface, too. :(
spoulson
A: 

My first home computer was a pieced together 486 running DOS 5.1. It was horrible, but I loved to tinker around with it. Whoda thunk I'd be writing code for a living back then!

ddc0660
A: 

The Apple IIe.

+2  A: 
Internet Friend
I *love* the placement of the power button. Must have been a joy spending hours writing a good program and going for left shift... boom.
Ludvig A Norin
Thankfully, that's not an actual power button, just an indicator light. It's just that all the buttons on this machine feel like they're floating on jelly. *Creaking* jelly.
Internet Friend
Given the average keyboard of the era, it actually looks pretty good.
U62
+3  A: 

ZX-81

  • 1KB RAM
  • 8KB ROM
  • 3.25 Mhz Z80 CPU

epatel
I had the expansion module, which (I think) gave no less than 16 kilobytes of RAM!
Thomas Padron-McCarthy
A: 

TI 99-4a though I mostly gamed on it.

Then C-64 and many blissful hours typing in programs from Byte magazine... IIRC, they had some kind of assembly validator that would beep when a line was correct.

Michael Easter
+24  A: 
KPexEA
I started on this as well, back when I was 7 years old. The other school kids would be outside having fun on lunch and recess, whereas I would be having my fun in the library writing quiz games on the PET.
mattlant
My uncle had one of those. First time I ever touched a computer. Brings back memories.
Jonathan Webb
Mine too. I still have it. It is a wonderful machine.
Grant Johnson
As I commented on the C-64, check out an emulator like http://www.viceteam.org/ I had a Pet at school, and then my friend got the C-64 at home. They kept us out of trouble.
Don Kirkby
wow - hardcore :)
reefnet_alex
Dude, the Commodore Pets we had in school (would be 1977, I guess) only had 1k of RAM. We did have one upgraded model with 4k! Such luxury.
Brad Wilson
This was the first computer that I ever saw programmed. My dad wrote a little BASIC app that did some simple geometric shapes on it and I was hooked c. 1980.
Scott Alan Miller
I never owned one of these, but it is the first computer that I ever used. I typed in a BASIC program from the manual and spent the afternoon modifying it. It totally sparked my interest in programming and I quickly bought a TRS-80 Model I to continue.
BoltBait
Does anyone remember the game "Lawnmower" ? I'm pretty sure it was for the Pet... perhaps for Commodore 64.
MrDatabase
I had an earlier model with small keyboard and 8KB RAM, which was my main computer from 1980 to 1983. Some time later I still used it as a terminal for my next one (a 64KB CP/M machine).
starblue
We had these in school. I discovered that you could do cool tricks by printing control codes. The other kids never worked out why my machine was in lower case and theirs where all in upper case!
Mike Sutton
We had one of those at school (early 80's). My first big disappointment with computer programming was learning that PET Basic wouldn't run on my ZX81....
Dan Diplo
This was the one where you could poke a value into the CRT controller that would completely stop the raster scan, leaving the beam parked dead center on the screen, making an INTENSE green spot that would quickly burn a permanent mark on the screen.
JustJeff
+1  A: 

Russian KUVT Korvet. It was based on Soviet microprocessor, a clone of the Intel 8080 CPU - KR580VM80A

xsaero00
A: 

TRS-80 Color Computer II

although programming with it didn't cause me to "fall in love" with programming

some of the games were fun tho...esp Dungeons of Daggorath

This is a duplicate.
Jeremy Stein
A: 

Tandy TL/2 1000

Joe Lencioni
A: 

Computer that got me into programming was an IBM 360/40, but the first 'home' computer I had was an Amstrad CPC464 - you could run CP/M if you had the disk drive - and it came with the firmware manuals.

Simon Knights
A: 

ZX 81

getting sentimental

Michiel
+1  A: 

Commodore Vic-20. Great piece of kit with those big plug-in 64k RAM Packs.

JRL
+1  A: 

An unbranded 386 PC with both 5 1/4" and 3.5" floppy drives. It came with DOS but we soon upgraded to MS Windows 3.0 with a dozen or so floppies. Before that I had done programming on GW Basic on school computers, so DOS based QBasic loaded with this thing made me super-excited. It was a super-productive IDE for me :) No need to generate line numbers for each line :)

Tahir Akhtar
A: 

I had access to an IBM 5100 for a while. But there's an entire graveyard of early computers that passed through my hands. Everything from DEC's VT180 to a Coleco Adam to an Atari 800 and a 1040ST and an Amiga 2000 before getting a PC clone when Windows 3.1 came out.

David
+1  A: 

+1 for the VIC-20.

I used to hand program a text adventure game out of the one programming magazine I owned every time that I wanted to play it.

Also, long live Omega Race!!! (which was set in the futuristic year 2003)

tidge
Comment, don't submit a new answer for it.
scragar
+42  A: 
Wow that was the first computer in my house, when i was a kid I remember my brother teaching me very basic programming, making a loop that would print "You are a pig" over and over in fancy patterns, we didnt have the disk drive, and I vaguely remember stuffing a fairy cake in the cartridge slot
I still have this somewhere with a bunch of floppies. Never had any cartridge though.
shoosh
Awh. Makes you nostalgic huh.
_ande_turner_
my parents got me the disk drive - I remember obsessing over the D.O.S. manual.... thinking about all the programming possibilities now that I didn't have to preset the location on the tape drive to load the program that I wanted........
I had the 600XL first, then upgraded to the 800XL -- 32k ram to 64k ram :)
AdamBT
Ah, the memories... Where is that blue screen with the word READY?
David Rabinowitz
This was actually my second computer (TI-99 4/A was the first), but I *loved* this thing!!
Coding Gorilla
+12  A: 
bruceatk
ANd the memories it provided - priceless
mattlant
Long live Jumpman Jr.!
spoulson
Add a pic of the tape drive and this will be my favorite answer on SO.
Nick
I remember playing Ultima III and IV, on my mates Atari 800.. so sweet.Oh, and Dandy, and MULE... having 4 joystick ports was outstanding.
Scott Ferguson
MULE was a great game ... I remember all the Scott Adams adventures too with fondness
PaulB
A: 

I consider the Parker Brothers Merlin to be the first computer I owned. It had a microprocessor and you could program music with it.

Derek
I had one of those myself. Funny enough, I also had it before I got my first *real* computer.
RobH
A: 

Commodore Vic-20 Boot to a basic interpreter. Had an audio tape drive too. Monitor was a TV. Got it at K-Mart!

mtruesdell
A: 

Vic-20, then an Atari 400, then an Apple II

A: 

Damn, what a great walk down memory lane with that little owl calculator, the vic-20, the Apple IIc, Trs-80. The Coleco Adam. I didn't see that above (but I probably missed it).

taudep
A: 

+1 for Apple ][e

I started out playing the Wizardry series, then fell into dabbling with BASIC programming through high school. Though not the smartest guy around, programming came naturally. Years later I got back into professional programming with Visual Basic during college, and now C#.

Craig Boland
A: 

Commodore 64!!

loris_p
A: 

My first was a TI-994a however the one that I learned to program on was Tandy Color Computer 2. I saved up the $250 of so to get a 156k floppy drive. Wrote a few games and learned a little assembler on it as well. I had it for years. But I always pined away for an Amiga.... ahhh the good old days..

Dan Adams
+4  A: 
Nullczyk
I was beginning to think I was the only one! I had a floppy drive, though. :)
Bombe
Yep, this was my first, with two 5 1/4" floppy drives, a 1200 baud modem, and a dot matrix printer.
BrianH
+1  A: 
horace
+11  A: 
Adam
+4  A: 
SoloBold
gotta love the full height drives!
geocoin
lol I had 4 of those in my bbsing days :)
crosenblum
+8  A: 
JoshM
WTF is that?! I wish computers still looked like that!
reefnet_alex
My dad's first computer! We lost TV reception in the entire house every time he turned it on. good times.
bendin
Very cool box. CP/M and a game called 'Ladder' Hooka!!!
n8wrl
Now that brings back some memories
HLGEM
When I was a boy, my uncle (the scientist), would lug this to family events. It was the center of attention for those of us old enough to be allowed to touch it! What was the name of the game with the jumping letter 'P'?
Joshua Berry
The game with the jumping P was "Ladder", a Donkey Kong play-alike, iirc.
JoshM
This was my first computer. I actually programmed on it, in PL/1 no less (and later in C).
Paul Lalonde
A: 

Apple II Europlus. My dad took me to his lab and they had Apple IIs there to control physics experiments. After many Saturdays at the lab he bought one for us and I used and abused it for years.

Andrew Queisser
+10  A: 
hometoast
2k RAM, expandable to 16k!
mbeckish
16K, however, disabled the 2K onboard. When the membrane keypad started to go on ours, my Dad took it apart and put it in a hand-made sheet metal case with an old teletype keyboard on top. Would you believe it worked? I bet he still has it.
JasonFruit
Was that rebranded Zx81?
Dan Diplo
@Dan Diplo: Yes. I think in EU it was ZX81 and in the US, the 1000.
hometoast
A: 

Packard Bell (shudder) 50 MHz 486DX2, a whopping 4 MB of RAM, upgradeable to 64!! Ran Dos 6.22, Win 3.11, even had a CD-ROM!

Adam Neal
A: 
Konrad
+1  A: 

an abacus

fnCzar
A: 

Atari ST 1024, with the mono monitor. Terribly neat machine - sort of a Mac Lite.

At the same time I was coding on an IBM 3090 mainframes at work using Cobol/CICS. C on the Atari was way more interesting.

Cruachan
A: 
Swish
A: 

An ELF kit using the redoubtable RCA 1802 processor. It was a single circiut board with some wood wedges on the back to set it at an angle so you could use the hex keyboard in comfort. A two digit LED display and 256 bytes of memory. Very cool for 1976.

A: 

Amstrad CPC 664

This model sat between the 464 (but had a disk drive instead of a tape drive), and the CPC 6128 but had 64K of RAM instead of 128K.

Is still own it!

Dimitris
A: 

Lambda 8300, a ZX81 clone with a green rubber-key keyboard. Learned (ZX) Basic on that thing.

Martin Bøgelund
A: 

TRS-80. 4K memory, used an audio cassette for program loading and saving.

Spent more than $500 of my own money to upgrade to 16K memory.

Thomas Andrews
This is a duplicate.
Jeremy Stein
+2  A: 
AlanKley
Ha! I had one too from Clarkson University. S-100 bus!
John Fricker
A: 
Peter GA.
A: 

Sinclair ZX81, upgraded to 16K with expansion pack. (Originally 1K of RAM.) Did a lot of BASIC programming on it and even dabbled in Z80 assembly.

I still have it, sitting in a box somewhere.

Barry Brown
A: 

VIC-20 with tape drive at home, and used a Commodore PET at school

(7th/8th Grade around 1982 or so)

Brad Osterloo
A: 

The Timex Computer 2048, the variant only sold in Portugal and Poland.

I spent quite a few hours of my youth fiddling around with the azimuth of the head of my tape recorder.

paulo.albuquerque
+111  A: 
radioactive21
wow.. speechless..
jinsungy
Hi Ada! I thought you were dead???
Vincent McNabb
lol :) We have a winner!
Dan
Babbage is here!
FlySwat
This is sacrilege but why am I thinking "Will it blend?" :-)
Jonathan Webb
If this is true, you win the question, sir.
Internet Friend
I actually own one of these.....a small scale model though lol not as detailed but it's sitting on my shelf.
radioactive21
I'd like to see an animation of one of these.
spoulson
@radioactive21: does it work?
Jonathan Webb
@johnathan webb, nope just a stand still model nothing moving. I've never thought about of getting a scale model of a working one. Maybe I will later on.
radioactive21
That's not a computer, it's just a fancy calculator! Show me a Logic Mill in working order, then we'll talk.
Wedge
Not THE first computer, YOUR first computer.... geesh!
Aardvark
That's just too funny. got my upvote.
Ben
Wow an original Fortran 27 compiler!!!
MrDatabase
Can it core a apple?
Andres Jaan Tack
I still have this one! ;)
Secko
A: 

TI Speak & Math ;)

but seriously, probably Logo on Apple II was my first experience with programming

+5  A: 

Amstrad PC 1512

with two 5.25" floppy drives and a color monitor

It came with MS-DOS and the GEM window system. When I tried to make a backup copy of the GEM floppy, I actually destroyed it by confusing the SOURCE and DESTINATION parameters :-) That was my first WTF moment.

But I didn't find out about programming until I got my next computer, found QBasic and read the help file.

Gudmundur Orn
This was my first one too. I started programming with it - typing in assembler copied from a magazine, and the BASIC that was in GEM.
harriyott
+1 Think mine is still lying in a shed at my parents house!
Harry Lime
I had the HD20. 20 whole megabytes of hard drive space. Never gonna fill that bad boy up...Really enjoyed test drive and that old F1 game.
John Oxley
Two floppy drives? That was luxury, ours only had one, but did have a RAM upgrade to 640K My PC1512 was a Christmas present (around 86/7), my father left my mother to draw in the better GEM paint package a Happy Christmas message to me, but after he left the room the program kept giving Abort, Retry, Fail messages and despite her selecting Retry, somehow the paint application got deleted. I do seem to recall that GEM had some form of Basic, and certainly had a turtle as well - I played around with programming that although it was 10 years or so before I did any other programming.
Sliff
Whoah!I had that one, but with a monocrome monitor... my neighbour was the lucky one with a cga color one...Also, my parent bought what here was called a "hard disk card", that is, a hard disk hooked to a controller card, of a size of 40 Mbytes. Dad had to return that in exchange for a 20Mbytes, cos the 40 one, was to noisy to stay at home... hahahahaBut I loved the volume knob it had, for playing the games music at a high volume... Maniac Mansion, Mach 3, Double Dragon, IBM Golf, Space Invaders, IBM Alley Cat... Lotus 123 ;)
Andor
A link to a photo: http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/photos/amstrad_pc1512_2.jpg
Andor
A: 

A split between an Apple IIe (wrote BASIC programs)

AND: a XT TURBO 640K. It still runs DOS 4.1, for such classic arcade epics such as Zaxxon and Test Drive 1 & 2. Ran on a CGA monitor... yikes.

Martin Lussier
A: 

The first one I owned was in 1995 I think - a 486 DX4 100MHz 540MB HDD .. i forget how much RAM it had :)

A: 

Xerox 820-II at my Dad's office. I always got a kick out of copy being "PIP" which I believe stood for peripheral interface program.

JohnOpincar
A: 

Wipro Genius AT 286. 1 MB RAM. 2x5.25" floppy drives. MSDOS 6.22 and a rock solid monochrome monitor. No hard-disk. No mouse.

I couldn't locate a image of this machine, but let me tell you it was magical! Changed my life.

ragu.pattabi
+1  A: 

The Amstrad PC1512 was the first computer I actually owned too. I didn't spring for the color monitor tho, had to put up with the weak black & white monitor. I remember swapping out one of the floppy drives for a hard drive. Agonized for days over whether I could afford the 20MB drive or would have to settle for the 10MB. (This was 1986 or 1987.) I remember sitting in my Compilers class, daydreaming of all the stuff I'd install on the drive, and figuring that no way could it use up 10MB -- but I got the 20MB anyway. Maybe I was feeling wealthy for some reason; more likely I was hoping my wife didn't find out how much I'd spent.

JP Lodine
A: 

Mine was a Sinclair Z81.

hectorsosajr
A: 

IBM PC XT I remember spending long hours playing BEAST on that thing. Best game ever.

p5ycho_p3nguin
A: 

My first was not the oldest one I ever owned, it was a standard Macintosh. I think my dad got it through some early-access program.

devinmoore
A: 
defmeta
Already listed. delete and add +1 to the 'real' entry, please
Stu Thompson
There was no Spectrum 32K - it was 16K or 48K!
John Topley
A: 

Apple ][e :D I remember playing Stickybear Math on the monochrome green. Then, one day, my dad brought home a switch to hook the computer up to the TV!! Color monitor baby! Stickybear was never the same. On top of that my dad showed me how to write programs that drew blocks of color. I was psyched beyond belief. From that moment on, my destiny to become a programmer was sealed.

Wes P
A: 

Amstrad 464 Plus (Basic 1.1 OS)

Richie_W
A: 

TI-99/4A

That was the one that did it for me. I had so much fun on it with its Basic and the Extended Basic add-on. Of course you had to be careful with the cassette and loading and saving programs. Tons of fun :)

StubbornMule
+25  A: 
DanWoolston
As I started with a ZX81, the ZX80 was a kind of legendary lost ancestor thing. I never even saw a picture of one until about 1984, I think. Was it basically like a ZX81 but permanently in 'FAST' mode so the display stopped working whenever it had to do anything?
Daniel Earwicker
It was great, it's 1K RAM was shared between program and display (which was a variable-length "string" with end-line characters - you could see the end of your display disappear when you used too much memory.
paxdiablo
Of course, I had 2K which was the same memory chip piggybacked on the current one with the chip-select pin bent out and soldered elsewhere via added circuitry. We were "real men" in those days, not afraid of a little soldering.
paxdiablo
They're also worth a bucketload on eBay, I believe.
paxdiablo
I'm sorry to say I'm partly responsible for the rarity of these, having destroyed one with an inept DIY repair job.
finnw
@Earwicker: FAST mode, yes, although I did see some code that emulated SLOW mode.
Charles Stewart
Actually, the original ZX80 came with a 4K ROM - you could *upgrade* to the equivalent of a fast mode-only ZX81 by buying an 8K ROM. My first computer was a second hand ZX80 with the 8K ROM already installed - I subsequently bought a small piece of circuitry (from a place called Compshop, as I recall) that added SLOW mode.
Mark Bannister
I sold mine to a cousin, wish I'd kept it. I have my ZX81...
Len Holgate
A: 

Casio PB-100. With the memory expansion pack that took it up to 1568 bytes of user RAM (not a typo!). It had room for 10 programs, in a tiny BASIC. Amazing what you can do in that space. And it was really easy to take to school.

A: 

My first home computer was a TI-99/4A, but my father at the time used to work for American International College so I got to play with a PDP/11-40 at a rather young age :)

SomeMiscGuy
A: 

Apple II+. Love programming in Basic, including some simple graphics. Also had great games for it such as Lode Runner, Castle Wolfenstein, and Aztec (right name?).

A: 

I nearly had a ZX81 for Christmas in around 1982 but got a VIC20 because Sinclair had trouble delivering then I had an Amstrad CPC464

Ian Hopkinson
A: 

Commodore PC 80/286,Turbo Pascal and Turbo C/C++ hooked me for life and eventually made me seek a career as a programmer :)

Tom
A: 
Pop Catalin
A: 

Amstrad CPC 464

+1  A: 

Phoenix Commodore, with 640KB RAM, 20MB Hard disk (early 90s)

NOMO
A: 

People, please try to find pictures of your computers to include with your posts. I find them... adorable.

Internet Friend
and don't duplicate!
Stu Thompson
This should have been a comment...
Omar Kooheji
+6  A: 
Jonathan Webb
Was that the one that had various sounds effects such as a gunshot noise built in?
John Topley
@John Topley: I can't recall if it did but seemingly it did have the same sound chip as the Atari ST and other machines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AY-3-8912
Jonathan Webb
Oric-I is my first computer !Oric Atmos is the next.Yes it has sound effects built-in.ping -> magical pink soundzap -> laser zapshoot (?) -> gun
Sake
My first too! It broke when I bumped the table it was sitting on. :(
John McCollum
Ha, hours of fun ! Graphic mode (240x200, 2 colors per 6x1 pixels block) and sound was accessible from the BASIC, a hefty 48Ko to play with, and quite crappy tape storage. In my nostalgia dreams, ORIC1 basic, run by a 6809 CPU and the C64 graphic chip...
Monkey
+3  A: 
grigy
+1  A: 

Ohio Scientific C8P. 8k ram, basic in ROM. 64 character wide screen (spacious compared to the 32 character wide screen of it's predecessor, the C4P).

There were no games for it, to speak of, so I wrote my own, learning programming as I went. Worked for me!

Mike Elkins
A: 

TRS-80 Model 1. We got it when I was 8 years old, and somehow my parents got a set of programming books meant to teach kids BASIC. We also had a floppy disk (and LPT port) adapter that was about the size of a standard AT style case and sat under the monitor, while the TRS-80 Model 1 itself was built into its own keyboard.

Mark Allen
A: 

Commodore VIC-20, where I typed a BASIC program into it from a magazine article (a game). That was fun, and when the computer was turned off the program was gone (no cassette recorder at first to store the program).

Much later I learned PC-type programming using Turbo Pascal 1.0 on a Sanyo 555. My first real PC programming.

Cyberherbalist
+10  A: 
Paul Wicks
Wow, That was the dream machine my mate had down the road. I was stuck with a 486sx 20 (turbo down to 8mhz) 2mb on board ram. 80meg hard disk I think(ah the days of dblspace) . Upgrades were4mb of ram (£120 - 1992 ish)sb pro (not the nice sb 16, but better than standard sb for some reason)cdrom - how else could I play rebel assault...
optician
I've had 2 monitors flame out on me. Pretty scary. I had a 386DX-33 and I remember my neighbor got one of these too... I was pretty jealous
snicker
I had one of these buddies (an Acer though)... the dx2 means it was overclocked from 33 mhz. 8mb of ram was pretty impressive back in the day. I remember it costing something like $2500
jle
To play doom you had to run it in DOS with 8MB, or else you needed 16MB :D
mna
+2  A: 
Smallinov
+18  A: 
Cosma Colanicchia
I had only wished to have an Amiga when I was young...
spoulson
I still have one. Still works.
Mark T
Mine works too. The 512KB expansion still works as does the second floppy drive. DeluxePaint! Faery Tale Adventure! Artic Fox!Those were the days. I learned AmigaBASIC and Aztec C on this machine.
Scott Alan Miller
If you open up the case, all the signatures of the design team are molded into the plastic.
Joseph
I still have three of those, all working ! Not my first home computer but I just love them.
boxofrats
This was my first one too. Waited a while for it - think I got one of the first ones sold in the state where I lived.
Anon
It's not even funny how far ahead of the PC the Amiga 1000 was at the time.
Neil N
Defender of the Crown -- best game ever!
San Jacinto
A: 

zx spectrum 48k. it was awesome. i knew every assembly command. those were the good old days.

lajos
+1  A: 
Ferruccio
Don't forget, we built them ourselves. Not like today when building a computer means plugging in parts... we soldered in the individual components. And many of us designed and built our own hardware boards ourselves. Mine was a serial board.
Mark T
+8  A: 

No pics, but mine was a 286 PC, 640K RAM, no hard drive, but it had TWO FLOPPY DRIVES (A, B).

So we used to create a RAM drive on it and load TURBO PASCAL, a fantastic compiler and really a beautiful language to program (Pascal).

Jay
I had a 286, and taught myself Q-Basic. That's when I started programming.
Lance Fisher
+22  A: 

The great ATARI 1040 STF with 1 MB RAM and the razor sharp SM 124 Monitor.

alt text

My first programming environment was GFA Basic, a really impressive Basic Interpreter with procedural concepts.

ATARI 1040 STF

Johannes Hädrich
Loved my ST and GFA Basic. You couldn't get more productive than that.
bruceatk
totally agree ;-)
Johannes Hädrich
Still have one and the my orginal GFA Basic books
1.01pm
With a SCSI hard drive and the MagiX replacement OS, it was super quick and a joy to use!
Nelson
I had a 1040 STE, and started coding with Omikron Basic when I was 10 years old... I probably still have the book somewhere ;)
Thomas Levesque
+4  A: 

Commodore Plus/4

Arne Evertsson
+41  A: 
Jeremy Banks
I remember seeing lineups of people in computer stores, waiting to sit down in front of this new computer and try out this new-fangled "mouse" ...
Paul Lalonde
Still one of the best computers ever made…perhaps.
Will Robertson
My boss called it an electronic etch-a-sketch.
dacracot
Yes, but how many etch-a-sketches have the signatures of all of the designers embossed inside the case? :-)
RobH
My first was a 512K (400K Floppies). The memories.
bendin
@bendin Same here.
Adam Jaskiewicz
got one of these after the TI-99. pricey
Tim
amazing that the OS was only 64k..ish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_history)
asp316
I still have it and it work fine !... i got the better 800k version ! wow
marc-andre menard
Loved these old tings. More for the old shareware games than programming... I still remember the old boot sound on those things. There's something very relaxing about it. Does anyone else hold a soft spot for System 6, or is it just me?
SoloBold
I was frustrated with the Mac, I couldn't figure out how to program it. Commodore 64 I just had to turn on. But this thing? I figured BASIC had to be in there somewhere... but that's before I knew there were other computer languages!
Qwertie
I hate these with all of my being... they littered our public school system destroying student's interests in computing
ccook
+23  A: 
bcash
Ah, my second computer....after the zx-81
Stu Thompson
My first *real* computer. I eventually had dual 3.5inch floppies on this bad boy. That coupled with the built in 5.25 drive was almost as good as a HDD (not). I learned to program modifing BBS software in BASIC (TProBBS).
Aardvark
Family had one of these as a 'portable' to take when we moved to the UK in 1986. i think it still exists, and there are several disks of games like diamond mine and one-on-one
geocoin
My first computer as well! An unexpected Christmas gift (after I'd expressed interest but told my parents I knew they were too expensive so I wasn't expecting to get one any time soon). Best. Christmas. Evar.
peacedog
I still have mine and it still works. That little beast is what I taught myself to program on. (Gotta love learning to code with only a list of keywords)
Matthew Whited
I wrote more lines of BASIC on this little beauty than I can remember. They were mostly failed attempts to write text-based adventure games.
Adam McKee
Was mine too. I remember playing hours worth of Lemonade Stand, Conan and Moon Patrol on this thing like crazy. I think I still have it somewhere at the parents house. Wonder if it still works. (H.E.R.O. got alot of play time too).
Forgot about space quarks..can't forget about that...
+6  A: 

IBM PC Jr with extra floppy drive, extra memory, color monitor, chicklet keyboard and a daisy wheel printer. I was the only person in my dorm with their own PC in 1987.

Image copied from Wikipedia.

Dodi
I was wondering how far I was going to have to scroll through the comments to find this one. I was eight, and my dad was cool enough to spring for the bolt-on 640k memory upgrade and the 300bps internal modem. Ah, memories.
Meredith L. Patterson
While the PC Jr was not the first computer I wrote code on (that honor goes to the original IBM 5150 owned by a friend of mine) it's the first PC that I personally owned and had in the house. I had many "sidecars" for extra RAM, ports, etc. and a replacement keyboard for the original Chiclet. But writing for this machine taught me how to be economical with code.
Bob Mc
The first computer I coded on was a Commodore PET, but the first one I owned was a PCjr. I loved the wireless keyboard! My dad bought this for me, and the rest is history. Literally.
RedFilter
A: 

Sinclair zx81

Guerry
+3  A: 
cpm
Wow... this reminds me of when a student in a class I was teaching called a Pentium II processor "Really Old"... (about three years ago)
Matthew Whited
wow I remember this machine, mate had one, I hated it.... bloatware wasn't any better back then..
optician
So this is that computer from The Sims!
iconiK
A: 

my parents bought a packard bell legend 486 with 8mb ram and a 800 mb hdd and windows 3.x but i regularly used apple IIe's in school from k-6

knight0323
+1  A: 

A 286 PC when I was in high school.

Uhall
+1  A: 

386 with colour monitor & a enormous 4 MB RAM

Nathan Koop
I came across a 386 with 16MB of RAM onces... never knew you could put that many 30pin SIMMs on one motherboard.
Matthew Whited
A: 

My experience, was on a Apple II, and it was formatting a floppy disk. I thought it was the coolest thing i'd ever seen or done!

+45  A: 
Jon Schneider
Funny it took this long to turn up the classic IBM PC. Maybe the price tag stopped it being popular.
Richard Morgan
I was young at the time, so this may be unreliable, but yes, I seem to recall my Dad mentioning that the price tag on this machine (circa 1982) was around $2000. And that was in 1982 dollars! Hopefully my Dad, working for IBM as he did (and still does today!), got some kind of discount... :-)
Jon Schneider
This was also my first, minus the CGA display (mine was monochrome text only)... man, I sure miss that keyboard though. They don't click like that anymore. :)
David Crow
I learned GW-BASIC on this bad boy in 1985. Thank you Eastman Kodak for letting my father bring this home for me to use!
Scott Alan Miller
Never knew what "del command.com" actually meant until a week or so after hitting Enter.
random
> (A: is the one on the left) < I can't believe you had to type that. It must be a sign of the times. Or I must be getting old. Or both.
Euro Micelli
I grew up with an XT (5160) ... I agree about the keyboard
dassouki
Don't you mean EGA? CGA had only 4 colours, not 16.
finnw
the oldest one I worked with :)
modosansreves
@finnw: Double-checked, apparently my recollection was correct: CGA supported 4-bit color, so 16 colors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter
Jon Schneider
Not my first, by a long shot, but I had one of these. In fact, I still have the keyboard. I only wish I could find an adapter that would allow me to use it on a modern machine. CLICK, CLICK, CLACK!
BoltBait
Technically, my first was an IBM-clone 8086 2.33Mhz w/Turbo (4.67Mhz button/overheat), CGA, 640KB of ram, 10 MB HDD (which I used dos debug on to get another 1.1 MB out of it).
eduncan911
That was the second computer I used at work and the first pc (used a mainframe before this).And Lotus 123 was wonderful as we had been hand creating and calculating spreadsheets that had thousands of entries.
HLGEM
A: 

I also started with the Vic 20. Still have the books somewhere. The computer died spectaculair because i tried to do other things with the casette port ;-).

Lots of sweet memories (or should i say mid life crisis).

Gamecat
A: 

TRS-80 as well. Had a couple of 'game' coding books, one with superheroes on the cover, and I forget the other one. Although the one I had wasn't the model pictured, and we just used a TV as a monitor.

A: 

Tandy 1000 SX ... I made that thing do quite a bit.

DGM
+2  A: 

Like several others here a ZX81 with 16K RAM pack, but I just wanted to add...

  • Do you remember typing in thousands of lines of code out of a magazine only to find the thing never worked? Programmes came in books too, and that keyboard was not built for typing. Particularly as if you pressed to hard the 16K RAM pack would bum out!
  • After all these late night typing in programmes sessions, was I the only kid to get in trouble at school for writing my sums like this:

    What is 13 * 3?
    ANS$ = 39

I got in such trouble for that...

reefnet_alex
+46  A: 
Ashley Davis
As crazy as it may sound I actually think I was already programming basic on my C64, before I ever touched an abacus.
Robert Gould
i think i still haven't touched an abacus..
Claudiu
+4  A: 
GvS
A: 

I had an atari 400 with 16k of memory. And yes I did write code in BASIC on the thing. I later upgraded it to 64k and a replacement keyboard to overcome the membrane keyboard that was rather cruel to code with. Ah, the life of an 9 year old.

MikeJ
A: 
Ryan Delucchi
A: 

TI Professional

redfood
A: 

Atari STm, connected to a monochrome TV, with an external floppy and GFA Basic!

Panagiotis Korros
+2  A: 

286SX with a whopping 2Mb RAM or would the Speak&Spell qualify?

Mayowa
+1  A: 

Wow, the memories. Atari 800. I was about 12 or 13. BASIC cartridge. ANTIC magazine and a tape recorder to store programs. Learned all about Sprits, DMA, collision and it had an amazing 4-voice synthesizer chip that I coded some vicious music with! I would give a year of my life to go back and spend it in those days again! Wonderful memories for me.

Optimal Solutions
Oh, and I did get a book on 6502 Assembler and did quite a bit of ASM programming back then too.
Optimal Solutions
A: 

An IBM Thinkpad 300c

pablasso
A: 

At school we had TRS-80 Model 1s with the mini-tape drives, later the school got the TRS model IIIs. The first one I had at home was the TI-99 4/A, with the Peripheral Expansion Box which made it look a lot more impressive.

A: 

I don't actually know what it was, but the Internet tells me that it looked like a Compaq Portable III. Amber monochromatic screen, keyboard that attached to it, BASIC and WordPerfect.

Noether
+1  A: 

Thomson MO-6. There's very little chance that you know what this machine if you didn't live in France at the time. Awesome computer in any case:

As you can see it used standard audio tapes for storing the software. Copying one was as easy as having a double tape deck (which wasn't that common at the time) and making a copy of the audio track. I think it was a bit of a problem for all the software vendors at the time :)

Gilles
A: 

A pentium 200 with mmx Using Visual Studio 6 we had that thing pumping out Open GL 3D images from C++! USING 128 mb OF ram and a 4GB harddrive.

WACM161
A: 
Jeremy Cantrell
A: 

The Apple ][+ at school in 3rd grade. The countless hours spent after school writing GOTO statements were sheer joy--except perhaps when you had to shift all of the line numbers because you didn't leave large enough gaps!

Nick Woods
A: 

Vector Graphic with David Ahl's BASIC Computer Games:

Brian
A: 

A custom built PC from a local shop, which I got in 2000.

AMD K6-2 450 MHz, 32 MB RAM, 13 GB HDD, 8 MB SiS 6326 AGP, ISA Sound Card, 14" CRT

Imran
A: 

Commodore 64! I learnt basic and assembly on that wee beasty :)

BlackMael
A: 
CindyH
A: 

My first computer was a Hewlett Packard with 128MB RAM, a 20GB hard drive, and a Pentium III at 533Mhz. The price was about $1300 at Best Buy.

Nick Arnold
A: 
jacobsee
A: 

Mine was an Oric Atmos. ¿Does anybody remember it?

That my second computer, next to Oric-I
Sake
A: 

Ohio scientific superboard II -- 8k RAM, MS BASIC, an old B&W TV, and a cassette tape recorder

david.jade
A: 

Apple IIe compatible

Yoni Baciu
A: 

I'm another early sinclair lewis 1000 user (before the Timex version) around 79 /80 I guess - it was the one with 1K ROM 1 (it could have been 4)K RAM.

K

defaulthtm
+1  A: 

The first computer I had at home was a Commodore 64 with a tape drive. I used a Commodore PET, TRS-80 Model II, and Apple IIe at school. Later I learned dbase II programming on a kaypro II.

I really fell in love with programming on the 64, Sprites, Simons Basic, even some assembly and C.

pro3carp3
LOAD "Nostalgia" FROM 8,1run
David
+2  A: 
Svet
A: 

My first computer was a Timex 2048 (TC2048), a ZX Spectrum-based machine with enhancements, namely a cartridge port to make it compete with videogame consoles.

Panic
A: 

My first computer was the TI-99/4A with a black-and-white TV for a monitor. But, my first laptop was the Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100. 40 columns by 8 lines. I loved it because I could modem (tip?) into the university VAXen and work from home. It was glorious.

Scott Bargabus
A: 
Kevin Conner
+1  A: 

Ye Olde TRS-80. The fist was one of the originals that hooked up to a cassette recorder to read and write data. And the second one - OMG, it had a floppy drive! Very cool.

Rich Bruchal
+2  A: 
Jason Stevenson
You might enjoy "Vcc" tte Color Computer 3 Emulator for Windowshttp://vcc6809.bravehost.com/
1.01pm
A: 

Radio Shack TRS-80, not sure of the model number. I actually discovered my parents setting it up at 11pm on Christmas Eve, so not only did I confirm the non-existance of Santa, but I also got to setup my own present that year.

A: 

Apple IIe for meee

Ian Suttle
A: 

ZX81 and after a few years a Atari 800 with an assembler cartridge.

Erick Sgarbi
A: 

An original Digi-Comp that my father bought for me in 1966.

Rob Wells
A: 

IBM 486-DX2-66!

cdleary
A: 

Epson Equity II+ 8088 640k addressable RAM 40 MB HD Monochrome Monitor

+1  A: 
pro
I was 6 years old when my father bought one of these second-hand in 1983. Wouldn't be where I am today without it.
odd parity
A: 
jholl
+4  A: 
shea241
A: 
Fernando Barrocal
+6  A: 
Chris
Oh yeah! I loved that machine.
Paul Nathan
A: 

Mine was the Apple ][e ... and learning the 6502.. mind-expanding stuff.

Wow, this is a nostalgia thread. How come plastic these days doesn't have the excitement that it had back then?? I am looking at the great images of machines people have posted above, the machines that I recognise and I can recall the totally awesome power I felt when my hands were on them. Yet I have my hands right now on a quantifiably much much much more powerful laptop... yet it feels lame in comparison.

Bring back POKE!

David Leonard
A: 

Mine was the Timex Sinclair 1000, then an Atari 400, 1200xl, (and some other weird models I can't recall), but the computer that really got me all revved up was a C=64... I Read Jim Butterfield's ML book, and never looked back.. :)

LarryF
A: 

Gateway 286 sx 16mhz /w 2MB ram and a 20mb HD

midas06
A: 

A Digital Group Z80

Jim In Texas
A: 

Commodore 64

cretzel
A: 

Like many, the Commodore 64

A: 

Commodore +4

I haven't played on it for a year, because I was so impressed by programming in basic and later in assembly.

I still have a working one in my closet, with casette, a catrigde with Commodore Basic from the Commodore 128 series, and the learning kit for assembly.

Biri
+12  A: 
Brent.Longborough
wow... fantastic!
ramayac
Beautiful. Reminds me of the Burroughs B5500 I saw in high school, or the IBM 1620 I used in college, then on to the 360 and 1130.
Mike Dunlavey
wow, had look up wikipedia on this one.. it's amazing how far did technology progress in last 50 years.
lubos hasko
11 people used this as their first computer? But Wikipedia tells me they only sold 19 of them. :)
Robert P
(1) Don't know if 11 votes means 11 users. (2) We had to actually share it with other people. My timeslot was usually 4:30 to 5:00 am on Tuesdays...
Brent.Longborough
A: 
neslekkiM
A: 

My first computer was a C64 too - I also made my first programming experiences there. :)

unexist
A: 

pentium..I was 15 when I got my first computer...that was incredible time...:)

vaske
A: 
Daniel
A: 

This Windows ME machine. Kinda feel a bit young. I've been collecting old "vintage" machines as a hobby lately. A proud addition that I've come to own is a Commodore 64. I adore my 64.

Zee JollyRoger
I never thought I would consider someone only ~7 years younger than me to be a young'n.
Brad Gilbert
A: 

A Sinclair ZX Spectrum - a UK rubber keyboarded home computer from about 1982

Andy Cook
A: 

486 Acer which was smoking hot compared to my friend's 386 lol! circa 1989, I think?

I'm pretty sure it cost about $2K and I remember my dad muttering under his breath about how expensive it was, "Could put a down payment on a car for that much grumble...".

Tony R
A: 

IBM PC Convertible Model 5140.

A heavy clunker of a box at 13 pounds. Mine also had the optional printer that attached to the rear and printed on thermal fax paper. What a joy it was to type up your own documents, only to have to go to Staples to make a copy of it on "real" paper :))

I spent lots of hours programming Basic on it, which I learned from a book. I actually wrote a file-based Hangman program that loaded the words from one of the floppies :)

+12  A: 

The mighty Acorn Electron, purchased from Boots the Chemists because my parents could not afford the BBC Micro that I really wanted. It allowed me to do my school computer club homework at home though. My "monitor" was a 14" black and white TV with a rotary tuning knob. It would slowly drift off frequency and need tweaking back on to the correct channel periodically. "Elite" seemed to take forever to load but was one of the most awesome games ever.

Acorn Electron on Wikipedia

Did you ever have unofficial competitions to see who could type in the most impressive BASIC programs on the display computers in Boots?
Jonathan Webb
My first and second computer. I once wrote a two player game in one line of BASIC.
Tom Hawtin - tackline
I got my first computer, an Electron on my twelfth birthday. I was gutted that didn't get a BBC Model B with its MODE 7 goodness. I had the "plus one" extension that provided joystick and cartridge slot, although the only game I had was frogger, or the AcornSoft equivalent. I got very good at it.
spender
I spent far too much time playing PacMan on this as a child
Matt Lacey
+1  A: 

HP-85

That was my first one too! My Dad had one in his office that nobody knew how to use. Brought it home with all of the manuals and I taught myself how to program. I loved that thing! I came in this big padded suitcase. I wrote a lunar lander game and spent lot of time on it. Soon, I got a Vic-20 then a Commodore-64 but the HP-85 was my first.
Loki Stormbringer
A: 

My first true compy was a Schneider Joyce. It had Mallard Basic and Wordstar on a floppy iirc, and the printer connected via a very proprietary plug to the main unit which housed both the CPU and the green monochrome monitor (I am talking 1980's here - Schneider the German company later sold out to or merged with Amstrad the British).

Before that, I owned a second-hand Sinclair ZX-81 with a memory extention thingy that added 16 Kb (as in a whopping 16384 bytes) to the on-board 4 Kb RAM (4096 bytes). The display was a small 6" black-and white TV I could lay my hands on (Russian Shiljalis, still have it. Runs on 12 Volt car battery, and also on a 220 Volt adapter. Manual includes detailed circuit diagram, for reasons unbeknownst to me).

And way before that, as a high-school student I used to spend some of my free time in the local Capi-Lux store, where they had an TI-41C on display. Or perhaps it was an 11C. It was the first programmable calculator I have ever interacted with. Stopping there after school, I would input the code from the manual (50 or so lines, with a calculator-style keyboard, nothing qwuerty-like in sight) to play "Moonlander". The objective of the game was to iteratively input fuel burn rates in such a way that at the end of your fuel, your elevation would be zero and your speed as well.

Heck, in 1973 I was the first in my class to own a digital watch! It had a LED display. Go figure.

+15  A: 
Jazz
Nice picture!! That brings back memories...
TonyOssa
I have an emulator for this thing ... and I still use it and LOVE it! Rock on HP48SX!
cplotts
Nice, I had one of these in middle school and remember the oddness of RPL.
qstarin
A: 

I started programming in school on a TRS-80 while travelling abroad. But my first home computer was an Apple ][.

MrJavaGuy
A: 

Apparently it seems that Thus far, I am one of the very few who had a cursed Apple /// or Apple III or Apple 3, or affectionately a Crapple.

Crashed more that (Windows 95)^2

See Wikipedia: Apple III

The Chairman
A: 

The IBM PCjr, with extra RAM and a floppy drive. No hard drive, but we had the Basic ROM cartridge - you plugged it into the front and always had basic on-hand, which was really cool. My dad got me my first Infocom games to play on it.

John Fiala
A: 
Glenn Block
A: 

When I was a kid I had a VTech, which is basically a toy. Back then, they actually included BASIC interpreters and that was my first experience with programming. I am very sad not to be able to find such a "toy" these days that is actually programmable.

ironfroggy
+4  A: 

The HP 41C and synthetic programming - the notion that data and instructions were stored in the same (binary) format was a revelation for me as a teen. Pulling modules to blur that line between data and programs also felt like dark magic.

Argalatyr
This was mine too. My brother owned it. I programmed with a friend on it when he was at footy practice. Love the red leds!
Martlark
pic http://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:w-SutXuqJckyMM:http://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/HP-41/HP-41C-M.JPG
Martlark
+1  A: 

Amstrad 286 with 1Mb of RAM!!

David Ameller
A: 

Sord M5. Played games for a few days, then found the cartridge marked "Basic G".

SordM5

volley
A: 

My First Home PC was Pentium 1 , 120 Mhz, 1.2GB HDD, 8MB RAM......it ran Windows 95 then...used it for 4-5 years....

A: 

Timex Sinclair 1000 that my parents bought for me at a grocery store. Followed four or five years later by a Commodore 64, which I used for about seven years (until college).

I still have both computers...

don
A: 

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16K, later upgraded to a mammoth 48K! My Dad bought it directly from Sinclair Research Ltd in 1982.

John Topley
+2  A: 
Knox
A: 

Commodore 64, it's BASIC language and some times later I've get back to this machine and had fun with motorolas assembler.

Crank
A: 

First computer ever used: one of those Apple II in 6th grade (1989).

First computer at home: My dad bought an IBM PC clone by Hyundai (1890). MS-DOS with GW-BASIC.

lamcro
A: 

I'm another Sinclair boy. Started with a ZX80 (for my 10th birthday (and christmas too, since it was so expensive!)). I was a Sinclair fanboy for years too. I even had one of those awful QL things with the microdrive ...

David Heggie
ZX80 entry already exists. Just vote that one up instead, and leave a comment on it.
Scott Ferguson
A: 

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. After a total of 2 weeks with BASIC managed to find the complete ROM Dissasembly book and learned a LOT on programming and neat techniques. That was when I decided to be a software engineer

njsf
A: 

Apple IIc. I actually ended up hauling it back and forth to Junior High School for almost a year.

Nerf42
+3  A: 
Tall Jeff
My first (non-minicomputer) and truly in-home.
gbarry
A: 
Jason Mock
A: 

A Micron Pentium 90... wow do I feel young I started in Paradox and moved to Delphi, Python, C/C++, Haskell, etc

Ed L
A: 

Apple ][+. Had to buy a chip to be able to display lower case on the green-screen monitor. But it had a TV out and could do some games in 16 colors, quite a big deal at the time (1981). Then bought an Apple ][c and after that a Commodore Amiga 1000 (1985). The Amiga was quite a computer for the time as well.

Turnkey
+2  A: 

Didaktik M (ZX Spectrum clone), 1992

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

DiGi
Mine was Didaktik Gama :-)
Peter Štibraný
+5  A: 
Eric Lathrop
I loved this one! My dad brought it home one day when I was in grade 7 and it got me interested in programming.
jgreep
I got mine as a junior in high school. I programmed in the entire periodic table of elements because we could use calculators on our chemistry. I even asked my history teacher if we could use calculators on the test ... she said, "yes" ;D
chefsmiler
A: 
cciotti
A: 
Nick
A: 
Purfideas
A: 

Well.... an Apple IIe at school, which prompted me to get a Commodore 64 at home, which was my only computer from 5th grade until sometime in my first year of college (in '90-91). I did BASIC, Assembly, and Pascal on that little beastie.

Incidentally, I had my C64 modded to add a second SID (sound) chip for six-voice stereo music and a 512K memory cartridge (I think... it might have just been 256K) for use with GeOS.

I'd add pictures... but there's already plenty ;)

Michael Johnson
A: 
Bob Minteer
Bingo! for me (well, my first Apple computer anyway) <typing on a MBP>
micahwittman
A: 

Vic-20 but before that I had been exposed to something similar to the KIM-1. The vic-20 would be considered more of a home computer...

dwelch
+9  A: 
Craig Trader
I'm such a geek for saying: that's cool. Did you ever type in and run those paper programs?
Barry Brown
By the time I had access to a computer, I had graduated to programs that I couldn't run in my head / by hand with pencil and paper.
Craig Trader
A: 

Commodore 64C with external floppy drive followed by a Compaq Presario 486. First ISP was phone modem through AOL and then a 10Mbit dorm room connection at Cornell. Talk about a jump in connection speed.

A: 
Bittercoder
A: 

Compac Deskpro - PII 350 mHZ, 128 RAM, 6 GB HDD, 4 MB graphic card.
I bought this computer in 2005, for programming in C++ ;)]

http://i38.tinypic.com/nef5up.jpg

A: 

A Digi-Comp 1!

http://www.mindsontoys.com/kits.htm

Rob Wells
A: 

Acorn Electron. After developing a nasty obsession with taking electronic things apart and trying to "build" computers out of wire and cardboard boxes, my parents finally took the hint one Christmas back in 1986 or so.

I had quite a lot of fun just messing about on it, and then one day I discovered BASIC.

Piku
A: 

Acorn Electron with tape drive. Programming BASIC and playing Repton.

A: 

Cybermax AMD-133 (overclocked from 90 [I think]) with 16MB RAM, 56k modem, 20GB HD, 4MB video card, and 17in CRT. My wife was generous enough to let me get it with her 401K check after she quit teaching.

Not to brag, but the next Christmas I got another 8MB RAM from CompUSA with my $50 gift certificate. True story.

Sorry, no pic. Cybermax went bankrupt in 2006 and I can't find any images.

domus.vita
A: 

Self-built 386DX with 170 MB HDD. I don't remember how much RAM it had, but I believe it was 2 MB or something.

It ran MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1, and I learned MS BASIC and PASCAL on this baby. =)

Can Berk Güder
+3  A: 
cschol
The Amstrad version (CPC 464) was my first computer, with that same green screen.
Pascal Thivent
A: 

Commodore VIC-20! 4k of RAM baby!

Jason Short
A: 

Elektronika BK-0010-01 (Электроника БК-0010-01) with Vilnius BASIC in ROM.

Ignas Limanauskas
A: 
Iulian Şerbănoiu
+4  A: 

An old Compaq

Kristin
I had a Compaq portable myself, two floppies, no hard drive, $3000. Very heavy to carry back and forth to work which I did as we only had something like 5 IBM pcs for 90 of us to share. Still have it inthe closet, hope to sell it an an antique someday.
HLGEM
A: 

466 mhz celeron, hehe, I started late, voodoo3 was such a beast for halflife1 and counterstrike

A: 

I first started with an Oric Atmos ... 48K to do wonders in 6502 Assembly language ...

Fabien Hure
A: 

An old HP pavilion running Win95.

A: 

An 8088 IBM-Comaptible XT from just before ATs came out. It had a 16 color VGA screen with a screen saver (in MsDos) that displayed a colorful clown.

It had a menu which was nothing more that a bunch of batch files and a listing of them displayed at the end of Autoexec.bat. I found that out wanting to add a new game to the list. That was all the spark I needed.

Thanks for a good minute of nostalgia.

Asaf.

Asaf R
A: 

First 'home computer'? BBC something or other. First one I bought? Mac Classic.

Robert Brook
A: 

An Acorn Electron, though the most complex program I wrote for it was something like:

10 print "Hello!"
20 goto 10

It was cool at the time..

Nick
A: 
Greg Whitfield
A: 

Atari 800 XL with 64KB (16KB of them were ROM)

Yonatan Maman
A: 
Kris
A: 

Commodore 64. I want to emulate it in Silverlight!

Mariano
+3  A: 
johnc
Not just Aussies, Kiwis too
Stephen Denne
No offence intended :)
johnc
ohh... we had one of those for a weekend (might have been Easter)... before Dad decided that if we were going to get a computer, it better have a real keyboard (like the IBM's at his work), and not toy rubber keys.
Scott Ferguson
A: 

My first PC was HC 85 :)

RaduM
A: 

As with a lot of others, Commodore 64.

stevemac
A: 

Hyundai 286 that my parents bought me from a PC Warehouse in NJ. Yes a Hyundai like the car.

rayray2030
A: 

Commodore 64! That was approximately 20 years ago...

dennisV
A: 

A Color Genie!

I still have it in my office (as a show piece though!) :)

+3  A: 
not enough keys! How did the typing work?
Martlark
ME TOOOO!!!! I had one too :)
Andrei Rinea
this thing looks awesome. could be a console in the Death Star
MAD9
A: 

http://www.elektronik.zolls-im-netz.de/c-one/zx81/zx81.gif" alt="alt text" />A faboulous ZX81 with a massive 1k of memory!

Rippo
+2  A: 

A 486DX IBM PC Compatible Computer running on Windows 95.. Back then I used it to program in Pascal and C...

jericho
A: 

Oooh ... Old days :) AX170 - SAKHR ... contains only Basic and painter !!

http://www.s77.com/up/up9/df70f8504d.jpg

+2  A: 

TRS-80, Scott Adams adventures!

Then on to Commodore Vic20, 64, Atari ST

Merkin
A: 

Commodore 64, but with a tape driver. Writing down and loading a program was taking few minutes. Not saying about head calibration.

Yoi-Nami-Ra
A: 

My first computer was the Sinclair ZX-80.

JDibble
A: 

I got my first computer late!! when I was in college! With 512MB ram and 40GB HDD... I fell in love with her the very next minute it came home!!!

Shoban
+1  A: 

Being from Sweden, I obviously had a Luxor ABC 802. Never heard of it? Well, one of their slogan were "who needs to be IBM compatible?" so...

vonolsson
+1  A: 
mlarsen
A: 

Does an IBM 5100 count? I had one of those on loan for a little while. As far as computers I've owned the list seems endless. I've had Ataris (800, 1040ST), the ill-fated Coleco Adam, an Amiga 2000 and then a series of PC-clones including a VAXmate before going to custom-build PC hardware until a few years ago when I ended up buying a total of 3 HP Media Center PCs.

And there still isn't a game out there that can compare to M.U.L.E. on the Atari 800 when it comes to getting 4 people excited and passionate playing against each other in a game of economics...

David
+2  A: 

A TRS-80

It had a fantastic 16KB of ram. Later added the Expansion Interface, a box as big as the computer, which increased the memory to a total of 48KB, and allowed you to add a floppy driver.

Phenwoods
+4  A: 

An 8088 PC-XT clone running at something like 4MHz. 640kb RAM, MS-DOS 3.0, and GW-BASIC. Don't believe it had a hard disk, but hey, when you have two bootable 5.25" floppy drives, who needs one!?

Steve Paulo
I just realized there's no way the machine in question had 640kb of RAM... must have been 64kb...
Steve Paulo
Inves PC 640 X turbo. 2 Floppy 5 1/4'' - 640Kb. http://fglez.com/misc/invespc640x.jpg
antispam
Yep, I had an 8088 PC-XT clone too. 640KB RAM, no hard disk, two 360KB floppies. 4MHz with the turbo button on, something like 1.4MHz without? 4 colour CGA graphics but only an amber monochrome monitor. Good times.
Kieron
Mine as well---but both floppy drives can't be bootable at the same time, I guess! And if it was 8088, it must be having a turbo button!
Jaywalker
A: 

IBM 386 when I was like six years old, loved playing on that thing

Maurizio Pozzobon
A: 

Wang 2200 T plus a whopping 5MB hard disk the size of a dorm fridge.

I wrote a joystick-controlled text editor for it, because it had no mouse.

-Al.

A: 

Packard Bell 486 DX2, 4MB RAM, Win3.11. ;)

A: 
chrisd
A: 

My first was an Amstrad 2286. Tere was a game written in QBasic where you were an ape and you had to throw bananas across the screen that I loved playing. That made me want to code something of my own in Basic and so that's how it all started.

rpfnovak
A: 

Used a TI-99 for years, but in 1990 we made a leap into the future when we got our 12mhz 1MB of RAM 286 from DAK.

alexp206
+1  A: 
+1  A: 

486 DX2, 4 MB RAM, Windows 3.1

goths
+1  A: 

I remember the "Little Proffesor" I think i was from Texas Instruments http://images.google.co.ke/images?q=little%20proffesor&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;um=1&amp;sa=N&amp;tab=wi then i got the Zenith Data Sytems 80286 where i learnt Basic Programming and teaked my 1st game on it... nibbles. It also had Gorilla on it.

CPU: 80286 
RAM: 64K 
HDD: 32 MB 
GRAPHICS: Monochrome 
Floppy: 5 1/4 Inch 
OS: MS-DOS Version 5

Oh what a Joy!!

Steve Obbayi
+1  A: 
Chris B-C
+33  A: 
levik
I still have mine :)
Callum Rogers
A: 
Scott
A: 

Like so many of you guys my first computer was the Commodore 64. It was sold as a multipurpose computer, but I mainly used it for playing games.

Mine came with the classic tape drive as disk drives was really expensive back then.

Favourite titles: International Karate +, Ghostbusters, Commando.. ah brings back.. For all you old C64 fans, check out the C64 tribute band Press Play On Tape. I watched them at the JavaZone'08 conference in Oslo last week, and those guys are really great ;-)

My second computer was a Commodore Amiga 600 (anyone remember those?). I had a ancient 14' Sony color TV (from 1972) in my room that I used as monitor for both the C64 and the Amiga ;-)

A: 

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.

The good: It introduced me to programming.

The bad: It was BASIC.

Also, IMHO, the best keyboard ever.

Rui Vieira
A: 

Oh how I miss my Commodore 64. SID Chips FTW! :)

A: 

From about 1984, my parents had an IBM PC 5150, and I was so mad that it had no graphics of any sort. My friends all had Spectrums and Commodore 64s. We had a total of 2 games - Othello and "BUGS!" (a Centipede clone done entirely in ASCII characters which I still can't locate anywhere on the web to my increasing dismay). I broke Othello trying to reprogram it. Doh!

But actually, no graphics turned out to be an amazing thing as I ended up loving text adventures so much that I started writing them and programming very badly in BASIC. One thing led to another and now coding pays for my whole life. I still kind of miss the glowing green text-only interface though... but not the endless floppy disk failures. Ugh.

Oh, and I still hanker after the days I spent on my Amiga 500+ which is now going yellow in my attic. It still works somehow, just with a few more guru meditation errors.

Odilon Redo
A: 

The Commodore VIC-20.

It had a cassette deck for permanent storage, and plugged into the TV. Had about 3.5 kb of usable RAM, more with an optional memory cartridge.

Chris Lawlor
A: 
rec
+1  A: 

Macintosh IIsi

Man, I still haven't found Carmen Sandiago!

ShawnD
A: 

Orel BK08 (ZX Spectrum clone produced in USSR back in 1991)

With Basic onboard and using cassette player to load available programs.

Yurii Soldak
A: 

Commodore Vic-20 with tape cassette to save data.

Pokus
A: 

Atari 800 - still have it, still works.

timepilot
+9  A: 
ykaganovich
I trust the "Electronica" name.
Purfideas
This was my first one too, and actually I still use it. Mine is labeled 'CASIO FX-700P' though.
Cees Meijer
+1  A: 
Bratch
A: 

My love for computing and programming began when I installed Visual Basic 6 on a Compaq Presario 5528

Kiranu
A: 

I had an Atari 400 loaded with 8k of ram. Never thought I would use it all up. We won it from the Pepsi cap game. Way back when you knew you won without having to login to their web site and plug in a huge code.

Thomas DeGan
A: 

The first computer I remember using was a dual-boot Win95/DOS. It spent most of its time in DOS, running Mechwarrior 2.

The first computer I actually owned was a home-built 486 with DOS. I taught myself BASIC in the QBASIC interpreter.

Branan
A: 

A Turing machine.

(Image not available)

Ray Vega
A: 

Amiga 1000 w/RAM upgrade. Ahh, what a sweet machine.

Sean Sexton
+1  A: 
Aardvark
+1  A: 
MattC
A: 
Euro Micelli
A: 
Shannon Nelson
A: 

PDP-1 was the first one I used, but they wouldn't let me take it home. The first home computer was a VIC20. I eventually added a 8K RAM expansion for a total of 11.5K and a single side floppy disk drive.

Now that think about it, by very first computer was a slide rule. It was analog instead of digial, but it was still a computer!

Jim C
A: 

I had a Pineapple;

Shortly followed by an Apple ][+ for years, and then a //gs, then a 386 with no math co-processor, and a 486 DX after that... then a Macintosh Quadra 950. It could run Photoshop 2 and had a programmer's button. My PowerMac 8500/120 actually has a kind of forth built in to the OpenFirmware.

dlamblin
A: 

Tandy 1000 SL running deskmate followed closely by tons of apple mackintoshes at school.

Glorious Machine.

Will Harding
A: 

My first was the IBM Aptiva M Series. The first Aptiva to come pre-loaded with Windows '95. The best part of it was the software bundle which came with out, including the "Hyperman" and "Cyberia" games.

While searching for the brand of Aptiva I owned, I came across this article which announces the new, state of the art system. It was a good read for a trip down memory lane.

BlueVoid
+2  A: 

A Nascom 1 of 1978/79

HW

1 MHz Z80, 2 kB RAM of which appr 850 bytes user RAM, 1 kB ROM, RS232, RF out, TTY, PIO lines, 300baud casette, single board uncased.

SW

Z80 machine code + monitor

fredarin
The Nascom ruled (the earth in the age of dinosaurs). I had a Nascom 2 (the greatest Z80 based machine of all time!).
Tim Ring
A: 
Jeff Yates
A: 

AST 100 Mhz P1 but didn't found a photo

Omar Abid
A: 

Tandy 1000EX

John Kraft
A: 

Still have my first computer, an Apple ][ plus.

Michael McCarty
A: 

An IBM PC jr. Given to me by my boss at Amdek. I managed to score a Parallel adapter so I could print to a Ricoh daisywheel printer. Found an article on how to modify the floppy controller to add another disk drive (hacked it up and added two more). DOS 2.1 running a modified Vdisk.sys for a ram drive. DOS was in A:, Applications in B: and Data in C:. A few bytes to change the equipment status byte and I was flyin'. Whoo Hoo!

A: 

My first computer was a 50 Mhz Windows 3.1 machine that ran everything in DOS.

Joe Morgan
A: 
Roddy
A: 
pmg
A: 

Also a TRS-80 Model I. We had the AT case sized floppy and PPT adapter that sat under the monitor for it, and the floppy disk drive that sounded like a garbage disposal unit to sit next to it.

Mark Allen
+1  A: 
EdmundG
+2  A: 
MrDatabase
You are not that old, are you?
Andreas Rejbrand
+3  A: 
Federico Ramponi
A: 

The first computer I owned was a BBC model B but technically the first computer I programmed was a kitset system based on a RCA1802 (possibly a COSMAC ELF) that belonged to a friend. This machine had a set of toggle switches on the front and a LED hex display.

ConcernedOfTunbridgeWells
A: 

A Philips P2000T. My father used to work at Philips Research labs. The first 50 machines were sold at a large discount to people working there with the provision that the source code for programs they wrote in the first year(s) would be made available to all P2000 users.

Wow, 12 pages of answers.

Stephan Eggermont
+1  A: 
Charles Faiga
A: 
Mike Hall
Is that Norton Commander? :X
Andrei Rinea
A: 

A Heathkit H8 (sorry, no picture)

2MHz 8080 16K of RAM (I splurged!) Audio tape for storage.

Purchased in kit form, everything except the CPU card had to be hand assembled and soldered. The 10 slot backplane took a lot of patience.

I also bought a H19 video terminal, but that was back ordered for a few weeks. So I got to run hand-assembled programs keyed in on the front panel in octal until that arrived and I got to use the assembler.

Six months later I bought a floppy drive and controller and never looked back.

Darron
A: 

An Atari 130XE. 128kB of RAM, tapedrive and floppydrive (overclocked with a so-called Happy chip).

I programmed an adventure game in Turbo Basic. Later, my mother threw out the machine as junk. She hadn't realized the sentimental value. Sob...

Martijn Heemels
A: 

Radio Shack's TRS-80

EdenMachine
+2  A: 
MatthieuP
That's a beautiful girl!
binOr
OMG, I remember of Alice now!
Pascal Thivent
A: 

My first computer was a Mac IIvi. I still have it stashed in the corner of a closet. My next computer was a 486 Windows box running Windows 95 and upgraded to 98. That was succeeded by a newer PC running Windows XP. That one's still chugging away. I plan on getting an Intel Macbook Pro soon. (The plan is to put Windows on it so I can boot into either OS.)

RobH
A: 

my first computer was IBM 5170. Learnt Lotus and Basic on it.

A: 

My first computer was a Amstrad PC 1640, which is an extended version of the Amstrad 1512 (more memory and EGA graphics! Yeah !).

Mine had two 5.25" floppy drives, and no hard drive (I had to return my copy of "Sim City" to the store, as it required to be installed on a hard drive!).

It was in 1988...

romaintaz
A: 

I'm pretty young, so...
Packard Bell C115

OTisler
A: 
Anders K.
A: 
unwind
A: 

intel pentium 100MHz 8Mb Ram and the tremendous amount of 1GB hard-disk-space and an borland turbo c compiler - still love that ide - has all you need - except code completion ;)

Gambrinus
A: 
Gary Willoughby
A: 

Tandy 1200

AFHood
A: 

My father had a Zx Spectrum back in 1984. I played some games, but then I was 4 and never learned how to program on it. The "computer" I programmed first was the Casio Fx-4500p calculator

I made games, math programs, and even some funny animations!!

A: 

A Nascom 2 in 1980

Hardware : 2/4 MHz Z80, 32 kB RAM + 1k video ram, RS232, RF out, TTY, PIO lines, 300/1200baud casette, single board uncased.

Built in software : 2k monitor (NAS-SYS3) & 8k Microsoft ROM basic.

Heavily modded over the years, ended up as CP/M machine with dual floppies and 256k ram. Still have it in the shed, tried powering it up last year, dead as a dodo (doh).

Tim Ring
A: 
Jimmy J
A: 
Zsolt Botykai
A: 

Sinclair QL God bless those microdrives! I then had an Atari ST, followed by a Compaq PC 386!

Stephen Newman
A: 

Celereon 400 Mhz, 32 MB RAM. Internet on dial-up. And I could play the first Half-life game on it.

Ricardo
A: 

My first home computer used a TMS9900 chip (which was the first one-chip 16 bit microprocessor). I designed it myself and made the circuit board myself. And built it myself, of course.

I then wrote a monitor, translated it to machine code by hand and entered it using the toggle switches on the CPU board. Once I had that I could use the terminal (which I had designed and built myself) to enter machine code more easily.

The storage was an old cassette player where I had ripped out all the electronics and attached straight the the read/write head with my own electronics. But I rarely turned off the computer and had battery backup for the memory.

The first bigger pieces of software I wrote was an assembler and a text editor so I could code more easily. After that I write an operating system (Unix-like, but without parallel processes) and a C compiler.

After a while I also got 5 1/4" floppy drives (what an improvement over tape) and built a graphics card.

A: 
John Fricker
A: 
  1. Northstar Horizon with 16K RAM, 90K floppy drive, 4MHz Z80 processor. I had to assemble it myself from a huge box of parts. These days it only exists for me as an emulator on linux which I have written in C.
shortbaldman
A: 

Mine was an Apple IIc. 128k of RAM and dual floppy drives with a good old dot matrix printer.

Mark Goddard
A: 

Ohio Scientific SuperBoard II

A: 

HC 85

It was built inside a box made from a mailbox :)

I miss those times so much. I was 12yrs old, and I remember working for a week to write something that would act like a type-writer :)

(that is not ionut, it's ionut's girlfriend)

Ionuț G. Stan
+1  A: 

p2 350mhz... shame on me :(

Rui Carneiro
No reason to be ashamed. (Mine was P200MMX.)
jholster
A: 

Cant help it ...

Dell Studio !!!!!

A: 

Apricot F1e - 128k RAM, single floppy drive, 9in green on black monitor. It was a thing of rare beauty... I used it to write my O Level CS project in GWBasic - it was a little thing that solved quadratics (surprise, surprise..!)

There's a pic of one at http://is.gd/y1Uh

adamvs
A: 
Neil Albrock
+5  A: 
Mohit Nanda
Finally found it! This was my first machine too. It was great!
djeidot
A: 

Microtan 65. It was 6502 based, had a hex keypad, 1k of memory (half of which was the screen memory), output to a telly. When I could afford it, I added the ASCII keyboard.

mj2008
+1  A: 
Steve Schnepp
Fortunately, I used Thomson computer at school only (MO5 and TO7). The keyboard of the MO5 was the first keyboard ever. However, I'll remember the logo "tortue" for ever.
Pascal Thivent
+1  A: 
Martin McNulty
+1  A: 
doekman
Those were also sold under the Radio Shack (Tandy) brand, weren't they?
Barry Brown
+1  A: 

I can't believe nobody has mentioned the Acorn System One

1k of ram, plus another 128 bytes in the io chip

I managed a basic interpreter, a 7 segment space invaders, and a Mastermind game solver (but not all at the same time).

I even bought the 128 byte ram upgrade

David Sykes
This was my first computer as well, the 6502 was quite an elegant processor. Got it for my 15th birthday 30 years ago!
Tony Edgecombe
A: 

The Transam Triton - a self-assembly kit based on the Intel 8080. http://www.humbug.demon.co.uk/dave/misc/triton/triton.html

Denis Hennessy
+2  A: 
zvolkov
A: 

Mine was a Digital Equipment Corp PDT11/130, running RX-11.

http://hampage.hu/pdp-11/kepek/pdt11130.jpg

In 1981, my older brother was a regional manager for Digital, and when I mentioned to him that I was interested in getting a personal computer - maybe the new Apple II-C - he said he had a computer at home in his closet he'd be happy to give to me. Elated, I took him up on it and we proceeded to load it up. We parted with him telling me "not to call him with questions". Little did I know what that was going to mean...

When I got it home, I set it up in my den and tried to figure out how to turn it on. There was no manual for it, and no On/Off switch. There was one marked "0/1", but that meant nothing to me. the only manuals I had were for the O/S, and they massed more than the hardware!

Eventually, I got it up and running and wrote my first Basic program on the box.

I later replaced it with a Digital Rainbow (sweet machine!).

+1  A: 

Despite the 380+ answers, this one was still missing: MikroMikko!

These were manufactured in Finland by Nokia Data, a division of the company that later went on to concentrate on mobile phones and networks. (Nokia Data was sold in 1991 to ICL, which in turn was absorbed to Fujitsu, or what nowadays is Fujitsu Siemens Computers.)

I had the original model, MikroMikko 1 (pictured), which dated from early 1980s. It was equipped with:

  • 2 MHz Intel 8085
  • 64KB of RAM
  • No hard drive but two 5.25" floppy drives (which had been labeled "program" and "data" by some previous owner)
  • Gorgeous green-on-black display
  • Some early version of DOS, I think, and a Basic interpreter

I can't really say I fell in love with programming with it - I just toyed around and created primitive Basic programs. (I did plan some elaborate text adventure game but never got around implementing it properly with my very limited Basic skills.)

Jonik
+1  A: 

386SX with a 40Mb harddrive. Can't remember the RAM...

Had both 3.5 and 5.25" drives and a colour 9pin dot matrix printer!

masher
+1  A: 
E Dominique
A: 

My first was an IBM 1620 at Tri-State College (now Trine University).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_1620_Model_1.jpg

+1  A: 
rasjani
Same here! It wasn't as popular s the 800XL but when I was 13 I taught myself BASIC on it. My mother scolded my Dad for spending half a salary on "the useless toy", but today she cannot live without a computer ;)
BeMeCollective
A: 

Commodore 64 with a Tape drive only. I wrote so much code the cursor would pause for a few seconds after hitting enter...

Later I got a 1541 Floppy drive, from there I was Amiga fan...

eschneider
+1  A: 
動靜能量
wow. that thing looks rugged.
MAD9
A: 

I'm a newbie in computer world. Before my first computer I played with logo, wordperfect, DOS, Word 95 and mspaint (he he).

My first computer, from 1998, was:

PI processor, 64MB of RAM, 2GB Hard Disk, Win98, 15" monitor, AT power source.

Current PC: from 2005, not much better: Celeron 2.3GHz, 512 RAM, 80 GB hard disk, 15" monitor, ATX power source.

yelinna
A: 

Amstrad PC 1512

Ben
+1  A: 
ToastedSoul
A: 

Mine was Phillips MSX-2 and it was pretty awesome, yuk, yuk

A: 

MSX_Philips_VG8020 link text

A: 

MSX Sony HB-201P

My best computer ever!!! I still got it.

+1  A: 
Stefano Borini
I had a Commodore SX-64. At 23 pounds it was definately more movable than portable. My first exposure to BASIC programming was on this baby.
jschmier
Looks like an oscilloscope.
Andreas Rejbrand
A: 

Amiga 64.

64 kbytes of RAM. External Tape reader/recorder. Just BASIC!!!

A: 

Gateway home personal PC

JuniorFlip
A: 

A MSX Sony HB-501P in 1986, and I have still got it and runs ok :)

This is : http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_info.html?Sony_HB-501P.html

A: 
pho3nix
Super Mario on a TI-83 and written in BASIC. I think I've heard it all now...
kirk.burleson
A: 

Amstrad CPC 464 with green monitor!!!! then i changed it for a commodore Amiga 500 with 1 MB o RAM The i became sentimental and bought one Commodore 64 and a Spectrum zx 64kb After these computers i got an apple Centirs 610 and then my first PC with an VGA card (i do not remember its specifications).

After that PC i got another one just to play flight simulator at Full speed!!!! And after that computer two laptops one Dell and one macbook pro ...rom now on probably only macs...I never learned to program.

A: 

Spectrum 128K load "" LOL

A: 

Amstrad PCW 8256

A: 

Toshiba T3100/20
http://www.technology-props.co.uk/frames/images/toshiba_3100e.jpg

When I was 9, I was offered my first computer for Christmas, a 7Kg laptop by Toshiba. I was happy playing with GW/Q-Basic, Lemmings for Dos, typing some funny texts or filling spreadsheets using Works, stuff like that. Since it had no battery, everytime I was visiting family I actually had to transport the thing itself and to bring the power cord along (which was exactly the same as the ones for workstations).

Here are the original specs: "Model from Toshiba with orange 640*400 plasma screen. CPU: 80286-8 (8/4.77MHz). 640 Kb RAM, 20 M hard drive and 720 K floppy. Operating system: Toshiba MS-DOS 2.11 shipped with earlier models, MS-DOS 3.2 shipped later. Weight 6.6 kilo, size 308x80x360 mm."

Since it wasn't even sporting a 386-type CPU, I could not install Windows 3.1 on it. It was high time I moved to a "multimedia" 486DX/66 PC (but that's another story...)

A: 

Yo estube algo más evolucionado... spectrum 128 Kb

Todo un lujo !!!

xDD

Ssasi

A: 

i started with this !

http://www.videogamecritic.net/images/systems/xesystem.jpg

A: 

Spectravideo SVI 728

+1  A: 
Priyank
This is a duplicate
Stephen C
+2  A: 
Peter Stuer
This was one awesome calculator... loved it!
Paul Lalonde
+1  A: 
bunn_online
Wow, I think I had that! It lasted about a week or two before I accidentally stood on it one day and broke the screen. :(
Ant P.
+1  A: 

I had a REAL computer.

With a HARDDRIVE. And a CD-ROM DRIVE. It ran WINDOWS 3.1!

(No idea on the stats, I just remember it ran Jazz Jackrabbit from DOS)

glasnt
Jazz Jackrabbit was FREAKING SWEET! Ah, those were the days.
Tullo
+6  A: 
Ledhund
A: 

http://www.heimcomputer.de/pics/cf2700_1.jpg

Panasonic CF2700. My parents got one when I was 10 or so. I consider it my first home-computer, as I hogged it most of the time :D

Hmm, I kind of miss those days of tinkering with MSX-Basic and wondering why people used "subs" instead of goto....... Ofcourse, back then there was no internet on which people could yell at me to not use goto ;)

Deliria
A: 

Xitan Z-80 (alpha 1) from Technical Design Labs.

Adrian McCarthy
A: 

I had a TI-99/4A. Loved it. Next was a TRS80 Model 100 portable. Both good machines - never crashed. Not once.

A: 

My first foray into programming was on a TI 59 calculator. It was so versatile that I took it to work to help reduce my workload, and it got the attention of my supervisor.

+3  A: 
Stephen C
+2  A: 
benjismith
+2  A: 
Marcos Buarque
A: 
ArneRie
A: 

first was a 386.. Then i upgraded it to 486.. so on =)

Jan
A: 

Sharp PC-1500 Pocket Computer with 8K of RAM, a cool printer/cassette interface that could print/plot in 4 colors and turn a cassette player (or an external relay) on/off programatically (making for a great little alarm clock that could turn lights on or sound an external bell).

mahboudz
A: 

Mine was an Epson HX-20. Black. I learned programming on it, by editing values from the manual's examples.

Fun fact: I could barely read back then, I was that young.

Kawa
A: 

Commodore 64. It had the tape deck too -- and I LOVED it.

Andrew Warner.
+2  A: 
cwap
A: 

Dr. Nim - it is a mechanical computer that plays Nim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxBghtQ8McA

Larry Watanabe
A: 

Dr Nim - it plays the game of Nim

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxBghtQ8McA

Larry Watanabe
A: 

TI-99 4a. Dude, that thing rocked.

Charles Shoults
+2  A: 

My very first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer. I love that ugly grey wedge so much. Many a night was spent in the Dungeons of Daggoroth. :)

Kevin Beck
+4  A: 
MAD9
A: 

My first was a 386 with DOS and Windows 3.1 that my mom bought from an infomercial on TV. The computer came with a CD of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?". The first thing I did was try to insert the CD into the 5.25 floppy drive. I succeeded, but luckily I didn't break anything.

Martin
+3  A: 

It was a Compaq Portable with an 8086, 20MB HDD, and 2 5 1/4" drives.

Joe
A: 

how old are you guys?

anyway, i used a pentium III at about 5-6 years ago. i am going to give it away.

A: 

Like a few folks here, the C64 was my first. At the time I didn't' think of getting into a career of programming (hell the area that I was from, they still don't' have reliable high speed internet), but had some programming books for the machine, and even made some programs in BASIC (remember GOTO loops? Good times.).

Also found that my one of my uncles was studying up FORTRAN and COBOL back when they were brand new, and used to read (well try too anyways) the manuals from his schooling days. Should have read a bit more, I'd be making more money if I knew that stuff.

canadiancreed
+3  A: 
pixel
A: 

HP-2116. In the minicomputer days, I defined "personal computer" to be "anything you could reboot without anyone caring", meaning a single-user machine. This particular machine was stuck into the lab for experimentation after they upgraded the time sharing system with something newer.

gbarry
A: 

Kaypro with 10MB Hard Disk, Z80 processor running CP/M

Frank Rotolo
+3  A: 
bbg
+1  A: 
dcpking
+1  A: 
dermatthias
+3  A: 
The Master Prawn
+3  A: 
billmcc
I got one of these as a hand me down from my cousin. I couldn't remember what it was called.
ScottS
A: 

Burroughs B22, with a tower, 8 inch floppy

Mark Schultheiss
+1  A: 
Rob Hyndman
+1  A: 
Ben
+1  A: 

The Intellivision Odyssey 2.. Technically just changing the cards for the game controllers can be considered programming. (as a kid I was the only one that could figure it out when my parents couldn't.)

Also - you can consider the times when playing Astrosmash on level 10+ and having smart bombs fly right through you can be considered software debugging. (that is when I first learned about sprite-collision.)

The Intellivision Odyssey 2

Talvi Watia
A: 

http://www.compuclasico.com/argentinos.php?model=cz.php

Czerweny CZ 2000, argentinian sinclair clon.

Koder_
+1  A: 

awwe geez, here's one I don't think anyone would know... VIDEOTON TV-Computer Learned BASIC on it alt text

it even had a slogan - "Kein Bild, Kein Ton - Videoton"

Daniel
+1 I used this! Go VIDI, go! xD xD xD (though I had a C64 at home and that was my first as well)
andras
I am surprised, I thought there was a total of 2 made...
Daniel
A: 

Although the Apple IIe was my first computer, the first computer I used and fell in love with programming (10 CLS; 20 PRINT 'HELLO'; 30 GOTO 10) was the Brazilian version of the Japanese MSX, the "Gradiente Expert XP-800", around 1985.

If you look close, it does look like modern PC

The MSX was based on the good old 8-bit Z-80A, with 3.58 Mhz clock and 64KB or RAM.

alt text

Padu Merloti
A: 

It was the Intel 8008, in the 70s. I made a little board with wire-wrap sockets containing the CPU chip, a PROM chip, an 8-bit parallel I/O chip, and a timer chip for the memory. Then I made a power supply out of a transformer, diodes, some voltage regulators, and a couple big capacitors, all kind of poured into an aluminum box. I programmed the PROM to play a little duet on a couple of speakers clipped to two I/O lines.

There was a small disk capacitor soldered on one end that, if you tucked it under another wire, would cause the timer chip to slow down by a factor of 1000. That caused the duet to play r-e-a-l-l-y slow, so you could hear the speakers just clicking.

Then when I was a professor teaching intro C.S. I would bring the whole thing to class in a paper bag, and use it to demonstrate how no matter how fast a computer seems, it is still basically doing one thing at a time.

Mike Dunlavey
+1  A: 

alt text

Ohio Scientific Superboard II

kmontgom
A: 

My first machine was an Olivetti computer with a 486sx 25Mhz cpu, 4Mb of RAM and a 256 Mb HDD. Ah, those were the days. It ran DOOM alright, and that was enough in those days.

Later got upgraded with another 4Mb RAM and changed the cpu to a 66Mhz 486dx.

The box is still around, but not in a working condition unfortunately. I think the motherboard bought it...

erikric
A: 

ABC 80 Swedish computer based on the Z80 processor and a build in BASIC interpretor.

It was where I got my first taste of programming. At first me and my friend wrote programs that displayed the text from hit songs on the screen.

Later I found that the track for the car-game was described through byte values. If I changed all the values to 0 the game became much easier. (But not as fun.)

alt text

leiflundgren
+1  A: 

I joined too late. I'm not going to post what computer I started out with, because I'll get laughed at on how modern it is :(

DMan
We all had to start somewhere. Pretty sure i wouldn't have gotten a computer as a kid if it wasn't for the fact my dad was a big computer guy and i got all his old stuff. :D
TheDPQ
Ha, kind of the same for me... I didn't start programming stuff at all until I got my own computer. I got interested after supposedly 'learning' everything there is to learn about the computers from a consumer point of view.
DMan
A: 

alt text

Tandy 2000

Joel
A: 

Commodore 64 with a tape drive.

Don
A: 

My First Computer (IBM PC AT). Get myself introduced with Binary world. It was fun writing basic programs and playing dos games like Dig-dug, Paratrooper, Frog, Prince of Persia, F1GP

Aakash
+2  A: 

My first computer was PRAVETZ 82. You may not have heard anything about it. It was a clone ("pirated" copy) of Apple II produced in a former communist country :)

alt text

Ross
A: 

"What was your first home computer? The one that made you "fall in love" with programming."

Coincidentally just before reading this question I read a few questions about security. You know, the biggest security problem is unwarranted assumptions. Now even though this question isn't a security issue, it demonstrates the exact same problem: unwarranted assumptions.

My first home computer was not the one that made me "fall in love" with programming. My first home computer was made by and lent by the employer that I was working for at the time, around 15 years after I "fell in love" with programming.

My first home computer had no compiler on it, for any language. If I hadn't already been in love with programming I surely wouldn't have done so from this one.

Sirius Systems and I don't remember the model number.

Windows programmer
A: 

Russian analogue of ZX Spec, called "Byte" Byte computer

Valera Kolupaev
A: 
Xinus
A: 

The CPU of my first computer was 586.

it was 100mhz but it was not equal to Pentium100.

people who have P100 could play Fifa97 but i could not.

ufukgun
A: 

Image of the mighty SEGA SC3000H The SEGA SC3000. I had the 'H' version (pictured).

MatthewD
+1  A: 

I started actually programming on a TI-82, editing the BASIC games that I traded with a friend in my 7th grade algebra class. So much fun.

alt text

JasCav
A: 

wang 386 with maths coprocessor!

Diarmuid
+2  A: 

In 1971 I bought a Kenbak-1, which was declared in 1987 to be the first commercially available personal computer. I had just started working on my MSCS degree, and had taken an assembly language course for the Univac-1108. I wanted to continue writing assembly language at home, and this machine, with its large number of addressing modes (but tiny memory), was fun to learn on. My machine is now in a vintage computer collection.

pic of the inside of my Kenbak-1

tcrosley
A: 

ZX Spectrum, with its basic was one of the best in the eighties :)

Werner
A: 

Simply Computers, 100Mhz Pentium, 16MB Ram, 1GB Harddrive, Hawkeye Video Card 1MB video memory, 14" Screen. - Cost at the time (around 1996) £1500!!

smoop
+1  A: 

alt text

Oh wait. You said "programming." Well, TI gave me a programmable calculator I could take home. That was 1979. But I didn't use it much. The first computer I took home had a "Turbo" button on it. If you didn't push the button, it ran at 6Mhz, to let games run that depended on timing. I wasn't too long after that when I got a laptop. I think it was 20MHz, maybe 40Mhz 286. It's probably in the garage collecting dust.

The first computer I programmed was an IBM 360 in 1971, but that was for a paying job, and the computer was a tad large to take home. :-)

Jive Dadson
+1  A: 

The Compaq Deskpro 386.

Compaq Deskpro 386

Ours had upgraded hardware, and was able to run OS/2 2.0. Learned QBasic on it. I still miss many of the DOS games I used to play on that machine...

Thanatos