Windows 7 What was your first computer?

MikeHawthorne

Essential Member
Microsoft Community Contributor
Hi Guys

Since this is Windows discussion I'm interested in what everyone had for their first computer, and when and why you got it.

My first computer was a Radio Shack Model 100 or something like that, running Windows 3.1.

I had previously worked on one barrowed for the summer from the Grand Rapids school system.

It had a 120 mb hard drive, 4 mb of ram, and a 25 Hz processor.
As I remember is cost about $900 and had a 14" super VGA (800 by 600) monitor.

It had a 5.25 and a 3.5 floppy drive, and I added a sound card, my first foray into the inside of a computer.

I don't even remember what it had for a video card.

I had a black and white HP scanner and an HP laser printer.

I ran Adobe Photoshop 2.5, Coral Draw, and Aldus PageMaker on it along with Ultima The Black Gate, my first computer RPG, and I had a Chess program.

It was really slow!

My friend Paul saw mine and went and bought one too, so he could play Ultima on it.

He's 75 now (I'm 72) and we still play Lord of the Rings Online together several times a week while we talk on Skype.

I went with a PC instead of an Apple because the GR school system gave me a copy of PageMaker for the PC, (it was expensive to buy) and a set of disks for Photoshop as part of a deal to do some work for them. I've been upgrading from these original numbers ever since.

It's amazing how much things have changed.

My first computer had one hundred twenty megabytes of hard drive space, my new computer has two million, three million if you count the external drives.

I never even imagined computers like the ones we have today or computer games like Dragon Age II which I have just started playing.

The first 3D game I had was Tomb Raider and I’ve been a Lara Croft fan ever since.
I've played every TR game ever made multiple times.

What did other people have for their first computer, and what did you do with it?

Mike
 
Mine was a 486 SX 25MHz no Math Co-Processor, 128MB Diamond Video card, No Sound card, No Modem, Dot matrix Colored Printer, Windows 3.0 installed. 13 inch cheap monitor. Early version of MS Works. Made by Compu-Add
Purchased December 1992. I am now 65
 
Started off, like a lot of people my age did, with a Commodore64 ( I still remember typing line after line of code (from a magazine) to create some type of game with an Archer who hunted giant spiders with his bow and arrow, saving to tape cassette) graduating not too awful long there after to a Packard Bell 386SX this was the one that convinced me that I needed to learn more about how to repair and service my own computer because I couldn't afford to own one and pay someone else to service/repair and upgrade it for me.
 
Mine was one I built myself in the early 70's based on a single board with a Motorola 6800 chip which had an 8-bit data bus and a 16 bit address bus. It had 1kb of Ram (yes - kb) which was on 8 chips - each chip had 1k bits on it and to address a single byte you pulled a single bit fro each of the chips in parallel. This was to help data transfer keep up with the superfast 512Khz processor clock! Input was via a hexadecimal keypad and output was a row of eight LED's, each plugged directly onto the motherboard via a ribbon cable. Power was a single 5 volt supply.
 
Early years:
Toss up between a ZX81 or Jupiter Ace for the first computer around 1979, after numerous consoles like Atari VCS, Colecovision, Intellivision, Phillips g7000 (magnavox), and the infamous Grandstand. I quickly jumped to Spectrum 16k and 48k and 48k+, then C64, then speccy 128+2 and +3 editions. I think the Spectrum had the edge on C64 despite the monochrome graphics and terrible bleep sound... C64 often had clumsy chunky graphics that made many games shabby looking, but the best music of the period without a doubt. Fave games of the time.... Most of the games by Ultimate, such as Sabre wulf, underwurlde, Knightlore, Lazer Squad, Lords of Midnight, and of course the alltime great "ELITE" was the epic of the period for sure.

The 16bit era:
Jumped to Amiga A500 about 1987-88, then A500+, A1200 (which I modded with a 68030), also had an Atari STFM. Consoles I had around then were SNES and Megadrive. Game that made me jump to Amiga? ....F18 interceptor. Games I was into back then were arcade classics by Bitmap brothers like Speedball 1&2, Chaos engine, as well as stuff like Sensible Soccer, Stuntcar Racer, Midwinter, Carrier command, Elite, Populous, Dune 2 (The grand-daddy of the whole RTS genre), and many others.

The 32/64bit era:
Jumped to my first PC which was a Pentium-1 75mhz with around a week after UK launch with my first and last pre-built PC. Consoles were now bannished totally from my life, most of my mates had Dx33/66 rigs which i'd messed about with before getting a PC, the key title for the change to PC was UFO enemy unknown.... early favourites followed such as DOOM 1 & 2, Duke Nukem 3d, Populous 2, Freespace 1&2, Wing Commander series, and of course Command & Conquer, so I've never looked back. I basically spent the next decades upgrading every year or two, totally avoiding all things console until bought my daughter a Wii for her 3rd birthday last year (which is largely gathering dust since, and now she's turned 4, she prefers PC gaming...lol definately a girl with taste :applaud:).
 
I almost had a Commodore 64, I actually went to buy one when they were so popular and you couldn't get one anyplace.
Then a friend was going to get me a deal on an Apple, but that never happened so I ended up with the Radio Shack.

I did have an Intellevision before that, got is for Christmas the year that they came out, I think that would have been around 1980.
After that I had a Nintendo, and then a Super Nintendo, once I got my first PC and discovered Ultima the rest was history.

At one time I was a GM for an Ultima Online shard.

Now I beta test everything I can get into.
I just did DC Universe and Rift and I'm trying to get into Terra, and Secret World if it ever comes out.
 
80 MHz, 8 MB RAM, 500 MB HDD, Sound Blaster 16 sound card, 3.5'' floppy drive, (S)VGA display???
It had MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

Used it to play DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D, Commander Keen, UFO: Enemy Unknown...
I think it still works although I haven't booted it up since 2007.
 
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