What was your first computer?

Where's the screen ?

The first version was holographic, but the second version just zapped graphics into your brain via large Tesla coil. ;)

All these early PCs used your TV set, as if it was a game console.
 
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All these early PCs used your TV set, as if it was a game console.

My father had a black and white portable TV he almost never used. It was a pop up. I hooked it up to that one.

The thing about these early PC's that could hook to your TV, they eventually burned the TV out. There was something inherently wrong with the signals and no one ever thought to sue the computer companies that made them.
 
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Atari 400. Circa 1983 maybe?
Then Tandy 1000 in 1985. I was hooked after that.
 
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Apple ][+
Apple_II_Plus.jpg

Note there's no caps lock key. That's because there were no lower case letters - shift was just used to get punctuation. It does have a repeat key, though. Oh, and the reset button seems to be conveniently placed right above the return key! I don't remember that being there! One little typo and BOOM!
 
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ZX81 in kit form. When I was done putting it together it was more an objet d'art than a computer, which is to say completetly non functional. I mailed it back to Sinclair with some more cash and they got me a working one :) I learned Z80 assembler on that one.

My first computer was a ZX81 also. I have memories of my father* doing some soldering to up the 1KB of internal memory to 2KB (I think?). Later we got the huge memory pack that you plug into the back, which gave it a whopping 16KB of RAM!!! We also got a the stick-on keyboard that made typing a little less error-prone (the factory touch keyboard was kinda crappy).

I learned BASIC on that little thing, and even wrote a couple of rather simple adventure games.

(* he was an electronics repair guy, and still doing it now, at the age of 74)
 
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First computer I ever built was in high school. I don't remember anything about the components anymore, but I'm still using my Lian-Li case that I bought for it. That case was the most expensive aspect of my build at $275, but I was completely woo'd by the features that are now pretty standard with towers (aluminum, thumb screws, removable bays and mobo tray, etc). Partially because I still like the case and partially out of shame for having spent almost $300 on the metal box the important stuff goes in, I will use that tower for as long as I am physically able to (it's been through a lot of rebuilds now).
 
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Around 1985 I got a Amstrad CPC 464.

That thing:
cpc464.jpg





Games were on cassette tapes and took 30-40 minutes to load…
 
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First computer I got was a TRS-80 from a yard sale, it was absolute trash, couldn't do anything with it and after 30 minutes or so it would short out and turn off.

Then I got a regular computer, forget the model and stuff, with an 18.8k modem in it. Eventually we upgraded to 56k and I spent a summer of my tween years playing Asheron's Call, it was glorious. When we updated to DSL it was a game-changer. Eventually my mom got me a nice computer from Rentacenter and I did a lot of gaming and downloading music on it.
 
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The mighty and immortal Commodore 64. Specifically a later 'C' version. It was replaced eventually but served as primary computer until 1993, when it shared desk space with a 386 DOS machine. It wasn't fully replaced until about '97 or '98, when we got a then-new AMD K6-backed Win98 computer.
 
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