What was your first computer?

#discuss

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Top comments (26)

John • Mar 21 '20 • Edited

A 386. You could tell it to beep with a single line of code in QBasic and that's the sole reason I'm a developer today XD.

easrng • Mar 22 '20

Try echo \a on any *nix.

Django Janny • Mar 22 '20

Very first (around 1990) : PCW 8256, learn some "basic" programmation language there.
Later (as student) (around 1997) : a generic 386 SX 40, so powerfull :p It supported my first linux install (Slackware, if my memory is right) which, at this time, was not easy at all !

Lorraine Lee • Mar 22 '20

First program written was in Basic on a Commodore PET belonging to instructor of a class offered by the Farmington Community Center, year was 1980, I was 15. Don't remember what the first program was, but programming exercises for the class were typically 10-20 line ditties for using a for loop to do some kind of summation or something.

First program I wrote on hardware I owned was on a TI-55-III programmable calculator, 1982 or 1983, time-in and time-out (in h, m, s) as input data and hours elapsed (in decimal, there's a "DMS-DD" key). Assumption was that time-in was AM and time-out PM if the latter was "lower" than the former. The calculator was "programmable" in the sense of running a sequence of keystrokes as a program. I used its "signum" function to sort of "emulate" a conditional branch, therefore I feel kind of justified counting it as programming.

First actual computer I owned was an Atari 400, obtained in 1983. Programmed mostly in Atari BASIC, w. some PILOT, assembly, Pascal, and "Inter Lisp 65". Wrote bignum +-*/ operations on string representations, arbitrary base conversions on same, lots of number theory exploration. Wrote a Russian-English vocabulary random flash card game (character pixel maps are rewritable). Can't remember what all else I wrote, thing was basically a plaything to me.

Matt Willtrout • Mar 22 '20

First that I touched: school TRS-80, BASIC, programs on cassette.
First for the family, a gift from my father: TI 38, learned to solder fixing that DIN connector.
Mom broke both joysticks playing Munch-Man

Jon Randy 🎖️ • Mar 22 '20

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k back in 1983

David Velasco • Mar 22 '20

Man. That comment brings me back.

Mine was the ZX Spectrum +. My parents actually bought it for my brother, who was a 9 year old budding programmer at the time (I was 4).

I still remember very fondly playing games with an attached tape recorder. The expectation during those long loading screens...

Ian Pride • Mar 22 '20

Lol some of you all have awesome memories lol I can't remember what build I had, but it had Windows 98 & right after is when Windows 2000 came out & I upgraded. I had been on machines before that, but not since the old ones with floppy drives in grade school in the 80's where every other Friday my class got to go to a broom closet and 6 (class of 30 kids) people at a time got to go in for 15 minutes and try and play Oregon Trails or Carmen San Diego while the rest got to sit out in the hallway quietly for hours. Our schools didn't get real computer labs until just a few years ago.