What was your first computer and...

RizbIT

Member
This is really for those people who were around when there werent any phones and computers. So you would have to be like 37 or over

So what was the first computer you bought / played / used

What did you do before you had a computer?

Was it just watching TV or more non screen activities like sports and board games?
 
First was a Commodore Amiga. Had loads of games on floppy disks too. Have very fond memories of it.
Before I had a computer, I'd usually be playing my NES, or drawing, or playing outside. I was a pretty active as a kid.
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
Commodore Plus/4 (1986). A few years later a C64. Best computing years ever! Very exciting times.

Other than that we mainly rode around on our bikes. You don't see that any more.

Christmas Day, every kid on the street would be showing off their new bikes. Now on Christmas Day you'd be lucky to see a kid anywhere. Although that's no different from any other day now.
 
Haha yeah, new bikes were the best. You'd get your little group of friends and ride around the neighbourhood all bloody day.

Man, got me thinking of all the old games I used to have. Apogee made a tonne a cool 💩💩💩💩 for the Amiga.
 

RizbIT

Member
Bikes.....oh yeah that was the thing to do those days...

Mine was the C64 and tbh it kinda replaced my outdoor social life.......
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
Bikes.....oh yeah that was the thing to do those days...

Mine was the C64 and tbh it kinda replaced my outdoor social life.......
Same here, sadly. It was the beginning of an end of an era.
 

Carnivius

Member
My first was Amstrad CPC 464 I got back in 1985. And I still have it. And it still works. And it still inspires my own game projects today. I'm still just fascinated by the thing and it's great seeing new productions for it that do things I never thought possible with that hardware. :)
For a while I wasn't allowed to use it every day. Usually just Tuesday and Thursdays. On the other days I'd often draw or go kick a ball about or plot to take over the world or something.
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
A windows XP
Modified Dell 2500

Back when I first started doing computer stuff as a kid
And blew it up with virus from pop-up ads
 
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Walky

Guest
Atari 65XE (or was it a 130XE?) with a 1050 floppy disk drive.
Many years later I got my first PC, a 133Mhz 586, 8MB RAM, 1GB hard drive and Windows 3.11.
Before that I think I spent most of my time breaking stuff and watching cartoons such as He-Man, Charlie Brown, Top Cat, etc...
 
@Walky my first PC I got for myself too. 133MHz overclocked to 233MHz! 8 mb ram too and W3.11. Way smaller HDD though.
Had a bunch of SCUMM games on it from the previous owner like Maniac Mansion, plus a tonne of shareware games. It was awesome.
 
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GM029

Guest
My first computer was an Atari 800 with an Atari 410 tape drive (Christmas 1982 I believe), I learned how to program in BASIC on it. I eventually got an Atari 1050 disk drive for it. I also had the Atari XM301 300 baud modem, lots of public domain games downloaded from various BBSes at the time.

After that I had an Atari 520ST, Commodore Amiga 1000, and evetually went over to PC with a DOS KLH 386 PC Clone with a 40MB hard drive. So exciting to install a Sound Blaster card into that thing (Still didn't sound as good as the Amiga).

After that pretty much all Windows machines up to my current Surface Pro 6.

I have pretty vague memories pre-computer as I was a little kid when we got our first one. But I used to be out in the neighborhood often with friends biking/roller skating/hide and seek/cops and robbers/kick ball/whiffle ball etc.
 
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TheouAegis

Member
Commodore 64. My grandma won the lotto and gave us money for that Christmas. My mom spent it on a C64 for my sister and me. I used it more than my sister. A lot more. One of our cousins hooked us up with a ton of bootlegged games. The crazy thing is that wasn't even near all of the games either. I still find stuff on YouTube about C64 games I never knew existed!

When my stepdad moved in, he had an IBM or something. I'm not sure. It had a monochrome monitor, I think a slightly different version of BASIC (I remember trying to write music on it and liked its simplicity compared to the C64), and -- if I remember right -- had CGA and we had to upgrade to EGA just to play Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer "smoothly".

In school we used Apple IIe, except in middle school computer science, in which we used some old monochrome Mac model. Not sure why one computer lab had IIe's and the other had Macs.

Eventually my stepdad bought a color Mac; again, not sure what model. We went with Compuserve instead of AOL. Awww yeah, you don't truly appreciate progressive images unless you grew up trying to download smutty interlaced images over a 28.8kbps modem. :D

My first PC of my own was some generic (edit: ) DELL PC with 256MB of RAM that came with Windows 98 for college.
 
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RizbIT

Member
I remember a time when there was just like one computer in the house, then even after home internet was invented, it was wired connection only so had to be in the same room as the phone socket...
As there was only one pc when it came to gaming it was like first come first served, or fighting over pc time..
 

JackTurbo

Member
My first computer was a P4 with like half a gb of ram. Taught myself photoshop and illustrator on that machine, despite it really not being up to the task.

My first gaming machin though was one of these:

Which was an all-in-one thing with a hundred Atari 2600 games on it. This was right at the tail end of the 16bit era, so I was behind the times so to speak.
 

O.Stogden

Member
First that I used was a Commodore Amiga 2000 that my dad owned.

First PC that was my personal one was a Pentium 90, 32MB of RAM, 1GB HDD, Windows 95. I remember trying to run Age of Empires Demo at 1024x768 and the PC not being up to the task, had to keep it at 800x600 to keep the frame rate good.

Kind of grew up with computers, my dad owned a couple of computers in the mid-80's, so always been computers around. Did like to do a lot of bike riding around the neighbourhood when I was 7-11 years old though.
 
I don't remember my first PC's specs at all, but I used it a lot during the early 90's when I was just a kid. I played some image game where a car was on the screen, and a particular key made it go around the screen in circles, which was weird given that it was a side shot of the car. I kept trying to get Heavy Gear to work on it when my uncle installed Windows 95, but the PC was too weak, so I could only stare at the lovely giant, embossed box. I did play Crayola Art Studio a lot, and even used it to print fake money.

When I wasn't on it, depending on the day I was either watching TV, playing video games, or outside doing who knows what. I usually spent my time outdoors, but I was in love with my NES. I don't know why we had three of them, but I still have them all and they all still work.
 

Rob

Member
We got a Spectrum 48k when I was a kid and I played it mostly. I got to play games like Chaos and Rebelstar 1&2 (all 3 made by Gollop of Xcom fame) as well as games like Lords of Midnight.

Plenty of other games too, some good, some ok and some ridiculously bad/hard/too complex and needed a manual.

Before we had that I think I played war with mah toys. I still played with them afterwards.

I got a Snes at about age 11 and that was pretty much my entertainment until I got a Pentium 486 at 16.
 
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GM029

Guest
Looks like everyone ditched their bikes for pc's
For me nothing really changed as far as playing outside when we got our computer. Of course computers in the home was still uncommon when I was a kid and playing outside was still the norm (not to mention your friends would make fun of you if you didn't go outside on nice summer days in favor of messing around on the computer). So the bikes (and roller skates) were still in full force.
 

RizbIT

Member
For me nothing really changed as far as playing outside when we got our computer. Of course computers in the home was still uncommon when I was a kid and playing outside was still the norm (not to mention your friends would make fun of you if you didn't go outside on nice summer days in favor of messing around on the computer). So the bikes (and roller skates) were still in full force.
"not to mention your friends would make fun of you if you didn't go outside on nice summer days" - Very true back then but now....now its the opposite
 

Rob

Member
Ah Chaos Engine on Amiga what a game!
By Chaos I meant this:


Up to 8(or 6 I can't remember) Wizards fight it out, either human or AI controlled. You had a random spell selection at the start of the game and there was usually a chance to fail when summoning a monster.

Stronger monsters had a higher chance of failure to cast.

You could cast a FAKE version of a monster and it would succeed 100% and move and fight as normal but if a Wizard cast Disbelieve on your monster, it would disappear.

Dragons were among the most powerful units and casting disbelieve on one of them only to find out THE AI FRICKING CAST IT NORMALLY was one of the scariest moment in the battle.

You could even raise a creature from the dead .

Undead Dragons were rare but OP!!!

And there was a sequel called Lords of Chaos:


I never played this game apart from a demo version so I don't know that much about it but it's basically an advanced version of Chaos where your wizard could earn points and unlock spells after fighting battles.

Needs a remake! (Well there IS a remake but I think it sux)
 
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Gamebot

Member
C-64. Playing the usual Pac-man, Congo Bongo, Root beer tapper, Up n down. I even ended up getting a 128 and tried to program my first for loop to make a ballon rise. "Tried" is the key as the ballon did rise across and up the screen, but the full ballon wasn't there the whole time.

Soon after we are able to connect to the outside world with the billboard, the first "internet". It Literally could take 15 minutes just to say "Hi" to someone. Though we all thought it was the best thing in the world.
 

jeff300

Member
The first computer that I used and programmed on was an Apple II+ in school.

The first computer I owned was a VIC 20. My first program I wrote was a database to keep track of my bowling league scores. I think I got about 10 weeks into the season before I couldn't use the program anymore because the whole season's scores wouldn't fit in memory. The un-expanded machine only had 5K of RAM, and only 3.5 of that was available for BASIC programs! Granted, I'm sure my code was absolute crap. ;)

Next I had a couple of C64s, followed by an Amiga 500 and 1200 before having to succumb to the misery of the PC world.
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
I had the Amiga 2000 in the middle there. I thought it was the coolest thing because it looked like a PC (and was far better than a PC at the time).
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Sooooooo.... Let's see... In order I had:

ZX Spectrum
Commodore 16
ZX Spectrum 128
Commodore 64
Atari ST
Some crap IBM PC
Custom built PC's all the way up till now...

:)

I think my fondest memories are actually of the ZX Spectrums. Games were cheap and plentiful (god bless you CodeMasters!) and really good... Atic Atac, JetSet Willy, Dizzy, Monty On The Run... So many fine fine games! I would also have had an Amiga instead of an Atari ST, but at the time I was writing music and wanted to set up a home recording studio, and the ST had BUILT IN MIDI PORTS! Didn't actually like using it that much though, but Cubase and Cakewalk were awesome DAWs for the time and made it all worthwhile (until I got that crappy IBM and installed a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 card with external MIDI interface... that was a game changer!).
 
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Lonewolff

Guest
CodeMasters were the best! Had a stack of their tapes for the Plus/4 and C64.
 
So what was the first computer you bought / played / used
First computer I personally bought : C64 ( followed by Sega Megadrive/Genesis, then a PC )

Edit : Loved the C64 - first games played - Outrun and Ghosts n Goblins. Still play the C64 games on C64 emulator sometimes. California Games was great. Too many to list but you get the idea. Oh, also it had SEUCK (Shoot Em Up Construction Kit) where you could design your own sprites etc...that was fun

First computer I played : First real computer with keyboard and memory that our family had was a SEGA SC-3000. Before that, we had various little battery powered hand-held electronic games. And before that, I remember one time somebody lent us a gaming system for a few weeks, don't know what it was called. It had 64 pre-selectable games, blocky as heck but loads of fun. Games like Tank, Pong, etc... Probably some others that I'm forgetting.

What did you do before you had a computer?

Was it just watching TV or more non screen activities like sports and board games?
Sports, Board Games, Army men, physical toys/figures (Transformers, Masters of the Universe (Skeletor and He Man!), Match Box cars), TV, listening to records / cassette tapes / radio. Skate boarding, roller skating, riding bikes, climbing trees, playing in the creek, swimming, going to the beach, camping, throwing a ball around, playing random stuff with friends after school. Reading books. Watching movies, renting BETA/VHS video tapes to watch at home. More time spent being bored. Having to follow the programming schedule of the TV Channels, for example, Sunday night was MacGyver night, Friday night was Knight Rider, Saturday was "What movies will be on the box tonight" day. Having to spend an hour watching a 45 minute TV show filled with 3 or 4 ad breaks. Compared to recent times where everything can be downloaded/streamed on demand/binge watched whenever we like.
 
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ethian

Guest
I got an acer-brand laptop when i was 5 or 6... i guess...
And i claimed as my own...

I wanted a computer rather than a videogame console as i was fond of computers by searching "computer" on YouTube at the time...
 
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MikeDark_x

Guest
My first computer huh... A Toshiba Satelite L505 or something when I was on around 8th grade

what did I do before having a computer... good question... probably just watch tv and draw sometimes as at the time I didn't even know how much I enjoy reading
 
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