Desktops forum: Poll: When did you first start using a personal computer?

...or maybe 1976. It's hard to remember way back then. Anyway, it was one of the first Radio Shack TRS-80's, complete with tape recorder I/O and 4K of RAM. We thought we were really uptown when we upgraded it to 16K. I don't believe when we bought ours that there were any prewritten programs available, but the machine was equipped with a very basic version of BASIC, and we amused ourselves by writing our own.

Or at least we did when the computer was in working condition, which wasn't very often. I think ours was the original reason the machines got the nickname "TRaSh-80." It spent more time in the repair shop than it did on our desk, and eventually we were able, by dint of excellent record-keeping and threats of legal action, to return the thing and get our money back.

About a year later we got an Apple II+ and found out what a real computer was. A few months later we got a second one and computerized our business. We'd have been Apple users for life except for the fact that when they came out with hardware upgrades (the Apple IIe and subsequent models) they weren't backward compatible. All of our custom programming would have had to be rewritten, and there was no guarantee that the rewrites would work with the next version of the Apples. So we continued to use the II+es for as long as we could, then switched to IBM compatibles which had the advantage of backward compatibility.

I was also one of the first Windows users, as my business became heavily dependent on the use of Adobe PageMaker with its run-time version of Windows.

My first PC was a Timex Sinclair 1000 that I used for about two weeks - it was so limited in software and capabilities that I quickly upgraded to an Atari 800 with the 410 tape drive (connected to a 13" TV) - it was more affordable than a Apple II and was supported extremely well here in Ohio. I still have these systems (and the Atari still works). Every few years I dig out the old stuff and plug everything together to make sure I remember what classic computing was like. There's nothing like waiting for a cassette tape Shamus,
Blue Max, Jumpman or Temple of Asphai to load. The graphics and sound effects are crude compared to today's games but the hours I spent trying to advance from one level to the next were well spent.

The first computer I remember using was a Burroughs B6700 main frame at college in 1976.
If you were lucky, you could go intereractive on the green sceen terminals, or one of the two graphics terminals.

I remember we booked both graphics terminals one day and played 'star wars' on them. I think we took a good proportion of the processor cycles to do this.

We also had Commodore PETS with the built in tape drives. I managed to collect a large number of games for this.

My first home computer was a self assembled 'Microtan 65', this was a kit consisting of a single board with 1K ram and a 6502 processor, storage was via cassette tape and the keyboard was 20 charactors. Programming was in machine code. Larger I bought an expansion board and 2K Rom to run assembler.

Later I progressed to a BBC Microcomputer which had a wordprocessor application in ROM.

I still have an Amstrad PCW green screen computer which ran CP/M on a Z80 processor.

My working life saw Texas TI99/4A, Sinclair Z80, Spectrum 16 & 64 and QL, Amstrad CPC and PCW, Commodore Vic 20, 64 and 128, Atari, Dragon, BBC, Acorn, Nortstar Advantage (green screen, CP/M & MP/M and fixed format 5 1/4 floppy disc) as well as the IBM AT.

That was just the 70s and 80s.

Now working with thin clients.

I had a CS100 course in 1968. We had no displays, but punch-cards. We made holes in the cards to represent code. The memory (RAM) of the system was 64 kBytes.

The first PC I used in 1983 was a portable Osborne computer in the shape of a suitcase when packed. The operating system was CP/M and the memory was (again) 64 kBytes. It had a 6" green on black display with two 5.25" diskette drives and no hard disk. As everyone might know, the 5.25 diskettes had capacities of 460 kBytes. One of the drives was used for the software and the other for data. I used "Supercalc" to calculate the 20-year projection of a 600-bed luxury hotel (Sheraton) in Ankara.

When I started work in 1985 on the Turkish Encyclopedia Britannica, our software manager came to me and asked that we should raise the capacity of our hard disk that was 5 MBytes to 20 MBytes because our relational database of encyclopedia headings was reaching 100,000. I bought one for 5,000 dollars paying cash!

Now I am writing this message on a lap-top with a centrino processor at 1.4 GHz and using a 60 GByte hard disk with a 256 MBytes RAM.

Next year, my relation with computers shall be 40 years old.

Kind regards,

Vedat Cakmak, Istanbul

In the seventies I bought a Commodore Vic 20 for myself and kids. It ran on Basic and we all learned the language. I bought a $30. printer for it which had to be reset for each line but it was fun and rather exciting to actually use it to write notes.

The computer cost around $130. which I borrowed from a loan company I was so determined to get a computer. Having always been interested in science I told my children that computers were going to be the machine of the future and they should learn everything they could about them.

I bought several games for it. One was a mystery in which you had to find the pirate's gold. Directions were in text--no graphics. It started out with a description of 3 objects on a table from which you had to choose, a rope, a pen or a pair of old sneakers. The sneakers was the correct choice. They were needed because later as you progressed you were forced to climb out a window and walk on a slippery ledge and without the sneakers you'd fall to your death.

Except for my husband, who wasn't interested in computers, our older kids and I took turns playing it. The youngest of my children who was old enough to use it was my 10 yr old daughter and she was the first to find the treasure--much to her 3 brothers' chagrin.

A year or two later I bought a word processer and after than a 1985 IBM computer that ran DOS, had Word Perfect and the REAL "floppies." I bought a dandy little printer at a local thrift store for only ten bucks because the management didn't know a thing about it. It printed on paper rolls with holes on the sides to advance the pages.

I used that until the mid nineties when I bought a Gateway that ran Windows 95 and came with a mouse! I didn't think I could ever get used to a mouse after using DOS for so many years, but I finally managed.

In 2002 I bought the computer I now use--another Gateway. It runs XP and has an 80 Gig HD which I thought HUGE back then but now that's SO obsolete! Ah, well....

I got my first pc in 1993. It was an Intel 486 DX2-66, it had 16meg of RAM, a 512meg HD, a 15" monitor, I added a video card with 8meg VRAM and a 16k modem for internet access. It was a full tower case. I upgraded it several times before they quit making the AT format MBs. The last incarnation it went through was an AMD K6-2 500, with 64meg RAM and 30G HD, as well as an onboard DSL modem. I now have an AMD Sempron 2500+ with 1Gig of RAM and the video has 64meg which is ample at this time.

Ancient technology with DOS the only option! I used it primarily to link, by phone, to the Real Estate mainframe for work purposes only. I left the rest of it for my young sons to use for their games. DOS is beyond my mental abilities to grasp, although the concept is understandable, it never worked for me.

Thanks Bill Gates !! I am now better off and a puter geek at work!

First computer was a "Kapro", at a lumber yard, who ever sold the unit to the company for estimating purposes didn't know lumber, so they assigned numbers to the sizes, when the sizes themselves were numbers, always needed 6 digits, 2x4x8 could have been 000248, but instead it was an off the wall number. The time the computer saved was more than used up by the need not only to memorize, but to have someone go over work carefully. Company also had an IBM mainframe, it had it's own "very large office", people did shifts because it was so cold in that room.

My First PC was of MITAC brand, an XT Computer that was bought in 1985. It had BASIC INTERPRETER LANGUAGE with which I programmed a lot. I made an analog clock programme, Universal Calendar i.e. Eternal Calendar programme, climatological regression model and a lot more. At end i.e. in 1992 I developed storm track prediction model (PC-based, DOS). This moderl got 13th SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) Young Scientist's Award in 1995. It is still my dream. I used many advanced computers later on like Pentium 4, Pentium duel core, HP Workstations etc. but I cant forget that MITAC Computers that I used first.

My first personal computer was an IBN 8088 and I wanted to upgrade my IBM 7" monitor to a Colour 7" monitor. The price was $3,000.00 but I was able to get a deal from a department store that decided to get out of Computer Sales and paid $1,500.00. Should have waited!

The introduction of technology has presented challenges for museums. Can you imagine on sound/video alone how many devices will need to be available to read/play the material? Take sound starting with the Edison wax cylinder,16,33 1/3,78(?)and 45 rpm records, reel to reel(mono and multitrack), cassette, 8 track,cd, mini cd and dvd.

How many watch/clock repair or shoe repair are there around these days? Going the way of the returnable milk bottle and beer bottle.

First personal computer was in 1984. It was an Epson QX10 with dual floppy drives (5.25) and 256k of memory. It was quite high-end at the time. It ran CP/M and an integrated office suite called "Valdocs" for valuable documents. It got me through Law School and made all the difference in the world. No hiring a typist. I could do revisions up to the last minute. It got me hooked. I used it all the way until 1990, when I bought my first Mac.

Yeah, remember programming in Basic? Remember the luxury of 80 column screens versus 40? Remember the VIC (only 20 columns)? Remember how 64K seemed like oodles of memory then, and oh my gosh, affordable color computers (in just 256 solid colors)?

Remember using cassette tapes and rewinding the tapes to store and find programs? Remember the luxury of actually owning your own floppy disk drive?

etc

HP Pavilion 6460 400 Hhz slot 1 Celeron CPU with a 10 G hard drive and 96 MB of pc66 RAM. A real burner by 1998 standards. 2 years later it was headed for the scrap pile, beat out by P3 600 Mhz

Well, i started very early, my first pc was an 8086 from IBM, 64k of memory, CGA display and a low density diskette unit. LOL, then my father buys a IBM PC286, of 8MHz and 640k of memory, then some years later i changed to a IBM 386Mhz, hdd of 60Mb, an 4Mb of memory and as a showing of riches lol, we set it with an Adlib Gold sound card.