Mine was this baby, purchased in 1985 for £400 (a king’s ransom in them days):
The Amstrad CPC6128 had a 4MHz processor (in practice it ran at 3.3MHz), 128k of RAM and no hard drive. The operating system was Basic 1.0 and the video system allowed a maximum of 27 colours on screen at once. The disks were chunky, near-indestructible buggers with 178k of storage per side that looked like this:
It was a great little machine and was still working the last time I switched it on sometime in the late nineties. Many, many hours were spent as a kid playing Mindtrap, R-Type and Impossible Mission.
Anyone else have misty-eyed recollections of the 8-bit era?
I had used the Vic-20 at school (it had a cassette tape drive), but the first computer we had at home was the Apple IIc.
It was great, at the time of course. Remember those big floppy disks?
Mine was a 386 Tatung. When I tell people here I had a Tatung computer, they stare at me with eyes wide as saucers, disbelieving. “Tatung made computers?!”
My first was the Atari 800XL. I originally bought a cassette tape drive for it, but took it back to the store the next day and went with the disc drive. [/img]
I give you…The Mighty Commodore 64!!!
The biggest selling PC of all time.
I got mine 2nd hand from a friend, and it used to overheat and shut down like clockwork after 42 minutes. Saving was a pretty big deal, but I was writing plays and screenplays on it, so I had an alarm clock set for like one minute before it would overheat, so I could save before I lost everything.
Came with Enchanted Forest…
I wasn’t an early convert. My college roommate in 1980-2 was a CIS major and he was always telling me how lame I was for majoring in English, because he bragged that computers would one day rule the world, so he’d be rolling in the dough. I swore I would never buy a computer and I meant it.
A few years later I owned a word processor, something like this, capable of remembering and erasing an entire line of text.
I bought my first computer in law school in 1988. My friend had an old one then that used these immense floppy disks (8 inch? 10 inch?).
I’ve still got a computer in my storage locker in California, that I bought about 13 years ago. I guess when I return to the States I can finally throw it away.
First game I played on it was Manic Miner, which at the time was mind-blowingly awesome.
My favourite games ever were Atic Atac, followed by Chuckie Egg, TLL (Tornado Low Level) and 3D Deathchase.
Oh, and I learnt the basics of BASIC on that computer, as did many’s a British Isles teenager of the 80s.
Manic Miner? Was that the same as Loderunner? I remember having that one.
I also remember the sheer and utter awesomeness of the very first Leisure Suit Larry game, but that was much later, on a far more sophisticated machine.
c 1983 I had a Tandy TRS-80. It plugged into the television and you could save data on a cassette player. It had a 16 KB RAM.
The main thing that you could do with it was type in a BASIC program to do whatever you wanted. You could program it to play music or draw patterns on the screen and stuff like that.
Of course it didn’t have much computing power, but it was a useful educational tool. My knowledge of computer programming probably peaked around that time.
Oh, and I learnt the basics of BASIC on that computer, as did many’s a British Isles teenager of the 80s.[/quote]
Same with brother500. Having the 48k Speccy planted the seeds for what he’s doing now. He’s now the boss of a company making games for Xbox360, PS3 and Wii. The boy done good…
I really feel young now
Although I did use many friends C64’s, Amiga’s and Atari’s, my first computer ended up being a Mitac 386SX 16MHz with 2MB of RAM, 40MB HDD and 256k of graphics memory…
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