First Computer

K

Kattie E

Guest
Posting about the MAC mini I started thinking back to our first computer. We bought it the year we got married. My husband was going to school and working full time and I was working too and it still seemed we were broke. lol We purchased a Radio Shack, Tandy, TRS80 color computer also know as coco. We used a small b&w tv for a monitor and used a cassette tape player to save data and load a program from it. It was a true thrill when we got our first 5 1/4" floppy drive. lol We really could not afford coco but my husband had such an interest in computers and it was a good investment in his career.

I did not use it much b/c it just seemed so fussy. It seems we have owned practically every brand since then. I loved the first IBM we got and that is the one that got me on the computer. My husband has had a couple of them built too. I would guess we have had between 15-20 computers.
 
I bought one of the first Tandy (Radio Shack) TRS-80 computers. Cassette drive, acoustic modem, and the 16K expansion box. Kept it for 30 years, I think I just threw it out in the last move.
 
Ours was a Packard Bell, and had a huge tower. I was in high school. I think it took those little diskette things. Lol Compiters sure have come a long way!
 
My first computer


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My first "computer" was an IBM Selectric typewriter. When I started working, my computer was a Sharp memory typewriter. I remember that we were all excited because we had about 3 pages of memory in the typewriter and it meant that we didn't have to retype as much. But, we still had to use carbon paper....
 
OK, my first actual computer was one of the first Windows 95 desktops. An HP Pavilion. Paid a bunch of money for it!

Windows 95 was a huge OS compared to DOS, and it required far larger hard drives than previous computers. This one had a whopping 1.6 gig HD, and 4 meg (that's meg, not gig) of RAM. I later added another 8 meg of RAM at a cost of over $100.

1.6 gig hard drive...let's compare to today...

Most smart phones have either 8 or 16 gig of memory. That's up to 10 times what my first computer had.

Most new computers have at least a 250 gig hard drive, and that's on the low end.
 
My first baby was an IBM 286-AT with a 20 MB harddrive, 1024K memory and 2 5.25" floppy drives, MS-DOS 3.0. The wife bought it for $5 from her office that upgrading all their computers. The wife says that created a monster!

That old PC lead to many upgrades, new builds and eventualy a business. I learned everything on my own by reading many different books.
 
My first REAL computer was an ACER with Windows 95 Beta edition. It was SOOO fast at the time, lol. We bought a 33.6 modem for AOL and we were flying.
 
When I was in first grade, my parents bought a TI-99/4A.

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Originally we bought just the console. We would load programs from a cassette tape and hooked the computer up the the TV as a monitor. We subscribed to a magazine that had programs in it for 4 different kinds of computer. I remember typing those in and then saving them to tape. I also remember when I started wondering how the programs worked and began analyzing them and then writing my own. I learned to program on this machine. It had 16 kilobytes of memory and the expansion box increased that to 32.

Later one of my father's colleagues upgraded his home computer and sold us the expansion box (big gray thing). The computer then moved to the basement with a black and white TV as the monitor.

When I was in 3rd grade, the school bought its first computer: an Apple IIe that was wheeled from room to room. When I got to the junior high school, they had a lab full of TRS-80s. We moved then and the new school had Apple IIe computers with monochrome screens. When I graduated in 1994, that's where they were.

My college, Grove City College, was one of the first to give every student a laptop. I actually still have the Compaq Contura they gave us. I remember it cost $2400 (so the college didn't literally give it to us). It started with 4 megabytes of memory and a 130 megabyte hard drive. I later got the memory expansion up to 8 megabytes. It ran Windows 3.1.
 
Although GD is more ancient then my first tech, I did have one of these. They were the bomb for a young kid interested in how things worked.

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atlantdav said:
Although GD is more ancient then my first tech, I did have one of these. They were the bomb for a young kid interested in how things worked.
Click to expand...

OH MY! I had one of those too. Loved that kit!
 
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