Growing old sucks

[Nebu]

First computer that I used was an Altair 8800.  Look that one up for a good laugh.

First computer I owned was either a TRS-80 or an Apple II.  To be honest, I forget which one came out first. 

[Numtini]

I had a Vic 20 which was pretty much useless. Replaced it with a Radio Shack Color Computer II when I went to college

[Slayerik]

My first "real computer" was a PC Jr.  What a steaming pile of shit that was. 

Definitely. But my first computer, the Tandy 1000 (in many ways a clone of the PCjr) was way way better.

Integrated 3 voice sound, 16 color ... pretty much remained its own standard for quite some time.

Still have a 1000 TX up and running at a whopping 8 mHz with a gigantic 40 MB hard drive. It plays Round 42, Sentinel Worlds 1, various Sierra games, and Pirates! like a champ. Good times.

This. Cause, well, he's my brother.

Between this and Intellivision we were living large!

[Furiously]

TRS-80 model 1 level 2. And then we got a modem. Then we got a second phone line.

[Chimpy]

Then another mutual friend's dad had an AppleII then an AppleIIe, then a Lisa...

Your friends family was extremely rich to have a Lisa.

[Paelos]

Yeah, what did those go for, like $10 grand?

[naum]

I remember as a young lad back in the 70's, one of my friends up the street, had one of the early Pong games — his dad had it encased in a wooden cabinet and all the kids on the street would gather in his living to ooh and aah over what was revolutionary (of course, any 60s era D/ARPA hacker already experienced videogaming on a much higher level) for the times — blips and dashes on a screen.

[Tebonas]

Mine was more brown than this one, maybe the European model or something? I think it was from Atari, though.

[Chimpy]

Yeah, what did those go for, like $10 grand?

Yeah, the OS required 1024k of Ram which was supa spendy.

[Arthur_Parker]

Mine was more brown than this one, maybe the European model or something? I think it was from Atari, though.

My first owned console, I later bought something that slotted into the port to give 2k memory or something, allowed you to hook it up to a tape recorder, christ, maybe I'm dreaming all that, I can't even remember what I did with the console.

Anyway, I had access to zx81's, 380Z's (typed missile command in by hand, twice) and BBC micros (elite goodness) through school.

Edit to add, found it, the Starpath Supercharger interface multiplied the Atari 2600's RAM 49-fold, from its meager built-in 128 bytes to 6,272 bytes, i.e. giving it an extra 6 KB.

Dragonstomper on that was awesome.

[Soln]

TRS-80

Trash80 yes, typo

[Samwise]

The primary gaming system of my childhood was an Atari 1040ST.  1MB of RAM and 16 colors, baby.   

[Sky]

Wow, I had the joystick in that picture.

[Nebu]

Wow, I had the joystick in that picture.

Me too. 

I'm really enjoying this thread.  It is nice to know that I'm not alone in my senility here. 

[Lianka]

I get depressed when I think my first gaming system was a pong knock-off.

Ricochet?  We had that, and followed it up with a Colecovision Adam computer.. There was a time when my family was bleeding edge, albeit the knockoff way.  That ended in the 80's and now the parents don't even have a CD player..

[Chimpy]

Is the one we had. 64K of RAM even. I guess the default was 48K which is why I was confused.

[Hawkbit]

I rocked it TI style as a kid.  Had the voice synthesizer and tape recorder and all that jazz.  All those awesome Scott Adams text adventures, hunt the wumpus.  Awesome stuffs.  Scott Adams games are here, btw.  http://www.msadams.com/index.htm

[Merusk]

Man, I can't even remember the name of our first computer.  It had dual 5 1/4" drives so you didn't have to swap out the boot disk so you could run the word processor in the other drive.  That was awesome.  2 glorious colors.. green and black.

We had the Atari 2600 right up through 1993 when my mom sold it in a garage sale.  I was pissed when I came home from college to find that out. "They gave me $20 for it and all the games! Besides you and your brother just bout that Super Nintendo"   (About 25 carts including Night Rider, Air/Sea Battle, Tank, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.. and all the controllers)

[Selby]

My first computer was an IBM 8088 that dad used for work.  He upgraded machines fairly regularly and I spent many hours playing shareware games that were ca. 1983-1985.  I found a disk that contained the copies of them all a few years back and surprisingly they all still play quite well using the right tweaking on the processor speeds.  I still remember him staying up late when new upgrades would arrive putting them in the computer (and cursing when the jumper settings were conflicting and requiring multiple reboots, etc to fix it).  I got my first job doing exactly what he did some years later and realized why he stopped doing it after about 10 years.

[Count Nerfedalot]

My childhood was largely devoid of computers, except for a couple of visits to the Marshal Space Flight Center where we got to see a room full of spinning tape drives and big cabinets with flashing lights and were given copies of awesome (not really) ASCII graphics pictures of the Saturn V and Lunar Lander printed on fan-fold paper.  My first computer game was a very early version of the Lunar Lander game there.  My first computer was a $500 TI calculator I got as my high school graduation gift.  In college, Adventure on the mainframe was fun, but Universe (an ASCII Star Trek with a zillion bells and whistles) on the VAX was awesome.  The first music I listened to on a computer was the college fight song played on a line printer.    The first program I wrote was on punched cards, although a later lab had me entering a program using toggle switches with LEDs for display.

On the ageing front though, I'm happy to announce that this grandpa just laid the smack down on some young whippersnappers in volleyball league play this evening so I'm feeling good about that.  Not bad considering the last time I played at this level was last century, when I was 20 lbs lighter, 12 years younger, and missing fewer body parts.  They've even gone and changed half the rules on me since then!  I know I'm gonna hurt in the morning though.   

[Der Helm]

Then another mutual friend's dad had an AppleII then an AppleIIe, then a Lisa...

Your friends family was extremely rich to have a Lisa.

fakeedit: I started with an Atari 800XL which was quickly replaced by a Comodore C128D

[Draegan]

My first computer was an Apple ][e+.

I'm turning 30 in a week.

[Cheddar]

I hate all of you.  I never got this experience.  Too expensive.  AND LOOK HOW I TURNED OUT!!!

I still have fond memories of going to my buddies house and playing mail order monsters.  What a blast!

[MahrinSkel]

The first computer I ever got to fiddle with was a VT100 terminal linked to a Honeywell 6030 (my mom's work system).  First computer I ever had to myself was a TRS-80 with a 300 baud Hayes acoustic modem (the kind you set the handset into the rubber cups), which I linked to the same 6030.  I eventually found a back door from that 6030 to a DOE Cray and from that to places I probably could have gotten shot (or an NSA job offer) for getting caught in.  Yeah, I'm old.

--Dave

[Chimpy]

Did you turn your brother Chet into a giant green toad-blob?

[Ghambit]

I've never been w/o a rig since the age of 6... which started with an Apple IIe, then a Tandy 1000, DX2, and on and on.
Ahhhh yes, my baby.  My DX2. 

To me the DX2 marks kind of a paradigm shift in computing.  The "www" had just come out, AoL 1.0, and BBS's, MUDs and so on were really gaining steam.... for the most part the real birth-moment for consumer multiplayer gaming probably.  By then every household had a rig with a US Robotics 14.4 modem.  Gawd, those chatrooms were the shiznit back then eh?

[tgr]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XZPflpw-ys (Ben's remake)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaxJK2c9Onk (the original)

I've probably just sat and listened more to this song than most new music made today.

[Ironwood]

Damn, that takes me back.

[tgr]

I can sit here and play sid tunes all day, baby.

[Jherad]

Dragon 32.



My favourite was the Amstrad 1640 though. A proper computer!

[tgr]

My very first computer was actually a dragon 32. I used to play pacman until it crashed.

Cousin of mine had the c64 though, and the music in the games on the c64 was just in a completely different league. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time at his place.

[slog]

1978ish we got the Bally Astrocade, complete with a cartridge to program in BASIC.  4k of ram and programming entire words in that keypad was painful.

[Paelos]

What the hell would that thing actually do? It looks like an old ATM.

[slog]

What the hell would that thing actually do? It looks like an old ATM.

heh.  Not much beyond print "my sister smells" in an endless loop and play cartridge video games.

[squirrel]

Wow. A Lisa. My inner child is jealous.

I grew up on Atari 1040 ST and Amiga machines. I had earlier computers but those two platforms transformed me and my friends.