First contact with computers

[EyeTech]

First computer zx81 with 16k rampack (self-assembly)
Then Texas Ti99/a, C64, Commodore Amiga 1mb - First Mac - Mac Plus 1988. Happy Days

[Joe]

Hook this bad boy up to the TV, plug in the cassette recorder and you're ready for some serious frustration!!!

[EyeTech]

Tandy. wasn't that sold by Radio Shack?

Anyway...remember these?
Atari, VIC 20, Oric, Atom, Dragon 32, BBC Micro, Amstrad.

And software like...
Scott Adams' Adventure's, Zork, Elite (that's still around on the net somewhere)...

[Joe]

Tandy. wasn't that sold by Radio Shack?

Yep. and later on they came out with a 286 IBM compatible that wasn't quite compatible. Never bothered with them again after that. The original Kings Quest game was great on that thing though. Had to swap a floppy every so often to continue playing but it beat the hell out of storing your game on cassette tape.

[30YearsandCounting]

Remember the Osborne?  I saw them, but never used one.  I think it was the first "laptop".
http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html

[beermonster]

amiga for me

monkey island folks - monkey island - THAT was where it was at.

[Gutnbg]

I owned an Osborne-1. Plain vanilla "laptop," that sucka weighed a ton.

Got it from a friend, carried it home on an airplane, eventually sold it for a buck. The screen on it was about 3".

They had a computer class at our high school, where they taught one person (certainly not me!) how to program, etc.
We only had one teacher who knew anything about them, as they were pretty new at the time, and he only felt comfortable teaching one person at a time, and our senior class had one guy who did it.

Before that, the first time I saw one was the one used for accounting at the first place I worked. This was the early 70s, and this monstrosity filled a room. It looked like something out of a bad 1960's Sci-Fi movie. Punch cards, front-loading tapes, all that good stuff.

[mwc]

Atari800 - Maxed out the 4 RAM slots with 64k - 16k massive cards.
Acoustic-Couple 300 baud modem (the one that you slapped a 'standard' phone handset on -- i.e. War Games...Do you want to play a game professor Faulken?) -- shit, the Bank my Dad worked for was testing this dial-up banking thing...I could check my meager savings account online in 1984 --
and an external 5 1/4 single-sided floppy drive, the size of a toaster.
Never had the TAPE drive, my Dad sprung for the high-tec floppy option.
Miner 2049er, Jumpman, and the cartridge for Missile Command were Favorites....as well a Programming in BASIC....Spreadsheets in VisiCalc...

[born2print]

Hook this bad boy up to the TV, plug in the cassette recorder and you're ready for some serious frustration!!!

WOW, we called that a "coco" (color computer) and I used to play a cool Ninja game on it!

[born2print]

Oh, Apple IIe for me. Unless you count playing with my cousin's Commodore.

[gnubler]

This was my first external, portable hard drive. It was "plug n play".

[David]

Then Texas Ti99/a, C64, Commodore Amiga 1mb

I had the TI 99/4a (my mom worked at Kmart, and she got one on sale with her employee discount for around 50 bucks US),
then I was lucky to get the Commodore 64...
Wow, some fun now!

I got to make a ball bounce on the screen with the Ti 99/4a, I was a programming machine!!

[almaink]

I started with Timex Sinclair. Had the old Sinclair ZX81 then I "upgraded" to a 2068. Spent hours entering code and even had a few workable graphics programs that did rudimentary drawings. Saving programs and loading them back via cassette was a real hit and miss proposition as I remember. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we'd be where we are now tho, back then...

[kermit]

Never in my wildest dreams did I think we'd be where we are now tho, back then...

Can you give us a guess what computers speed or storage will be in 5 and in 10 years?

[almaink]

My guess is we won't be using computers as we now know them in 10 years time.