Ah- my first machine, a Texas Intruments TI-99/4A. Though my friend had had a Commodore 64 for the longest time, computers remained a total mystery until I got one of my own. Well- OK- even when I finally *did* get my own, they were still a mystery. They were a mystery to me while I took apart my Colecovision ADAM, a mystery while I did research papers on my Tandy 1000, and only starting making sense on my friend's old 286...

Remember any of these? Spark any memories? Care to share your first PC story? What was it? What were the specs? What software (if any) came with it and what was your favorite program?

Take a stroll down memory lane...

My computer adventure started later I think, i was always interessted in toys with buttons and wheels etc. The first computer we had could only show orange colors and I think the only thing you could do on it was typing and printing. Then we got a windows 95, wich my grandpa has now, it was really new and modern in that time. The third was a windows 98 also really modern for that time. And now i have windows xp sp2 computer and a windows xp sp2 laptop.

The first console I saw was a game boy. I was really addicted to pokemon red and yellow. Then we got an gameboy color and i saw a SNES. A few years later i saw a N64 and again some later i buyed an XboX....

Our first computer ever was a pentium 100, with windows 95 and it only had a 1GB harddisk and 8MB RAM when we buyed it, my dad upgraded that to 4GB and 40MB. That one was pretty modern, but not the best, because my parents didn't know much about it and didn't want to spend much money on it. A few years later we got a pentium 600 with 98 and 40GB, but that one totaly crashed so my father had to buy another one. Now we have a pentium 3400+ with 240GB (I'm not sure of that) and 1024MB RAM. I had any consoles, until I buy my GBA SP a few years ago.
Btw: moody, nice to see I'm not the only Dutchie here.

Hmm....let me see...It was not until i was 9 before i saw my first computer. Before that i used to play with my TV remote control - then my dad bought me my first game console. It was a what you could call lame now because it's those $3 mini games you find on small shopping marts.

The house i was living in back then had like - 5 storeys. It's a terrace house. I mainly stayed around the first 3 levels because it's where all the bedrooms are. Then one night i heard the dial-up "song" and i thought it was quite cool and followed it up to the 4th floor. Well...back then everything with buttons and a screen was a mystery to me and i actually got to see my very first Windows 95. (It was not until 3 years later that i found out it had 68mb of sdrRAM and err...i think it was 10gb or space)

When my mother saw me looking at her with that creeped out look on me, she told me i could use it for my school projects.

My opportunity finally came and i had to research on the founding of Singapore. I wanted to find a website but don't know where to start. (Oh by the way my internet connection back then was 32.5kbps) So i typed "Sang Nila Utama" onto the address bar(Well...he is founder of Singapore). That was when i started my love for computers.

After that, everything was kinda a blur to me....i got my gameboy and playstation for birthday....got a computer and printer - Windows 98, 128mb SDRRAM 30gb. Pretty simple but i played plenty of DOS games in it. Later on i came to America for a one year stay and bought a pretty cheap and worth the price computer - Windows XP, 512mb sdrRAM, 40gb, NVIDA and all the cool stuff.

Right now I'm back in the U.S and using that same computer - upgraded of course. It's still about the same specs though. Well...that's ok i don't play much games anyway. I play only MUD games and a few other graphic games and nothing else. I stick most of my spare time onto graphic-design and HTML. Might be getting an Apple soon - looking forward to a Powerbook.

The TI-99 was a good machine. It came with the best processor of its time (the only real 16-bit processor available then), and had solid state cartridges instead of 5-inch floppy drives as standard equipment. Their big problem was that they priced it way too high, compared to the other home machines of its day. The cartridges were also too small for storing BASIC programs, which were popular then, or source code. The average user also had trouble getting used to the idea of working without a floppy.

In general, great technology but bad communication with the customer. RIP.

At my old school we used to have Windows 3.1, and I liked it 'cos it seemed so simple. But it was old and deosn't compare to the computers of today.

But my absolute, first ever computer expirience was what I think was the Commodore 64. I loved to play all kinds of gsmes on it, though back then they were mostly poor quality, and all on tapes...

I just thought that you youngsters would like to see the specifications of my first system. It will give you a laugh. It was an Apple II+.

8-bit 6502 processor, running at a bus speed of 1 MHz. (No, children, that's not a typo. The processor could really handle a whopping 3 MHz, but Apple, like Intel, believed in underclocking.)
64 KB RAM. (No, children, the K is not a typo.)
I can't tell you how big the hard drive was, because it didn't have one. One normally booted off of a 5" floppy.
OS: DOS, which I think was written by Microsoft. In any case, it was very similar in use to the early MS DOSs, written personally by one Mr. Gates. It came with a version of BASIC which was indeed written by Mr. Gates.

It was a pretty good system for its day.

If you wonder how a system that small handled a GUI: it usually didn't. One normally worked from the command line or text menus.

If you're wondering how one even wrote scripts for such a small system: one wrote a lot in assembly language. This was less difficult than it sounds, since the machine was supplied with the complete source code of the OS, so that one could hook onto its subroutines easily, or write substitutes. The source code filled about 5 or 6 small pages.

my first computer or rather to say my brothers, due to he bought it not me, i was to young, anyway it was an atari 2600 I think, you could play games from the rom or a disk which we never had, anyway later on got an zx spectrum 48kb or so called speccy, it needed kasettes to play games or load software and it took a while, later we got an speccy 128kb it had a disk drive with big floppies, that were the times, great games. Later on bought an amiga 500 + it had 68000 cpu ECS chipset 2mb of ram and expanded to total of 4mb of ram, it had no hdd, somehow we didn't manage to make it work, we had an scsi 40mb hdd, I played lots of amiga games which i stil play sometimes using whd, I was using Workbench 2.1 and DOpus for most of my things.. after few years we got an amiga 1200 with 68030 cpu with fpu, cd-rom 4gb hard-drive etc. I stil have it near me and it works and you can almost do everything, browse, chat etc. except that there is no browser with css support on Amiga OS3, later we got an x86 system and installed Linux also tryed various OSes and Emulation, like Amithlon, UAE and onother x86 which I am using now.

My first experience with a computer was when I as around maybe 7 or 8 in school. I remember we would go to this small computer lab maybe with 10 computers. They were these ancient things but I was too young to know any better. All I can say is that we booted it from those uh.. 5" floppy drives. LOL I don't even know what we did on those things but that was my first experience. It wasn't until later that my parents bought a computer. We didn't know much about them, but they were becoming quite popular. The first computer I owned was an IBM with a 500MHz AMD K6-2 processor, 128MB RAM and a 20Gig HDD. But now I know a lot more about computers and can build my own, well if I had the money.

Wow, I feel really quite humbled ;; My first computer was already very modern--it had an Intel 486 DX-2 running at 66 MHz. It had 8 MiB of RAM and a 550 MiB hard disk. The computer even had, in addition to its 3 1/2 inch floppy drive, a dual-speed CD-ROM drive.

Sadly, I've had more and more trouble getting it to run what I'd like it to run recently. Especially as the Linux drivers for my CD-ROM drive fail, there is not much I can do with this relatively recent computer.