taking off from some amusing responses in the 'how many funds do you own' thread, i thought it'd be fun to know what PCs folks here had s their first computer. mine was an Osborne, followed by a Kaypro, both circa 1982. both had similar specs -- a superb, ha ha, 5-inch display, two sludge-slow 5.25" floppy disk drives, 64k memory and a modem that made future advances to 300 baud seem like a miracle ... all for the low low price of around 2k. i bought a printer with the kaypro, bringing my total to around $3,200 iirc. but remember - both the O and the K were portables. the first of their kind. weighing only 25 lbs each!
was the operating system CP/M? i believe so. No windows for a few more years ....
what about you?
Comments
My mother was another matter. She had an Apple II, which I never understood. I would see her spend two nights doing a sysgen (loading a new OS) on her S/360 at work and wonder why she wanted more grief at home.
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/X1612.99
Sorry, you asked for one PC and I went into a senior moment. My answer has to be Commodore PET.
Cost: Around $120
Memory: 8 bits (expandable to 16 or 32)
Optional Storage: Cassette tape deck
Optional Monitor: B&W
Optional Printer: Dot Matrix
2. 1987, Apple 2E, Apple green screen, floppy disk drive, inkjet printer.
Cost: $1,000+ including peripherals
3. 1992 - Zenith (IBM clone), HD Drive, Microsoft Windows
Cost: About $1500 without peripherals
In grad school I got a dot-matrix printer and GEOS (Graphic Environment Operating System) software for it which installed a GUI and a sort of WYSIWYG word processor that I used for writing papers. Also had a direct connect 300 baud modem (no acoustic coupler) that I used to access CompuServe.
First working, useful code: Wrote my first successful code in FORAST & it ran on BRLESC.. Would have been in the 60's & I was frustrated with the amount of hand calculation I was doing to make stereographic plots. Went to talk to the mathematicians across the hall for help & never got THEM to understand sterographic projection, so I took a class & wrote the code myself. You took the paper sheets over to the card-punch ladies & eventually your deck could be found in the box outside their office; then you could walk over leave it in the in-box for a short test run. Later, checking the out-box, a deck by itself failed to run at all; a couple of sheets of errors was bad news, a suitable modest output was "SUCCESS". Ultimate humilation was a HUGE pile of garbage output -- meant you doubly screwed up AND didn't include proper fail-safe exit in the code. (Usually you tried to grab it & sneak off with no one looking.....) Typically some corrections were needed & to save time you could punch a few new cards yourself on the key-punch that sat on the stair landing. (FORAST, BTW, was an excellent language which had some nice capabilities not found in FORTRAN, but was not widely used & eventually abandoned. )
First computer that was "mine" at work: a PDP that arrived with my first scanning microscope.
First (and most totally beloved) computer on my desk: my true-love SGI. Somehow I managed to succeed in dodging the curse of M----soft. When M---soft slides were required for a meeting, I got the boss to come by after hours and make them for me.
First home computer -- forgot the mfg, but ran a current version of LINUX. Second computer I built myself, but after that decided building fro scratch wasn't worth the time & effort.
Current home computers: System 76 desktop "Wild Dog" and laptop "Gazelle"; both Linux. No M---soft, no Apple, all happy.
First computer I owned was in the mid-80s .... Apple //c, green monitor, then added an external 3.5" floppy a few years later as my 'hard disk' -- OMG all my school work for the whole year, plus Appleworks, on ONE DISK!!!
The first computer I remember using was a TRS-80 color computer in a weekend community college programming class I took back in ... 6th grade-ish.
Apart from a 4 year stint in later parts of college and early work, I've been an Apple person for my computing (but not cloud services) needs. Given my career, I've certainly forgotten more about Windows than most people will ever learn, though. Also somewhat handy w/Unix, too -- most of the boxes I used to host were -nix based.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
2nd Hyperion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion
I got the box, keyboard, mouse, and a 10-ton monitor for $2,000.
I bought a pin printer a year or so later, don't remember for sure but it was around $200-$300.
Went online in 1994 with AOL. Had dial-up until 2005.
My first personal computer was based on an S100 bus. My S100 chassis contained a Zilog CPU, a disk controller, a SCSI (Small Compute Serial Interface), and memory cards. I used a Persci 8-inch floppy disk drive. (When I took the disk drive in for repair in Hollywood, the repair shop said they also did work for Fran Zappa.) I later acquired an Apple IIE, then a Mac 512; and now I use a Macbook Pro laptop.