I saw the other thread and thought about my first computer. A Commadore 64 with a tape drive. I'm wondering what everybody here got started on? After the '64, we had a Franklin Ace (apple II clone) then an Apple IIC.

 

My first was a Commodore PET, a 4016: 16kB RAM, tape drive, green screen. The works -- deluxe.

We used to have it in the lounge so our visitors could play Frog, and Adventure.

 

Apple IIci -- not a lot of difference in the use of the one I have now except for speed and capacity. That was a really nice computer, but just very very slow (a 14400 dialup modem) and a teensy harddrive. It worked like the windows xp that I now use, so switching over wasn't difficult at all. I loved that computer .

Oh, almost forgot 8megs ram, but can't remember much more about its capacity. I know it had a disk drive and a floppy drive.

 

Heathkit but I don't remember the model number. It ran CP/M. I graduated from that to an IBM PC/XT with 2 5" floppys (no hard drive) and 64K of memory.

After I got a 10 meg hard drived I thought that was all the computing power I'd ever need.

 

I "owned" a computer through my employer (the University of Colorado at Boulder) before I had one at home, an HP 110, one of the first laptops. It had a cult following for a while, but about the only compiler available for it was Turbo Pascal, a klunky language for a FORTRAN user to adapt to.

Since then, I've run through several generations of desktops, finally returning to laptops as my only systems, both at home and at work. HPH

 

I inherited my uncle's Trash 80 (TRS-80), a Radio Shack machine that somehow made it to Ireland in the late '70s. It didn't have any real software for me to play with, but it helped me learn BASIC.

We were on a TV game show in 1983 and won a Dragon 32. The 32 referred to the astounding 32k of memory it came with.

 

I think our first was an Apple IIGS and I remember be brazen enough to take off the cover to add memory....was it 256 to 512k? Much to my surprise, it worked....

Seems to me this was in the early '90s....does that sound right? I recall that we went to DE (home of tax-free shopping) and made it into a family Christmas present that year

 

I remember a typerwriter with a mag-card slot. The women I used for typing back in college had it. I thought it was amazing.

 

When I was stationed at the Pentagon back in 1971, the Office that I was attached too had to answer a lot of White House and Congressional correspondence, all of which had to be letter perfect. No white out, no mistakes allowed. I remember with frustration making a mistake on the last sentence and having to start over again. In the fall of 1971, our Administrative Officer put in a reg for an IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MTST). By the time that it showed up, I had already ETS'd. On a subsequent visit back to my office after I "got out", he had fashioned a small cardboard plaque dedicating it as the "SP4 Matthew Janowicz Memorial MTST"

My first experience with a PC was an original IBM 8088. And upgrading it from 64 K of RAM to 256 K so that it could run Lotus 123.

 

That brings back memories of my early spreadsheets. I started with Supercalc. I think that they were a competitor of Visicalc. In any event, it ran so slowly on my Heathkit and my PC/XT that you could actually watch the cells recalculate, row to row after you pushed enter.

From there I graduated to Microsoft Multiplan. It was a pretty good spreadsheet in its day.

Next came Quattra Pro. Probably the best of the Dos spreadsheets. Probably the most graphical.

Finally I ended up in Excel.