your first PC?

sheerluck · 16th November 2011, 08:56 PM

First was a BBC Micro model A, around 1982, which was supplied by my school for a technology project, had to give it back though.

Then was a ZX81, circa 1983, with the god-awful rubber keyboard and a massive 1kb of RAM.

Then upgraded (!) to a second hand Commodore VIC-20 with a huge 16kb RAM expansion pack in about 1984.

Then a Commodore Amiga 2000 in 1988.

Crap machines, I think I've owned a complete set.

**Blknight.aus** · 16th November 2011, 09:02 PM

Originally Posted by Scallops

My first computer? My Grandpa's base 10 blocks....got them in 1968....

Buy Invicta Base Ten Group Set (Dienes) from Junior Scholars

Crap....

I remember those too....

can we stop it with the make dave feel old threads.

**wrinklearthur** · 16th November 2011, 09:36 PM

Originally Posted by crash

What was your first PC you owned?

In the 80's I bought my first pc from Radioshack (Tandy), called an MC 10*. It was a minature keyboard, with word shortcuts using the tab key and had an amazing 4k memory, I later expanded this to 8k with cassette tape memory storage. I then traded it in on a TRS80 which I think had 16k of memory. The "rich" kids had 32k TRS80s or commodore 64s then. Can not remember what our computer lab at school had*.

Hi Crash

* I still have mine in its box.

* Typewriters!

**Jay70** · 16th November 2011, 09:52 PM

Commodore 64

**DiscoCam** · 16th November 2011, 10:01 PM

Not sure on the model but I remember the green monochrome monitor, 20mb hard drive (tried as hard as I could but only filled half of it), and I think it had a Turbo button which wound up the clock speed from 8Mhz to 10Mhz! Phew that was fast.

**Chucaro** · 16th November 2011, 10:35 PM

Microbee, I used to like the awesome and versatile Z80 CPU

mikehzz · 17th November 2011, 06:37 AM

A Sord business computer. It cost $5000 in 1980, had no hard drive, 2 x 360kb floppies and 64kb of memory....all state of the art at the time. It ran a proprietry operating system and was programmable with a version of BASIC. The business apps were a rudimentry dos like word processor and spreadsheet. It also had an awesome snake game

And the screen had 2 colours, black and green.

**crash** · 18th November 2011, 12:30 PM

You got to love Basic. You would spend all day typing out a program then when you went and ran the program you spent the next few days correcting all the syntax errors.

**p38arover** · 18th November 2011, 01:40 PM

Dick Smith System 80 Business computer (no cassette drive in that one, it was meant to be used with floppy drives.). It ran NewDOS and would run TRSDOS programs.

System 80/Video Genie/PMC-80 Microcomputer Archive Site

I bought it because we used them at work (I was in charge of the technical maintenance group which repaired all of the equipment in that area - keyboard display units, teleprinters, printers, etc.).

**Hoges** · 18th November 2011, 02:04 PM

Wasn't mine as such...was an Elliot 803, I was a student at the time and it was programmed in ALGOL and FORTRAN. We had blue 5 channel tape with holes in it and a hand held device for punching holes in the tape to make corrections (like the tram conductor punched holes in tickets...).
Those were the days when 'numerical analysis" was done using calculating machines with a handle... the kids doing advance maths were allowed to use the machines which had an electric motor... then in the early 70s my lab results were crunshed using a PDP8 ...which a few years later could be done on a TI hand held calculator... now think Excel spreadsheet... $250 for a 20Mb WD HDD in the late 80s was money well spent!
I think I am very lucky to have witnessed such transformation...

First laptop...1985/86 as I recall...

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still have mine in its box

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