<p>Mathblaster- LOL I think I still have the cd’s for this in the basement.</p>
<p>We moved to the US in 96, H had a laptop that he would bring home and I would email back home at night.</p>
<p>97 after we had moved into our home, we bought a compaq. I think we paid around $1500. Now, we all have laptops. The home PC’s are redundant and still sitting unused in the den and another in the basement. I think the original has long gone.</p>
<p>Getting rid of the home PC is like getting rid of the landline. We all have cell phones- but keep the landline just in case!</p>
<p>There was some great kids software & it is disappointing that the companies seem to have disappeared.
My last desktop computer was a Umax clone. It ran up to system 9.1.
I have also had an PowerBook 540c, an iBook & a couple MacBook pros.
But now I mostly use my iPad!</p>
<p>It’s most likely a Pentium II unless you splurged and got one of the earlier Pentium IIIs. An older college classmate had one of those Compaq towers. Ran fine for the first few years…but the PII processor on his was becoming rapidly obsolete with newer operating systems/software and the hard drive died after year 3. </p>
<p>It’s currently sitting in a mutual friend’s apartment while I clear out some space to take it in, replace/upgrade some parts from a spare stash of CPUs, RAM, etc…and maybe turn it into some sort of a file server.</p>
<p>Apple I - Electronic Engineer father brought it home and we spent a month adding the power supply etc to make it a real computer. We also built an maple wooden case for it. </p>
<p>Dad still has it - it was in the barn until I made him bring it inside a few summers ago. Now it sits in a place of honor in his office. Doesn’t work anymore but still a major piece of history.</p>
<p>If we are talking about the first computer I used, it was an IBM 1130. That’s what we had at the college computer center. I took one computer programming class (it was in the Engineering Department - well before the birth of Computer Science). I programmed the computer to play solitare, but I had to get special permission to go to the operator’s console to test the program, because the only real time input for the computer was the built in IBM selectric type keyboard on the operator’s console. Other than that it was the old decks of punched cards. Was just explaining to S1 the other day how the card punches worked in the “good old days.”</p>
<p>First “PC” (we didn’t call them that) was at work - it had a PDP11 processor and ran a flavor of RSX-11M. Mine had the 5 mb (yes megabyte) hard drive, and color graphics.</p>
Heh, we had an IBM 1130 at high school. It had 8 kilobytes of core memory (little metal rings with an unbelievable amount of wiring) that took up the space of an office desk.</p>
<p>No card punch, we used 17-column optical-read cards where you had to color in a bubble with a marker to indicate the character. Talk about painful.</p>
<p>I don’t remember. We’ve had a computer my entire life. My dad did something with computers before he was a plumber and we’ve always been early adopters of technology. </p>
<p>I’m 21 and I do not remember a time without a computer in my life. My sister says she does (she’s 26) but I don’t believe her. I have younger cousins who don’t remember a time before handheld or laptop computers. Truth be told, I only VAGUELY remember a time before internet.</p>
<p>My first home computer was a before the days of the IBM PC - it was a CP/M S100 bus system with an 8" floppy drive and no hard disk. It had a dumb Televideo terminal as the monitor/keyboard. I think I paid around $3,000 for it but that was okay because I made more money than that from development I did on it.</p>
<p>I started out with the very first IBM PC, the one with two floppy disk drives. It was a huge upgrade when I moved up to an XT with a hard drive.</p>
<p>My first computer was an Amiga! We had a donald duck game on floppy disk that elementary-aged Ema thought was simply the GREATEST. I had dozens of educational games on disk… reading, math, etc. I think my dad had a game called sub hunt… My dad, a computer programmer, kept the amiga-- keyboard and all-- in the bedroom closet, and took it out and set it up on the floor each time we wanted to use it. We didn’t own a desk until the later 90’s.</p>
<p>We played mathblaster, too… that was about six PCs later, though.</p>
<p>Leading Edge, in 1986. The first PC I used in an office was a Wang. I was the first to have a PC, though there were Wang dedicated word processors in my organization. When I mentioned to the office manager that, by the way, I also needed a printer, he asked why. The worse thing I remember about these early PCs was they didn’t automatically save documents. I had some tragic losses.</p>
<p>Compaq
I think the kids used to play Math Blaster, some kind of treehouse themed word/reading program, and Backyard Baseball (not quite sure of the name).</p>
<p>AT&T PC-6300… Era 1985, $2.5k with a nice color monitor and hard drive… Upgraded to a Gateway 486 in 1991 or so… Since then I assemble my own from top quality parts.</p>
<p>I fondly remember creating my own Elbonian word processor package based on Borland’s Turbo Pascal Editor toolkit and writing a device driver mod for the Epson FX-86 dot matrix printer to print in Elbonian script. Priceless. </p>
<p>I even ran Windows 1.0 and DRI GEM on the 6300. Awesome machine.</p>
We had a donald duck game on floppy disk that elementary-aged Ema thought was simply the GREATEST. I had dozens of educational games on disk… reading, math, etc. I think my dad had a game called sub hunt… My dad, a computer programmer, kept the amiga-- keyboard and all-- in the bedroom closet, and took it out and set it up on the floor each time we wanted to use it. We didn’t own a desk until the later 90’s.</p>