<p>DH & I bought a Gateway in 1989. My dad worked for TI and had one in the last 70s and built a couple from scratch that he used awhile and sold.</p>
<p>As a kid, we always had computer paper for scratch paper and the tapes and punch cards to make Christmas decorations with.</p>
<p>Commodore 64, about 1985-ish. Had a 5.25 inch floppy drive. 13 in TV was the monitor.</p>
<p>It could word process, run a simple spread sheet. I even had a gradebook software program for my grades. And who can forget Carmen Sandiego!!</p>
<p>commodore 64!</p>
<p>[Tandy</a> - Radio Shack TRS-80](<a href=“http://oldcomputers.net/trs80i.html]Tandy”>Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 model I computer)</p>
<p>Twin 5 1/4" floppy’s. One for the OS and one for the program. HD’s not invented yet. </p>
<p>300 baud phone line modem. Wicked fast!</p>
<p>I’m about 95% sure this is what we used at my elementary school until I was in around 2nd grade and someone donated a bunch of new computers. [Apple</a> IIc Plus computer](<a href=“http://oldcomputers.net/appleiicp.html]Apple”>Apple IIc Plus computer)</p>
<p>Yay for private schools spending money on what’s important… you know, like brand new Bibles in the classrooms each year.</p>
<p>I remember the punch cards at the computer center in college. Lots of kids with lots of punch cards meticulously arranged in perfect order. Once in a while, a kid would drop their stack or box of punch cards and the room would erupt in a collective gasp! We all knew how long it would take to put those cards back in order.</p>
<p>^ First thing you learned with card decks was to draw a diagonal line across the top with a marker, which made it much easier to put the deck back in order when you dropped it.</p>
<p>The first one I used is whatever Harvard had in 1975. I played Advent on the Arpanet in 1977 or 78. My now husband’s roommate had a computer he made out of a tape recorder, a TV set, and I suppose it must have had a motherboard or something. I remember when he came home from a summer at Bell Labs raving about this thing he’d seen called a mouse.</p>
<p>The first computer I used not for school, was the PDP 11 in dh’s lab to write my resume.</p>
<p>DH’s first computer was sometime in the mid 1980’s Compaq laptop I think. The first one that lived in the house was a PC clone running Windows 3.0. Can’t remember the brand.</p>
<p>I also remember the first time I saw a fax machine - 1972 - Senator Lawton Chile’s office where I was a high school intern. :)</p>
<p>You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.</p>
<p>Some things have been around longer than we think. The first fax machine preceded the invention of the telephone. Its signal was sent over telegraph wires and used magnetic ink. The first practical telephone line fax was invented in the 1920’s.</p>
<p>The first one that I owned? I’d say the HP-67. I still use it from time to time. The first computer I used? I think that it was an old CDC mainframe when I was 11 or 12.</p>
<p>“Get an Apple,” my landlord said. So I went to a shop in town to get an Apple and discovered a Laser II, Apple II clone. It was cheaper; I bought it. It worked. Everything after that was Mac.</p>
<p>My first touch with computers was registering for college using punch cards. I had a friend who decided computers were going to be where it was at; he was in L.A. and headed north. It took me fifteen years and into the 80s to realize he had been right. :)</p>
<p>No, I am in a maze of little twisty passages, all different. :)</p>
<p>Ah, the memories. My first computer was what they now call a “toaster Mac”, the one with a small footprint and a tiny little screen and the whole shebang sat on your desk looking so cute and non-threatening. The amazing thing about it was that it was the first of the series to have an internal hard drive of, wait for it…20 Megabytes! I mean, can you imagine!!! So HUGE!</p>
<p>I word-processed my thesis on it, plus ran the statistical tests, and generated all the graphs (on a dot matrix printer) from the comfort of my own home. My advisor was totally amazed that a computer-phobe like me could put this all together without knowing LaTeX. I mean, really.</p>
<p>First one I used was I think DEC PDP11. I had a programming class in high school on it with Basic language. I remember playing Lunar Module landing game, I think.</p>
<p>First computer bought was 1981 original IBM PC with double sided 320k floppy drive, 64k ram. First I have monochrome monitor then I later I bought a color monitor with graphic card. Also I had Okidata dot matrix printer and Hayes 300 Baud modem. Couldn’t get myself to spend the extra $1000 for 10MB hard drive. Zork was the text adventure game to play at the time.</p>
<p>Then first portable computer was a Compaq with tiny little monochrome monitor with pop out keyboard. The thing must have weighed about 30 pounds, more like luggable computer, but it was cool at the time.</p>
<p>I think I win! The first computer I ever used was July of 1971—a terminal on the Dartmouth BASIC network, back when there were eight terminals in the entire state of New Hampshire. When I took my first programming course, spring of 1973, I programmed in FORTRAN IV on an IBM 1401. Later I worked on a time-shared IBM 360, testing CMS (that job was from 1977-1980). (As part of that job, I played Adventur (no E because you could only have an eight-character name) for an hour a day to test the communications links. I knew those mazes of twisty little passages well. Later Adventur became Zork and made the programmers a lot of money.)</p>
<p>The first computer I bought was a MS-DOS Compaq luggable (weighed 27 pounds) with dual floppy drives, which cost me $2495 on March 31, 1984. I remember the date because I got two friends together and we bought three computers on the last day of the quarter, thereby making the salesman’s quarter, so he gave us a massive discount off list of $2995.</p>
<p>In 1985, as a free-lance writer ghost-writing technical articles (and 8 months pregnant with my daughter), I wrote an article for a client about the development of the internet and packet-switching hardware. As part of the article, I saw a demonstration of email.</p>
<p>In 1990, I bought–used–the actual Mac IIci that was used to develop the MIDI interface, when the developer upgraded to the brand new Mac FX. I sold my car for a higher-mileage model in order to raise the cash–$5000!–to pay for the Mac. At the time, my husband was appalled, but within months he had developed a fondness for it, and in 1992, he made the move from mini-computers to what were then called micro-computers, which is when we moved west, along with most of the computer industry.</p>
<p>^^ You don’t really win necessarily since the thread is about the first computers ‘owned’ at home - not ‘used’. My CP/M system beats your MS-DOS system in this regard.</p>
<p>I didn’t talk about all the IBM mainframes I used to work with but of course, didn’t have installed at my house (I wouldn’t have been able to afford the utility bills and couldn’t have come up with enough space). However, you beat me in this regard since I didn’t use computers until a few years after you but in the 1970s.</p>
<p>We have an IBM PCjr in the attic in case the Smithsonian ever calls. It had one 5 1/4" floppy drive, (DH added another later) and programs - like that new-fangled one called BASIC came in plug-in cartridges like undersized 8track tapes.<br>
Spent hours squinting at that green and black display…
It wasn’t our first computer but certainly is a contender for “most obsolete”.</p>
<p>DH just walked by and says it had a color display and that BASIC wasn’t new in 1983. Spoiling my stories with facts, he is…</p>
<p>I just realized I forgot the computer I bought with my FIRST husband… 1976: a Kim-1 microcomputer. It came with a board and a four digit display. I programmed it to say “hell” since it couldn’t say “hello” with the four digits!</p>
<p>Even using a computer you lose bragging rights, dmd77. I dropped out of a summer computing class while in HS in the late 1960’s due to boredom but after a field trip to the UW-Madison computer science building (they gained a LOT of space without adding any square footage as computers got smaller- I remember room sized ones with reel to reel tapes on the tour- and air conditioning!). Recently met someone only a year or so older than I am who couldn’t major in comp sci as an undergrad at an east coast flagship while doing tons with programming for her career- did a math major because comp sci didn’t exist as a major at her school. I found that strange as I remember the Comp Sci BUILDING on the UW campus in the early 1970’s- did my one Physical Chemistry data punch card there. Looked up the UW dept- “one of the earliest departments…began in 1963 as the department of numerical analysis…” Anyone know- was U of Illinois (Champaigne-Urbana) the first?</p>
<p>High speed internet makes owning a personal computer worthwhile, I used to not use ours because it was simply far to slow at getting information, even with 56 K modems.</p>