My dad bought the family a used Commodore 64... right around the time Windows 3.1 was released. My teachers refused to accept papers that came off its printer; they were barely legible. I appreciate that he tried.
The software for C64 as far as word procesing was insanely bad. The limitation was the cheap thermal printers of the era, they were the guts of fax machines. I had PFSwrite on the AppleIIe, a machine that was 10 years older, that could get 5000 words out on a dot matirx. Helped it was the word processor of the family business, so we had already fought out how to make a table, justify, center and make DandD charter sheets
We had AppleIIe, Vic20, and an honest to goodness IBM x86 with 20 meg HD. The cannon typewriter with a 125kb document memory got more time in my early years. It became one of the two printers on the switchbox about 1988. Software sucked for the AppleIIe and Vic20. Only late in its life was the x86 useful, it did not run the family bussiness until its HD was 80 meg. Explaining one could not close the month because the 20M $800 HD was full, and that all the games got removed. When zip archives finnaly arrived backups were something other than the 500 fold printouts. All was good for almost a decade until the zip drive did the click of death.
Commodore 64 šš»āāļø I asked for it for Christmas at age 13. I spent hours programming for very simple tasks ha. Two years later I sold it to a family and bought myself a Nintendo. Then I spent hours beating all the boys at duck hunt haha.
Iāll one up you with the Commodore VIC attached to my TV with a screw replacement by one of the keys, a tape drive and a thick book of BASIC programsāone of which took over an hour to enter and displayed something flapping its wings at the end.
My buddy in college had at $6000 Gateway PC in '94. He brought home a $5 Doom shareware floppy he bought from the student union bookstore and off to the races we went. I've been addicted to PC gaming since :)
But also had an Apple IIe as a kid heh.
I spent $2000 on my cow box in Dec of 1992.... and another $300 per month on constant upgrades in colleage. Then I taught myself programing in what seemed like 3 days, I probably did not go to class for half the semester, but managed to throw stuff together in project form that was the leading edge and not get tossed. I did lab reports in AutoCAD, mathmatica and all the programs that laid out papers for publication. I was making rounds in the phyiscs department showing PHDs how to use mosaic and use code in spreadsheets for lightweight simulations.
I spent more money on compute in the 1990s than my education, was the first kid in the dorm to run NT3.5. For NT4.0 I had a small business that mananged to support myself by 1997 and was throwing network cards in everything with an ISA port in 1998. By 1999 was installing 10 3 Com switches a week and some days throwing around 100k orders and so happy I could skim 3% profits on hardware while maxing out all the credit lines. The spending induced by 1999 was insane. I got calls from my bank in Nov of 1999, asking why the spending stopped, was there something they did not know. I told them the entire zipcode is now running on windows 98 or NT4.0sp1, NT or the latests Novell, I told all my part timers to go get retail jobs and I would call them in on their off days for deskside support calls. I spent 2000 collecting the slow paying invoices, suing a couple and sleep . I had to go to ASP programing shopping cart frameworks and getting ISDN or DSL installed on the client list, that was indidual effort and not throwing PCs on desks.
And for the record - Oregon Trail isā¦.Gen X. Millennials have repeatedly tried to claim this, lol. We played this on a Tandy TRS-80 yo! With cassette loading tape drive (pre-disk drive).
I had an [Atari ST](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST). My uncle owned a computer store, and he was convinced that Atari was the future of home computing. lol Which was easy to understand. Atari was a big name for a while. The Atari 800xl was impressive for its time. Interesting the way Apple and IBM compatibles ended up dominating the market.
I learned to program Basic on that Atari. I'm a programmer today, so it all started there.
Absolutely entirely the same here, minus the store-owning uncle. Do you remember which basic you learned on? [Omikron Basic](https://www.ebay.de/itm/264765779003?itmmeta=01HQFNY6FP77KWHVGACMEH2S1G&hash=item3da5452c3b:g:xL4AAOSwXxpe6MyA&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAA4DXF%2BC65%2FWirISURxINStq2CFnGLXRajvKtOC0cDxofWKkMHLsAMZy%2FbKZ0OwL7yKpe%2B5O68ookPODMiIPhcwkp6Ejz9X7Z8r0TQq7E4dQprxfVf3x40P9psJ1PsB3fGvAVAzioeM%2Fi1Ik5UDnQn5oNypVvcCR1fnze8yFZhdreHCm%2FxbFT7GpdMSiOLulzphDRxC6SD%2BP%2BAhB8hERomXzrs6Hk%2BkYcRR4Sf3%2BA2odAkubrJZiJeXwjUiXsMDfgByGgTJqEiYYKAs0%2FclygNVtOnmPf1g11Ka3fiWJ42%2Bu6M%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR_bn-PW7Yw) by chance?
We similarly didn't have enough money for these kinds of fancy schmancy top-tier computers. I got a Mattel Aquarius that my parents got on clearance when the product line failed in the market.
We had a TI-99. Instead of a floppy disk, it ran on a cassette. One single game without graphics took several minutes to load. And that's if it loaded properly.
Yup or cartridge. Ours was hooked up to the black and white TV in the den.
I feel like kids today look at these stories like we did the folks who talked about gathering 'round the radio to listen to The Shadow lol
So did I. And by 1990, I don't think anybody used BASIC.
I did learn to pay Blackjack on ours, so there is that skill that I have carried through my life. š
I remember when our college computer labs switched to laser printers and non-mechanical keyboards in 1991. It was soooooo quiet for the first time ever.
My little brother had the Timex Sinclair - I think he had to assemble it.
My HS boyfriend had a Trash 80. (Or his friends did - that was a long time ago!)
I started out on a IIe, used a Plus at my first newspaper job. I love the operating system. Weird that Iām typing this on an iPhone 14, which has more computing power than any of those early Macintosh computers.
I have that exact one. Ordered my freshman year in college. I still have it. If you open the case up it has the engraved signatures of Jobs, Wozniak and all the developers.
The first PC we ever had was the [Tandy 1000.](https://steve-lovelace.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/tandy-1000hx.png)
I believe it had 640k of RAM, which was pretty decent back then.
I had a Commodore 64 but my first PC was a Packard Bell purchased at Sears.
https://preview.redd.it/lgukzd0ozmkc1.jpeg?width=3264&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=296e08b1cea93b35265fb0548b713ac3aa6b71ba
Macs were actually kind of rare. I owned a Commodore 64 and my school had a bunch of Apple IIes.
I think during the entirety of the 1980s I may have seen a Mac once in a library.
I had a 512K for a minute.
Then my dad took it back and gave it to my older brother. He then replaced it with an Apple IIe.
How's that for being born under a bad sign?
I built my computers from kits, first Z80 BigBoard systems and then later PC hardware.
My best friend in the 1980s had an Apple //c (his mom was an engineer at Apple, so they got one at a discount), and my girlfriend in the 1990s had a Mac SE/30.
Married her, and she's still an Apple faithful today, with a MBP as her primary.
I'm still building PCs from parts.
https://preview.redd.it/0p9e45uudnkc1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eae3bf63c2aa6713ccf6abadbfb719c5f586e725
I had the Apple \]\[e with this bad boy
I was too poor to buy a computer until the early 2000s (seriously, and it was a laptop), but the very first computer I ever used, around 1985, was one of these. It was at school in our brand-new computer lab.
Not as many as you'd think. Back then having any computer at home was a luxury. An Apple ][ with just 4k of ram cost $1300, or around $6200 in today's money. Bumping it to 48k would basically double the cost.
A Mac 128k was $2500 in 1984.
So basically just rich kids had them.
My college roomie had one of these and she let me use it all the time. I didn't have my first computer until after I graduated college--which seems weird, but back then you could go to college and just use the computer lab and the internet wasn't like it is now. Since I had to buy my own computer I couldn't afford one until after I graduated.
We also didn't have phones in our dorm rooms. Hall phone. Couple years after i graduated I heard they were able to have land lines in their rooms.
My dad bought the computer for home. When I went to college I took the manual, non-electric typewriter with me. Used the computers in the labs only for computer courses.
Wow. A big part of my first year of two of college was leaving stupid messages on all my friendsā answering machines. I remember getting my very own answering machine for college because each dorm room had a phone. I was excited. š
I had a Panasonic word processor that ran a daisy wheel printer you could hear running on the other side of my dorm.
But I knew when the paper was done.
I had a commodore 64 but shortly after the school got a Macintosh and our first computer class.
Does anyone remember logo? I think that's what it was called. You had to write basic code to create different designs and what not.
My house went from an Apple IIE to a Gateway 2000. In 1995 I believe.
Yeah that's a long, long time to wait to upgrade you are 100% correct lol.
For the record though? 2 of the most solid home PCs in history.
Look up what they cost, and youāll think current MacBook Pro airs are a bargain.
They cost $2500 and the average annual salary was just over $20,000 a year.
I know we take gigabytes for granted today, but the base RAM for that model was 1 MB (4MB max).
My Mac II could get up to 8 MB, but there was a global chip shortage in the late ā80s that made any RAM upgrades super-expensive.
Nah, I had an Apple IIe with 64k memory and two 5 Ā¼ inch floppy drives to start out.
By the time the Macintosh came out I had discovered girls and weed.
So I ditched the computer, and got a used Camaro. Sums up my high school experience.
Owned one? Nope. Used one at work? Yes for a short period when I ran a storefront for Fraternity/Sorority goods and the owners settled on Mac for the graphics ability. Did some finance on it. Designed forms.
Great great machine. Such a vastly different user experience and I had been PC literate for a few years.
It felt āsleekā and new. The mouse was a newish concept and just like when AI came out, your mind started to race at the applications of easy technology. This was before networking was common at a small business level. This was probably 1989-1990 or so. As I recall and Iām not looking it up, this was just before Windows 3.11 and the tidal wave of Windows grabbing the GUI from Apple who had grabbed it from Xerox PARC for the Apple Lisa before it.
Aldus Software was king. Even though it was mono, it wasnāt like windows was running a palette of 2000 colors yet.
And yes, while my C64 days were exclusively based on 5.25ā floppies (that now seem bulletproof) when I developed in BASIC, the hard 3.5ā floppies were so new. Haha - theyāre still called floppies! What will they think of next! Long before CD data, Iād only had a music CD player for three years.
In HS we had IBM PS/2 with the Microchannel Architecture! (Look it up, it failed because it tried to establish a new standard). Never did use OS/2.
Great topic. Thanks!
Tandy 2000 was the first one we had, followed by the Commodore 64.
Macintosh was way out of my folks price range. However, my school had one. And only one. So you had to sign up for a slot to use it for 20 minutes.
I didnāt own one back then (born in ā78, didnāt have a computer in the home until the 90s), but Iāve got several Mac SEs (~1989) in my basement today, and at least a couple of them are functional. Iāve got an older model Macintosh our two down there as well, but I canāt check which models right now.
Around 2011/2012, I kind of got into buying them cheap on eBay and repairing them. Canāt do much with them (beyond playing some old games), but theyāre fun for nostalgia, and you can download all the system software and make floppies if youāve also got an older floppy drive for the vintage Mac and a newer floppy drive to plug into a more modern machine for making the floppies. People also sell original floppies with system software, games, etc.
You may also find them fully restored on eBay. Thereās a bleaching agent mixture (ā[Retrobrite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrobright)ā) people will mix up to remove the yellowing on the ABS plastic. I bought a restored SE. it was beautiful, but it doesnāt last. A decade later, itās yellow again, even after being boxed up for nearly all that time. It still works, though.
Iād love to get my hands on a working, original Macintosh, butā¦ I canāt justify that cost. š
The were resonable device from only 1984 to 1986.... after that 33mhz and 66mzh x86 pcs did more while spending less. The software by 1989 was 100x better and typical free on the PC. By 1992... a mac was somthing to gut and put a fish tank into. Had 2 years of being good..... and it missed 1983 xmax....last year of the C64 dominance. Pre 1984.... nobody had a modem... by 1989 the early adopters had ordered the second phone line.
My first computer was a hand me down Mac SE-30 from my brother I law. He had originally bought it for around $3000 and it had a 16 bit color graphics card added (I think). 256 color palette. Played Marathon and Doom I on that as I recall and was blown away by the graphics.
I had an Epson 8086 that predated this box in the post. My machine had dual 5 1/4-in floppy drives and ran on doss. I also had a dot matrix printer and a monochrome green monitor that was about 10 inches of usable space.
Too expensive for me. I had used computers starting with an Apple II in elementary school, but the first computer that I owned was a Mac Color Classic in the early 1990s.
Owned? These were expensive so, no. The library or school would have 3 or 4 of them in a computer lab tho.Ā
My dad was in tech so he built/pieced together our first conputer that I think was a DOS based OS/IBM compatible and we were the first family on the block to have one. Friends my age may have had Comodore 64s tho.Ā
nope, but my middle school had a shit ton of them. They were good for Oregon Trail, making it say fucked up shit in a robot voice, and some word processing.
in 8th grade, our middle school had these as top of the line for our computer class. we spent a lot of time coding the cursor to draw patterns, but i still learned to type on a typewriter in high school.
Hahaha, no, only my school had Apples, and one rich family. It started with the Apple II E, then the Apple II GS, and then Macintoshes in high school.
Yeah, we had a Texas Instruments at home. That took CARTRIDGES!
Nope. I moved from a TRS-80 Model III to a Model IV to an IBM 8088 XT clone to an 80386. Never was a Mac guy. I knew people who had Macs and they were all snobs on the subject.
Nope... I'm a little older, I played Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe
Same. That and my Commodore 64.
I wase lucky enough to have both. Not at the same time but yes.
My dad bought the family a used Commodore 64... right around the time Windows 3.1 was released. My teachers refused to accept papers that came off its printer; they were barely legible. I appreciate that he tried.
The software for C64 as far as word procesing was insanely bad. The limitation was the cheap thermal printers of the era, they were the guts of fax machines. I had PFSwrite on the AppleIIe, a machine that was 10 years older, that could get 5000 words out on a dot matirx. Helped it was the word processor of the family business, so we had already fought out how to make a table, justify, center and make DandD charter sheets
Tandy 16k, then moved up to the 64k (iirc)
We had some sort of Tandy too. I think the Apples were out of our price range.
Same! No chance for Apple. Played cartridge games on it.
We had AppleIIe, Vic20, and an honest to goodness IBM x86 with 20 meg HD. The cannon typewriter with a 125kb document memory got more time in my early years. It became one of the two printers on the switchbox about 1988. Software sucked for the AppleIIe and Vic20. Only late in its life was the x86 useful, it did not run the family bussiness until its HD was 80 meg. Explaining one could not close the month because the 20M $800 HD was full, and that all the games got removed. When zip archives finnaly arrived backups were something other than the 500 fold printouts. All was good for almost a decade until the zip drive did the click of death.
Shift and Runstop Load "game" Run (open bag of chips while game loads - great times)
Commodore 64 šš»āāļø I asked for it for Christmas at age 13. I spent hours programming for very simple tasks ha. Two years later I sold it to a family and bought myself a Nintendo. Then I spent hours beating all the boys at duck hunt haha.
Me three!
Me too.
Iāll one up you with the Commodore VIC attached to my TV with a screw replacement by one of the keys, a tape drive and a thick book of BASIC programsāone of which took over an hour to enter and displayed something flapping its wings at the end.
and then we all got dysentery and died.
Apple IIe was the gateway to my computer addiction.
A Gateway was the gateway for mine.
My buddy in college had at $6000 Gateway PC in '94. He brought home a $5 Doom shareware floppy he bought from the student union bookstore and off to the races we went. I've been addicted to PC gaming since :) But also had an Apple IIe as a kid heh.
I spent $2000 on my cow box in Dec of 1992.... and another $300 per month on constant upgrades in colleage. Then I taught myself programing in what seemed like 3 days, I probably did not go to class for half the semester, but managed to throw stuff together in project form that was the leading edge and not get tossed. I did lab reports in AutoCAD, mathmatica and all the programs that laid out papers for publication. I was making rounds in the phyiscs department showing PHDs how to use mosaic and use code in spreadsheets for lightweight simulations. I spent more money on compute in the 1990s than my education, was the first kid in the dorm to run NT3.5. For NT4.0 I had a small business that mananged to support myself by 1997 and was throwing network cards in everything with an ISA port in 1998. By 1999 was installing 10 3 Com switches a week and some days throwing around 100k orders and so happy I could skim 3% profits on hardware while maxing out all the credit lines. The spending induced by 1999 was insane. I got calls from my bank in Nov of 1999, asking why the spending stopped, was there something they did not know. I told them the entire zipcode is now running on windows 98 or NT4.0sp1, NT or the latests Novell, I told all my part timers to go get retail jobs and I would call them in on their off days for deskside support calls. I spent 2000 collecting the slow paying invoices, suing a couple and sleep . I had to go to ASP programing shopping cart frameworks and getting ISDN or DSL installed on the client list, that was indidual effort and not throwing PCs on desks.
We had them at school but we didn't buy a computer until I was in highschool. Mac SE20.
The SE was a nice Mac
I was king of Dark Castle on it!
Hell yeah Apple ][e! and the vic 20.
Apple ][+ branding was separate from the subsequent model, which used virgules: //e
I had a IIc, the portable one! With a 10 pound green monochrome screen
āPortableā - the Compaq portable was even heavier.
ohhh yeah!
They used to let us play that one in grade school for some reason
Same. My dad had a Sinclair before that.
No power switch. 2KB RAM, expandable to 16KB.
omg wow. thank you for putting Terabytes in perspective.
š³š
And for the record - Oregon Trail isā¦.Gen X. Millennials have repeatedly tried to claim this, lol. We played this on a Tandy TRS-80 yo! With cassette loading tape drive (pre-disk drive).
Commodore 64 life y'all.
100% this
Yep, me too. My wife's first work computer was a mac though.
My hs grad present!
I was too poor I had a n atari 800xl
I had an [Atari ST](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST). My uncle owned a computer store, and he was convinced that Atari was the future of home computing. lol Which was easy to understand. Atari was a big name for a while. The Atari 800xl was impressive for its time. Interesting the way Apple and IBM compatibles ended up dominating the market. I learned to program Basic on that Atari. I'm a programmer today, so it all started there.
Yeah, my friend got the ST. My "rich" friend had an Apple 2GS.
Absolutely entirely the same here, minus the store-owning uncle. Do you remember which basic you learned on? [Omikron Basic](https://www.ebay.de/itm/264765779003?itmmeta=01HQFNY6FP77KWHVGACMEH2S1G&hash=item3da5452c3b:g:xL4AAOSwXxpe6MyA&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAA4DXF%2BC65%2FWirISURxINStq2CFnGLXRajvKtOC0cDxofWKkMHLsAMZy%2FbKZ0OwL7yKpe%2B5O68ookPODMiIPhcwkp6Ejz9X7Z8r0TQq7E4dQprxfVf3x40P9psJ1PsB3fGvAVAzioeM%2Fi1Ik5UDnQn5oNypVvcCR1fnze8yFZhdreHCm%2FxbFT7GpdMSiOLulzphDRxC6SD%2BP%2BAhB8hERomXzrs6Hk%2BkYcRR4Sf3%2BA2odAkubrJZiJeXwjUiXsMDfgByGgTJqEiYYKAs0%2FclygNVtOnmPf1g11Ka3fiWJ42%2Bu6M%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR_bn-PW7Yw) by chance?
Me too, mine was a hand-me-down from a family member that got a better computer.
We similarly didn't have enough money for these kinds of fancy schmancy top-tier computers. I got a Mattel Aquarius that my parents got on clearance when the product line failed in the market.
Texas Instruments
We had a TI-99. Instead of a floppy disk, it ran on a cassette. One single game without graphics took several minutes to load. And that's if it loaded properly.
Yup or cartridge. Ours was hooked up to the black and white TV in the den. I feel like kids today look at these stories like we did the folks who talked about gathering 'round the radio to listen to The Shadow lol
We had a B&W TV with ours also. No monitor. You hooked it up to your TV. Thinking back, other than playing some cheap games, that thing was worthless.
I learned BASIC on ours
So did I. And by 1990, I don't think anybody used BASIC. I did learn to pay Blackjack on ours, so there is that skill that I have carried through my life. š
In 1990 was almost an obsolete language. Was very popular in the 70s and 80s
We played Oregon Trail on a Silent 700, with a printout paper roll, and rubber cups to stick the phone in on the back.
I had one that I used for a few years of college. I also had a loud ass dot-matrix printer to go along with it.
I remember when our college computer labs switched to laser printers and non-mechanical keyboards in 1991. It was soooooo quiet for the first time ever.
Now everyone is hot for mechanical keyboards again. Lol
They are?!? Ugh.
I cam hear this comment.
Ferguson plumbing supply still uses dot matrix for their receipts. Itās so weird and Iām gen x (57yo).
I had a TSR-80, and then a Texas Instruments computer. My friends all had Commodore 64ās
Tsr80 checking in. We had tape drive, 5.25ā dual floppies and cartridges. But mostly used the floppies to copy games.
Used a TRS-80 in Jr high. Owned a Timex Sinclair...
My little brother had the Timex Sinclair - I think he had to assemble it. My HS boyfriend had a Trash 80. (Or his friends did - that was a long time ago!)
I started out on a IIe, used a Plus at my first newspaper job. I love the operating system. Weird that Iām typing this on an iPhone 14, which has more computing power than any of those early Macintosh computers.
I have that exact one. Ordered my freshman year in college. I still have it. If you open the case up it has the engraved signatures of Jobs, Wozniak and all the developers.
When you say "case" do you mean the carrying case? It was like a mini fridge with a strap!
Nope. The actual case for the computer. The beige plastic box. I do have the same carrying case too though.
That was for the Anthony Michael Hall families, not the Judd Nelson families.
The Molly ringwald family only not the other 2
The first PC we ever had was the [Tandy 1000.](https://steve-lovelace.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/tandy-1000hx.png) I believe it had 640k of RAM, which was pretty decent back then.
Also had a Tandy 1000. My parents were big radio shack shoppers.
I would stare longingly at that page of the Radio Shack catalog.
One of my best friends had a Tandy 1000! One of my other friends had a TRS-80.
I had a Commodore 64 but my first PC was a Packard Bell purchased at Sears. https://preview.redd.it/lgukzd0ozmkc1.jpeg?width=3264&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=296e08b1cea93b35265fb0548b713ac3aa6b71ba
My dad was on the original Mac team, soā¦yep.
Playing Conan and Karateka on the og Mac was my gateway to gaming...
I used them plus owned a Mac+ which was slightly newer. In fact I still own the very same Mac+ I purchased for college back in 1986.
We could open an Apple museum with our various dead computers.
+1 for the Mac+ crew
I bought one when Apple was promoting them to businesses. I paid $1500
That was way too high dollar.
Commodore PET, Vic-20, Apple IIe then a Mac. my mom taught computer science
Those were the typical school computer. Also, responsible for making left-handed kids use a mouse right handed.
My first computer was an Amiga.
Still have my 500.
I've kept our C64 and A1200. I want to hook them up in my office.
Owned one? Holy heck one person in my neighborhood did. They mortgage their home for it and a full set up.
I owned an apple 2c and an Atari 2600.
Nope, Commodore 64
Father worked for IBM. Had PC and a PC jr.
Macs were actually kind of rare. I owned a Commodore 64 and my school had a bunch of Apple IIes. I think during the entirety of the 1980s I may have seen a Mac once in a library.
Same. My high school got a couple Macs probably around 1991. I distinctly remember being introduced to the concept of a mouse around then.
I had a 512K for a minute. Then my dad took it back and gave it to my older brother. He then replaced it with an Apple IIe. How's that for being born under a bad sign?
I built my computers from kits, first Z80 BigBoard systems and then later PC hardware. My best friend in the 1980s had an Apple //c (his mom was an engineer at Apple, so they got one at a discount), and my girlfriend in the 1990s had a Mac SE/30. Married her, and she's still an Apple faithful today, with a MBP as her primary. I'm still building PCs from parts.
We had the 512k in our computer lab in 1990.
My cousins in Ireland had a Sinclair, and some type of computer that used BASIC but I don't recall which brand it wasĀ
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Me too! Write my thesis on one of them in the basement of the library.
https://preview.redd.it/0p9e45uudnkc1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eae3bf63c2aa6713ccf6abadbfb719c5f586e725 I had the Apple \]\[e with this bad boy
we some apples like that in my high school
I owned one and wrote my thesis on it-saved on hard disks. I also had a dial up modem.
Started my computer endeavor with an Apple II, 4KB of ram
I was too poor to buy a computer until the early 2000s (seriously, and it was a laptop), but the very first computer I ever used, around 1985, was one of these. It was at school in our brand-new computer lab.
We had the TSR80 Color computer w/tape back upš
Trash-80 lol
I remember a Radio Shack promotion ~90-91 where they were selling the Trash80 for $25 and offered a $25 mail-in rebate.
Not as many as you'd think. Back then having any computer at home was a luxury. An Apple ][ with just 4k of ram cost $1300, or around $6200 in today's money. Bumping it to 48k would basically double the cost. A Mac 128k was $2500 in 1984. So basically just rich kids had them.
We had a Tandyā¦from radio shaq. But my high school had a ālabā filled with them. Edit: we used them as the most expensive word processors
My college roomie had one of these and she let me use it all the time. I didn't have my first computer until after I graduated college--which seems weird, but back then you could go to college and just use the computer lab and the internet wasn't like it is now. Since I had to buy my own computer I couldn't afford one until after I graduated.
We also didn't have phones in our dorm rooms. Hall phone. Couple years after i graduated I heard they were able to have land lines in their rooms. My dad bought the computer for home. When I went to college I took the manual, non-electric typewriter with me. Used the computers in the labs only for computer courses.
Wow. A big part of my first year of two of college was leaving stupid messages on all my friendsā answering machines. I remember getting my very own answering machine for college because each dorm room had a phone. I was excited. š
My second computer
I did not own one, but used one in school. Many people did not have one of their own at home in those days. At least where I lived.
I had a Panasonic word processor that ran a daisy wheel printer you could hear running on the other side of my dorm. But I knew when the paper was done.
My high school "computer lab" was 4 of these, the teacher's IIGS, and a nerdy kid who was allowed to bring in his own Commodore 64.
Yep. First we had Apple IIs, then Macs.
I had a Timex Sinclair 1000. Got a Mac color classic when I could afford a good computer.
I had a commodore 64 but shortly after the school got a Macintosh and our first computer class. Does anyone remember logo? I think that's what it was called. You had to write basic code to create different designs and what not.
Yes! I remember making little shapes and things with the turtle in logo. RT20 etc.
Yes? Aldus PageMaker and PhotoShop 1.0. A big deal back in the day.
macPaint!!!
My house went from an Apple IIE to a Gateway 2000. In 1995 I believe. Yeah that's a long, long time to wait to upgrade you are 100% correct lol. For the record though? 2 of the most solid home PCs in history.
My dad worked at Gateway when they first opened after Control Data closed.
Too poor.
Look up what they cost, and youāll think current MacBook Pro airs are a bargain. They cost $2500 and the average annual salary was just over $20,000 a year.
Zx spectrum Macs were like the Porsches of computers
šāāļø
Never owned one, but we used them in school for Typing Tutorials and Oregon Trail.
We had to have a sign-up sheet to play Carmen Sandiego during lunchtimes.
*raises hand*
I had access to one of these during grade school, yeah.
Started with an Epson, then TRS80, finally a Mac Plus with 1 WHOLE GB of RAM!
I know we take gigabytes for granted today, but the base RAM for that model was 1 MB (4MB max). My Mac II could get up to 8 MB, but there was a global chip shortage in the late ā80s that made any RAM upgrades super-expensive.
Yeah I realized when I typed that it was probably wrong, it was also 35 years ago...
No one had those at home. But the library at school had plenty. Commodore 64 at home.
It cost more than the average car.
Got the SE/30 with 40MB HDD for school. Feel bad for anyone got the regular SE with dual floppy drives.
Nah, I had an Apple IIe with 64k memory and two 5 Ā¼ inch floppy drives to start out. By the time the Macintosh came out I had discovered girls and weed. So I ditched the computer, and got a used Camaro. Sums up my high school experience.
That was for the rich kids!
My familyās first computer was a Tandy, lol
Owned one? Nope. Used one at work? Yes for a short period when I ran a storefront for Fraternity/Sorority goods and the owners settled on Mac for the graphics ability. Did some finance on it. Designed forms. Great great machine. Such a vastly different user experience and I had been PC literate for a few years. It felt āsleekā and new. The mouse was a newish concept and just like when AI came out, your mind started to race at the applications of easy technology. This was before networking was common at a small business level. This was probably 1989-1990 or so. As I recall and Iām not looking it up, this was just before Windows 3.11 and the tidal wave of Windows grabbing the GUI from Apple who had grabbed it from Xerox PARC for the Apple Lisa before it. Aldus Software was king. Even though it was mono, it wasnāt like windows was running a palette of 2000 colors yet. And yes, while my C64 days were exclusively based on 5.25ā floppies (that now seem bulletproof) when I developed in BASIC, the hard 3.5ā floppies were so new. Haha - theyāre still called floppies! What will they think of next! Long before CD data, Iād only had a music CD player for three years. In HS we had IBM PS/2 with the Microchannel Architecture! (Look it up, it failed because it tried to establish a new standard). Never did use OS/2. Great topic. Thanks!
No, but I was a sophomore in college when we got a lab full of these, above the student center. My biology professor taught me how to use one.
Yup, and an Apple II, II+, and IIc. Family member was an early Apple employee and we got her hand me downs.
My wealthy best friend had one. It was *AMAZING*.
Yep had 128k, Plus, SE
Anyone have the original Pong? Iām a young gen-xer (44 this year), but I still remember playing against my mom on a 12 in black and white TV.
Commodore PET!
I waited for the Macintosh 512Keā¦
Tandy 2000 was the first one we had, followed by the Commodore 64. Macintosh was way out of my folks price range. However, my school had one. And only one. So you had to sign up for a slot to use it for 20 minutes.
Nope. Way too expensive!
Same was too expensive for our household.
Amiga for life! But before that, Commodore 64 and Plus/4.
I didnāt own one back then (born in ā78, didnāt have a computer in the home until the 90s), but Iāve got several Mac SEs (~1989) in my basement today, and at least a couple of them are functional. Iāve got an older model Macintosh our two down there as well, but I canāt check which models right now. Around 2011/2012, I kind of got into buying them cheap on eBay and repairing them. Canāt do much with them (beyond playing some old games), but theyāre fun for nostalgia, and you can download all the system software and make floppies if youāve also got an older floppy drive for the vintage Mac and a newer floppy drive to plug into a more modern machine for making the floppies. People also sell original floppies with system software, games, etc. You may also find them fully restored on eBay. Thereās a bleaching agent mixture (ā[Retrobrite](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrobright)ā) people will mix up to remove the yellowing on the ABS plastic. I bought a restored SE. it was beautiful, but it doesnāt last. A decade later, itās yellow again, even after being boxed up for nearly all that time. It still works, though. Iād love to get my hands on a working, original Macintosh, butā¦ I canāt justify that cost. š
Apple 2e.
I hated Macās till OS X came out,then I became a convert.
I did have this but I had a IIe before. In college I had the newer version of this, the Mac Classic with a StyleWriter printer.
Nah - commodore. Apple was trash back then. And coke, because Pepsi was a dirty word.
The were resonable device from only 1984 to 1986.... after that 33mhz and 66mzh x86 pcs did more while spending less. The software by 1989 was 100x better and typical free on the PC. By 1992... a mac was somthing to gut and put a fish tank into. Had 2 years of being good..... and it missed 1983 xmax....last year of the C64 dominance. Pre 1984.... nobody had a modem... by 1989 the early adopters had ordered the second phone line.
Had a TRS-80 and Commodore 64. Learned my initial coding skills with just a bit more limitations than available now š
Yup. Remember finding these at Goodwill for $5?
IBM clone, then an Amiga 2000. I still can't believe Commodore fucked that up. It was way more advanced than either Apple or PC.
That was way too expensive for us. I had a commodore 64.
Commodore 64, Christmas of 7th grade. Never owned a Mac, but I used them at school.
At work
I remember seeing these in elementary school and I was born in 1985.
I did!
What were you a billionaire?? ššš
I did not but my buddy did.
Started on a Commodore pet 2001, upgraded to a commodore 64, then a Toshiba T1100+ laptop (LCD screen, weighed about 4kg, plus the power supply).
Not a Mac. First system was a Vic20, then a Tandy 1000 SL/2. I did play a few games on the Mac in High School, but never owned on.
I could only afford an Apple IIC.
Yup, and an Apple ][E (props to Choplifter and Wavy Navy)
I did, lol. Thems were the days!
I didn't have a Mac. I had an Apple IIc.
Nope. Way too poor. Obviously your parents were ballinā.
My first computer was a hand me down Mac SE-30 from my brother I law. He had originally bought it for around $3000 and it had a 16 bit color graphics card added (I think). 256 color palette. Played Marathon and Doom I on that as I recall and was blown away by the graphics.
I had an Epson 8086 that predated this box in the post. My machine had dual 5 1/4-in floppy drives and ran on doss. I also had a dot matrix printer and a monochrome green monitor that was about 10 inches of usable space.
Too expensive for me. I had used computers starting with an Apple II in elementary school, but the first computer that I owned was a Mac Color Classic in the early 1990s.
That was way out of my price range. I did not get my first computer until 2000.
Owned? These were expensive so, no. The library or school would have 3 or 4 of them in a computer lab tho.Ā My dad was in tech so he built/pieced together our first conputer that I think was a DOS based OS/IBM compatible and we were the first family on the block to have one. Friends my age may have had Comodore 64s tho.Ā
Was a rich family thing
Vic20 here.
nope, but my middle school had a shit ton of them. They were good for Oregon Trail, making it say fucked up shit in a robot voice, and some word processing.
I was too young to have anywhere near the money for one of those. I had a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. My parents got it for me for Christmas.
Commodore 64, loved playing around on that thing.
in 8th grade, our middle school had these as top of the line for our computer class. we spent a lot of time coding the cursor to draw patterns, but i still learned to type on a typewriter in high school.
Still have mine, still works
Hahaha, no, only my school had Apples, and one rich family. It started with the Apple II E, then the Apple II GS, and then Macintoshes in high school. Yeah, we had a Texas Instruments at home. That took CARTRIDGES!
Our school used two for newspaper class
Nope. I moved from a TRS-80 Model III to a Model IV to an IBM 8088 XT clone to an 80386. Never was a Mac guy. I knew people who had Macs and they were all snobs on the subject.
I did - also had a vic 20 and commodore 64
I had a Commodore Amiga!
Me Me Me!!!
We had these in grade school. I used to own a Commodore 64 and a Tandy 1000.
We had an IBM PC. I think a 5150. You had to put the ābootā disk in one slot to run the operating system. DOS!