Our first family computer was a Tandy/Radio Shack color computer 3. It ran with a tape deck and an old B&W TV for the monitor. My dad must have been somewhat of a contrarian because we also had the much less popular Intelivision for our first gaming system.
First computer tales
- Thread starter qwerty
- Start date
My first PC was a custom built 8088 with an upgrade to the amber monochrome screen.
The first PC I remember we had at home was a 386 PC with a dot matrix printer then in high school we got a 486 and eventually upgraded it to have a modem for dialup internet in the mid 1990's. We had AOL and funny enough my parents still use their original AOL email addresses today for some reason because "I don't want to go through having everyone update their contacts if I change it." The 386 was still MS-DOS OS where you had to type a command to launch a game from a floppy disk. Eventually got Windows 3.1 with the 486 PC which was a game changer. Played games like Space Quest 3, A-10 Warthog, Sim City and Sim Farm, Tetris, some NCAA Basketball game that you could edit the rosters so my brother and I would take a sports almanac and plug in stats from NBA teams and create NBA rosters and the game was smart enough to make some player skill rankings based off those stats but we could still manually make the values whatever we wanted to. I think I still have some of these games in box stored in my basement that maybe one day I will get out and see if I can get them to work with Windows today.
My first actual PC purchase of my own was in college. I bought a Compaq Presario with Windows 98 that I think was Pentium 3 or 4 processor with a 20" CRT monitor for like $1600 from Best Buy. Thought it was a pretty top end PC at the time but eventually when I went to add upgrades found it did not like things like video cards that you did not buy from Compaq. Eventually upgraded it to Windows 2000 with a discount purchase through ISU and that OS was not much better for blue screen of death errors than Windows 98 was. Replaced that PC with a Dell that had Windows XP in 2002 and I still actually have that PC in my basement storage for some reason so maybe some day I will get bored and boot it up just to play around with again.
I do IT support for a living, mostly desktop hardware and software support so have tons of stories about PC hardware and operating systems I have worked with over my career that I liked or hated. I've worked with nearly every Windows OS either on a personal PC or in a enterprise environment. The 2 I probably dealt with the the least were ME and Vista and both were huge failures for Microsoft IMO and luckily were short lived too. Windows 8 is probably up there with them too although I never had much of an issue with 8 on my personal PC like some did, was just as stable if not more stable than 7 was and was kind of a bridge to what they were eventually moving to with Windows 10. Windows 10 IMO has been the best OS Microsoft has released and it was supposed to be the last OS too as they were going to follow the Apple model of making incremental build changes to that OS then eventually decided they needed to release Windows 11. 11 has been a good OS too but typical Microsoft they had to go and mess up something that was not broke by tweaking the look and feel of the Start Menu in Windows 11. That's really my only big pet peeve with the noticeable change between 10 and 11. The 1 big plus between 10 and 11 is the bootup time from power on to login is just a few seconds.
My first actual PC purchase of my own was in college. I bought a Compaq Presario with Windows 98 that I think was Pentium 3 or 4 processor with a 20" CRT monitor for like $1600 from Best Buy. Thought it was a pretty top end PC at the time but eventually when I went to add upgrades found it did not like things like video cards that you did not buy from Compaq. Eventually upgraded it to Windows 2000 with a discount purchase through ISU and that OS was not much better for blue screen of death errors than Windows 98 was. Replaced that PC with a Dell that had Windows XP in 2002 and I still actually have that PC in my basement storage for some reason so maybe some day I will get bored and boot it up just to play around with again.
I do IT support for a living, mostly desktop hardware and software support so have tons of stories about PC hardware and operating systems I have worked with over my career that I liked or hated. I've worked with nearly every Windows OS either on a personal PC or in a enterprise environment. The 2 I probably dealt with the the least were ME and Vista and both were huge failures for Microsoft IMO and luckily were short lived too. Windows 8 is probably up there with them too although I never had much of an issue with 8 on my personal PC like some did, was just as stable if not more stable than 7 was and was kind of a bridge to what they were eventually moving to with Windows 10. Windows 10 IMO has been the best OS Microsoft has released and it was supposed to be the last OS too as they were going to follow the Apple model of making incremental build changes to that OS then eventually decided they needed to release Windows 11. 11 has been a good OS too but typical Microsoft they had to go and mess up something that was not broke by tweaking the look and feel of the Start Menu in Windows 11. That's really my only big pet peeve with the noticeable change between 10 and 11. The 1 big plus between 10 and 11 is the bootup time from power on to login is just a few seconds.
One other thing to add on this thread, the past 2 summers I have taken my family on a walk around the ISU campus and apparently ISU has been loaning out the replica of the Atanasoff-Berry computer as both times we have walked through the Durham Center we have been greeted with a sign that it is on loan somewhere. Is it normally on display during the school year still? Used to walk by it all the time when I had classes in that building. One of these days would love to show my kids this and show how our cell phones today have way more computing power than the 1st PC did.
My first computer was a Tandy/RadioShack brand back in the late 80s. I remember trying to organize all my baseball cards into whatever archaic spreadsheet program they had at the time.
Played Lunar Module landing on the moon, paper punch tape memory medium, in high school.
Punched cards at the Comp Sci center at ISU.
In 1985 was issued a laptop by the state for my auditing duties. IT gearheads everywhere I went wanted to see my portable computer. It weighed 13 lbs. 8" orange screen and the all were mesmerized.
Punched cards at the Comp Sci center at ISU.
In 1985 was issued a laptop by the state for my auditing duties. IT gearheads everywhere I went wanted to see my portable computer. It weighed 13 lbs. 8" orange screen and the all were mesmerized.
Was just talking with a coworker this week and he mentioned the days Gateway had stores that at the time were kind of like the Apple stores we have today. Their product was crap but you could at least get support in person at their stores if you needed.
My buddy Maury would come back from his computer class with a stack of cards 2”x 6”, something like that. I wanted no part of that. From the late 1970’s,
ISU.
ISU.
My dad took that class and said you'd every so often see some poor soul who'd drop his box of cards and just scream in agony
This was my baby and I loved it, I purchased it used from an ISU student that was raising money to pay his fines to avoid going to jail:
ibmfiles.com
www.ibmfiles.com
As a teenager in the 70's, I was responsible for walking around the building of a major urban high school for the last few periods of the day to collect the punch-cards for students who were absent, giving them to the crochety old lady who ran them through the machine reader, and then returning the cards to the proper bin for each teacher. I'm not sure we even called it a computer.
KidSilverhair
Well-Known Member
Our first computer was a Macintosh Performa. Bought it in October 1995 (I remember that because we got it at Best Buy and it was in our van when I took the family out to the Cedar Rapids airport to see Air Force One and the plane carrying the Czech president when they were both here to dedicate the National Czech & Slovak Museum).
We used the heck out of that computer. My kids had a CD-ROM of Toy Story-based games that was a lot of fun. And our old dial-up modem screeching and beeping away, that would get bumped offline if somebody picked up the phone … good times.
(I had been a Mac fan for a while before that, seeing them in school settings as well as being used for designing ads at the newspaper I worked at. Although I haven’t owned another Mac since that Performa, as Windows machines have proved to be much more affordable. I love my iPad, though.)
We used the heck out of that computer. My kids had a CD-ROM of Toy Story-based games that was a lot of fun. And our old dial-up modem screeching and beeping away, that would get bumped offline if somebody picked up the phone … good times.
(I had been a Mac fan for a while before that, seeing them in school settings as well as being used for designing ads at the newspaper I worked at. Although I haven’t owned another Mac since that Performa, as Windows machines have proved to be much more affordable. I love my iPad, though.)
Lunar lander game... theres a memory. But before the video version, there was a text based, turn based one!
Anyone remember that?
Or this gem:
Hell, the first generation Iphone (128MB) had over 100 times the computing power of the space shuttle (1MB).
I used to occasionally steal my brother's TI-30 calculator so I could play the LEM lunar landing game on it. Let's just say I was no Neil Armstrong...
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