Question of the Week: the first computer
Our Question of the Week is inspired by the fact that I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks setting up my new computer and getting it configured properly.
So the question: what is the first computer you ever used? No wrong answers, obviously.
For myself, it would be a Commodore VIC20. It had 20 kilobytes of RAM, and the Word file for the rough draft of GHOST IN THE VEILS is 355 kilobytes in size. So to load GHOST IN THE VEILS in Microsoft Word format, I would need about eighteen different Commodore VIC20 computers. That’s like one computer per chapter and a half. 🙂
-JM
My first personal computer was an Atari 1040 ST with 1 MByte of RAM. I participated in the “religious war” with the Amiga 500 users, which one is better 🙂 and looked down on the MS-DOS PCs, who only had 640 KByte of RAM. :-))
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair. It had 2k of RAM, and I forked out $50 for the 16k RAM extender module. The manual that comes with it says ‘you will never need this much memory’. I used a cassette tape recorder/player to record and load programs, it ran at 300 baud.
I never did manage to make it useful, but still have it somewhere.
In 1994 I purchased a 486 DX 2 8MB of RAM for use in school. I believe the HD was about 250 MB. The monitor weighted a ton. I wrote a bunch of machine code and play Wolf 3d like crazy.
In 1993 it was a 386 with 4MB RAM with Windows 3.1. I played a lot of Prince of Persia and got bad grades at school. Then the computer was locked up. In my educational defense, I did do some Pascal Programming.
TRS80 and Apple 2 were the first I worked on and learned to program. The first In owner was a laptop about the size and weight of a paving stone and ran Windows 3.11 and cost $800. It was a real bargain!
So, the first computer I ever used was my neighbors Vic20. We used to play some text adventure game. The first one I owned was an IBM PS2, with 2MB of RAM and a 128 MB hard drive that I bought with money from my summer job.