Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Your first computer?

my first one was a Macintosh SE...i have no clue what the specs are...its still sitting in my basement though and works great. has 2 hard drives and a black and white screen! haha. my best memory is playing dark castle and oregon trail on it, back in the day...ah...memories...still using a mac. a PC has never entered this house. and i dont think it ever will

1st computer: TI 99/4a 1983. 16 bit processor, 16 bit video co-processor. It has speech module, 300 Baud external modem (Fast ) Had a huge expansion box. Dual steel walls. Had 16k ram built in, 32k expansion ram, 16k Basic rom, 32k Extended basic rom. 1 Single sided floppy 5 1/4, 90K ) which I later expanded to 2 Double sided, double density 360k floppies.

I still have it, it still works. I have forgotten how to use it for the most part as it is completely command line driven.

I used it for College (Mech. Engineering) and did most of my math and engineering homework with it as well as word processing etc.

The Ex. Basic was similar to Fortran (Had Global and local variables, you could declare variables) except for line #'s needed. I could write all my fortran programs on it, debug them, then print the program out and enter it on the mainframe in school just minus line #'s. We had terminals, but they were always busy so I used the punch card machine.

It is/was a great machine. Much more accurate (needed for Engineering and math) then the Commodores, Ataris and Apples as the processor was 16bit and used 32 bit words for math. Much fewer rounding errors which was important when working with large matrices.

Whew, brain cells lit up on that memory.

Timex TC-2000. My parents bought it at a yard sale in 1984. It didn't have a hard drive, but used regular 4-track audio tapes to run programs and store files and games. I had Frogger, a Flight Sim, a calculator, and a word processor for programs.

Here are some more vital stats:
3.5 MHz, 8 bit processor
16 KB ROM
16 KB RAM
Keyboard
Tape I/O
TV I/O
Expansion port (Memory up to 128 KB OR a printer that looked like a miniature fax machine)

WHAT A MONSTER!!!




FWIW...I still have my first (Mac Classic), second (Mac Performa 636), third (233MHz iMac), and current (Compaq Presario 2130 Notebook) real computers. I gotta get rid of these things... I still use the Classic as a fish tank or clock when people come over. Or to play RISK! And the iMac is currently my recipe book, running only OS9 and Williams Sonoma Cooking on CDROM.

Hmm... No one else had a Commadore 64? My parents still remind me that when they bought it, the salesman said, "The C64S is all you'll ever need." Bwhahahaha....


--JamesT

LOL, you guys must be pretty old. The oldest computer that I had was a Pentium 200 mhz. Can't remember the specs but it's still alive somewhere in storage