When did you get your first computer?

"Early eighties" ... I'm thinkin'. I know it was run by MSDOS.

I can top that! 


~

I believe it was around 1995.

When I turned 10 (in December 2001), my dad bought me a used Toshiba laptop. That was my first computer. Before that I had used my dad's Windows 98 Compaq. 

Around 1980. It was a Godbout S100 frame with 256-k of static RAM. Had a pair of double-sided 8-inch floppy disk drives. Had dual processors. Ran the M/PM-86 operating system that loaded from disk A (still have the disks around somewhere.) Ran a spreadsheet program called Supercalc.

About a year or so later I bought one of the first IMB personal computers. That had 16-k of dynamic RAM on the motherboard which I "upgraded" to the full 64-k (and later I meticulously removed the ones soldered-in bank of 16-k chips and replaced them and the other three socketed banks of memory chips with 64-k chips thus expanding it to the full 256-k of memory). Added a 3-1/2" floppy disk controller with serial interface and a pair of full-height floppy drives; didn't much like that cassette interface for program and data storage. 

And one "dedicated" computer at work, a Data General NOVA 1. I mention it because of one unusual thing about it. It had mag-core memory. No UPS needed to back it up. If it lost power it would pick up from where it stopped when power was restored.

1983 IBM Personal Computer my grandmother bought me. I was the bomb. It had a four megabyte floppy hard drive and came with a monitor and everything. I get excited just thinking about it. The keyboard was all shiny and it had a little DOS manual that came with it. I didnt know how to use it, but it sure looked nice in my front room. I put  a plant on top of the monitor with a little purple doily under it that matched our couch. It was cool beens. ;+
      
                                                                                                   This post was edited by carbonproduct at August 6, 2017 5:38 PM MDT

from a thrift store

An Amstrad PCW9512, in about 1990.

Though primarily a word-processor as the initials indicate, and connected to a dairy-wheel printer, it came with two separate 3" (not 3.5") floppy-discs. One held the WP programme itself - and you needed blank ones to hold your files - the other had a collection of various utilities including the compilers for the BASIC and DR 'LOGO' languages. 

I bought one right away so kids could stay on top of things.  It was a box with nothing in it basically.  DOS............headaches galore.  Finally, Windows came out and things got easier.   AOL dial up was so modern and cool.  If an update was 1MB I could cook dinner while it was downloading.  Oh my goodnes..............good times indeed!!!

Way before that and before kids we had a Commadore computer that we somehow hooked up to the TV and could play table tennis.  My husband and brother in law spent the night at J.C.Penneys (I believe it was) to get one for $50 on a black Friday.  I don't even think it was called Black Friday back then.   This post was edited by Thriftymaid at August 6, 2017 7:16 PM MDT