C64 was the first family one, my own first was a ZX Spectrum.

BBC Micro costing £400 around 1981 / 1982.. + tape recorder.. bought for my 3 children..

Atari 1040 ST with add on speech pack that used to sound like Steven Hawking.

BBC Micro then a BBC Master with dual external floppy drive.

 

I also had a machine called the 'Oric 1' - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oric#Oric-1

 

Then the Amiga 500, 500+ <<--- amazing in its day

I remember having a ZX-81 then an Amstrad 6128.  I also remeber getting a 386 PC and doubling the memory on it probably from 2MB to 4MB (or possibly 1 to 2) because the company I worked for got hit by thieves who stole all the memory out the machines but managed to drop the envelope they put it in so the company sold it off cheaply.  I think that was around 1995?

Are you sure, a friend had an MZ-80, and I am sure it came with a green screen.

 

 

 

Yep - the MZ-80K had a B&W screen but a later version, the MZ-80A had a green screen...   I remember ordering the colour film from an advert in PC World magazine (got a few games that way as well...   Not sure what happened to it but I'm guessing it was sold on / dumped

ZX-81 as a 'home build' kit in either 1981 or 1982.

 

My dad built it into a fancy wooden box with shaped red acrylic cover with a (at the time) proper keyboard. It looked like a modern version of a typewriter which was really cool.

 

My brother and I spent many an evening entering 'code' from magazines only to find the game didn't work due to one of us having typed one character incorrectly at some point.

 

First 'work' computer was a BBC 'B' at college in 1990. The college had three of these in one room...

 

Mine was a Vic20 max 3.5k  with 8 colours and cassette tape, was a great little thing, I even started to learn basic programming on it, and you could get quite a few games for it, although very basic

 

If I remember right it cost me £139 at the time

 

 

What was yours? if you can remember  :think:

 

 

Snap - bought after not being able to find anything else  - sold and bought a Dragon 32 (which died) and finally got a BBC B  (played Elite a bit on this) then a Atari 520 STE. (played Elite a bit on this)

 

Edit:  Then several PCs (Played Elite a bit on this) upgraded it to Frontier and upgraded again to First Encounters , Bought 2nd hand Acorn A7000 ( to play Elite  on .

First cartridge gamer I had was an Atari 2600 Age 6-7

 

computer wise I too started with a Vic 20 but I must have been posh because I had a 20mb external Hard drive. I remember having a text based game for it which was a bit murder mystery and it was a bit like dos, you had to type things like "walk over to door" "open door" & "look inside" etc. I Also remember getting a PC magazine which had several pages of code that you had to type into the prompt and when you ran the program (after several hours of typing) it would display a whirling graphic a bit like the old windows screen saver.

(If you were lucky otherwise you would just get a syntax error).

 

After that it was:

 

Comodore 64

Atari ST520 FM

Sega Master system

Sega Mega Drive

Nintendo Snes

Nintendo 64

Gameboy

Dreamcast

Playstation1

PlayStation2

Xbox

PlayStation3

Playstation4

Raspberry Pi 2

 

and several Gaming PC's that I built during that time.

Home computers -

 

Acorn Electron + expansion

Spectrum 128 +2A (inc light gun and Operation Wolf :clap: )

Amiga 500 (added ram pack later)

 

PCs -

 

PC Pentium 1 200Mhz MMX (from Simply Computers)

Dell Pentium 3 700Mhz (128Mb Ram)

Home built AMD Athlon 2500+

Home built Intel i3

 

Laptops -

 

Dell 486 laptop running Win3.1

HP laptop AMD Turion 64 (now running Mint Linux with an SSD)

Dell laptop Intel i5

 

Handhelds -

 

Psion 5

HP Jornada 520

Nexus 7 2012

HP Linx 7

Amazon Fire 7 HD

 

Various smartphones and consoles.

Wow some great Computers..

 

I moved on to these...

 

Comodore 64

Comodore 128

amiga 500

HP Pavilion

dell

acer aspire

now I have build my own

 

This is what I put in it..

 

GIGABYTE GA-78LMT-USB3 AMD 760G (Socket AM3+) Micro-ATX Motherboard

AMD (Piledriver) FX-6300 3.50GHz (4.10GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 6-Core Processor

Dominator Midi Tower Gaming Case

EVGA 500W 80 Plus Power Supply

8GB Mushkin Enhanced BlackLine Frostbyte(2x4GB) 1600mhz

 

I already had the ATI Radeon HD 4650, 160gb Intel ssd, 2x 1tb hhd, Optical drive.

 

 

Commodore 64

Atari 520 STFM

pc that I can't remember in too much detail - think it was 486 based IIRC

Various other PCs

 

Oh yes, i found an acorn archimedes a3000 stuck in the bottom of the cupboard too, that still works as well.

Those things were beasts - remember how quick they were in comparison to everything around at the time. Considering the other machines the school had at the time were BBC B's and Apple Macs, the Archimedes was in a different league.

IBM 386 was mine. First time I ever did an upgrade was fitting a Sound Blaster 4x CD drive to that, I was 11....

Amstrad CPC464 with a colour screen and built in cassette. It had a half decent word processor and , I recall, some sort of music program.. I let my then 3 year old have play with the music program, and when me and swmbo played back what he'd done, we thought we had a musical prodigy.  Sadly, we later discovered what was recorded was quite a few random notes which blended seamlessly into one of the demonstation tunes.  27 years later, he still can't play a note, but he does have an awesome Alienware gaming machine.

 

Mine was a Vic20 max 3.5k  with 8 colours and cassette tape, was a great little thing, I even started to learn basic programming on it, and you could get quite a few games for it, although very basic

 

If I remember right it cost me £139 at the time

 

 

What was yours? if you can remember  :think:

 

 

You got a bargin!

 

Mine cost £179.99 + another £39.99 for the bespoke tape recorder

 

What a great machine!

Think mine was an Atari something or other. Floppy discs and all that!

Wanted a BBC model B but my first one turned out to fe a ZX Spectrum, oh the fun of losing manic miner off a cassette, get all the way through loading and it would fail, so have to reload again, from test to an Amstrad running lotus spreadsheet programme....

Still got the ZX in the loft

Currently running an Alienware Aurora R4

Edited 30 April, 201511 yr by Warkman

ZX Spectrum but it failed when first switched on, as did those some colleagues bought at the same time. My first working PC was a BBC Model B.

Yep - the MZ-80K had a B&W screen but a later version, the MZ-80A had a green screen...   I remember ordering the colour film from an advert in PC World magazine (got a few games that way as well...   Not sure what happened to it but I'm guessing it was sold on / dumped

 

 

AH, that explains why I thought the model number ended in an "a" not a "k".

 

 

As for everyone reminiscing about the ZX81, you all realise it was just an upgrade to the original Sinclair ZX80 (they basically doubled the RAM from 512 bytes to 1024 bytes).

 

I have fond memories of the BBC "B", although I never owned one; a steel armoured version was used to control the casting station at Cosworth Engineering in Worcester for many years. yep, all those Cossie engine blocks in fast Fords, Mercs, Rollers,  and F1 cars were made using a BBC "B".

Amiga 500 Batman edition - which I still have.

Console - Atari 2600 Woody

PC - C64 circa '83 , upgraded later with a floppy from external tape deck.

 

First modern era PC - 1996 ( it still runs )

Think mine was an Atari something or other. Floppy discs and all that!

Floppy discs? You posh bugger! We had to put up with tapes. 12 minutes to cload a game, if it worked the first time.

Learned FORTRAN on an ICL 1900 at college, then RPG on an IBM 360 (Liverpool Dock Board) then got to play with a very early Commodore PET (4k RAM, tape, chiclet keyboard, 40 character display) and got hooked. Best mate got a job servicing these machines so we got to play together on all sorts of stuff - PET expansions (remember CompuThink?), bigger PETs, Tandy TRS-80 then Apple ][, a whole slew of consoles etc. I then got a job at the same place as a "systems specialist" - no, I didn't know what it meant either but the boss thought it sounded good

That increased my exposure to a wider range of current kit, primarily business oriented, but also covering the likes of the Spectrum - because I could write programs.

I developed rapidly into what is now known as a Business Analyst because I had this kit and everyone wanted to put it to work but no-one knew how. Fascinating times.

Anyone remember Microdigital in Liverpool? Brucie has always been an ar$e but he did have an eye for business.

Regards, Mike

Floppy discs? You posh bugger! We had to put up with tapes. 12 minutes to cload a game, if it worked the first time.

Ahhhhhh. I remember 'the tapes'too....but not on the atari as that was my "serious 'puter". It was a long time ago, probably late 70's? When as you rightly say games took an age to load up, if at all - especially ones copied from your mate! Xbox 360...they don't know the half of it!

The mighty Commodore64 and it's 64k ram was my first computer at home, kind of hard to explain to younger folk now how amazing that was at the time.  I particularly liked the fact that each weekend my brother and I would go to the local computer shop and look through the games and choose one based on the the blurb on the back, many of them would be rubbish but then we'd be back next week and there were always gems to find.  

 

After that it was an Amiga 500+ then the first Windows PC, a Cyrix PR133+ powered system with 850MB hard drive, 8MB of ram, 8x CD-rom drive (remember when cd-rom drive speed was a big thing?!) and a 15in 800x600 display.

 

From one point of view you could say kids are lucky these days having pretty incredible technology at their fingers, even as someone who works in technology I still find it pretty amazing what I can do with a mobile phone now in terms of being able to watch pretty much any TV program or film almost anywhere at very high quality when I think back to how excited I was when we got our first video player...we could play back TV programs whenever we wanted!  On the other hand I think it makes it hard for kids to understand technology because they haven't seen the progression and they don't understand the basics, there are amusing 'kids react' videos where they give old technology to teenagers and younger to see what they think and they of course mostly rubbish it.  However on one video where they were showing them 56K modems and what the internet was like in the late 90's, they turned it on its head a bit and asked the kids how did they use the internet?  They all replied they just opened a browser on their tablet or PC, when they were pushed about what was a router or DSL modem they didn't have a clue. 

 

John