IBM 1130

Punchcards

FORTRAN

Tandy 102.  I still have it and it still works.

Commodore VIC20. Was borrowed from a friend of my parents. My parents bought a Commodore 64 not long after.

TRS80

Atari 800.

My dad was an entertainment industry analyst for an investment bank in the 70's and 80's.  Which was kind of cool, because we got to go to some neat movie premiers and we got the VIP treatment at Disneyland.  When video games started taking off, he started covering Atari.   In 79 or 80, they set us up with the full Atari 800 system - including the modem that you used with a telephone handset (like in Wargames) and a tape recorder drive (that looked exactly like a tape recorder).  They even came to our house to take pictures of us for a magazine, with all of us pretending to be fascinated by the computer.

I was only like 7 or 8 at the time, but none of us really got into it.  My dad spent a bunch of hours tediously typing in programs from a book that would do something stupid and then disappear when the computer shut off.  I suspect he may be part of the reason that we're not all using Atari computers today.

The one cool thing it did, was it played the game Star Raiders, which was a kick ass 8 bit first person space flying sim. We played the shit out of that.  My dad said that at the Atari office, they had a special Star Raiders set up with Recaro seats and a 400 watt sound system (so you could be blown away by 120 dBs of 8 bit sound effects).

The next computer we got was an early PC that didn't even have a hard drive. It had two floppy drives.  You'd load one disk with the operating system and the other with the program you wanted to use.  It had some really complicated procedure to juggle disks in and out if you wanted to save something and one wrong move and you were screwed.

Unrelated side story: My dad's 15 minutes of fame was when he was the first person in the world to announce that TRON sucked.  Disney decided to invite a bunch of stock analysts to a special showing a few hours before movie critics got to see it.  They had been hyping TRON as something that was going to be bigger than Star Wars and Close Encounters combined and Disney stock had been going nuts.  My dad watched it, left the theater and sent out a report that said that it was ok, but kinda stupid, and had no chance in hell of beating Star Wars or Close Encounters.  Disney stock dropped $2 and they halted trading.  Roger Ebert accused my dad of stock manipulation.  He got his picture in Time Magazine for it.  Funny story.

Whatever the school had around 1984 or so.  Wanna say it was called an Apple 2 or something like that.

First one I remember using..

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Ditto

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First computer Atari 800 and worked my way to 800 xl and then 65xe. Ran a BBS with the Atari for a number of years before finally switching to a MS-DOS XT machine that I had built which I also ran a BBS with.

First computer used in school was a TRS-80 and an Apple II.

Commodore PET or TRS-80 Model III

Yep. Our high school had one of these:

Digital PDP-11/35

http://www.threedee.com/jcm/terak/index.html

It was basically the moral equivalent of a PDP-11/03.  

Commodore Vic 20

This was my first also.

This was the second computer I used:

Radio shack trs80, at least I think that’s what it was called.

Specifically no, but it would have been an Apple IIGS in elementary school.

Would have been one of Apples first machines. Tiny monitor with black screen with green text/animations. The first laptop I ever laid eyes upon was about two inches thick.

I think dad got some kind of US TECH maybe? Then Emachines lmao

TRaSh-80

On another note, I remember when Dad built his first 386 in about 87 or 88, and it heated the entire upstairs 3 bedrooms 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house.

Used the TRS-80 in school first and my first computer that I owned was a Texas instruments TI-99

Yeah, they looked like this:

Bingo.  Surprised it took second page.

Best as I can remember...

Apple 2e or something like that in grade school.

Spent most of my early working life as a BioMed Engineer in medical imaging. Was involved in a design, prototyping and testing of probably the first medical X-Ray control panel that used an Intel 8080A to replace about 300 pounds of copper wire and relays. I bought an Altair kit serial #110 in March 1976. Soldered it together and acquired a used ASR-28 as a terminal. Learned Octal front switch panel programing. Built some memory card kits. 4K BASIC paper tape from that dropout college kid. 8K and 12K followed.  Altair Disk Extended BASIC followed with two Altair 8" disk drive kits.

X-Ray control panel was killed by the company because the service force was still in the jumper wires and analog volt meter. Only about 5 of us in the whole US service force could have supported and serviced it.

My Altair resided in a  spare bedroom and all 4 daughters grew up with a computer in the house. I jumped to computer support in 1983 only retiring in 2002. As our family has owned a hobby shop since 1967 the computer quickly became a part of it with a very simple Point of Sale system written in disk extended BASIC.

Since then we jumped to TRS-80 Mod 3 and 4/4p with a Corvus 5 MB hard drive and 8 user multiplex box. later to XT clones and in 1990 Novel Netware arrived at our hobby shop. Today our Point of Sale code still contains many parts of that Altair code now developing and coding with PowerBASIC.

The 1976 Altair #110 still runs but the serial terminal is an 8 core Ryzan

A Sinclair ZX81 that my dad and his avionics tech helped me build.

And by helped, they fixed ALL of my errors that I made inserting the components in to the PCB. And my soldering bridges.

Lord, I miss them.

Tandy Sensation..... I remember dad working alot of OT to get this stupid computer with a cd rom....

First computer I used...1974-1975 my algebra teacher required all of us to log some time in the math lab on some sort of hot, noisy, room sized contraption doing simple calculations/flow charts but nobody could get much time on it because the math nerds had all of the time reserved so they could print out those weird number portrait things.  This was the age of slide rules and the dawn of pocket calculators which were both extremely expensive and prohibited in class.

I worked for Atari in 1977-78 but was out of there before they offered their computer.  Think Pong and the first console, then later the coin-op division.  lol

First home PC was a HP Pavilion with Windows 95 in 1995.

Burroughs mainframe, model B6700.  Through a punch card reader.

Some Apple from the mid-late 80's. It had a turtle that you drew with. "Pen up", "pen down" and "hide turtle" were some of the commands.

CDC 6500 mainframe
Tektronix 4014 graphics workstation
Hewlett-Packard 9820A

In that order.

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IBM Mainframe Ft. Lewis Washington, 1985 the last year in I was reassigned to the Battalion Support on Main Fort.
Prior to that I was on N. Fort doing Air Defense Artillery with 1/67th. Boy, brings back memories.  I bought a TRS-80 too.
They were in two semi trailers, only went to the field one time and it took a year to get the bugs out.

Same, except IBM 1105

Big step up was when I could use the fancy punch card machine that didn't actually punch the card until you hit return.

My dad bought this when I was 5. I became a master of MS Paint on this machine.

First?  Might have been around 77, a KIM-1.  Moved up to an IMSAI.  Was really good at toggling in the bootloader, like idiot savant good.

Scored a PDP-11 somewhere in the early 80's.  (From MIT no less, I jsut had to move it out).  Spent a lot of time on the hardware, traded it a few years later for a 3B2/310.

Sold the 3B and bought a C64 and did an assload of programming on that (I helped program the Versa Series from Computronics way back when.)

A slew of ibm and clone machines, an Amiga and once Macs came out, I was all over them.  Running a monster Mac Pro right now (Trash can version) and love it.

Edited to add, I remember an Old IBM Mainframe I had that had an APL keyboard.  I think I might have used it for a month before it got stuck in the garage, I just could not wrap my head around APL.  LOL, Weirdest keyboard I have ever seen on a computer.

TRS-80 model 1.  With a cassette for storing BASIC programs.  Stayed after school almost every day to use it.

Unknown mainframe at University of Texas computer lab in 1977.  Fun punching those 2000 count deck of cards for input by high-speed card reader and then waiting for a LONG time to get the results of my program.  First job involved an IBM system 36 and then adding the first microcomputers by IBM with 5.25" diskettes.  If I remember correctly, Excel had a number of disks to load as you used various functions.  Then, we finally got an IBM microcomputer with a HARD DISK!!!  5MB.  To save money, we started buying gray market IBMs from Dell (initially working out of his dorm room?).  CompuAdd computers from here in Austin came next.  We even had those Compaq portable computers with about a five inch CRT screen in a suitcase-sized format.  This was it:  

Ah, the good old days!  DOS 1.0

I was a new accountant at the time and it was tough to get the old dogs away from the green columnar pads into microcomputers (a.k.a. PCs)

ZX81. RAM pack wobble and wipe out FTW !

I believe the first one I used was a Radio shack TRS80?  I remember my dad had a few games to play on it.  Think after that it was an Apple 2+ I got to play on and do some basic programming when I was a kid.

Ti 99-4a in late 81, early 82, can't remember specifically when we got it but it was around then.  Had a floppy drive with extra RAM and that case was about as big as a small PC now.  I think it only added 1 meg of ram.

Apple IIe at school.

At around the same time, my dad bought an Apple IIgs

PCs all the way until ‘09 when I switched to a MacBook.

Tandy TRS80.

Some Apple thing in elementary school with stand-alone 5.5" floppy drives and a menu interface.  No mouse.  We played Number Munchers on them.