Mine was the Apple II Europlus. Bought it in 1979. Loved that thing.
The Leading Edge Model D. An 8088 from the late 80s that we got 3rd hand
It had 2 double density 5.25" floppy drives and 256K of RAM! If I let it warm up 10 minutes it could even run Print Maker Pro.
Used computers at school (BBC B), uni and work (beige PCs); and had video game consoles (Intellivision, NES, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Philips CD-i, etc) but didn’t my own first home computer until relatively late, bought in 2000.
A Dell Inspiron 7500 “desktop-replacement” laptop, with:
- 15-inch 1400x1050 screen (shit hot back then, still higher resolution than many laptops today),
- 6GB HDD
- Intel Mobile Pentium CPU (can’t remember exact specs)
- 128MB RAM (a significantly expensive extra back then)
- ATI Rage Mobility M graphics
- Windows 98 SE (I tried out BeOS R5 PE on it, so much more stable but the only available graphics driver could only give 800x640)
And I’ve been cleaning out my mum’s shoddily built shed and just found it in this sorry state!
The hinge was always super stiff, and after 4-5 years snapped. I kept it alive for a while by rigging up some brackets to hold the screen. Eventually I put it away, and after a few moves it ended up stored at my mum’s. Now wIth a fair bit of opossum crap on and around it, and rainwater from the leaky shed roof.
I wonder if there are still any episodes of The Sopranos downloaded from Dalnet IRC on it.
Very close! Mine was the Apple II plus. I remember using that before I could read. I memorized how to spell catalog which did a directory listing. I eventually learned some Apple basic on it as well.
Gateway 2000 with Windows 95. I do not know which specific configuration (I was too young). I do remember the games I had though: Tyrian 2000, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, C&C, HoM3, I-war, Flight Simulator 95, LBA 2 and Jersey Devil. Half of them were copies I got from a neighbour that owned a cd-r.
Commodore 64.
Timex TC2068. It’s a Portuguese revision of the Timex TS2068 which is itself a bad ZX Spectrum clone.
An Atari 800XL. Custom OS loaded into a BASIC interpreter at startup unless you put a bootable floppy in the external 5.25" drive. We would load up DOS on the external drive and then boot whatever games my dad had pirated from his buddies. Played bootleg Ultima IV, Castle Wolfenstein (the original original one, not the 3D one) and a bunch of others. We had two cartridges (Pengo and Galaxian), but we also had 100s of games in a big shoe box of floppies.
I also learned BASIC on it at a pretty young age, which helped push me into technology as a career path, though I had to unlearn a lot of that when I got to high school and took real programming courses.
It was some packard bell PC with windows xp, and a 1.9 GHz pentium 4
Computer - Commodore 64
Mainstream - Macintosh Performa 450
Windows - Packard Bell piece of shit
Coleco Adam
Oh no. My parents had intended to get an Adam but went with an Amiga. We did have a coleco vision though.
Close call. You lucked out with the Amiga.
I think my dad was pretty up on stuff at the time and saw all the issues the Adam was having. That and Andy Warhol/Lou Reed Amiga ads.
Acorn Electron.
Commodore 64
My brothers had an Amiga 500 that I was glued to. But I have vauge memories playing games on the Spectrum ZX
Our family had a 286 PC-compatible running Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS, built by someone at my dad’s job; I think he built and sold computers as a side gig. Looking back I strongly suspect all the software he included was not paid-for, or he bought it once and kept reinstalling it.
