Stop it, you’re making me drool! I remember lusting over the Coupé brochure after the Sinclair Loki was revealed to be complete vapourware. I’ve still never seen a Coupé in the flesh.
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WHEN I WERE A KID, BACK IN THE DAY, WE ONLY HAD 8 BITS, AND WE BLOODY WELL GOT ON WITH IT!
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No, not found in my basement, but I thought that finding an old NASA computer in some guys basement was interesting. Too bad the tapes were ruined.
The first computer that was actually mine was a cobbled together Pentium II that I loved dearly. However before that I used various Windows PCs back to about 3.1. I also spent a lot of time on a friend’s Amiga 500 (presumably - might have been a different model). It was powered by alien technology compared to the Windows machine I used at home.
At school we had some variety of Acorn, presumably Archimedes. I recall being taught to use Logo for a brief period and being baffled as to why. We also had some other, older computers in various classrooms. I recall using a BBC Micro but the other machines I’m not so sure on. Power-wise I feel like it was between an Archimedes and a BBC Micro but who can say what it was? I recall playing some medieval-themed game on it briefly that had an arm-wrestling minigame. Any takers on what that was?
In general though I feel like the whole programming initiative passed me by. It wasn’t long before teachers were trying to teach me the rudiments of Microsoft Office and little else.
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You guys are old. 
My first computer came with a Pentium P5 processor, 8MBs of EDO RAM (later upgraded to 40MBs), and Windows 95. We bought it in 1996 with an amazing 14 (or maybe it was 13) inch color monitor. The machine was epic, it worked better than a tractor, although the Windows crashes were not fun. I think it’s still somewhere in storage at home, my mom kept using it up until very recently because of attachment issues.
Good GRIEF, my first computer with a Pentium on board was like my sixth (a custom-build dual-CPU Pentium Pro full tower). Old isn’t the word!
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Hi, I’m Picky Bastard, you may know me from other posts like “that’s not the real history of the Amiga”, “God? pffffff”, and “I love to quote Montgomery Scott”.
I think you’ll find (read this in a Comic Book Guy voice if you like) that the “computers” are actually tape readers.
You may go about your business. Carry on.
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4th here (CPC464, Atari STe, 386DX40, then P100). Funnily enough it was an Escom one as mentioned in the Amiga story.
Biggest heap of turd ever, that exercised the W95 bluescreen code excessively.
Glad they went bust.
Fixed by binning the 100MHz mobo/CPU and replacing with a Pentium 233MHz, which was my first ever online purchase.
Really? Haven’t noticed. 
I’m hearing it more in the narrator’s voice of a 1960’s documentary!(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJPLVa7q410)
I started out with the Commodore VIC20, then moved on to the ZX Spectrum128K and later a Sam Coupe’.
x86? Windows 3.1? Pansies.
I had to program these real computers for real men in the mid-80s in machine language, in octal.
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I support for DOS being the most initial operating system.
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For those interested in comparing how the results differ in other communities, I’ve also posted this poll at LQ:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/general-10/lq-poll-what-was-your-first-computer-4175611051/
–jeremy
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The computer we had at home when I was a kid was a Commodore Amiga 500. At school we had Acorn Archimedes (around one in each classroom in primary school, separate computer rooms in secondary school).
I also had a friend with some PCs, mainly running OS/2 but also DOS and Windows 3.1.
When I was about 13 it all moved to Windows PCs, then I first installed Linux at around 16.
Mine (1st fully online buy) was in 1998.
A friend of my Dad’s is after some old Spectrum hardware, for nostalgia I think. Not sure which/how much of mine I am ready to part with, and at least one +2 has non-working sound due my attempts to give it stereo via the home-brew ACB system someone came up with.
Wow this is a popular thread!
When I was a kid my dad had an Acorn Electron
I think it had a very old fashioned drawing program, and a Space Invaders clone
Then we got an IBM PS/1 (the PC before the PS2)
It ran Windows 3.1 and had Lemmings (in DOS)!
In Primary (Elementarry) school, we had a BBC Micro
I think they had a text based D&G game on it
And a few Acron Archimedes machines
The Acron Archimedes machines where much better than contempary Windows machines, had deeper colour too.
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Interestingly, just came across this:
–jeremy
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