Atari 600XL or Texas Instruments Ti99-4A, had both about the same time. The Atari was awesome!
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First computer I ever programmed on: a time-shared IBM mainframe, using BASIC.
First computers my friends had, which we played games on (or not): Apple II and Atari 400/800. I wasnât terribly interested in the TRS-80, even though I haunted the local Radio Shack store.
First computer systems for which I did game software beta testing: Commodore Amiga and Apple IIGS. I worked for two different game software companies at two different points in my work career.
First computer my family purchased: an IBM PS/2. At that point in time, I was selling personal computers at the university where I was a student.
First computer my spouse and I purchased: an ALR (Advanced Logic Research) system with VL-BUS. Mine was an early version that used a lot of PLCC chips, instead of a later version that used a custom ASIC, and several of these PLCC chips started overheating, causing random system crashes. I was not amused when ALR could not find a problem with the computer.
First personal laptop: a Toshiba running gasp Windows 95.
Oh, and I was aware that Heathkit had a computer - but I was far more interested in their other kits. After all, back then, it seemed to me that a radio operatorâs âbadge of honorâ was building or refurbishing a Heathkit radio. I refurbished an AR-3 receiver that is still working today. (I aspired to get my Amateur Radio license back then and did not have time to master Morse code. I finally got my license in 2005, a couple of years before Morse code was dropped as a licensing requirement.)
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IIRC - and I did programming on some of the first IBM PCs when I was in high school in 1983 - IBMâs original 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive (FDD) capacity was a tiny 360kb. Yes, it was truly amazing that DOS could run from a single 5 1/4 inch floppy disk.
When the PC/AT came out, the 5 1/4 inch FDD storage capacity grew to 1.2Mb - not exactly an even multiple of 360kb. Thatâs one of the reasons why I remember the storage numbers on these drives; the other is that I sold a LOT of floppy disks to the Computer Science students at my university, and I had to learn to ask if the disks were being used on a computer in the dorm room (likely the 360kb storage) or on one of the PC/AT machines in the computer lab. Sometimes, the answer was âboth!â
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As far as the IBM PC and other personal computers, I was working at General Motors in an organization that managed both data centers and telecommunications. Our mainframe systems were overtaxed and we needed something else, so we were looking for solutions in multiple areas - the use of IBM PCs and other PCs, but connecting all of them to mainframes in those days required both extra hardware and software, too expensive to do across hundreds of systems, so we looked at distributed processing with minicomputers running a variety of different systems. I was personally involved with the PCs and minicomputers, utilizing UNIX on the minicomputers; thatâs what helped launch my UNIX career.
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I never used paper type but thought it was an interesting idea. That was used after punch cards, right?
@MarshallJFlinkman that âpaper tapeâ stuff was WAY back in my HIGH SCHOOL days when I had longer hair and it was ALL brown! Now Iâm losing most of the hair on my head, and what remains doesnât have any brown, itâs either black, gray, white, or âdome colorâ, mostly white in what remains - thatâs what seven decades of life do to a software geek!
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All due credit to my father on this, first computer was completely home-made, wire-wrapped, keyboard attached to the case, very heavy, glad I took some typing training, had to re-enter BASIC programs or just leave the power on since the cassette tape storage didnât work reliably. CP/M computer after that, a Cromemco terminal my father rescued from the trash, he built his own circuit boards, Z80 processor, paid a bunch for a couple of 8 inch floppies that sounded like a Ford LTD clunking into reverse every time the head engaged. WordStar was my idol, did my best to replicate some of that in BASIC. Crazy. Went to C a couple of years after that.
I always wanted the Atari 
Yep, they must have had plenty of advertisements in BYTE magazine, I remember seeing them.
If I end up selling some software, Iâm considering mailing out a printed manual just to buck the trend. I did that for a stock market utility program I made some time ago. Binders from the office supply store, canât remember the printer I used, but I believe it was an inkjet.
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Thatâs cool. Canât remember everything Iâve mentioned, but one of my friends at Digital was good at both hardware and software. He made a PC for me; we looked for parts together; he built it and I paid him for his trouble; with the carefully chosen parts plus his labor it was less expensive than buying a unit myself.
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If im being honest I cant remember my first pc, but for sure I remember my first handy me down pc had windows 98 on it and we switch between roadrunner, earthlink and aol for our ISP but speending hours playing pinball, going on runescape, or looking up the most randonm things up, age of empires.
That was the same PC that I used later on I used to âmodâ my fat PS2 with the hard drive to be able to play games off it. I remember spending weekends trying to get it right and the triumph i felt after succeeding.
Though currently heading back to school to finish my CIS degree so learning more about Manjaro, Linux mint, and slax currently in my school.
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I found cassette to be reliable, but it did take experimenting with different formulations of tape, volume control, and tone control to get things working smoothly.
I remember typing in programs from magazines. Compute! magazine published SpeedScript for the Commodore 128. I patiently typed it in, and I used it for years until GEOS was released.
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1986! Wow, MS/DOS was out there by then, but the Windows interface that so many people take for granted was probably in early development at that time and Microsoft Office as we know it was also a few years in the future! These were UNIX days for me - no other system other than expensive proprietary systems were available in those days, which is why I didnât purchase ANY computer hardware in those days. I had plenty of systems to use in my office at Digital Equipment; in 1985-1986 DEC VAX/VMS was a mature proprietary operating system with DECnet networking; I enjoyed it at that time - but at work, NOT at home except in rare cases where I loaned out a system to take home overnight to complete assignments when I needed extra time or I took a few hours off during the day. We always had 1-2 systems in our group for that purpose.
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Dell Omniplex with GPU upgraded to a Matrox + Sony Trinitron (curved CRT).
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Yes, I am much older than the appearance of my avatar, the quirky ubernerd from âAliasâ:
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My first computer was a salvaged Sinclair ZX-81 with a whopping 1kB RAM. 
It was build in a case that formerly housed a small type electronic cash register (because the original case was broken) and came with a custom 3rd party keyboard.
The BASIC ROM was OK but 1kB is a bit cramped so I had to do the more fancy things in raw CPU instructions (PEEK/POKE) or at one of the (very few) school computers (TRS80 Model 1)
Although it could do a bit of BASIC just fine, loading and saving on a compact cassette was a real pain. 
I did program âbattleshipâ though (human against computer). 
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You bet In 1989 at work I toyed a bit with Windows 1.0 that someone brought in. We all had a good laugh about what a horrible ugly and crappy toy it was.
It was only a filemanager then. And a bad one too.
MS-DOS was at version 3.3 at that time but we never used it. Everything was done in QNX.
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Well, I did not actually own my first computer. I just had been using it. And it was IBM System 360 mainframe⊠
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@ugnvs The IBM System 360 mainframe was the first enterprise business mainframe computer system I used, beginning in 1979 after graduating in 1979 with a degree in Computer Science from Michigan Tech. At âda Techâ we had a UNIVAC 1110 mainframe that was the main campus system. Fortunately we had other systems to learn various things on too, for instance we had a real-time system in a laboratory and we had a few Heathkit systems (H8 and H11) that I can recall, plus some board-based mini and microcomputer systems. Back then these other systems were not network based systems; we used them mostly for project based educational work.
That first IBM System 360 mainframe we had didnât have any IBM networking products at first, but my employer, General Motors, was very interested in such things, so THEY created their OWN network-based software called GMnet that they used in the seventies and eighties, at least until I departed in 1985. The place I went next, Digital Equipment Corporation, had their own network product, DECnet, which they used until hardware and software based on TCP/IP gradually eliminated both DECnet and Digital from the picture, along with statements from their founder, who didnât think that other companies knew what to do with personal systems, networking, or home computers. That killed Digital - such things are known to nearly everyone today.
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I can remember how we interconnected PDP11 via serial interfaces and wrote software for that ânetworkââŠ
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Yeah, me too! I didnât write device drivers, but I helped install, test, and distribute some software/firmware that some really smart engineers wrote to bring smaller, faster, more capable disk drive technology to both large and small PDP/11 based systems; the larger ones were almost as large as the old VAX systems; the smaller ones were similar in size to desktop workstation/PC sized systems. I helped bring a few of those along once the drivers were written.
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Like Eugene, my first computer was an IBM 360 mainframe (at the School of Computer Science, during my first year at McGill for Honours Physics, which I later switched to Mechanical Engineering, being what I really wanted to do).
My first Personal computer (1983) was the
which is where I learned the hard experience of âleading bleading edgeâ! I bought it to be able to learn programming for the
Because of its being released before IBM finalized their hardware interfaces for their PC, the Hyperion ended with a very small, but crucial, incompatibility which made it hard to integrate any of the 3rd-party commercial products, driving the Hyperion owners to rely on home-built small-batch hardware products!!!
Yes, it was a nightmare! The experience was completely frustrating! 
I eventually junked it 3 years later (for a tower built to personal specifications), but only after it saved my bacon in preparing course material for my attempt to become a College âMasterâ, which failed for reasons of incestuous clique politics which did not expect an outsider to apply for the position. I walked away and never looked back, easily entering the industrial world with my first position at Nortel in London, Ontario as their Divisional CAD/CAM Systems Administrator during its ramp-up phase, for the Graftek GMS CAD/CAM System, and for remote-usage of Nortelâs own CBDS system!
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