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 wasnāt 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 operatorās ābadge of honorā 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 - IBMās 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. Thatās 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 āboth!ā
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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; thatās 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 āpaper tapeā stuff was WAY back in my HIGH SCHOOL days when I had longer hair and it was ALL brown! Now Iām losing most of the hair on my head, and what remains doesnāt have any brown, itās either black, gray, white, or ādome colorā, mostly white in what remains - thatās 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 didnāt 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, Iām 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, canāt remember the printer I used, but I believe it was an inkjet.
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Thatās cool. Canāt remember everything Iāve 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 āmodā 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 didnāt 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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