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ZX Spectrum...
Bought by my parents to help with my Computer Sudies O'Level, but all it really helped was my Manic Miner and JetPac technique.
First PC was a 386 with a whopping 4Mb RAM and 512K hard drive. I've now got a memory stick with more capacity than that...
Vic 20.
Happy days waiting for the tapes to load the games, then spending a few hours trying to get out of a stick maze.
Also enjoyed literally MINUTES of fun typing in Basic code to fill the screen with NIC IS A BASTARD when my mate Nic came round.
Well, maybe not actually whole minutes, but you know what I mean.
And a few frustrating hours typing a program from VIC20 Owner Magazine that was supposed to do something that you could do in your head anyway, but only succeded in making "RUN TIME ERROR LINE 10" appear on your screen.
Ahh, those were the days!
Mine was a HAL 9000, you know the one with the patronising voice, heap of shit. I only wanted to mess around with music, not go to Jupiter 
I was the proud owner of a good 'ol Texas Instruments TI99/4a sometime in the very early 80's. Used to write melodies using basic commands and the onboard sound generator piped out through a tv. 
Diamond White wrote: Vic 20.
Happy days waiting for the tapes to load the games, then spending a few hours trying to get out of a stick maze.
Also enjoyed literally MINUTES of fun typing in Basic code to fill the screen with NIC IS A BASTARD when my mate Nic came round.
Well, maybe not actually whole minutes, but you know what I mean.
And a few frustrating hours typing a program from VIC20 Owner Magazine that was supposed to do something that you could do in your head anyway, but only succeded in making "RUN TIME ERROR LINE 10" appear on your screen.
Ahh, those were the days!
lol same here. I still have it. with tape drive an plug in cartridge games.
that was more like hours typing in basic only to have that stupid error appear.
Used to mess around on a mates spectrum 48k, vic 20, amstrad 64k and our kids Atari ST.
The First computer I ownded was an amiga 1200 "with a beefed up" 40 mhz processor and a 1gig hard drive. Would only take me a few hours to fill that hard drive up with downloads now. Used to take months on 33.6k dial-up :D
Diamond White wrote:
NOOLigan wrote:
...plug in cartridge games.
The POSH version!
i never got a disk drive for it though. ah the olden days. 
Another ZX Spectrum here. Actually, it was a TK 90X, a Brazilian ZX Spectrum clone. At that time we were prohibited of importing computers so we used to produce clones.
48kB of RAM and several minutes to load a game from the cassete. Those were the days (when I had more time to spend).
ZX81, natch.
Then my folks bought a Spectrum for 175 notes when it was mail order only, then Sinclair - the fcuker - dropped it to 125 notes shortly after ... and cornered the market.
Still all way cheaper than the BBC Micro though which was a whopping 400 notes in 1981/2. Ouch.
Ally wrote: Incidentally, anyone after a BBC Model B or Master emulator can find a really good one here and a list of software and gaming ROMs (pretty much everything ever) here!
What a nostalgia fuelled evening that was
Sabre Wulf is still bloody good fun!
Must dig out a joypad for a bit of Elite as well.
I still play Elite II on an amiga emulator ( cos the amiga had PCM sound, and the atrari version doesn't, not cos of any hardware shortcoming I might add)
And Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy are still fairly regular on my speccy emu.
Used to be some fantastic chip tunes done on the amiga, especialy on some of the 4k demos/intros.
Bentley wrote: I was the proud owner of a good 'ol Texas Instruments TI99/4a sometime in the very early 80's. Used to write melodies using basic commands and the onboard sound generator piped out through a tv.
The exact same thing that I first had...
My parents never "believed" in the use of computers, as they had the terrible dot matrix printers. So I had a word processor, as my dad thought typed documents were more professional. It was a Smith Corona with a screen that fit about three sentances. Took a couple times to print it out to make it fit on the page right.
I remeber my dad telling me typewriters would never go out of style, that they would be the lasting professional way to do business. Looks like a bad predition, eh?
Mine was a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer with a cassette player.
Ah the memories...
I believe it took me a good 5 years to convince my dad to buy a PC, and that was then in 1989.. and to be honest, it was mostly for computer games, until I had a modem.
This super machine had 16k of memory, through the years, we upgraded it to 64K and got a 160k floppy drive (5.25") that was worth something like 400$ at the time.
When opening the pc, you were in basic programming... funny I just saw on Wikipedia it was Microsoft's Basic.. which means I've been programming Microsoft for more than 25 years now
Oh, for the first PC, it was another from Tandy (Radio Shack), which was a 286 clone, crappy computer with only 16 colors if I remember well... it took me up to 1991 I believe to buy my own 386 computer with a VGA screen ;) but in 1990, I was running my first BBS on that other computer!
Snorrimon wrote:
Just look at the graphics on that! :D
Snorri xxx
The venerable Amstrad CPC6128 if I am not mistaken?
We had a 464, sort of a spectrum on various drugs I always thought, the killer game for me was Guadalcanal, probably fucked my engineering HND up with that and ATF.
I never got a PC until Jan 2000, I'd been fixing the bastards for years for other people, totally blindly, just relying on my inate TimeLord empathy with all things electronic (OK, TimeLord, Schmimelord, but I do have a gift). I hated them, despised their stupid half assed architecture, loathed that spastic operating system (even I will concede XP is an improvement on win3.1...prerformance tax aside of course), an frankly could not comprehend how they were rapidly taking over when things like the Amiga (which never knew it wasn't a mainframe, could shit Babylon5 episodes, and if given 3GHZ to play with, would be running the planet by lunch time), died a terrible death.
My Atari was only taken out of the loop about 4 years ago, and still gets fired up as a debugging tool when the PC's MIDI is on the blink (well, that's never nowdays really).
In the end if was grand prix legends that drove me to buy a PC...a lash up of mates old parts. Almost instantly I started looking at BeOS, Linux BSD, and alternate shells for windows, because I just could NOT cope with it...to a great extent I still can't, my cow-orkers get a big kick out of my computer rage
I think there's a fair split, persons who have used a lot of other computers, tend to loathe windows much more than those who have only known it, and come to accept it's inherent shiteness.
we had a commodore 64
used to be big arguments about whose go it was on the games & typing out those massinve long programs was a nightmare
Old Blue wrote: ZX Spectrum...
Bought by my parents to help with my Computer Sudies O'Level, but all it really helped was my Manic Miner and JetPac technique.
Yep, me too. Can still smell those rubber keys. Was I the only one who would spend hours and hours tweaking the fucking volume control on their tape player in order to get an nth generation C90 full of games to load?
Nope.
Oh how I miss those days, getting home with a dubbed 90 with 50 games on it. 20 would die loading, 10 would be unmitigated shite, and you'd fire through the other 20 after playing each for maybe 3mins, and busting to see what's next. I never grew out of it I think, computers sort of did though.
Spotnick wrote: Mine was a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer with a cassette player.
Ah the memories...
I believe it took me a good 5 years to convince my dad to buy a PC, and that was then in 1989.. and to be honest, it was mostly for computer games, until I had a modem.
This super machine had 16k of memory, through the years, we upgraded it to 64K and got a 160k floppy drive (5.25") that was worth something like 400$ at the time.
When opening the pc, you were in basic programming... funny I just saw on Wikipedia it was Microsoft's Basic.. which means I've been programming Microsoft for more than 25 years now
Oh, for the first PC, it was another from Tandy (Radio Shack), which was a 286 clone, crappy computer with only 16 colors if I remember well... it took me up to 1991 I believe to buy my own 386 computer with a VGA screen ;) but in 1990, I was running my first BBS on that other computer!
we had those trash 80s and something called microbees in school.
Forgot about the volume tweaking! You grew to learn the sound each game made as it loaded. A tape recorder with one of those 3 digit mechanical counters was ESSENTIAL for locating each game.
They used to sell really short tapes for games as well, didn't they? C16 or something - 8 minutes per side.
My first was a Dragon 32. was going to get a spectrum, but the lure of a proper keyboard proved too irresistable. Donkey Kong and missile command were my favourite games.
My first one was an Amstrad CPC464 then moved to a 6128. We used the BBC ones in school oh and those Tandy one's.
Ah Chuckie Egg and Roland Goes Digging.
Old Blue wrote: Forgot about the volume tweaking! You grew to learn the sound each game made as it loaded. A tape recorder with one of those 3 digit mechanical counters was ESSENTIAL for locating each game.
They used to sell really short tapes for games as well, didn't they? C16 or something - 8 minutes per side.
Yes, Boots did excellent C15 data cassettes.
And I used to dig some of the funky noises tapeloads made.
SHARP MZ-721
