sippyjug104 Loc: Missouri

My first computer was a portable Osborne 64 that had two floppy disks and a 4-inch text-only screen and a CPM operating system. I paid $1,800 and it looked like I was carrying a sewing machine with me. To put that in perspective, I paid $1,920 for a brand new six-cylinder Rambler American with an automatic transmission and $25,000 for our new three-bedroom ranch-style home on a 1/2 acre lot.

WaterBabe Loc: Utah

That was our first, too. 1981-ish.

mebert72 Loc: Plainfield, IL

No, I built my own cp/m system back in the early 80's. I used a Z180 processor and wirewrapped a circuit together that contained 64K of memory along with a serial interface and HD controller. I used a Wyse-50 terminal for the interface and had a pair of Shugart 8" floppies along with a 20 meg 5 1/4" HD that set me back over $400 at the time. Once I got the system up and running I used a program called Wordstar for word processing and a program called Dbase for creating databases.

JoeBiker Loc: homebase: Houston, TX

The first computer that I actually owned was a Commodore Pet. It was given to me by a business when I help them upgrade to a Radio Shack TRS-80. Prior to that, I programmed on a PDP-11, but I obviously didn't own that.

The Commodore Pet had 8K of static memory, which I upgraded myself with a wire wrap board to 16K. No hard drive or floppies, but a cassette drive for storing data, and a 300 baud modem.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I was building simple computers in the late 50s with 12AT7 dual triode vacuum tubes for flip flops and a telephone dial as an input device. Fast forward to training on the shiny new 360 system running Fortran and Cobal when I started with IBM in ‘65 - big jump. I was working for Tektronix when the IBM team in Boca wrote the PC specification, which we all had to almost memorize. Tek (who was at the time a standard for graphics) decided that the PC age was the future and demanded (on pain of dismissal) that all sales engineers learn to program 6800/6805, Z80 and 8080/8086 machine language since we were selling microprocessor development systems and logic analyzers. They also bought every field guy an IBM dual floppy “luggable” with a 9” amber CRT. At the same time we were breadboarding machines from scratch and writing machine language to get hands on experience with our instrumentation. When we got the first 286 XTs with a HD, we thought we had died and gone to heaven, and then the 386 was REALLY fast. In the background, most of us were starting our kids off with first VIC 20s and then Commodore 64s. Followed by real time computing (OS9 & VxWorks) and then BIG petascale HPC computing and storage. What a long strange trip it’s been… Honestly, I’d rather have been doing RF, but the money was in computers and storage.

Stephan G

I remember those.

My first owned computer was the Sinclair 1000. With the extra 16 Kb memory.

I still have it in a box in the garage. It was the start of the many upgrades over the years.

Price I paid for it was $30.00, plus $30.00 for the additional memory. BASIC was the way to go.

[Cue in "Those were the days]

TreborLow

No, but I did buy a BASIS which had dual processors. An Apple 2 and a CPM. Dual floppy drives (128k I think) and a 12" green monitor, a dot matric printer, plus the newest 300 baud modem!!! All for about $3500!!! No, I no longer have any of those! Just got a Dell laptop with all the bells and whistles for less than half that!! Ah, progress!
Bob

CaltechNerd Loc: Whittier, CA, USA

I got a multiple station Televideo system with no drives on each computer, just a shared 10 Meg "server." Ran TurboDos, a huge improvement over DOS. Used it for registering kids into summer classes, putting together carpool lists, and calculating teacher paychecks for a summer program my then-wife ran. That's when I learned the hard way that you not only need to back up daily (I did) but also frequently verify that the backups are good. Big mistake.

Awesome what you could do with 10 megs on an 8-bit system.

DavidPhares Loc: Chandler, Arizona

My first computer was an Osborne (5” screen and 40 lbs) like your Kaypro (which was my second computer), I had 64k of memory, two double-sided, 180k, 8” floppies. It came with Wordstar for CP/M which only had three files. When I got the Kaypro I bought a 10MB hard drive confident I would never fill it! I used my Okidata dot matrix printer for years. No doubt it still works somewhere! My first modem was 1200 baud, I nicknamed it “Pokey!”

Babes in the woods! 😀😀😀

srsincary Loc: Cary, NC

I got my first software engineer job in 1980, in India. An Indian company known for their TVs wanted to get into the PC business. They built the hardware - Intel 8085 chipset, 2 floppy drives, 64 KB RAM (buggy, would randomly flop bits!), and asked our company, a 20 person startup working out of a rental property in Delhi, to build ALL the software, starting with the BIOS.

I was in the Compilers team. Met my wife there - she was in the Operating Systems team.

The industry has changed so much in the last 42 years. Still enjoying the ride - now in the Cloud. 🙂

Robg

My first programming job was when I was a senior in high school in 1964. I was programming an IBM 7040. It was being used for measuring bubble chamber tracks. Because the programs ran in "real time" this was not a batch programming environment, and to debug my program I would get a time slot on the machine. So in that sense it was a "personal" computer, albeit one that cost over $10 million (in 1964)!

One Saturday morning I came in for my two hour time slot and started out, as usual by booting up the OS from a tape drive. I punched the "Load" button on the console, but instead of starting to load from the tape drive the computer started to shut itself down. This was accompanied by the clicking of lots of relays shutting off power to various components, and various fans slowing down and stopping until the room was deathly quiet!

So there I was, an 18 year old kid having just killed a $10 million computer!

The computer was down for almost a week while IBM techs worked on it. Because the drastic power-down sequence had shut down all of the cooling fans, the components sitting on various heat sinks had overheated and had to be tested individually.

Luckily it turned out that it wasn't my fault. The blame fell on a hapless IBM service tech who had apparently left a loose dangling wire behind the control panel, and my punching of the Load button had apparently flexed the panel enough so that the loose wire temporarily shorted.

geoglass

Bought a Sanyo MBC-555 in 1983, and it cost $1000. Was only "semi-IBM compatible," and its disk drives were just 160KB each. I think it only had 128KB of memory. It ran WordStar, and my wife wrote her college dissertation on it. A 256 GB flash drive costs about $27 on Amazon today. That much memory cost about $512,000,000 in 1983!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

We interviewed an SE looking for a job at NetApp one morning over breakfast who, when working by himself as a contractor in the First Union National Bank main data center one night, accidentally hit the EPO (emergency power off) button, bringing down the entire data center for close to a day plus the entire network of ~200 ATMs. The bank fired the contracting company (and all their employees lost their jobs) and the data center manager and the bank CIO, and then everybody sued everybody, all over the push of a button.

SunBeach1962 Loc: Syrscuse, NY

No, But I did buy an IBM pc with 8 mg ram and a TallGrass Technoligy hard drive with 3-2/2 floppy in the pc and a 20 mg tape backup on the drive. Used it to run Dbase, File pro, I wrote a simple accounting program. (1968)

shirleyhogan

Radio Shack! 1988.