Wow, awesome picture!
For some strange reason, even stranger since the fact didn’t strike me until right now, I don’t have any non digital picture of my computers. This is especially strange for such a fetish creature as a geek. My first picture is a very late one, from the very late 90s.
BBC Micro Model B for me. The word processor came on a ROM chip.
First computer was a 5K Commodore VIC 20 (** 3583 Bytes Free **)
Had a 1541 disk drive (160K storage!) and a three-slot expander with:
The three-slot expander had a reset button added and switches for the slots, since one had to turned off as the VIC only had a 40K address space: 32k for regular programs, and an 8K area for machine language apps. If you were using the Super Expander, you had to turn off one of the RAM cartridges as the ROM sat in the same address space.
You could also load the contents of ROM cartridges into the upper 8K, but you had to add a switch to make that cartridge read-only because the copy protection for ROM cartridges was that they would just write stuff in that address space - if it was ROM, the write would do nothing, but if it was RAM, it would scramble the program there and crash your VIC. So the switch let me run stuff like Omega Race and Scott Adams adventures off floppy instead of having to plug in the cartridges.
I didn’t buy my first computer until I was 33, so compared with the rest of you, mine is current-gen! It was July 1993, and I still have the original purchase receipt.
A 486/SX 33 with 4 megs of ram, and a 170 meg hard drive, and a 1X cartridge-loading CD rom drive. Cost $2,600.
A couple years later, I upgraded it to a 486/DX2 66 with 8 megs ram, added on another 420 meg hard drive, and a double-speed tray-loading CD rom drive. The upgrade cost another $1,000.
TEAM Electronics built it for me, and I still have it, and as far as I know, it still works (5 years ago it did anyway). Except that the CMOS battery is a rechargeable POS that is soldered to the motherboard, so it crapped out long ago.
My family had many computers when I was a kid. But the first I bought with my own money was a Gateway 2000 386/DX 25 MHz. With a freaking turbo button.
My favorite game I bought for it? Mechwarrior (1989).
IBM PCjr, replaced in a year with an Apple IIe. Commodore 64 in college to play games on with roommates.
286 senior year of college, and an Amiga 500 on the side just because.
386-16 when I was dirt poor and waiting tables after college. 486-66 a couple of years later.
P3 and a P4 …and then into home-built computers mixing and matching parts to the present day.
Hah, I didn’t realize I was the OP on this topic, since it was started 15 years ago. :) So my post a few days ago was redundant…
My first was a Trash-80, Model I. I loved that thing and I modified the hell out of it. I remember the day I got an expansion interface which brought it up to a whopping 48k of memory. Then it was pure joy once I got disk drives. No more tape cassettes for me!
I kept that for years and years until I got into college, when I finally got an Amiga 500, which was a totally awesome machine. I loved the Amiga, and that was definitely a magical time in my life.