Just curious to know -

[kristel]

What was it like for you the first time...... you got a computer ?

I was always jealous of my brothers ZX81, with PSSST and JETPACK but my first computer was a little more advanced...

Mine was an old old commodore 64 (second hand of course - that was the best we could do back then ) but it came with a small truck load of games. I remember playing the first game to have propre synthesised speech in it - Mission Impossible. When you started it said something like "Stay a while.... Stay FOREVER!!! HAHAHAHA!" Very classy at the time

Oooh - and learning basic was a very interesting activity at the time. Best I managed was making a ball bounce around the screen, and getting it to print my name in an infinate loop! I also remember getting a cartridge game and thinking - "yes, this is the way forward for games. Tapes and disks are useless!" This was before I'd even handled a CD.... let alone a data cd!

Favourite games had to include the Dizzy games, and Park Patrol - classics!
Least Fave game: Purple Turtles. Great music, but took 180 to load, usually didn't work and I always died within 2 minutes!

So, what was your first computer? What were the most memorable experiences you had? Fave games, etc?

 

[Eric Portelance]

I remember playing around with WordPerfect 3 for MS-DOS or something of the sort back on an old Toshiba laptop. My dad warned me "not to play in there" when I asked what the shell was, but I did anyway.

I remember the days where WordPerfect came with a cardboard cutout to put over your keyboard. I still use WordPerfect today, just a slightly newer version.

I also remember using some old Unisys Icon computers and then the Icon IIs. Commodores as well.

I'll always remember playing Simcity 2000 (DOS version) on my old Pentium 100mhz (top of the line back then, they were still selling 75mhz, which was standard).

 

[Ian]

Spectrum 48K first Lovely! Finished all of the dizzy collection (even if it took YEARS!)

Then an Olivetti 8088 - a mono CGA monitor (that is an oxymoron of a description! Mono Colour Graphics Adapter?!)

All time favorite games : Dizzy Series and Prince of Persia

 

[floppybootstomp]

Late starter me. About 1996 somebody at a college I was working at gave me an 8086 (is that the right number?) with all the bits and a mono monitor.

He showed me a few basic DOS commands as that's all it had on it and I became interested. Up until then I'd always ignored computers, don't know why.

I took this thing home, friend of mine gave me Word Perfect 5.1 on 5.25" floppies, loaded that up, acquired a cheap dot matrix printer and I thought I was flying. Also loaded up some DOS kids games like 'Maths Rescue'.

I decided to do an upgrade. Got a 386 board (built in processor), 8mb 30 pin RAM, an IDE card, soundblaster, a 0.5MB vid card, and a 3.5" floppy drive to compliment the 5.25". The case I had was a massive desktop thing with a sloping front, massive PSU and I remember having to employ a few metalwork skills to fit everything in.

Then another friend gave me a 12" colour monitor and a set of WIN 3.1 floppies.

Wow, I was surely a high flyer now!

Played a lot of games that each came on a floppy disk, can't remember what they were called, but great fun.

And then Quake was released. Bloody hell Yeeeeeee-hah!

 

[james]

Same as Flopps.I never touched a computer untill I was 41.
Once i found the WWW it was full steam ahead.built my first rig within 6 months,wanted to know every thing about them.
Love it all.

 

[Quadophile]

Sinclair ZX Spectrum back in early 1981. Bloody hell just realised it was 21 years ago.

I had a Sharp cassete player which I used for all the games and programs (I was not much into games but was facinated with the music part of it. Did use the basic to create music programs. The only thing I remember is that it use to take me hours to write the program and the damn thing use to play the whole thing in seconds. CRAAAAAAZY!

Sold it about six months later at the same price I paid for new, invested in a better music system. Was without a computer for few years untill I got an IBM 286 in 1988 or thereabouts. Since then a regular user.