http://www.arikah.net/commons/en/8/80/Tandy1000HX.jpg

There's a pretty good pic of one just like mine. A Tandy 1000 HX. Note the clever way they incorporated the keyboard right into the CPU. I didn't have a printer, but remember springing for a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive (something like $150?) because a lot of software hadn't yet upgraded to 3 1/2 inch. I think it was 1990. I can't think of the name of the word processing software I used, but I didn't like having to change and learn a new one. So bizarre.

One day in Radio Shack, I was playing the NEW Jeopardy game. The answer was "A Sloshy Sleeping Experience". I yelled out, "What is a wet dream!"

Here's an interesting old ad from 1989 I ran across while I was looking for a pic of my old computer. Monitor and mouse not included. What a deal!
http://www.garmana.com/blogs/mark/im...ldcomputer.jpg

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"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves." ~Ronald Reagan

2MB of RAM? Wow. Impressive. And for such a low price.

Our first computer was a Commodore 64.

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I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

I don't remember what it was called, but it was something my father bought at a Radio Shack in 1989. I remember that everything on the monitor was neon green. I used it mainly to listen to synthesized music and compose some simple tunes of my own. That was many years ago now.

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"Some people complain about the system. The system is not good, so they can't do anything. It's an excuse. Freedom is in your heart." (Jin Xing)

Commodore Vic-20... with a cassette tape drive. Eventually upgraded to a Commodore64


After that it was intel's 8086 cpu so it's been wintel stuff since (except for some Apple machines at work).

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"When I'm in command, every mission is a suicide mission!" -Capt. Zapp Branigan
The United Church of the Latter Day Tangential Tarts

My dad was a professor, so the very first computer I ever played on was a minicomputer, a VAX.

Through friends I also experienced an array of early microcomputers, like the Texas Instruments TI-99 and the VIC-20. A cousin had a TRS-80, my grandfather wrote his own stock-management programs for the Atari 800. But the first one in our house was an Apple II.

The first computer I ever actually owned was a Mac SE -- a 9-inch B/W screen, two floppy drives and a whopping 512K of memory. All for just $2,400!

That wasn't near enough computer, so I later upgraded to 1 MB of RAM for a few hundred dollars, and bought a 120-MB external drive -- more storage than I'd need in a *lifetime* -- for just $1,000.

Besides holding vast amounts of useless data, the external drive had the charming virtue of being cooled by a fan loud enough to be mistaken for a jet engine. Every time I turned it on I felt like I was firing up a nuclear reactor.

All through college, though, I was jealous of my friend's Amiga. Those were awesome game machines.

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Man up.

2 megs of Ram? Listen to miss moneybags over there...

Try 128K...that was after I upgraded it from 64.

TRS-80 CoCo2 - http://users.digitalindigo.net/~techno/coco2.html -

I got the $100 tape drive with it initially, and then my dad splurged the next Christmas and got me the $350 128k (5 1/4")floppy drive. The drive was more expensive than the computer.

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That reminds me of the $250 I once paid for an Intellivision (1982?). Our friends were actually jealous.

Or the $2100 I paid for our first VHS recorder and camera (1984). The camera only weighed a couple of pounds, but the thing that hung on my shoulder was as heavy as a concrete block.

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"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves." ~Ronald Reagan

After that I had an Atari ST 520 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST

For those of you that dont know, it was roughly analogous to the Commodore Amiga.

Probably my first "real" computer, although that was still pre-internet. 3.5" drive, and built-in Midi interface. It was actually pretty cool. Later upgraded to the 1040 with 1 meg of Ram. OS was on a ROM chip, so it booted almost instantly. It had a built-in GUI like the Mac.

It used a motorola 68000, which was extremely versitile. This was 1985 technology, but you could play 3D games on it (Carrier Command was an awesome game). This was not a flight simulator...this was an ARCADE-style 3D game with complete 6-directional movement. There is nothing else of that era that touches it graphics-wise. I really wish someone would do a modern version of that game...it really was a cool concept.

Later picked up a used 30 meg (yes, thats Meg with an "M") hard drive. And then it was almost a real computer. The hard drive itself was external and the size of a dinner plate.

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I was...They had Utopia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(video_game) -, which was sort of like Sim City. I loved that game...I used to leech off my friend for his Intellivision every chance I got.

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That was the old ad I posted the link to. My computer came with 256 kilobytes of memory. I never even got to upgrade to 640.

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"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves." ~Ronald Reagan