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Your first computer was?

When I looked at the responses to this tweet asking people what their first computer was, I realised that I must be very old.

So many of those responding had PC-era machines as their first computers and perhaps the most common pre-PC gear was the C64 and its peers.

Gosh... I had to build my first computer because there was absolutely nothing available off the shelf back then and there was no such thing as "online ordering" from suppliers on distant shores.

It made me stop and realise that in a few years, I'll have been a computer geek for half a century.

It's amazing how the "hobby" of playing with computers has changed in those few short decades.

These days, people go out and buy a turnkey Windows-based PC with powerful GPU and all the RAM they can use for a couple of grand or so.

Back in the mid to late 1970s, you had to build your own stuff and much of that cost was a the huge cost of just a kilobyte or so of static RAM.

Forget graphics... we were lucky to have a glass-TTY type display and many didn't, relying instead on a bunch of LEDs to show the status of the address and data busses.

While today's modern PC systems have a plethora of input devices such as comfy, quality keyboards, mice, webcams, microphones, joysticks, graphics tablets, etc -- we were pretty much stuck with a bunch of toggle switches and a push-button or two. In fact I recall fondly the day I got my first QWERTY keyboard -- what a thrill!

There was no fancy 4K 27-inch HDR LED backlit LCD display either. The step after those flashing LEDs was an old CRT-based TV set and a VHF modulator connected to a very basic interface that simply allowed you to stream ASCII characters to that screen. No colour, no addressable cursor and certainly no bitmapped graphics.

Once store-bought computers (such as the Apple II, the TRS80 Model 1 and others) became available things improved a lot on the human-interface side of things.

The Apple offered colour and pixel-addressable graphics -- OMG!

The TRS80 offered double-precision BASIC and (with a small mod) lower-case ASCII characters!

The Commodore VIC20 got a lot of folk into computing but as someone who'd long ago become accustomed to display with at least 64 characters and 24 lines of text, the VIC20's ridiculously stupid 22 colum display was absolutely awful. Typing in BASIC programs using that display must have been a horrendous experience.

Let's not forget the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 though, whilst on the subject of horendous experiences.

These little computers also got a lot of folk into the hobby, mainly because of their incredibly low (for the time) price. Forget their lacklustre performance and many deficiencies -- they were a masterpiece of getting every last ounce out of the good old Z80 microcomputer chip with the bare minimum of support circuitry.

There were some cool stand-outs in the years that followed and these included the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST series and the Amstrad range of home and business computers.

By the time the IBM PC rolled around, I'd been working (as a hobby and as a job) with computers for quite a few years and had already made a good amount of money writing software for a wide range of CP/M-based business computers.

Sadly, although the arrival of the IBM heralded the legitimacy of the microcomputer as a business tool, it also signaled the end of true innovation and inspiration.

Gone were wonderful machines that dared to be different and introduce new concepts and ideas... instead, everyone started copying/cloning IBM's offerings.

Suddenly, the computer world went from a vibrant explosion of ideas, concepts and variation; to a world of very boring beige boxes.

The only exceptions to this have been some of Apple's offerings, and the latest generation of home-baked CPU machines in particular. However, that is not a patch on what we once saw in this industry.

Even today, despite all the uber-powerful processors and GPUs, regardless of how much SSD, RAM or RGB-enabled components onboard, there's a certain blandness to the computer world. I doubt well ever see the 1970s/80s again but my goodness, they were a lot of fun and those of us who were there will always have the memories.

What was your first computer? Do you still have it? If not, do you wish you'd kept it?

Carpe Diem folks!

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