Commodore 64, with the tape reader, hooked to a black&white CRT
Seems I’m the eldest one here for now
Be neither alone nor afraid, your brethren gather
Same. First program I built was a bouncing circle, took 15 minutes to code and an hour to save to the cassette.
I’m kind of jealous. My first program was asking the user what 2+2 is and either displaying wrong or right.
When my cousin came to visit he coded a simple labyrinth like game where you had to move the cursor from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the screen as quickly as possible while not bumping into random symbols scattered around. Sometimes it was unwinnable because the entrance or the exit were completely surrounded.
Commodore 64. I played BC’s Quest for Tires for hours! 1996 Sony Vaio.
I think I have you slightly beat… mine was an Apple II+, circa late 1981, with a disk drive, and a monochrome green screen monitor.
First cell phone was around 1997. Though I honestly don’t remember what it was. I recall having a Nokia model from before they made that indestructible model in all the memes, as well as a Kyocera one that I could connect to a laptop and have wireless dial up internet at some abysmal speed like 20 kbps. (0.02 mbps). I had at least two more phones, including a Treo 650 “smartphone” before getting my first iPhone, a 3G. I’m on my sixth iPhone now.
First computer in about '99, which I’d “built” (I was 8, so I mostly just watched while my dad’s friend built it and occasionally let me plug some wires in)
First phone, Nokia 3310 in 2003, with a Simpsons case, I think I’ve got it in a box somewhere…
My first computer was a Commodore 128. Of course it mainly ran in C64 mode for all the games.
I used an old TV as the monitor. I secretly bought an antenna cable so that I could watch TV. Through some in-house cabling stuff I could also see the BMX videos my older brother was watching. Good times.
In December of 1994, in Greece, finally my parents agreed to get me a computer, as I was finishing college (was studying to be a computer programmer). I come from a very poor family, so it took some convincing. I ordered a modest 486 DX-40 Mhz, with 4 MB of RAM (10 months later it had to be updated to 8 MB in order to run Win95), 4x CD-ROM, 1.44 floppy drive, and a 420 MB Conner HDD. It had a Cirrus Logic graphics card (which I later upgraded to an S3), and a plain soundblaster sound card. The monitor was an 800x600 14" CRT monitor, and I think I also got a joystick with it too. I ran Win3.1 originally, and DOS. I was programming mainly in Turbo Pascal, and dBase III.
The only “computer” we had at home before that, was an Atari 2600, that I bought my brother as a gift, in a yard sale in 1991, Germany. Already extremely outdated by that time, but that was the only one I could afford (I was in Germany for 8 months in early 1990s, before I went to college back in Greece, working menial jobs: janitor, kitchen help).
I installed a bunch of shareware games found on magazines when I got the 486, so I got viruses a couple of times too because of that (Greek PC magazines at the time weren’t as careful as they should have been). I had no access to the internet or BBS, you see. It had to be through magazines, especially since almost no one else in my small town had a computer at the time to share software with.
That’s the computer I had when I moved to the UK in late 1996, to go work as a programmer there. I got paid well there, so I upgraded a few times, particularly the graphics card (at one point I had a voodoo SLI).
When I got married and left for the US in 2001, I had a dual Celeron at 333 Mhz, 128 MB RAM, and an nVidia TNT2 Ultra.
I got a cellphone for the first time in 2003 I think, some Nokia ones I think. I was writing tech reviews online, so companies were sending me loaners to review. However, my phone usage was spotty, since I was on a pay-as-you-go (with limited, or no data plan) for about 10 years. It took the 2010s for me to get a family plan, with enough data. I did get my hands on the first iphone though, and the first android too (my husband was part of the original android team at the time, at Google). These days, I’m back in Greece as of the beginning of this year, and I run Murena e/OS, the de-googled version of Android that is privacy-focused (based on LineageOS).
Phone: it looked like https://www.sparkshire.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/CREAM8746TELEPHONE_1512x.png?v=1627985748
Computer: ZX spectrum
1995
- Pentium 75 MHz
- 8 MB RAM
- 700 MB HDD
- CD-ROM drive
I got my first phone in 1998. It was a nokia 8110, aka the ‘banana phone’.
I got my first computer in 1989. It was a Commodore VIC-20. I still have it. 5kB of RAM should be enough for everyone.
We had a Vic 20 as well! In 1984. I was 4 years old.
Wow. In 84 it cost about a dollar per minute to talk on a cell phone. That’s when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour. So you’d have to work for 20 minutes to afford one minute of talk time if you were a minimum wage worker.
Ok yeah I’m old. Thanks :P
5kB of RAM should be enough for everyone
I believe so too, on a micro-controller
My first computer was a ZX81 - in 1982 - which, with my brother, I built from a kit and was astonished when it actually worked. We eventually added the 16k ram pack too: how could anyone possibly use all that?!
First phone. I think it was a Nokia 5110 or similar in 2000.
Pretty sure it was a Nokia 3110 in the late 90’s.
For first PC it would have been around 1995. Dial up baby.
Gaming console would have been the Sega Master System. But I do remember other things before this but they were my uncles. Maybe a commador
I remeber my 1st computer was a 133 Mhz with a 36k dial-up, I had a pager before I had a phone, but im sure the phone was Nokia and had Snake 🐍
Edit: pc was around 94? 95? Tbf we had a Tandy 1000 as a family computer in late 80s
Tandy… Kings Quest. So good. California Games. I miss how simple life used to be.
Anyone over 40 who doesn’t say Nokia or Motorola is either lying or should check themselves into memory rehab.
AT&T
My first phone was some badass Nokia from 1998. My first comp was in 1993. DX33 with a 1MB Genoa GPU, 8MB RAM, 250MB HDD, and a 2400 baud modem. That sumbitch was $3,000 back then.
Commodore 64
TRS 80 sans disk drive. My school library and local library had BASIC programs in the books. I’m now a SR Software Engineer. Wild. My first phone couldn’t even text… Whatever it was.
Phone, probably in 2012 or 2013: Sony Ericsson W200i.
Proper computer in 2020: (Laptop) eMachines e627. A very slow AMD Athlon 64 powered laptop. It broke after 2 months of use. It’s what got me to Linux. I barely got any understanding of what OS is, less so a difference between Linux and Windows, but I needed one. I found the UI of Windows 10 too complicated, so I went with Linux Mint 20 MATE.
Of course, that is only after learning what “distribution” is.
My ass was trying to find “just Linux”.Thankfully, it already had Windows installed (used, unclean, untrusted, potentially unsafe to use) and I managed to dig out some DVD-RW which used to have some cartoon on it. Of course I had 0 flash drives.
For the reference, I am 18 now.
