First used: Father’s POMI PC clone with 486 and 16MB of RAM running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups (he used it until it broke in 2001 because of broken DIMM)
First owned: Compaq Presario 9520 running Windows 95 and later MS-DOS 6+DOSSHELL
Right now: Apple iBook g4/1.2GHz 12″ with 768MB of RAM

Oh wait! I completely missed 1) and 3)!

1) My memory is a bit hazy, but quite possibly a C64.
3) A broken MacBook that I got for free. The screen is not entirely non-functional, but has soda stains in it. (Like, actually inside the screen, between the light dispersion layers, I think.) The keyboard is entirely non-functional. As you might imagine, that poses a problem when it comes to turn the machine on, which I’ve solved by adding a button that shorts two suitable points on the moth… I mean logic board. It now works as a stationary computer so I mostly put it to sleep anyway.

I think my first computer was a 286, donated from my school. I actually think I’ve preserved some/all of the files from that computer, and from all other computers down the bloodline. I’m an OCD kind of person, like that.

What I like to think of as my first computer, even though it was possibly the second one, is a C64. Of course. It was just borrowed, though, so I had to return it after a couple of years (mybe when I was 10 or so.) That is a loss that I have since restored. I still have a big bunch of games on tape from the first C64, though.

First computer I used was probably a BBC Micro.

The first computer we had at home was an Olivetti dad would bring home from work. I remember it was DOS based but had a menu system over the top that would launch programs. It included a paint program with an included line drawing of a tiger which I used to colour in and when i was a little bit older I used to play xenon 2 on it.

My first computer was an Acorn Archimedes A3000. It has no hardrive and I remember having to manually reassign memory from one program to another at times. You could open up a panel which gave you sliders for the memory each program was using and you could drag them back to 1k if you needed more space. It had a three button mouse as standard. I can’t remember what the different buttons were used for though.

I remember my favourite games being Cannon Fodder, Lemmings, Chuck Rock and this demo of a game where you went around with a large mallet squashing hamsters (gosh, wasnt it an innocent age back then).

The machine I’m using now is my brother’s old gaming rig from Dell, Dual booting win7 and ubuntu.

Luke, thanks for this post.

My first computer was the Commodore 16.

First computer (also owned it): Spectrum +2 128K
Current computer: custom axxiv notebook with ubuntu installed.

1: Commodore 64

2: Commodore 64

3: AMD Athlon(64-bit processor) (2410.96 MHz)
3G of memory
1Tb of diskspace spread across 25 partitions (23 of which are LVM)
Nvidia 6150 graphics card
OS: Debian GNU/Linux (testing branch with some packages from the unstable branch)

I’m not really that old, but I don’t consider myself that young (turning 30 this year, ugh). However, I don’t have that many interesting computing stories either as my family didn’t get a computer until I was about 11 or so. The first one I ever used was probably either one of the Apples at school with the old fashioned green and black display or my Uncle’s (I have no idea what kind he had way back then).

Then like I said when I was about 11 or so my family got a IBM desktop with a 486 processor and it was running Windows 3.1. I remember we had an account with Prodigy at the time and I used to go on that all the time to post on the bulletin boards. I’m pretty sure at the time Prodigy also charged for emails sent back and forth and I think I got in trouble for sending too many emails to other kids I met on the boards. I also played a lot of DOS based adventure games on it (King’s Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, etc). I also “copied that floppy” from my friend and used to play Wolfenstein 3D and Prince of Persia on it. Oh yeah and there used to be this great golf game that I had for it and I want to say it was called Links 386. That was a lot of fun. I wish I had the disks for it still so I could fire it up on DOSBox.

I guess the first one I ever owned myself was an old Compaq Presario with a Pentium processor in it that ran at a blazing 133 MHz. I want to say it had 32 mb of RAM, but I could be wrong. I think I bumped that up at some point as well. It’s been a while and that PC is long gone. It also had Windows 95 on it and at that time I thought it was the greatest thing in the world compared to our old IBM with Windows 3.1.

At this particular moment, like a lot of other people, I’m typing on a PC I’ve built myself. It’s kind of been one of those ongoing builds where I started out with one set of hardware but slowly I’ve swapped parts out here and there to try and keep it as up to date as my budget will allow me. Right now it has a Intel Core 2 Quad with 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. This summer I’d like to bump it up to 8 GB of RAM and then after that I’ll have to buy a new board the next time I want to do any upgrades unfortunately because at that point it will be maxed out. I also have a laptop (Dell Studio 1555) and a netbook (Lenovo S10), but I probably mostly use my desktop lately.

The first computer I ever used was a Radio Shack Model-I back in 1976. I was 16 and they let me come into the store and use it any time I wanted. I was the one who figured out how to get the darned tape recorder to work by recording at one volume and playing at a different volume. Even back then, I was the IT guy.

The first computer I ever owned was a Radio Shack Model-100. I was in the Marine Corps (1984-1988) and that was the only computer that would fit into my locker. I found a cheap typewriter/printer at Sharper Image that actually plotted the letters as you typed them, using tiny little pens. It had a centronics connector and could be switched into plotter mode. I used that to experiment with Sierpinski Curves and recursive algorithms.

When I got out of the Jugs I got an Amiga 1000 which I hacked a couple of 32 Megabyte hard drives onto using a kit I bought at a convention. I could open over twenty copies of WordPerfect on that machine with only 256 MB of RAM.

I currently own a desktop that I built myself, duh, with a 2.14 GHz Core Two Duo running Windows XP. I have two 24″ widescreen monitors, one of which is in portrait orientation so I can view long web pages or long stretches of code. Try it, it really increases productivity. I also own an Acer Tablet PC which I couldn’t live without. I take all my class notes in Microsoft OneNote directly in my own handwriting and can then search through my notes to find what I need later. It is one of the few Tablet PCs with a screen the same size as a letter sized piece of paper.

I have been looking into switching over to Linux but I just can’t find replacements for things like OneNote or Adobe Lightroom. So I will probably just run Linux in a virtual machine for the things I can only get on Linux.

The first computer I used was an old Olivetti 386 or 486, can’t remember which, which I used when I was 4 or 5 and killed on a regular basis.

The first computer I ever owned was an even older Toshiba T2200SX, which had a cutting edge monochrome screen and battery life of 0 minutes (it wouldn’t turn on unless it was connected to the mains).

Right now I am on my Lenovo ThinkPad SL400. :D