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.
Phone: it looked like https://www.sparkshire.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/CREAM8746TELEPHONE_1512x.png?v=1627985748
Computer: ZX spectrum
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.
1995
- Pentium 75 MHz
- 8 MB RAM
- 700 MB HDD
- CD-ROM drive
Commodore 64
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).
First tower computer in 1993. Acer (absolute piece of garbage)
First cell phone in 2009 (I think was the year) it was an LG . One of the slider phones where you slid part of the phone to expose the keyboard.
First computer, Tandy Coco 2 (TRS-80) in 1988 or 89.
First phone (other than a landline) was a Motorola bag phone around 1996(?)
My first computer too. That’s where I learned my first bit of basic programming. Used to get magazines with pages of code to type in. Always needed tons of troubleshooting.
My first computer was our family’s 286 Wang pc. I used it mainly to play Sierra games. It’s how I learned a lot of my first English words.
I got my first cellphone, a Sony-Ericsson, around 2003 and only because my brother gave it to me. I was a staunch hater of cellphones but too Dutch to pass up on a free thing :)Ooh, my family’s was a 386 Wang Exec. My mom upgraded to the 384MB 5.25" internal hard drive. Dual 5.25 and 3.5 inch disk drives. So many memories.
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.
Third or fourth hand nokia, one of em indestructible ones. I was in school, so I didn’t have much use for one. Kept using nokia until I got a blackberry, and then a samsung. Moved over to iphone but didn’t like it much.
First computer though a console Atari 2600 when I was 5
Proper computer Acorn electron at 7
Phone 6610 at 14
My first phone was the standard '70s Bell-style rotary
