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November 14, 2009

What was your first home computer?

PC Advisor writers share stories of their first PCs

PC Advisor staff

ith its clunky keyboard, low-resolution screen, pitiful RAM allocation and miserly hard drive, your first computer was probably the worst computer you ever owned. And yet it's likely you remember it with great fondness, either as the product that started your love affair with the PC or as a measure of how far home computing has come in such a short time.

Micro Men, the BBC drama about Sir Clive Sinclair's 1980s battle with Acorn founder Chris Curry, reignited PC Advisor's nostalgia for the home computer boom, so we asked several members of the team to spill the beans on their first home computers.

Join us in reminiscing about the glory days of the UK computer industry and the boom years of the 1990s by taking part in our online poll in the left-hand navigation menu. Then, discuss the results in our forum.

But first, read on for the full details of our first home computers.

Paul Trotter - Amstrad CPC-464

I'm going to start off by cheating because I have only a vague recollection of the first family computer in the Trotter house. It was referred to as "the Tandy" and in recent years I've come to the conclusion that it was probably a TRS-80. As far as I recall, it was only ever used for Space Invaders. Not a great anecdote.

So I'll skip a few years and focus on our first recognised home computer - the Amstrad CPC-464. It arrived in August 1986 and had a colour screen as opposed to the second-rate green screen version owned by my best friend at the time. I have a clear memory of the salesman demonstrating a word processing tool and a number of other worthy applications. I used it for games.

A number of titles in the 'Roland' series came with the CPC-464 (if you remember the Roland games and fancy a trip down memory lane, take a look at this and this) and after that I bought more or less every Amstrad football game available.

Amstrad CPC-464

Amstrad CPC-464

Like others here, I tried my hand at programming - usually by typing in lines of code printed in Amstrad Action magazine. On one occasion, I spent hours typing in code to produce a personal finance management app, at the only period in my life when my income per week exactly matched my outgoings - £1.

As for the hardware itself, our CPC-464 had 64KB RAM and a built-in tape deck. A floppy-disc version was available at the time, and I distinctly remember reading the letters page of Amstrad Action in which a reader had asked whether the cassette had had its day. The magazine's reply was that cassettes were still the cheapest form of storage, and would be with us for a few years yet.

By 1990, even I'd lost faith in such promises, and made the switch to an IBM-compatible PC.

Rosemary Hattersley - Commodore 64

The first home PC I had access to was a Commodore 64. It was a little bit different as all my friends had ZX Spectrums. A couple of people had BBC Micros like the ones in our school library. I think the school had the sum total of three. We didn't get to use them unless we were on the GCSE Computing course though.

My brother and I used our Commodore 64 mainly for games. As well as the usual £2 games such as Frogger and Horace Goes Skiing, I'd buy books of games code and then tap it all in. The games were stored on C60 cassette and if you accidentally put a computer tape in your cassette player, you were treated to the screeching sound of binary. Not pleasant.

Commodore 64There weren't really any of the applications you get today - no proper word processor or email, of course. However, I wrote a program to catalogue the contents of my music collection (tapes and records, of course) and made a basic database.

I also had a plastic keyboard that fitted over the top over the computer keyboard and that I used to learn to play the keyboard - the 80s lent itself to this sort of stuff. I was really miffed when my brother sold the Commodore 64 to his mate along with all the games we'd typed in and, of course, my trusty keyboard.

About three years after we got the C64 my Dad decided to get one of these new-fangled laptop things - a white Elonex 386 model that cost about £3k as they were just beginning to import them from the US.

Continued...
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Wolfie3000 said on Friday, 13 November 2009

I always wanted an Amstrad CPC 464,
A friend of mine had one and at the time I thought it looked so high tech and futuristic. lol

E. Mayler said on Friday, 13 November 2009

My first computer was an Oric Atmos , remember them ? Then I graduated to a 286 PC with 40 meg. HD and 640 K ram.

redshift50 said on Friday, 13 November 2009

ZX 81 with Ram Pack Wobble,

The brother said on Friday, 13 November 2009

Well what can I say, I wouldn't be where I was today if I hadn't had taken that PC apart, and *ahem* broke it!

Arcless said on Friday, 13 November 2009

I started on the Oric 1, moved through the Amstrad CPC 6128 into the world of the Archimedes computers, first the A3000 then the A5000 (and I've still got it).

2bathred said on Saturday, 14 November 2009

I had the Oric Atmos as well, 1.5hrs to load a program from tape then told errors were detected. Must be the only one ever to have a special program written for it to turn off error checking that wouldn't load 'cos it detected errors. LOL. Still got it in a box in the attic.

Chris said on Sunday, 15 November 2009

I had an Acorn Electron machine, really loved it too hours of fun on Elite and other games. Computers have changed so much, from that Electron to my new Macbook Pro

ArrGee said on Monday, 16 November 2009

Kicked off with a Commodore VIC-20, then Spectrum 32k and ended on a BBC Model B whilst at school. How many hours/days/weeks did I spend sifting through PC Magazines for programs to type? Don't ask!

Manic Miner said on Monday, 16 November 2009

I too cut my BASIC teeth on a Commodore VIC-20 in 1985 - with 3.5KB of RAM the games were not great, alas not even with the 16KB "Super Expander" card slotted-in the back, consequently I spent a lot of time learning to program and am thankful for that. Next was the slightly obscure TATUNG EINSTEIN, a £500 monster in 1987. Ran CP/M and had a "massive 64KB of RAM" but still no hard drive - 3.5 inch floppies only. What FUN!

MalcolmF said on Monday, 16 November 2009

Video Genie EG303. A pretend TRS80 with a built-in cassette and sound unit. Learnt a great deal of BASIC from the amazing Micr-80 mag.
Progressed to a PCW8512 that was a superb secret weapon, being able to produce copies of stored reports when the originals had been "lost". The wonders of LocoScripts filing system. Floppy drives and a printer. Nirvana!
Puting a new rubber band into the 3" drive, rather less Nirvana-ish.
I learnt about spreadsheets with Micro Office, and still use the home accounts program I wrote back in '87 on the laptop that this is being pecked in on.
It also gave me a grounding in DTP, with a program called Micro Design. I later appreciated the speed and convenience of real PCs when the manufacturers eventually found out how to make them reliable.

Ray Woods said on Monday, 16 November 2009

A Dragon 32 was my first home computer and, not only do I still have it but, it is still also working! At work I had a PET with 2, 5.1/2" floppy drives.

Most of the work and home software had to be programmed by yourself and, in the case of the Dragon, saved on a standard cassette deck.

I always remember my first program when there was a pause between hitting the enter key and the result coming up on the screen. From then on a lot of the time was spent finding quicker ways of getting a program to run without long delays or programming in machine code.

DenLong said on Monday, 16 November 2009

I had a TRS80 in 1979 and I spent all my spare cash on upgrading. It was a brilliant machine with a fantastic technical manual which allowed my son and I to do all sorts of geeky things helping us to overcome its limitations. By 1981 we had published articles in magazines on subjects as diverse as fast storing of data, 'garbage collection' and how to clean copper tracks. I received letters from all sorts of people using TRS80s in homes, surgeries, offices and factories for all sorts of innovative jobs.
I worked in an oil refinery. Using my home TRS80, I worked out the best conditions for making lubricating oil. I produced a technical report which convinced management that the TRS80s were not toys so they bought one for our technical services department, where many more oil industry technologists got hands on experience. We were young, enthusiastic, and full of new ideas, having suddenly been released from the constraints of a slide rule and mechanical calculators.

Bill Smith said on Monday, 16 November 2009

My first computer was a Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-8. This had 8000 words of core memory and a 32000 words on its hard disk. A word was 12 bits.
There was editors, assemblers linkers etc for machine code programmes, Fortran etc., but the splendid software I remember was FOCAL which was an interpreter and ran your programmne directly. BASIC was developed along similar lines but was a much harder languauge to learn, that show you how splendid FOCAL was.
Later I had an Amstrad 16??on which we drew all the plans for our self build house using Autosketch.
A reduced version of AutoCAD. Used it for 8 years and only changed to windows because I couldn't get email and browser software for it.

Michael Wilkinson said on Monday, 16 November 2009

The Tatung Einstein
Arrived too late to make an impression but it worked a treat.Marketing is all!

Carl said on Monday, 16 November 2009

My first proagrammable machine was a Sharp PC-1211 with a full 1kb of memory expandable with a tape deck interface and had a 16 column printer. First CRT computer was a Mac Plus.

Connor said on Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Windows 98 Computer - I was only little and it was the family PC. The one I am typing this on is my second one (XP SP3). 1GB RAM (Upgraded), 80GB HDD, CRT Monitor,Floppy Drive (My Dad still Wanted it!?), 1.6ghz processor and a CD/DVD Drive

Squillary said on Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Hard to believe no-one started with an Amiga or Atari ST. I started with an Atari 800XL, with the makers moving over to the Amiga, but I stayed with the more PC-like Atari 520STFM. Great graphic OS in the 80s, much cheaper and better than a Mac, less horrible than the DOS based PCs at the time. I didn't move away from an Atari machine until 2003 having finished up with an Atari TT030

lizardtail said on Wednesday, 18 November 2009

I started out on a Commodore Vic-20 a 1MHZ, a tape drive & 400 boad modem (not much internet back then!) then a C-64 w. dual floppys then onto an Amiga-1000 7MHz which is still in the closet, it got a virus from a rental game and that was the end of it, i got burned out on puters & went to a webtv afew years later & coordinated 500 volunteers round the country with it then got burned out again and now on a HP laptop 4 GHz dual 64 cores that i've done so much work with in 2 1/2 yrs its amazing.

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