TL;DR It was an old Wang system, 286 processor(I think, anyway), with no hard drive, a 5.25" floppy drive, and a lovely green monochrome monitor. I didn’t have it long enough to reach the point where I could have identified the actual hardware/specs.
Back in 1993, I was 10, and the internet really wasn’t a thing yet(yeah, yeah, I know. But for most of us, the internet didn’t exist until the mid-late 90’s). You’d probably have difficulty even finding someone in the neighborhood who could tell you what a computer was, nevermind having used one. I was out running around the city, as you used to be able to do at 10 years old, when I passed by some local business/office/who knows I was 10. Big pile of trash out front, waiting to be picked up. When you’re a kid, and you’re poor, you go picking. Trash picking, I mean. You can get all sorts of cool shit, especially from the wealthier neighborhoods. Maybe it’s different nowadays, but back in the day, people would toss out perfectly good toys, bikes, electronics, furniture, and as they became more commom, videogames, computers, etc. A ton of the shit I owned as a kid is stuff I picked straight out of the trash. Even after that, I picked trash for years. Resold a metric FUCKTON of stuff that other(presumably wealthier) people deemed to be garbage.
Back to this business/office/free stuff location, I obviously start eyeing what’s in the big pile out front of this place. Among the stuff, I see a big, beige, metal box, a weird looking TV, and something with a big coiled wire hanging off of it. Now, it’s not like there weren’t computers in movies/TV at that point, and I had just read Jurassic park the same year, so I did recognize, vaguely, what it was. So I start looking at it, poking around, It had a name on it. “Wang”. Don’t know what that means, but I’m 10; that’s hilarious. I decide I’m taking it. Tried to pick it up, and yeah, that shit is heavy. Nevermind the TV thing, and the keyboard. So as you do, I look around for a stary shopping cart, and sure enough, there’s never one far away. Grab the cart and start lifting my haul into it, when someone comes out of the business/office/treasure-hoard, and yells “HEY!” Thought I was about to be in trouble, but instead, this guys walks over to me and says “you’re gonna need this.” Handed me a bundle of wires, and a square envelope, and just went back inside. So I toss that in the cart, and start pushing. And push I did. A shopping cart full of early 90’s computer hardware, pushed by a 10 year-old, down the street, on and off of curb, up and down hills, from the other end of the city, is hard work. But eventually, I got home with it. Not to worry though, I only lived on the 3rd floor of a three-story building.
So I get home, and I start unloading my haul, one piece at a time, and start dragging it up the stairs. Thankfully no one was home, so I could bring everything into my room without anyone complaing about what I’m doing. That was also one of the only times I actually had a bedroom, so that worked out. Once I get it in there, I put the big metal box on the floor in the corner of my room, I take my monitor and decide that I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to sit on top, so I put that there. The keyboard was next. After I untagled that cursed coiled cable, I obviously checked the back of the monitor, looking for where I need to plug the keyboard in. Figured out that no, it gets plugged into the big metal box. What next? Oh, right, that bundle of wires the guy gave me. It tuned out to be a couple of power cables, and a (what I now would assume) was a VGA cable. So I get to work plugging all of that in, and when it comes to the VGA cable, that’s when I realize that oh, everything plugs into the metal box, that seems important. That must be the part that is a “computer.” So what the hell is the TV thing? Took a minute, but I eventually remembered my NES, and realized that oh yeah, the box is where everything happens, and the screen is just where you see it. Again, I was 10, and all of this technology was still new to the average person. Give me a break here.
And last up was that square envelope. Would you believe it had a black plastic thing inside? It’s really floppy. Weird. What the fuck is this thing? It has a white sticker on it, and some illegible scribbles. Nintendo to the rescue again. This black plastic thing sure does look like it would fit into the slot on the front of the metal box. Oh shit, it did! Now I just have to turn this thing on. How the fuck do you turn this thing on? Spent a while on that one, flipping the obvious big red power switch in the back. Took a while before I figured out there was a second power button on the front. TWO power switches?! What is this nonsense? Whatever. It’s on now.
I sat and watched as bright green text started popping up on the screen. Various numbers, and phrases that I’d never heard in my life. Clearly, this stuff could only be understood some secret government agent, or that one kid I read about Jurassic Park, who was obviously like, a genius hacker or something. The slot where I shoved that floppy plastic square sure is noisy. What the hell is it doing, anyway? It loads in just like my Nintendo games, maybe it’s a game?! Maybe a game is about to start. It sure was, friends. Maybe the greatest game ever made. We called it… DOS.
Man, did I love that game, DOS. I spent the several hours, typing random shit on the keyboard, as the command prompt did absolutely nothing of interest, since I had no idea what I was doing. But after those couple of hours of typing swears and random nonsense, I finally started to get bored, what with all of the nothing that was happening. And for whatever reason, I thought maybe someone could help me. Or, why not the computer itself? Maybe it will help me. So I typed the work “help”, I hit the enter key, and sure enough, something finally happened. Holy shit, it’s doing something. It’s telling me how to DO stuff.
And so, before this novel goes on even longer, yeah. I found the help menu, and spent many more hours needlessly using very basic commands to create, copy, move, rename, and delete empty files and folders. Truly, I was now an elite haxxor man.
Over the next couple of years, I pulled many systems and parts out of various trash piles, and cobbled together different systems. Many, many different 386 and 486 systems. Until finally, when I was 15, I managed to get my hands on an obscenely slow, but absolute magic at the time, dialup modem, and a pile of “free hours” of AOL.
And they all lived happily ever after… Until social media was invented. The end.
If people like/want to read/discuss such poorly written nonsense, maybe I’ll write up some nonsense about other technology-based shenanigans from over the years. And if people would rather make fun of my poor writing skills; fair.
Commodore 64, probably around '86 or so. It had a tape drive and games would take like 20 minutes to load. Crazy to think about now.
Later on (probably around 1989 or 1990) I got an Amstrad 8086 PC. IIRC it had maybe 1mb ram (pretty large for the time) and a massive 20mb hard drive. I remember playing games like bubble Bobble, the Sierra adventure games and so on. A few years later I got a 386 DX PC and played a lot of wing Commander and privateer, dune 2, LucasArts games and so on.
Ahhh, memories!
In the 2010s my family had a HP Compaq SFF with Windows 7.
Mine was an aquamarine blue iMac G3 (the see-through, cathode ray one), which was already quite outdated at that point. My father got me it from work, they were getting rid of old machines.
I used it mainly for music, my brother shared his huge music library over Bonjour inside iTunes, some basic games like chess and sudoku. I remember him teaching me to use Gimp and Seashore and some basic coding in Smultron. It barely ran YouTube, which I remember vividly because I would play videos via Miro, and trying in Safari or Firefox could straight-up freeze the computer. I must have been 7 or 8 at that point.
My first computer was a brand new Commodore Amiga 600 that I got for Christmas in 1992. I was 10. It was glorious. It had 1MB of RAM with a built-in floppy drive (and no hard drive) and was paired with a lovely 14" CRT monitor at a time when most non-PC home computers were connected to TVs with RF modulators. The difference in image quality was immediately apparent when I went to my friends’ houses and played on their Amigas.
My parents were convinced because you could do educational-type stuff on it, but really it was a games machine with a keyboard for me - we never had dedicated games consoles. I played the hell out of it for a few years until we got our first Windows 95 PC around 1996.
Amiga 500. Best entertainment ever.
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. I first saw one in school, and while the rest of the kids took a turn playing a snake game, I read the instruction card. Hit break, read the program, decided I could do that. Took a summer class (for adults, I was the only kid). Got my own. Programmed a lot. Despite (because of) the limited graphics: 64x16 chars, or 128x48 B&W pixel graphics, there were a lot of games on it, very low barrier to writing your own.
Couple years later got an Atari 800, which is still my favorite computer of all time, and I make retro games or demos for it.
All I remember is that it ran Windows 3.1 and had a ‘Turbo’ switch on the front. To this day I have no idea what that did, but was told not to touch it.
The turbo name wss misleading. It’s purpose was to allow the PC to be slowed down for software that needed it. Some games relied on the 4.77MHz CPU speed, and would run too fast if Turbo was on.
My first computer was an old Sinclair ZX81. It was my friends dad’s old computer, I got to borrow it over school summer break as they headed to India during the summer. Spent most of that summer learning the basics of BASIC, but you couldn’t really do terribly much with it.
I think this was 1982.
Got my own ZX Spectrum 48 couple of years later. Glorious times gaming and programming.
Vic20. When I was 8 or so. It was a handmedown from my uncle. I remember writing some very basic basic while poking through the manual and playing cartridge and tape games on it. Good times!
First computer of my own was a Macbook air (2013 I think) when I was in middle school. Before you ask my age, I’ve already graduated college with a bachelor’s and could be any of your coworkers.
Tldr; daily reminder that y’all are old now
I’m well aware, my body reminds me in new ways every day.
Same year for me, but I built a PC with an i7-4790k and a 760. I had just started high school. I also have a bachelor’s and could be any of your coworkers.
First computer, I got was via a trade. I was about 12. At the time I knew next to nothing about computers, with desktops being a thing at school (in one room). Something like this in a home… that’s rich people stuff. It ran Windows XP, and was almost certainly a Pentium (don’t know which).
I remember making several trips to transfer the monitor, desktop, and accessories home. That thing was HEAVY, for me back then. It must have been about 3 miles before I carried everything home. I connected everything, booted it up, and everything worked perfectly… Then five minutes later I found out the importance of the internet… optical games worked fine, but no porn… My next purchase would be a USB 2 mobile internet dongle. How else was I going to do all that valuable “research”.
About two years or so later, it wouldn’t turn on (the PC). There wasn’t any shops near me that could fix it, and I thought what would be the harm in opening the side panel, and taking a look. Suffice to say… I made things worse. Can’t recall what I did, but the power supply went bang, thankfully no fire. I ended up throwing the computer out, and selling the accessories and monitor. I didn’t want to own a desktop computer, again for years. That loud bang scared the living hell out of me.
I only later got back into computing, because I was kinda addicted to video games, heard PC gaming was better, and slowly aquired several games from relatives (Crysis, Total War Empire, etc). That computer I purchased, new, with cash I earned from trading with folks/shops (still haggle, to this day). My next computer was AMD, a A6-3600, I think. No graphics card, though I would later haggle for a GTX 960. This computer was where I started to get really interested in IT. I wanted to learn why my old computer bit the dust, and figure out everything I could. It was more than a porn and gaming machine. That computer taught me more than most IT lessons ever did (still can’t believe using Google Search, constituted as a “lesson”).
Man I was maybe 3, and my dad brought home lots of weird equipment because of his job. Those big ole beige HPs with the phat CRT monitors.
I don’t remember specifically what computer I got first because there were several. Some of them down the line were pieced together by disassembling other systems, with and without help from pops.
I used it for lots and lots of unsupervised, unrestricted internet browsing. 2000s tor was a wild place. Saw a ton of shit I had no business seeing, talked to people I had no business talking to, did shit I had no business doing. Amassed a bunch of bitcoin very early on, got rid of the pc. KillMeNow.jpg.
I fully built my own customer with all new parts for the first time when I was like 11. Been on customs ever since then.
TI-99
My first computer was a hand-me-down Toshiba T3100. I was around ten years old at the time, in the late 90’s. The portable computer, was way far different from any computer I’ve seen thus far. It also came with a printer, but I don’t think I managed to make it work. The portable computer only had a 20MiB hard drive, and memory that can be measured in kibibytes. Its hard drive has already been reformatted, and had MS-DOS 6.21, Windows 3.11, as well as some DOS games installed in it.
I didn’t really bother with the DOS games, but I’ve had a lot of fun playing Chips Challenge on Windows. However, a huge chunk of time went into me just messing around with QBasic. Later on, when I had programming classes, I installed Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, and Turbo C in there for homework and projects.
It could have lasted far longer but I couldn’t resist myself opening it up. I didn’t have a lot of trouble opening it up, but had a bit of trouble putting it back together. It didn’t survive my prying though, and it got shoved into the storage.
Just recently, a few years ago, I found out that it’s a bit of a collector’s item, and was even expensive back when it was new. I couldn’t have known it at that time, nor would I have cared, but I still regret not taking care of it a bit more.
An IBM PCjr, when I was 4 (I was one of those kids that picked up reading very quickly).
I learned DOS, played King’s Quest, and even picked up simple programming in BASIC from a book. Not sure if the book was a pack-in with the computer or if my parents got it for me separate. I didn’t learn PC internals until a few years later, although I do vividly recall an ISA-slot 15MB hard drive that was the size of one of today’s big video cards.
