How to Buy a Computer in 1993...

[lee n. field]

Okay, if we're now doing the old codger "first computer I ever used" thing...  

I don't know what kind it was, but a terminal in High School that printed to rolled paper stock attached to the terminal. You saved your programs to punch cards. Hunt the Wumpus ruled! We got our first video terminal my senior year. The actual computer(s) were at a school district office somewhere.

On saving computers, I really regret not saving both the Timex and also my Atari ST. There are neat programs for the ST that have never been ported to any of the emulators. As far as my early PCs, I don't mind not having saved any of them since DOSBox seems to have most anything I would want.

Had and ran with an ST for a good while.   Still have a monochrome monitor for that in the basement.  Bought the ICD scsi host adapter.  My first hard disk as a 40MB scsi for that.  I might still actually have that disk.  I have an image file of that hard disk, somewhere, and have messed a bit with the emulators.  But, I have moved on.

I actually hand upgraded the 1040 to 4MB RAM.  Had to dig up a simm socket, which was not easy to do.

Lightning took it out, in the classic way (phone line takes out modem takes out pc through serial).  Took the payout from that and bought a pc clone.

[MillCreek]

I wish I had kept my old acoustic coupler that I used to connect to Unix bulletin boards.

[HeroHog]

Bought an "American Semiconductor" 8088 PC Clone with a Hercules graphics card, amber monochrome monitor, 640k RAM, single 5¼" floppy drive and an IBM full height 10meg HD. I forget what we paid but it was a lot for a college student back then!
Eventually it was upgraded with a NEC V20 CPU, Math coprocessor, 1meg RAM, and a seagate ST225 20meg half height hard drive.

[WLJ]

Toyed around with the idea of a Vic-20 or a C64 but my first owned computer was a Franklin PC-8000 512k 2x360k 5.25 floppies.
First harddrive I ever bought, 20mb ST-225R, I installed in a Laser XT. 20mb! Thought I would never run out of space! Got single photos bigger than 20mb now.

[RocketMan]

I wish I had kept my old acoustic coupler that I used to connect to Unix bulletin boards.

I think I have a portable coupler around someplace.  I used it back in my storm chasing days in the '90s, downloading datasets for forecasting software from the NWS on payphones.

[HeroHog]

Had 2 friends back in my 8088 days, one had a Commodore 64 and the other an Amiga. The things they could do with audio and video blew the PCs of the day away!

[RoadKingLarry]

Commodore64 with a cassette tape to start. Added a modem, a 5.25" floppy and about 1986. Moved up to an Amiga 500 with the extra 500K memory add on and a modem in late 1987 or early 1988 or so. Also had a Okidata printer of some sort. I was big into the BBS scene in those days.
My first IBM clone came in 1995. I was working at Memorex-Telex and we were allowed to build our own "loaner" machines out of the miscellaneous parts bins on the repair line. Mine was a 486DX2 with as much RAM as I could scrounge up.
When the company was bought out by DecisionOne a few years later all the records about loaners were lost.

[French G.]

I had a Kaypro. I think there were high hopes among my dad's friends that I would "learn to code." Maybe in some parallel universe I am so rich that Zuckerberg mows my grass. Just never interested me.

[Devonai]

My first was a used Mac Plus in 1992. I struggled along with 128k of RAM and a single floppy drive for months until I could afford to upgrade to its maximum, 4mb. Such a huge increase in RAM, relatively speaking, was astonishing. Then a few months later I bought a 20mb external hard drive, and again, mind blown.

After that was one of the Performa series but I don't remember any of its stats, just that the color monitor was nifty. I finally dumped the Mac thing in 1995 with a 486. I wanted to play Doom with my buddies and that was all that mattered.

[Andiron]

Apple 2E,  Oregon Trial and xeon patrol FTW.  Carmen San Diego and Number Crunchers for honorable mention.

My first build was a P4/Voodoo5 box.  Still in the basement,  no idea if it would boot up.

[HeroHog]

The Louisiana tech Modem Users Association's first BBS ran on a IIe with 5 floppy drives.



PS: I am still friends with and in touch with 3 of my fellow geek friends.

PPS: We had forums and played "Trade Wars" on-line (go {coordinate}, scan area, go planet...)

[Larry Ashcraft]

First computer I used was in a Fortran II class in 1967 or 1968 in college.  It took up several large rooms in the basement of the school.  First one I bought was an Atari 800, expanded to its maximum of 48k.  I even wrote a business program on it in Basic that worked pretty well.

I bought a Mac in about 1986 for my business.  A good late friend wrote a program for it to handle invoices, statements etc.  It was such a good program that I used it until about 2010 when my last Mac died.  I used a PC in the back of the shop to run my laser engraver and for internet access.  A friend from England sent me some software to run a Mac simulator that I was able to access my old invoices. We retrieved the data from my old Mac backup hard drive.  I couldn't print from the simulator, so I just used it for reference.  I found a canned business program online for the PC and customized it to work for invoicing.

My first computerized engraver was a Dahlgren Wizzard XL in the mid 1980s, that cost around $7000.  It was such a capable and fast machine that I bought another used one as a backup.  Both of those lasted me until 2008, when they were so obsolete that spare parts were unobtainable, so I bought a state of the art Xenetech912 which I still have.  The Xenetech was around $8000 without computer, but it made about $200 an hour when it was running.

[brimic]

I bought my first around 1998 or so. It had that sweet AMD chip that was capable of 233MHZ.