I'm not asking about your first PC specifically,unless that was your 1st experience with one,rather if you can remember your first encounter with one and what you thought.

Mine was back in the late 80's.My girlfriend at the time took me to her brother's place and as they had something to do and I was at a loose end he let me have a go on his PC.He loaded up Windows 3.1 and left me to it.I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.In fact that would have been my first time with a mouse. He came back after a few minutes to find me staring blankly at it and asking 'what can it do'?
He showed me a few things and I thought something along the lines of 'this is crap' but it piqued my interest somewhat.

In fact my first PC followed on not too long afterwards running DOS 5. I remembered my not-too-impressed introduction to Windows and did not install it until the first game came out that I wanted which was Windows only,The Journeyman Project.

My first encounter with a PC was in my 7th grade "Intro to Computers" class (this was in 1985). It was an Atari 800 and I remember being frustrated trying to program in "Logo" which was the language our teacher was using. I didn't actually own a PC until 1992.

Red Baron at the PC of my uncle. I don't think I had much choice to NOT become a flightsim nut.

Same as Panzer except in 1985 i was about to graduate from college and had used one before in a FORTRAN language computer class. The first time i had my own PC was in 1998 - I used it to play "Panzer Elite" and it was a Dell XPS 400

There's a difference between "Personal Computer" and "PC compatible" when you go back far enough, so here's my entry:

In the mid 1980s and I was probably 7 years old, a family friend had one of the first generation Apple Macintosh computerers with an external floppy drive.

Played a few games on floppy disk on that, plus MacPaint and such. Had a blast.

Just a year or so later I got my own first "personal computer"... The Tandy TRS-80. Which was nothing like the Apple. A step back, but hey by the age of 10 I had learned to program the TRS-80 to do loads of stuff.

The first "PC compatible" experience was in the late 1980s, my Mom and I signed up for a local PC training class at a nearby church. They taught us all the same DOS prompt navigation commands and stuff I still remember to this day. At the time, with the software we were training on, I kind of felt that the PC was inferior to my TRS-80, except for the floppy disk and dot matrix printers. Heck my TRS-80 had colors on the screen, not just green on black!

And by the time I bought my first PC in the early 1990s, it came with Windows 3.11. But all those DOS commands were critical to doing just about anything. I felt like I owned a supercomputer!

1979, in high school we were working with the antique card reader using binary codes.
The card reader would transfer the data to this huge cabinet that had these huge Tape
reals.

Personal PC came in 1984 when I bought a Apple 2 clone by Franklin.
Using basic programming languages and beginning Fortran.

My first encounter with using a computer was at a local college computer lab with one of my older brothers. Even though that wasn't a PC, it started my interest in computers, and made me look at PCs differently than I might have otherwise. I would see computers in stores everywhere back in the early '80s, and was drawn to the Atari 800 series, but they seemed too expensive for me to buy with money from my early jobs right out of high school.

I kept going into computer stores and checking out different computers, and reading in magazines about them, and almost bought a Sinclair, then a VIC-20, because they were less expensive, and then I heard about the C-64 coming out. I waited and waited and they finally came in. I bought one, brought it home, and had no software for it because it was so new. After a few months, I sold it, and bought an Atari 800. Of course the C-64 had more stuff come out for it later than the 800, but I always just liked how the 800 worked.

Gotta love those membrane keyboards on the Atari 800.

That was the Atari 400 - the 800 had a real keyboard

My dad had an old Texas Instruments computer in the early 80s, then a few different Atari ones.

Then of course we had the old Apple IICs in school.

If you mean PC compatible, it was probably 1987-1988 when my dad got a Commodore PC Compatible. Played Battlehawks 1942 and Falcon on it.

Ah ok, you're right. It was the Atari 400 then that we were using in my 7th grade class.

First computer was a C-64. Still got it. *Would* still work if I wasn't a curious young kid with a screwdriver. The replacement we got for it still works. Kinda.

First PC-compatible encounter was an Amstrad 1640, an 8086 with 640kb of base RAM, DOS 3.2 I believe, and EGA. Ahhh, Alley Cat.
I may be mis-remembering, but when we got an IBM PS2/30 (286, VGA I think), we did a FS3 LAN attempt. I so should have used the Learjet.

I meant any PC really. Come to think of it I'm sure the one I got my hands on was an IBM. I was astounded at the cost of some of the parts,the monitor for instance was 500 to 600 pounds (or even more) if I remember correctly.


I bought Falcon 3 before I even owned a PC. I then persuaded my brother-in-law to install it on his PC so I could figure out how expensive a system I would need to buy to run it.I remember him editing the config.sys and autoexec.bat files furiously in an attempt to free up enough memory to run it.I got really worried that he was messing up his PC in the process not realising he had already made back-ups of said files.I had much to learn. But run it did.It was unbelievable and I was hooked from that moment on.

I had to put my DOS skills to use only last week.I had an old laptop given me.It would run but it was very flaky. I decided to flash the BIOS but because it wouldn't boot to an OS I had to do it using an external floppy drive I keep for just such an occasion.This boots an old Win 98 rescue disk with fdisk etc on it.However the BIOS utility wouldn't run with DOSKEY loaded so I edited the autoex.bat and REM'd out the offending lines. I was pretty pleased with myself.Not touched DOS for years,apart from a brief foray into DOSBox.

Ah, editing config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Those were the days.

I remember having to do just that for several games that I played roughly between the years 1989-1992.

I've got a Sun 22" CRT that weighs somewhere in the region of that much...


With crass abuse of the "menuitem" keyword in DOS 5/6+, me and my brother essentially had an auto/config for pretty much every game we had that played hardball with lowmem... and the ones which didn't play ball with E/XMS, plus or minus smartdrv, emm386, yadda yadda...

...half the satisfaction came from just getting the darned thing to work! Kids today got it easy...

Dad brought home a TRS-80. Cassette drive. Probably about 1980.
I played around with it, using one of those programming books where you'd pick a project and copy it in to get used to BASIC.
Spent HOURS working on a graphic of a blocky fort that would fire a cannonball(a square) at another fort. It was the middle of the night when I finished.
I woke everyone up. The fort fired the cannonball, then had a syntax error. I saved it to the cassette tape to mess with later, but it didn't take, as was typical.
It was then determined that I'm not a programmer.




Late we got the cool Apple II-C. It was portable! Well, had a handle. LOL Pretty cool computer really.
Ours:

Commodore 64 in 1983, either in a classroom setting or at a family friend's house, then I got one for Christmas in 1984.

It was used in the movie "2010" as a futuristic portable PC when Haywood Floyd is working at the beach.

http://www.starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/2010_apple_iic.jpg

Started with a Spectrum 48k (we had a ZX81 for an hour, before it went back as "the wrong one", as was replaced)...

Started with laboriously typing several short program examples... then found some strategy games and basic flight sims...

Was still using the Rubber keyboard Spectrum several years later, despite the availability of a "new" Atari ST, because I had recently found "Lightning Simulator" ~ a decent EE-Lightning simulation, something comparatively scarce even today... and one I still tinker with emulated on my i5.

First use of PCs was at university (engineering) using early versions of office for reports, and Fortran 77.
University PCs were 286s mostly, but I bought a shiny new 386/387 (admittedly mostly to "get the best out of" Falcon 3), which fried itself under warranty and replaced itself with a 486

My best friend's dad built (...I wanted to say a Tandy but that wouldn't work with the dates; so, don't know...) in '78. We would spend hours taking turns punching numbers while the other read the list, then play whatever game we finally got to run bug-free.