My first pc was an IBM PC XT. I bought it with the advance money I got for programming a POS system on it for the tourist trap town of White's City, New Mexico (outside Carlsbad Caverns).
My first computer purchase was a Commodore VIC-20, with tape drive. I even bought an expansion card for it that would hold 4 more expansion cards, and an expansion memory card that pushed the 4kb of ram all the way up to 32kb. I was smokin'. You could only have one expansion card active at any time, though (you'd have to turn the vic-20 off, flip dip switches to choose which card, then turn it back on). I used to participate in a competition for 1-line Vic-20 games, but don't remember who it was that held the competition (some magazine, I think).
After that, I moved up to a Commodore 64 and then an Atari ST. Somewhere along the way, I also had an Apple 2+ that I got on loan to produce some financial software on.
One of the most maddening things to me is how much these darned things cost back then compared to what they cost now, but we paid it to upgrade our machines.
Examples:
Model 1541 Floppy drive for Commodore 64 - around $300.
I forget what i paid for a 20Mb hard drive for the Atari ST, but it was at least a couple hundred.
My first computer purchase was a Commodore VIC-20, with tape drive. I even bought an expansion card for it that would hold 4 more expansion cards, and an expansion memory card that pushed the 4kb of ram all the way up to 32kb. I was smokin'. You could only have one expansion card active at any time, though (you'd have to turn the vic-20 off, flip dip switches to choose which card, then turn it back on). I used to participate in a competition for 1-line Vic-20 games, but don't remember who it was that held the competition (some magazine, I think).
After that, I moved up to a Commodore 64 and then an Atari ST. Somewhere along the way, I also had an Apple 2+ that I got on loan to produce some financial software on.
One of the most maddening things to me is how much these darned things cost back then compared to what they cost now, but we paid it to upgrade our machines.
Examples:
Model 1541 Floppy drive for Commodore 64 - around $300.
I forget what i paid for a 20Mb hard drive for the Atari ST, but it was at least a couple hundred.