Commodore 64, with the tape reader, hooked to a black&white CRT
Seems I’m the eldest one here for now
Be neither alone nor afraid, your brethren gather
Same. First program I built was a bouncing circle, took 15 minutes to code and an hour to save to the cassette.
Commodore 64. I played BC’s Quest for Tires for hours! 1996 Sony Vaio.
I’m kind of jealous. My first program was asking the user what 2+2 is and either displaying wrong or right.
When my cousin came to visit he coded a simple labyrinth like game where you had to move the cursor from the upper left corner to the lower right corner of the screen as quickly as possible while not bumping into random symbols scattered around. Sometimes it was unwinnable because the entrance or the exit were completely surrounded.
I think I have you slightly beat… mine was an Apple II+, circa late 1981, with a disk drive, and a monochrome green screen monitor.
First cell phone was around 1997. Though I honestly don’t remember what it was. I recall having a Nokia model from before they made that indestructible model in all the memes, as well as a Kyocera one that I could connect to a laptop and have wireless dial up internet at some abysmal speed like 20 kbps. (0.02 mbps). I had at least two more phones, including a Treo 650 “smartphone” before getting my first iPhone, a 3G. I’m on my sixth iPhone now.
First computer in about '99, which I’d “built” (I was 8, so I mostly just watched while my dad’s friend built it and occasionally let me plug some wires in)
First phone, Nokia 3310 in 2003, with a Simpsons case, I think I’ve got it in a box somewhere…
My first computer was a Commodore 128. Of course it mainly ran in C64 mode for all the games.
I used an old TV as the monitor. I secretly bought an antenna cable so that I could watch TV. Through some in-house cabling stuff I could also see the BMX videos my older brother was watching. Good times.
In December of 1994, in Greece, finally my parents agreed to get me a computer, as I was finishing college (was studying to be a computer programmer). I come from a very poor family, so it took some convincing. I ordered a modest 486 DX-40 Mhz, with 4 MB of RAM (10 months later it had to be updated to 8 MB in order to run Win95), 4x CD-ROM, 1.44 floppy drive, and a 420 MB Conner HDD. It had a Cirrus Logic graphics card (which I later upgraded to an S3), and a plain soundblaster sound card. The monitor was an 800x600 14" CRT monitor, and I think I also got a joystick with it too. I ran Win3.1 originally, and DOS. I was programming mainly in Turbo Pascal, and dBase III.
The only “computer” we had at home before that, was an Atari 2600, that I bought my brother as a gift, in a yard sale in 1991, Germany. Already extremely outdated by that time, but that was the only one I could afford (I was in Germany for 8 months in early 1990s, before I went to college back in Greece, working menial jobs: janitor, kitchen help).
I installed a bunch of shareware games found on magazines when I got the 486, so I got viruses a couple of times too because of that (Greek PC magazines at the time weren’t as careful as they should have been). I had no access to the internet or BBS, you see. It had to be through magazines, especially since almost no one else in my small town had a computer at the time to share software with.
That’s the computer I had when I moved to the UK in late 1996, to go work as a programmer there. I got paid well there, so I upgraded a few times, particularly the graphics card (at one point I had a voodoo SLI).
When I got married and left for the US in 2001, I had a dual Celeron at 333 Mhz, 128 MB RAM, and an nVidia TNT2 Ultra.
I got a cellphone for the first time in 2003 I think, some Nokia ones I think. I was writing tech reviews online, so companies were sending me loaners to review. However, my phone usage was spotty, since I was on a pay-as-you-go (with limited, or no data plan) for about 10 years. It took the 2010s for me to get a family plan, with enough data. I did get my hands on the first iphone though, and the first android too (my husband was part of the original android team at the time, at Google). These days, I’m back in Greece as of the beginning of this year, and I run Murena e/OS, the de-googled version of Android that is privacy-focused (based on LineageOS).
I got my first phone in 1998. It was a nokia 8110, aka the ‘banana phone’.
I got my first computer in 1989. It was a Commodore VIC-20. I still have it. 5kB of RAM should be enough for everyone.
We had a Vic 20 as well! In 1984. I was 4 years old.
Wow. In 84 it cost about a dollar per minute to talk on a cell phone. That’s when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour. So you’d have to work for 20 minutes to afford one minute of talk time if you were a minimum wage worker.
Ok yeah I’m old. Thanks :P
5kB of RAM should be enough for everyone
I believe so too, on a micro-controller
Phone: it looked like https://www.sparkshire.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/CREAM8746TELEPHONE_1512x.png?v=1627985748
Computer: ZX spectrum
1995
- Pentium 75 MHz
- 8 MB RAM
- 700 MB HDD
- CD-ROM drive
My first phone was some badass Nokia from 1998. My first comp was in 1993. DX33 with a 1MB Genoa GPU, 8MB RAM, 250MB HDD, and a 2400 baud modem. That sumbitch was $3,000 back then.
Anyone over 40 who doesn’t say Nokia or Motorola is either lying or should check themselves into memory rehab.
Commodore 64
TRS 80 sans disk drive. My school library and local library had BASIC programs in the books. I’m now a SR Software Engineer. Wild. My first phone couldn’t even text… Whatever it was.
I remeber my 1st computer was a 133 Mhz with a 36k dial-up, I had a pager before I had a phone, but im sure the phone was Nokia and had Snake 🐍
Edit: pc was around 94? 95? Tbf we had a Tandy 1000 as a family computer in late 80s
Tandy… Kings Quest. So good. California Games. I miss how simple life used to be.
My first computer was a ZX81 - in 1982 - which, with my brother, I built from a kit and was astonished when it actually worked. We eventually added the 16k ram pack too: how could anyone possibly use all that?!
First phone. I think it was a Nokia 5110 or similar in 2000.
Pretty sure it was a Nokia 3110 in the late 90’s.
For first PC it would have been around 1995. Dial up baby.
Gaming console would have been the Sega Master System. But I do remember other things before this but they were my uncles. Maybe a commador
I have no idea what the specs of my first computer was, but I know that it was running Windows 98 and was one of those old beige boxes that looks terrible, but that was like the only color for computers back then for whatever the hell reason was that God awful beige tan shit. That would have been in about 2003 and my school was running computers with Windows XP at the time.
I got my first cell phone in 2006 or 2007 and it was a Sony Ericsson flip phone on AT&T and it was this black and white flip phone. At about that same time, I also got my very first laptop, and it was running Windows Vista, I think, and we still had dial-up, because nothing more modern had come to our little country home. So I had to use 19 KB/s dial-up until 2010.
I got my first smartphone in 2011 and it was an iPhone 3GS because it was either free or $99 on contract. I remember being in a 100,000 population city and listening to Pandora with edge cell data and having an entire monthly allotment of like a gigabyte or maybe two. I also remember the rollout of 3G because I started seeing that in the city of 100,000 people and only had 2G in my hometown and then finally one day saw 3G was beginning to roll out in my hometown.
All computers were beige… unless you were a smoker, then it was an ugly yellow-brown color after a few months
I absolutely hate that color and seeing it just makes me want to vomit.
