What was the very first computer you ever used

Driver8 · #26 03-06-2007, 04:19 PM

I bought a KayPro PC 8088 w/ 640k, dual floppy drives and an RGB monitor when I started grad school (top picture). Without a hard drive, it was a chore to use. I paid $1200 for that boat anchor, and sold it a year later for $900 to a lady - God bless her - that I'd wager never even turned it on.

At the office (bottom picture) I had a Compaq "luggable" portable unit (pre-laptop) with a small built-in Hercules monochrome screen, a single floppy, 640k and a 10mb hard drive running MS-DOS v2.01. It had just enough room on the hard drive for Lotus 123 2.01, PC-Write, dBase 3.0 and, of course, Tetris

This was the one I cut my teeth on, and the one that ignited my interest in computers.

Man, that thing must have weighed 40 pounds! It was like a roach. You couldn't kill it. It's probably still around somewhere gathering dust. The fact that it survived a very dusty construction office and being tossed around in the back of a Suburban speaks volumes...and backs up the reputation Compaq computers had back in the day.