There's such as broad range of people on these forums that I thought it might be interesting to find out what machine they first found out about how great personal computers are.

For me, I was bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum when I was about 10. That's 1981.

I think that the UK contingent will be mainly those, Amstrads, Commodores and BBC Micros...but the rest of the world I don't know.

Osborne I

More on the topic here.

Spectrum 48K

Mine was a pentium 1 dell laptop, can't remember much about it other than it was heavy.

@Garmanma. Did you pay 9k for it?

@King. I knew it had to be a Speccy...

@Nigglesnush. Your first PC was a laptop? Wow!

Mine was a sinclair zx spectrum
I could spend ages wasting my time on it (I wish I could understand my newer PC )

It feels like a long time ago, I have just found out it wasn't a Dell. It was a Toshiba Tecra 700CT I only really used it for the games but still I think phones have more power that it now.

Good Lord, no. I wouldn't even ay that much for a car back then

Texas Instruments TI-99/4A
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99

Still have the book and one game cartridge.

I use HP!

My first technology piece of equipment was a hand-me-down NES. I was four then. And the Duck Hunt game with the guns still worked (Mom's side of the family is huge. Five cousins had it before me and when I got it, it was pretty beaten up).

My first PC that I was exposed to was a very old Apple. I was 5-6 then and too young to notice the make and model, but the screen glitched here and there.

My first PC that my parents bought was a Gateway 500x PC.

In a lot of ways, if I hadn't been exposed to the Nintendo, I wouldn't had even bothered discovering computers. I played a lot with Barbies. Thank God for Mario and Duck Hunt... they saved my soul.

I hope Barbie gave you permission.

ME = 1949. I was four.

A Chinese made simple abacus with both a letters and number system. I still have it. It did have a wire replaced tho'. Brass - Stringer.... What does one expect after 400 years +?

I still have my slide rule, but I don't remember how to use it
Makes a nice straight-edge, though

That would be the one I had.
It was this one, the beige model.

Our first IBM clone was a generic 386DX w/ 24megs of RAM

Mine was an IBM Aptiva 2159 CPU-P166 MMX Black "Stealth" model.

Bought in 1995...

Poppy

A Sony VAIO

Commodore-64

Back in the 80's. First system I worked on was an IBM 360/20.

ZX Spectrum
I was 9 or 10, and I seemed it was the greatest PC ever!

I don't remember, but I think it was a gateway.

I cant remember that much about my first computer, my dad took it from his work and gave it to me when i was like 12 -13 it had a Pentium 90mhz 2 mb video memory , 16 or 32 megs or ram ( I forgot ), 2 GB hard drive, no sound card , windows 95 (could not handle 98 LOL) and loud I believe it was used as a server before.

I love the part when it says a lightning-fast 20Mhz... So what would me 3000Mhz Dual-Core processor be?

BTW My piece of computer technology was a Super Nintendo but my first actual computer was a Pentium II 233.

Don't remember the brand. In fact it might have been custom built. 66MHz, 16MB RAM.

A used clunker that ran Windows 95 - with no instructions and no friends that knew anything about them either. Learned the basics by messing things up regularly - one advantage with that method though, one learns how to 'put things back together ... well, most of the time.

Still remember the frustration of heading to Microsoft website for help ... could be just my impression but so many of their 'help' sections seem written for someone who is not a novice/newbie - would have been nice to find a page that even said, "F1" on keyboard is Windows Help. And who knew such great places as this actually existed?

Sinclair ZX81 with 1K of RAM (yes only 1KB)

A HP Brio ba410 (Specs > PIII - 800Mhz, 20GB HDD, 64 MB RAM, 16MB S3 Pro Savage).
Now the PC lies unused, packed in a box!

TI99/4A
w/Space Invaders

Wow! I see Bleeping Hacker also started with this one. I remember learning to write simple programs in Basic, saving to a cassette tape and then losing my work. I couldn't afford the floppy drive offered. This machine sure made me appreciate the rapid advances in computer technology to come.

TRS-80 had some sort of dungeon runner game for it

Hi, ..........how bored are you ppl?

an old 96' packard bell, still operational, my buddy has it, he just somehow managed to get XP on it, after about 4 tries, and he says it runs slower than hell...can XP even recognize ISA slots???

My first computer was an old Intel Celereon with 40Mhz on the clock, 128 Mb SD Ram, a 4 MB ATI Rage card and a 4Gb hard drive

It was a good computer for me at the time (Since I was young).