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DaveyDarko: In 1981 I purchased a Sinclar ZX81 kit for $99.99 through mail order from an ad in the Scientific America magazine.
How much would that be, in today's $?

I started with a
386 SX, 16 MHz
4 MB RAM
VGA graphics card
100 MB hard drive (SCSI, oh yeah! :-)
5.25'' and 3.25'' floppy drives
12" CRT monitor and a dot-matrix printer
(No turbo button, but there was a key-combination to lower it to 8MHz. Yes, some games ran too fast at 16MHz.)

It came with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0.
Oh, the joys of juggling EMS and XMS memory. :-D Kids this days are spoiled. They can't even know what a CONFIG.SYS is. :-P

The first game I saw in it was Prince of Persia. I thought that PC games were much better than the ZX Spectrum games I had played before.

I then got a Pentium Pro, around 1997. I no longer have the 386.
My first computer was a 386DX 40MHz with 4MB RAM, a 5¼-inch and a 3½-inch floppy drive and an 120MB HDD.

PS: I now longer own it, but I still have a 486 75MHz laptop with 20 MB RAM .
Post edited January 08, 2015 by xy2345
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DaveyDarko: In 1981 I purchased a Sinclar ZX81 kit for $99.99 through mail order from an ad in the Scientific America magazine.
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Gede: How much would that be, in today's $?

I started with a
386 SX, 16 MHz
4 MB RAM
VGA graphics card
100 MB hard drive (SCSI, oh yeah! :-)
5.25'' and 3.25'' floppy drives
12" CRT monitor and a dot-matrix printer
(No turbo button, but there was a key-combination to lower it to 8MHz. Yes, some games ran too fast at 16MHz.)

It came with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0.
Oh, the joys of juggling EMS and XMS memory. :-D Kids this days are spoiled. They can't even know what a CONFIG.SYS is. :-P

The first game I saw in it was Prince of Persia. I thought that PC games were much better than the ZX Spectrum games I had played before.

I then got a Pentium Pro, around 1997. I no longer have the 386.
Not sure how much that would be, when I was 10+ every summer I earned money hoeing soybeans and detassling corn. I couldn't afford the ZX81 already assembled so I ordered the kit which I had to solder all the parts in to the board myself.

My 386sx ran @ 20MHz, I worked at Gateway at the time and I actually designed part of the motherboard (i have a vivid memory of a horrible trip I had to make to Austin,TX to check the first boards to come off the production line at TI), and even with my employee discount it still cost me $2200 in '91. I think I still have it around, although not all together, had upped the mother board to a 486 later.

I first used a PC, with DOS, in 1985 when I went to college, that was also my first intro to UNIX too (and some mainframe OSes too like Prime and VAX).
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DaveyDarko: In 1981 I purchased a Sinclar ZX81 kit for $99.99 through mail order from an ad in the Scientific America magazine.
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Gede: How much would that be, in today's $?
259.77 USD according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I think it was a 486DX2 66Mhz, 4MB Ram.

I recall I got 4MB as a present so I could finally play the awesome new Star Wars game, "Dark Forces".

That is if we talk PC, if we talk computers in general, then my first was an Atari 800XL.
Post edited January 09, 2015 by LoboBlanco
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LoboBlanco: I think it was a 486DX2 66Mhz, 4MB Ram.

I recall I got 4MB as a present so I could finally play the awesome new Star Wars game, "Dark Forces".

That is if we talk PC, if we talk computers in general, then my first was an Atari 800XL.
either or
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_Slaugh_: 259.77 USD according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Thank you.
That seems expensive to a 10 years-old. But I was expecting a larger ammount.
An Amstrad Mega PC was the first computer my family had at home. My brother and me played more on the Sega side, but I also learnt some useful stuff on MS-DOS and Windows 3.1
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Gede: How much would that be, in today's $?
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_Slaugh_: 259.77 USD according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Sure seemed like more to me at the time, but I did get plenty of enjoyment from it. :)
I suppose technically we're talking the Commodore 64 here. But the first proper PC was a P120, 16MB RAM, 1.7GB Win 95 and no graphics card to speak of. I actually managed to play through Half-Life with that rig despite it being below the minimum requirement of a P133. Ran OK, but the loading times were horrendous.
First I used was a Friend's TI-57 programmable calculator.

Then a TRS-80 owned by the school which sat in the computer lab among the terminals connected to a PDP-11. Anyone could use the TRS-80 I then later had a BASIC course which used those PDP-11 terminals.

I also used a 8080 computer in the microprocessor course. It had no video output or typewriter keyboard, the display was 4 hexadecimal LED displays and the keyboard was hexadecimal also (0 to 9, A to F, a few key to store instruction and run the program entered by hand). I learned how a CPU work on that thing and how to program in 8080 machine language.

The machine I owned:

A TI-58c programmable calculator.

VIC-20 on which I learned 6502 machine language

Commodore 64

Commodore 128

An XT clone with 640K of ram, 10 or 20 MB hard disk, hercule video card. I learned C on that machine.

Then a 12MHz 286 with 1MB of RAM, 100MB Hard Disk, Matrox VGA card, Soundblaster sound card. I played DUNE 2 a lot on that machine. It's the machine that replaced my C-128 who was still being used during the XT period.

I got a 386 after that but I do not remember anything about it.

In early 1995 or late 1994, A $3500 NEC 60 MHz Pentium machine with CD-ROM, 8 MB of ram, don't remember the HD, Soundblaster 16 sound card, Windows 3.1, had built in video card but I eventually replaced it with a Matrox 3D card. That was my first new brand name computer since my C-128 and the last until my present machine. One of the reason I bought it was that I could upgrade the CPU to a later Pentium but the only compatible one ever made was the 66 MHz version, Intel changed the package after that. I bought Windows 95 for it when it came out.

After that I built my owns and it's kind of a blur (it went through a few different machines by upgrading a part at a time) until my present Gateway Intel Core 2 quad processor.
Post edited January 10, 2015 by justanoldgamer
My first computer was an Atari 2600 and my second was a Commodore 64 and then a Laser 286
Post edited January 10, 2015 by clisair
The first computer I actually truly owned was a Compaq Deskpro EN, with Windows 2000. The p3 worked well in most older games.
1986, Apple ][e with two, count 'em, TWO floppy drives, color monitor, and a dot matrix printer.
Commodore 64