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I was fortunate to start with a C64 moving onto Amiga 500, 1200 where I first had a 40Mb hard drive.
From there I was fortunate to work commercially with the Amiga 3000 for a few years and also I dabbled with the zx80, where myself and friend created some speech recognition using the tape port, it had a repertoire of 3 words only and with the memory expansion pack having a dodgy connection crashed often. My friend and I then linked this to the IO port and mains isolated switch to turn a light on and off using voice. It makes you wonder at the rapid progress at speech recognition in recent years.
Daren
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Quote: the memory expansion pack having a dodgy connection crashed often.
Did you not use the Clive Sinclair approved bodge of Blu Tack!
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Maximilien wrote: I wish I still has it.
But why? What was so good about it?
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote: What was so good about it?
Imagine a multitasking windowed-OS, on 880Kb.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Like GEOS? I had that on 64Kb too 
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Very good (for the time) graphics, sound chip, motorola 68000, OS.
And there was a game on it that I really liked, The Four Crystals of Trazere - YouTube , I still think about it.
and others like Eye of the Beholder.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Maximilien wrote: Very good (for the time) graphics, sound chip,
The Ataris had an excellent chipset from the beginning, always ahead of their time.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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My first computer was a Commodore PET, with a whole 8K (!) of RAM. I used it to learn 6502 Assembly Language, and hand-assembled short routines to speed up some BASIC programs. I also remember calculating prime numbers, and calculating e to about 1,000 digits using multiple-precision arithmetic routines that I wrote.
A few years later, my father bought a "portable" IBM PC, which was upgraded with a 20MB hard disk to make an XT-compatible. This was built like a tank, and massed about 20kg, so it was more "luggable" than portable. We later added an 8087, which I used for a lot of my M.Sc. research (incomplete, unfortunately). It was much more cost-effecting than using the mainframe at the University...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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The first PC I worked on was PET 8K, which my high school acquired. Then we got a 16K! The tape drive on which we stored our work was amazing technology.
An insurance agent I dealt with had a luggable. He was tremendously proud of that thing, as he could do all his work while visiting your home. At the time, it was also amazing technology -- AND -- carrying it around eliminated the need to do regular workouts.
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Atari 400, 4k ram.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Good choice. Still have one sitting on the shelf, along with all the other Ataris.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I had the Atari 400 as my first computer, tape drive that took 45 minutes to load a game, upgraded to the SS/SD 5.25 floppy which made things a whole lot easier.
I hacked together an external keyboard from an old teletype machine and a LOT wiring, and ribbon cables to get a "real" keyboard for it.
I spent so much money on that thing doing upgrades, wish I had that money right now.
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Atari 400 was my first, too. First program I wrote in BASIC, I ran out of memory. Upgraded to Atari 800 with 48K. I still have that one. Back in the day I would buy old game cartridges and unsolder the ROM and replace it with an EPROM and then burn games from magazines like A.N.A.L.O.G. to the EPROM. The EPROM burner plugged into the joystick ports of the Atari. My first foray into assembly language programming was with the Atari.
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Dick Smith in Australia put out a "Super 80" computer which was basically a Radio Shack TRS-80 model II knock off, but at less than half the price. Briefly owned one, smashed it to bits with a hammer (most fun I ever had with it) when I moved onto...
a Beeb (BBC Micro) with ISO Pascal ROM because BASIC was for weenies that couldn't write proper programs. (It was a real "structured language!")
after that briefly an "IBM-PC clone" - 8086, that was a real CPU with the huge 10MB HDD and 3.5" floppy (I mean 5MB just didn't cut it and 5 1/4 FDDs were just too, well, too floppy - not that they had anything on the flex of an 8".)
onto a celeron 386 (XP, multi tasking), i5 4650 (FreeBSD - Unix then win7 for doing work),
and now i5-8400 (linux because let's face it, win10 sucks and is a waste on a modern CPU)
Message Signature
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after that briefly an "IBM-PC clone" - 8086, that was a real CPU with the huge 10MB HDD and 3.5" floppy (I mean 5MB just didn't cut it and 5 1/4 FDDs were just too, well, too floppy - not that they had anything on the flex of an 8".)
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I will be buying my first computer at the end of my current project (when the client finally pays) and it will be the "Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 (14”) laptop"
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Netronics Elf II[^], a kit based on the original COSMAC Elf[^] from 1976. Build one yourself to find out why it was so much fun. The little graphics chip is almost impossible to find anymore, but the processor has still been in production until a few years ago.
This is a computer from the time when you had to solder if you wanted to have your own computer. The parts list is astonishingly shhort for the time and the little guy could do a lot, even without expansions. Ok, 256 bytes RAM were a little restrictive, but by adding the graphics chip (whopping 64 x 64 pixel resolution) you could already make something happen on a screen. DIY computers and kits often had no graphics at all, so this was really something.
Best of all: I still have it and it's still as good as ever. Ok, the bus connectors and the keyboards are worn out, but I want to keep it in its original state and don't want to rip it apart. Instead, I'm designing a new one. Overclocked processor, 16 Mb RAM, PIC32 based graphics chip. Lots of fun. Much more interesting than the antics of Mickeysoft and the like.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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What are you using to recreate the processor?
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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The real thing. I have a brand new CDP1802BCE for that, but maybe I will need a second one on the graphics card. I want 3D graphics on an 8 bit processor
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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The first computer I owned wasn't until after I left university, and had enough disposable income (after beer charges, natch) to be able to buy what I wanted when I wanted it.
Amstrad PC1640 (the twin floppy version), which I immediately upgraded with a Hardcard: a HDD and controller on a big long PC slot card. 32MB that I thought was amazing, even with an access speed measured in furlongs per fortnight compared to modern stuff.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: access speed measured in furlongs per fortnight
I still have that problem. The controllers basically were glorified parallel ports. You were lucky when the CPU did not have to access that port several times to bit bang the signals on the bus. That part probably was already done by about 20 pounds of TTL logic on that board. Still, fetching one 16 bit word after another over the ISA bus (or its XT predecessor) is a slow affair. Or did they really invest another 20 pounds of TTL logic in some DMA feature?
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I have an almost identical story Paul
We can’t stop here, this is bat country - Hunter S Thompson RIP
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I think back now, and it had a seek time of what? 45ms? And I thought it was quick!
And it was, compared to floppies.
Ah ... "Kings Quest" in glowing EGA! Start generating a fractal, and go down the pub to let it finish. Play a game with no "save" and stick the KB in a drawer to keep the cat off it while I was at work! Them was the days!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Mine was a ZX Spectrum[^] 48K.
Although it nearly wasn't - when we got it home, the box was empty. They'd given us the display box instead of getting one of the real boxes from the back of the store. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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