Commodore VIC-20
That was the computer - the motherboard was inside the keyboard. It didn't use a computer monitor, you plugged it into the TV. There was no floppy disk drive, it stored data on cassette tapes on a cassette drive, and loaded programs from ROM cartridges you plugged in the back. It had a whopping 5K of RAM!
yea 6 hours of writing code turns out a super cheesey video game
My first computer was a
Timex Sinclair 1000 I bought from an ad in an electronics magazine for $99. in 1982. For $49. you could get it in kit form and solder/assemble it yourself. It was cool to play with but with 2K memory it was mainly good for learning a bit of BASIC and running very basic programs. I spent the better part of a day typing in code from a computer magazine and got it to produce a very crude Space Invaders game. Fortunately it was able to save to a cassette tape:)
A couple years later I got the Radio Shack Color Computer 1 (later version with white case). Like the Vic-20 it was a one-piece everything inside the keyboard that hooked to a TV, had cassette storage and could use ROM packs. It had 16K memory which you could expand by using a ROM pack, so it was not a memory upgrade, it only had the extra memory when that ROM pack was plugged in. The cassette games they sold were mostly text adventures with artwork. Arcade type games were mostly on ROM packs. I bought maybe 6 ROM packs, but at that time most known games were still going to Atari so I used my 2600 more than the "CoCo". The real fun was typing in programs from "CoCo" magazines. I hated the joystick which was skinny and did not return to center like the Atari. I eventually passed it on to a friend and supplemented my "play" with a
Vectrex gaming system and later moved to Nintendo and Super Nintendo systems.
I did not buy another computer until 1998. I had been online with WebTV for over a year and was ready for access to those things it couldn't do. It was a custom built system by a local shop and ran over $2K
It was a Pentium II 450, with a 17 gig HD, had a DVD player and a CD burner. I remember indulging the clerk when I picked it up as he showed it to oohing/ahhing customers while referring to it as a "screamer"
I used it (with upgrades along the way) until I lost it in Katrina. I've gone through 3 PCs and a laptop since.
