What's the FIRST bit of IT you bought?

UK General Chat Tech & Gaming
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Somewhat inspired by “What’s the last bit of tech you bought?” topic, I was thinking about my first computer.

It was one of these

A Commodore PET 2001 with a keyboard even worse than the much later Sinclair Spectrum’s. I remember the guy in the shop asked what I was going to do with it. I couldn’t think of an answer (I didn’t want to say “play games”), so he told me he was trying to write programme to control his microwave. I didn’t even know anyone who owned a microwave!

I like to imagine he’s still doing that, and hasn’t sold out and bought a Google Home.

So what was your first bit of IT?

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My first bit of IT Tech was a Packard Bell Desktop & CRT monitor running windows 98 :desktop_computer:

Looked like this:
image

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A second hand BBC B micro from a local newspaper advert when I was around 8-10ish. Saved up my pocket money.

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A friend of mine had one of these for years and years. It was built like a tank. I think hers ran Windows 3.1.

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The first Tech I bought was with my sister and it was the Nabaztag (I had to ask her what the name was). I was very young and used pocket money to buy it. To this day I don’t think I have bought anything tech wise with my own money… Idk though.

500px-Nabaztag-IMG_1666

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I can’t remember how ours finally died, I think one of the capacitors on the motherboard blew.
Then went to a Windows XP machine which I believe was Compaq

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What does it do?

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Ummm kinda like a alexa kinda thing. Ours never worked well.

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6a00d83452989a69e2013484b0d669970c

My route into electronics as a career…

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My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464, but I didn’t buy that, my parents did when I was in primary school.

The first bit of tech I bought myself was a hard drive for my Amiga 1200 - a 256mb SCSI drive. It was a bit useless as I didn’t have much software that needed it, but a few games could be copied from multiple 3.5" floppies to it, so it saved needing to swop. Just the OS required some of the 2mb ram the computer came with, so opening Deluxe Paint from the drive meant less space for complex creations which wasn’t ideal.

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My friend bought me a Nabaztag so we could talk to each other. Always worked pretty well for us. When we got bored of that I took it to work and it would announce the weather and headlines each day which was amusing for a while. It’s the kind of thing that would be super popular these days I’m sure, it was a bit ahead of its time.

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I went to a computer auction with my dad. He bought me a 386 PC, and I bought a massive 200Mb hard drive for it. I think the disk cost £200!

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I remember like it was yesterday! First bit of IT I bought was a floppy disc :smile:

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That’s not floppy :wink:

Proper floppy…

FloppyDisk

I still have some in a drawer somewhere!

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Can’t find a bigger picture but my parents got me a Packard Bell PC that cost them about £1000 and it had 16MB of RAM haha!

Capture

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Massive indeed! I was sold a 200MB hard drive once; the sales guy said I’d never fill it up. He was right, it died before it was full!

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image

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If the Atari tennis console doesn’t count then I think it was probably the Sinclair Spectrum with the rubber keys. I can still hear the loading buzz to this day!

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ZX-81 with 16mb RAM expansion.
ZX81-left
Boy, did that ‘OS’ need dark mode! :dark_sunglasses:

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Whilst not my first computer, which was bought for me, the first one I bought with my own money was a 486 DX2 66mhz, 4 megabytes of RAM and a 170 megabyte hard drive, built for me by a local PC builder called Bruce.