PC March Through Time

June 4 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the Apple II, one of the 1977 trinity (also including the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET) that started the PC revolution. In honor of this auspicious event, eWEEK staff got together to recount their first&

Then: I used a Leading Edge PC with two floppy drives—one for the application disk and one for the data disk. My dad gave it to me when he bought himself a new one. The first PC I had at a job was one of those Apple Macs with a single floppy drive an

Then: I used a Kaypro 2: 25-plus pounds of portable computing power with a massive 64K of RAM and two (two!) 360K floppy drives. All of this was powered up by a blazingly fast 4MHz Z80 chip running CP/M-80. In its day, it was a

Then: My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80. I would sit like a dedicated dog, laboriously typing in BASIC programs that resulted in Hello, Cameron Sturdevant being displayed on our family television (Sinclairs monitor of choice).

Now:

Then: The first computer that I actually owned was a Heath H89 I built myself. It had a pair of hard sector 85KB disk drives and 48KB of memory. The first PC I actually used was an H8 I built.

Now: My current desktop PC is an HP xw8200 dual Xeon works

Then: The first computer I ever bought was a used Apple II, complete with monochrome screen, big floppy disks and a few simple games. The first computer with a digital readout I ever used was a type-composition system terminal in 1977 in the sports depar

Then: My office shared two Radio Shack TRS-80 machines with two disk drives and a giant green screen that took up an entire table. You needed to put the program disk in one 5.25-inch drive and a blank disk to which you wrote in the second drive. The machi

Then: Making a return slide show engagement after a successful run in the Products That Turned Me On to Tech slide show: my Texas Instruments TI-99/4A.

Then: My first PC was a BASIC from RadioShack (at least one or two generations before the TRS-80). It had no floppy drive or hard disk. It didnt even have a monitor. (It was supposed to be plugged into a television.) Another early PC I had saved files on

Then: My first PC was a Nippon Electric PC-8000. I purchased it in 1982 for $3,500, and it was configured with 32KB of RAM, no hard drive, two 5.25-inch floppy drives, a 12-inch monochrome monitor, an NEC Spinwriter printer (so slow, but true letter quali

Then: The first PC I ever used was a Commodore 64 in 1983 that was owned by my brother and allowed us to play games. I dont even remember what the games were (although I think Pong was included). The first PC I ever owned was an IBM PC with two 5.25-inch

Then: My first PC was an Apple IIe with a 65C02 processor running at 1.023MHz with 64KB of RAM and two 5.25-inch floppy drives. This was 1984 or so. The first PC I ever played with constantly was a 386SX 33MHz IBM clone with a 3.5-inch floppy and maybe 20

Then: My first computer was a Mac Classic II that had a 16MHz 68030 processor, 40MB hard drive, 1.4MB floppy drive and a whopping 9-inch built-in monitor. I bought it through the computer science department at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. I was r

Then: The first PC I owned was a Commodore VIC-20, given to me in 1984 when my uncle upgraded to a Commodore 64. The VIC-20 boasted 5KB of RAM, an MOS 6502 CPU, BASIC programming, a cartridge port for games and add-on memory, and William Shatner as a spok

Then: Im not a nerd by nature (at least not a computer nerd), so I dont remember any specs, but the first PC I ever used, when I was in college, ran MultiMate. The first PC I used at work was some kind of weird, refrigerator-sized unit tha

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