Best of Reader Comments: Your first computer

Do you remember your first computer? Punch cards, soldering kits, valves, flashing lights... those were the days.

We asked a number of our recent studio guests about their first computers, and while some reluctantly confessed to losing their computing virginity back in the 50s and 60s, others have more recent memories of the explosion in home computing in the early 80s...

Click here to watch the video: http://www.silicon.com/a52539

Here are some of the best reader responses so far...

David Evans
My first PC was a Hyperion 'Portable' 8086 with a six inch square yellow display that my Dad took to and from work on his moped.

This must have been in about '82 or '83. At the age of seven, I learnt enough DOS commands to find and run my favourite program 'Sheep'. It claimed to be the first ever PC game, and involved using an ASCI smiley-face to chase around a bunch of 'Pi' character sheep into a little pen which I could then block the entrance to with my smiley-face and win the round.

The exciting part was that you could set the number of sheep, up to a maximum of eight - which the author claimed nobody could manage. In terms of playability, it has got to be up there with the great games of all time.

Simon Keefe
My first computer was a Commodore Plus 4. I remember finding it on top of my mother's wardrobe about a week before Christmas and thinking "Bugger, I really wanted a Commodore 64...". The games were rubbish, so I'd use my brother's 48K Spectrum instead.

Malcolm Clarke
It was an Apple Macintosh with a single floppy drive. We eventually acquired a separate hard-drive - all of 500k!

In fact we still have it, since it survived a fire and we felt that it would be cruel to throw it away. It languishes in a cupboard, but still works.

David Wishart
My first computer was a Stantec Zebra, operated by the University of St. Andrews at its Queens College, Dundee campus in 1964. I was a Mathematics undergraduate and joined the university's first computing course.

Program input in machine code was by paper tape, a nightmare to edit. Later an assembler program was introduced, hailed as a major advance. The computer ran valves which generated much heat, and one could judge whether a program was running correctly or stuck in a loop by the pattern of the lit valves.

I was so intrigued by this new science that I continued after graduating at the Computing Laboratory, and was amongst the first to obtain a PhD in computer science in 1970 on the theory and application of classification methods. The software I developed was presented in a Colloquium in 1968, and I have been developing it further for the past 35 years

John Hall
My first computer was a Sinclair MK14 - soldered together from a kit. It had a hex keyboard and a little strip of LEDs for a display. I managed to program it to ask my wife to marry me, leaving the result as a random(ish) choice when she hit a key. I had tweaked the random Y or N so Y has 99 chances to N's one, so it's not surprising to find a household with 2 adults, 2 kids and more computers, 23 years later!