This meme went around Facebook and generated a lot of conversation. I thought I would expand on my answer here and see what your story was :)
We played on a cousin's Atari 2600, and had one of those pong sports games, but we didn't get to experience a computer until I was 8 or 9.
My first experience of a home computer was the Commodore Vic 20 that my cousin brought around on a visit. That Christmas, 1983 I think, my parents bought our own Vic via the shopping catalogue. This meant a few years later when we upgraded, they were still paying off the vic. That said, it was a founding moment in my life and I will be forever grateful.
After the vic 20, a few years later we got a Spectrum 128+2 when they dropped in price after Amstrad bought Sinclair. This is due to not knowing anyone with a Commodore 64 apart from the same cousin who introduced us to the Vic 20, and he lived too far away to swap games with.
In the UK at that time, Sinclair was highly popular. There were essentially:
- Spectrum 48k
- Commodore 64
- Amstrad 464
- BBC/Electron
- Oric, Dragon 32, etc
And we all used tapes. Nobody I knew had a disk drive until the Amiga and Atari ST other than some folks who did wordprocessing.
The only folks I knew who had a monitor were the Amstrad owners, or again wordprocessor users.
In 1987/1988 my brother saved from his first wages and bought an Atari 520STFM. The price had dropped during the marketing war with the Amiga 500. Again, nobody we knew had an Amiga. Well, we knew one person but he wouldn't have swapped games anyway. The ST was ￡100 or more cheaper than the Amiga, and there was a huge software library.
I didn't realize until a few years ago that both the Commodore 64 and Amiga lived on long into the 1990s. While I own both now, by the early 90s I had switched to PC and I thought home computers had become obsolete.
My first PC was a 286 with 12mhz, 1mb RAM, and a 40mb hard disk. To get the big hard drive I had to sacrifice colour in the monitor, so only had monochrome until I got to upgrade later.
Over to you, what was your first computing experience?
I am going to nominate/tag @themarkymark to answer :)