What was your favorite computer from the Early Days?

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I'm not so sure how faithful it is. The display used is not subsequent to standard 8.3

LOAD "VICE CITY"

The early computers would truncate the space to it would be one word

LOAD "VICECITY"

My first computer was the Z80A Amstrad CPC464+ Tape Deck

Commodore VIC 20, 1982

Not very powerful but was under $100. Learn a lot by using it though.

No mention of the Wang 2200 or the PDP-8 either, and I still dream of the first IBM 360 I programmed

There was also Commodore 16 and Commodore +4 which were popular in Finland and Eastern Europe because of the low price, commodore was basically giving them away (because of the failure of selling them in the west).

The Sinclairs + Spectrum was also available in most of europe, not only the UK.

My first was Commodore Vic 20, but my favourite was C64 which brought me into programming. I did BASIC and ASM (using FC III). Also had Amiga 500, Amiga 1200 + CD and HD. Sold all of them because i was poor.

Now i have repurchased a few computers and got a modified C64, C64II, C128D and an Amiga 1200/030.

In Sweden we had a domestic computer named ABC-80 and ABC-800, but it was an expensive toy and i only got to play with it a few times during the 80s.

And then there was the CMAD 202 - a small office computer offering COBOL, database, screen, natural language enquiry and word processing. In 1981.

I have to say a PC, because my first computers were owned by other people - mainframes and stuff. I was issued dumb terminals and stuff for work until at some point I bought a PC.

Computers today are so much better. Linux made a huge difference. I'm not nostalgic for old DOS or CP/M machines at all.

amiga. thought hard about getting into computing when those things came out. ultimately I decided I was too much of a luddite for it, as user-friendly as it was, I didn't really know what I needed a puter for in the first place.

A VAX or a AS400 can still be your favourite computer, even if someone else owns it. I loved the municipality Sun Unix box that was used as a mailserver, but also had shell accounts that came with an email adress. It was my first contact with Unix and i used it to learn different commands, even though it had such small storage that it didn't even have man pages installed.

Well in that case, the computer I was most excited about back in the day was the olde unix dialup at Software Tool and Die - world.std.com. It was a little like the Well, back in the day. I think it was a SG with a modem bank on it. In any case, first taste of untrammeled internet access from a unix command line. It felt like a rush, though it was more from the software and connectivity than the hardware itself.

Egad, they still exist at http://world.std.com/ .

none of the above. my favorite would be a Cray.

I still have fond memories of the Vaxen..... The Vax brand was so much better than anything IBM made.

Amstrad CPC 464 then Commodore Amiga.

Exidy Sorcerer
Apple II+
Amiga 500

Wonderful memories. Guru meditation errors.

if somebody somehow managed to put a cray engine under the hood of somebody's normal PC, and then updated their software to seamlessly take advantage of it, what is the first thing different they'd notice the next time they booted up and got to work on it?

They would wonder what virus had suddenly rendered their PC so slow and lagged.

Cray 1: 80MHz, 1MB RAM, 80 MFLOPS
Raspberry Pi 1: 700MHz, 256MB RAM, 41MFLOPS
Samsung Chromebook: 1.7GH, 2021MB RAM, 612MFLOPS

Massively outclassed by today's smartphones, let alone laptops and desktops.
Chromebooks are more powerful.

But it weighed more than 5 tons, took more than 100Kw of power and required massive refrigeration support.

fascinating... I wonder where all those kw of power went if all it had was 80mflops? ok, what would happen if you put a deep blue under the hood?