Nerds become nostalgic about their first computer in the same way that car buffs get all misty-eyed about their first wheels (and the car attached to them). Oldcomputers.net is a museum of the original home and personal computers.

I first got my hands on a computer when I was too young to really know what it was. Back in the seventies (maybe '76 or '77), my dad introduced me and my brothers to the DEC PDP-11 at the university. It was a row of red-and-black refrigerator-sized boxes with all the buttons, switches, and spinning things you could ever want. I remember playing Space Wars and Lunar Lander... badly. My Lunar Lander games would last about five seconds before I crashed in a little explosion of lines and dots. All those poor Tron guys... they met an untimely death at my hands.

Anyway, the first home computer I got my hands on was an Apple IIc at a local school. I still didn't "get it", but I could at least use LOGO Turtle Graphics to make some cool line drawings.

And then... ooooh.... portability. Or at least an early-eighties attempt at a portable computer. The Hyperion was an 8088-based IBM clone that weighed a ton. I wrote a lot of fun adventure games on that thing.

I think I started down memory lane today because I have a Dell PIII with Windows Me. It BSDs regularly, of course. It makes me yearn for a reliable old 8088 and a copy of WordPerfect for DOS.

What was your first computer and what did you do with it?

As an aside, the Blogger spell-checker suggested that I replace the word "nerds" in the first sentence with "Nordic". When will Blogger replace that useless spell-checker??