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The first computer I used was a home made computer my father built around a ZX80. Basically it was boosted Sinclair Spectrum. First PC I used was an XT, it had 512K MEM and 360K floppy only (later we got a 10Mb MFM hdd that had to be parked). I could not afford a computer of my own until I went to university ca. 10 years ago, and it was a DEC workstation from CERN's trash (seriously, I'm not kidding). I still have the first machine that was really mine, which is a Pentium 1G DDR RAM, 120G HDD. Still works as a network server, running Gentoo.

Hmmz,

The first computer I could reasonably consider to be mine was a 75Mhz Pentium 1, with the gloriously massive 1Gb hard disk!

I had, however, made use of many many machines prior to that. Particular fondness for the BBC micros we had at school.

The first computer I ever touched was a Sinclair Z81. I was surprised such a thing even existed. A little later I became friends with a boy who had a ZX Spectrum. We spent hours on that thing, playing adventure games or trying to write an adventure game in BASIC. We were constantly arguing with the Commodore party which was best, Sinclair or Commodore, but I changed sides when I first bought my own computer, a Commodore 64. I sold it a few years later, which I still regret. My first PC was a 286, second hand and then already outdated.

I had an Atari 800XL. Despite being very old, in many ways it outperformed my current Core i7 system. The shutdown time, for example, was astounding.

The first computer that i used was :
-nearly 990 MHz Intel Pentium 3
-10 GB hard disk
-1.44 Floppy
-Its name was Onyx (I still have the case )
-Windows 98

These specs are nearly because I was young when i used it . (Now I have 15 years old so i am young )

Somewhere around, I still have my very first box, probably still with the OS (Win98 as I remember) on the hard drive. <notetoself>Find first computer</notetoself>

First computer was an Atari 65XE with 64 kiB of memory and a 1.8 Mhz processor (which I still own). Without anything in the cartridge slot or tape drive it boots straight into a BASIC interpreter, and trying to work out what I was supposed to do with that 'READY' prompt was probably the main reason I learnt how to program. Second was an Atari 520STE later upgraded to 1 MiB. The clever thing about this was that you could buy an add-on called AT Speed which was essentially a small circuit board with an 80286 chip on it that you soldered onto the main board over the top of the 68000 and you could then run PC stuff with it too (it also emulated some CGA device as I remember). It didn't quite fit properly and caused the keyboard to bulge out in the middle. Unfortunately I sold this a while ago.

Regards,
John.

My first was a father custom Win98 named Bubba that I shared with my brother. The first that was exclusively mine to use was a Pentium4 WinXP named Dr. Jekyl. I consider it to be more my first one because it was the one I learned everything computer related on. It became my Linux box after it got replaced.

My first computer that I bought by myself is the Macbook Pro that I am typing on right now.

First computer used for me would be the NES.
First computer i was given was a 286 clone with two 10MB HDD st412's, 5.25 inch floppies, monochome screen and that for someone who is 24, oldest system currently in my possesion is the Atari 800XL.

RADIO86RK -> Specialist48 -> zx Spectrum 128 -> Amiga 1200 -> Amiga 4000T - Intel PC )))

First computer that I used (if banging on the keyboard as a 3-to-5 year old counts as "using") was probably a NEC laptop my mom had. It was dedicated for word processing and had no disks, just a flash memory cartridge (or whatever equivalent to flash was used in the '80's). I don't really remember many details.

First computer that I owned is the one I'm using to write this post. It's a System76 Pangolin P5 which I bought in 2009.

The other computer I own has actually been in the family for 10 years or so (a 2001-vintage eMachine), so I've been using it longer, but my dad didn't say "we don't have any use for this anymore, you can have it" until I already had this laptop.

EDIT: After some googling, I think that my mom's old laptop may have been a NEC PC-8500. I'm not sure though... It's been 20 years.

My first system was a bbc master 128k with two double density 5.25" floppy drives and a whole stack of floppies

I miss that beige brick...

First computer I came in contact with was a second hand 286 that they told us was "upgraded" to 386 standard.. I was 11 and had no idea that to be 386 there had to be 32-bit mode, hehe. It costed about 250 euro at the time, while new(er) computers was closer to 800-1000€.
I feel like I missed out on so many older computers, since I'm born 1985 I could easily have come more in contact with Commodore or Amiga, but unfortunatly I've only had breif experinces with those while visiting friends. My first "programming" was problably linking together a bunch of .bat files to form a text game where you just walked around. And later some qbasic for dos and visual basic 2.0 on windows 3.1. Took me like 6 months of enjoying the +40 included DOS games before I realized that for me it was much more interesting to figure out how they worked and how to make my own. Next step was a blazing fast pentium 75mhz with windows 3.11 which we later upgraded to windows 95.

Good old C64!

The first PC I contacted was a Commodore 6502 based Agath of Bulgarian manufacturing in early 80th.
But first my own PC was the PC developed by myself, first based on i8080, then moved to Z80 (Not Sinclair compatible at all!) with 56k RAM, 5.25" FDD (controller was also developed by myself), 512k RAM-disk, DEC PDP keyboard and other stuff. Much time I spent with my friend to port OS CP/M on that hardware. I was very happy when I launched C, Fortran and Ada compilers on it . That was in mid 80th. I even made a commercial project on that PC - a Forth-system developed on demand of one large Moscow company.