An ode to my first computer
Yeah, that snaggle-toothed kid with the bed-head haircut is me at my eleven-year-old birthday party. It’s hard to tell, I tend not to get overly excited, but I am absolutely overwhelmed with joy having just received my first personal computer as a gift, the Timex Sinclair 1000. The Timex Sinclair weighed a nimble 12 ounces and supported 64K of ram. Data was stored on audio cassette tapes and you were able to plug it into any black and white television – that’s right, no expensive monitors needed.
I grew up in Grandview, Ohio (a suburb of Columbus). Circa 1983, Grandview consisted of hard-working, close-nit families. There were two kinds of computers that people in my community were buying. If you had money, you bought the Apple IIe. The rest of us went without or bought the $99 Timex Sinclair.
In 1980 my life had been transformed by Star Wars, most specifically, The Empire Strikes Back. Two weeks prior to the moment captured in the photo above, I had seen War Games with Matthew Broderick. It was the world’s first glimpse at the power of personal computing – I was absolutely amazed by the possibilities. Many of my colleagues point to War Games as a foundational point in their life as do I.
The Timex Sinclair certainly wasn’t the most stellar of personal computers. But looking back now, the developers captured a simplicity that has been lost. The Timex Sinclair was small and nimble and could be plugged into a multitude of devices from television sets to cassette players. You weren’t limited by its bulk, brand, version or costly updates. It did what it needed to do and nothing more.
I’ve hung this photo on my office wall. Whenever a project begins to get out of scope or I’m feeling exhausted by bureaucracy, I look at that 11 year-old smile and remember the optimism of 1983.
If you have fond memories of your first computer, don’t hesitate to comment below.
Commodore 64 for me. Pimped out with two 5 1/4″ disk drives, a color monitor, and a screaming fast 300 baud modem. Those were the days.
Our first computer came in 1984. That was coincidence rather than some sort of Orwellian time warp.
The big decision for us as a family then was whether to go with an established computer, namely the Apple II that was extensively used in the school district our children then attended or whether to try out this newfangled option called the “Mac Plus.”
We opted for the MacPlus, and Apple II’s disappeared from production shortly thereafter.
Our MacPlus had a small, black and white screen. It had no hard drive. Eventually we paid several hundred dollars for a 20 megabyte external hard drive and wondered who would ever possibly fill up that much storage capacity?
The MacPlus had a total of one megabyte of RAM. This was when RAM cost, as I recall, something like $1,000 a megabyte. We eventually upgraded to four megabytes of RAM, as the cost dropped significantly.
It had an internal floppy disk drive, and it required an external disk drive. You inserted the “system disk” into one drive and the program disk into the other.
We also had a dot matrix printer.
That original MacPlus served us for several years. It was the first, though certainly not the only, learning curve we stumbled through.
Taking a picture of that first computer set up would have been a good idea, but it is not one that occurred to us. We disposed of the computer–reluctantly, I might add–long after we had ceased to use it. In some ways, I wish that I had kept as a memento of those days.
Funny… that was also my first computer; I remember going to see Wargames with a friend, and afterwards we came back to my house to try to make that Sinclair replicate what we saw. Needless to say it wasn’t very successful… 2K of RAM and BASIC can only take you so far.
Between losing power if you breathed on it the wrong way, the membrane keyboard and having to set the cassette volume just so to get it to load programs correctly, it was more a source of frustration than anything else. My parents eventually replaced it with a Commodore 64, which I consider my *real* first computer. But I’ve thought about buying another TS1000 on ebay once or twice… I wonder what they go for these days.
While the Timex Sinclair was a great “starter” computer for a kid, we followed that up with a Commodore 64 — as so many did.
Now that I’m a parent, I’m seriously considering the purchase of a netbook for my daughter. I really appreciate the stripped-down design of the netbooks — great for kids just beginning.
As a young gun, I dont remember the model but we had a DOS box that my grandmother did accounting on. (I was not allowed to touch it) In about late ‘93 we bought our first Windows box. It was a Packard Bell Legend 386 running Windows 3.1
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