Cool thread -- like to see some of that history stuff since I am pretty much history anyway ....

My first PC (and we called them "microcomputers" then) was a Heathkit H89 and a Heathkit H8. In 1978 some of us assigned to a military intelligence unit at the Pentagon had read articles in Popular Electronics about the "TV Typewriter". Heathkit of Benton Harbor, MI, came out with three kits; the H8, the H88/H89 and the H100. All kits. The H88 and H89 were all-in-one units; the H8 was a horizontal configuration metal box with a backplane. The H100 was like the H8 only bigger. The H8, H88 and H89 all used the Z80 CPU, which ran at a blistering 1Mhz clock speed and had 8 Kb of memory, with an upgrade package taking RAM to an astonishing 64Kb. After the first few models were sold with either a cassette tape drive or a punched paper reader to input the operating system, a single side, single density, hard sector 160Kb 5" floppy drive was available. The H100 was a 16-bit machine and had 2 awesome 8" double-side floppy drives and an optional 10Mb Hard Drive.

Our little office built all of these and tried them out in various configurations for electronic surveilance and other technical spooky stuff

The kits built very easily and worked almost on the first flip of the switch. One of our guys (now a big wig at the National Security Agency) wrote an assembly language app for the H89 which sent and received teletype and morse code. That was the first-ever military intelligence application of a Personal Computer and one for the history books.

BT

I think it was a commador 64....used to plug games into the back of the keyboard with a atari-like cartrige.....cassette drive and your home TV.....I loved playing Gorf on the think, but the first one I personaly owned was a Apple ][ then later on a 8086, then a 486, then the pentium MX, then celeron, then what I have today.....seems like alot more then that....but thats all my systems.

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AMD T-Bird 1ghz
256 PC-133 RAM
A7V Mobo
30g ATA 100 7200 WD HD
20g ATA 66 7200 WD HD
SBLive! 5.1
ATI Radeon 64 VIVO

vic 20 with casette tape drive! Man that thing was sweet.
I used to play some game where you typed your answer and the computer answered back with the next quest.
I wrote my first program that scrolled across the screen.
It said: I LOVE YOU! Then I wrote a random number generating
program that we used in the army until the Apple II came on
board.
Funny how you can remeber so much about that first PC but
little or nothing of all those inbetween the first and the present.

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Serious Soldier