I remember saving up and buying the external hard drive for the old Amiga 500... it cost over £200 for a 20MB hard drive and at the time I was wondering how on earth I'd ever fill up 20MB!
I remember buying a 2400 baud modem for my Amiga to connect to the BBS. This is before the WWW came along. TBH it doesnt seem long ago I was running up and down the stair with the telephone extension lead for my 56k dial up!
Also the other day I stumbled across a game I'd written in 1993. Apparently it made its way out into the public domain and its still around on internet, got reviews and everything! I've downloaded it and played it on the Amiga emulator. Happy days!
The first "serious" computer I worked on was a Commodore PET. Having gone to night classes to learn touch typing, it turned out to have a "Chiclet" keyboard. My typing skills have never recovered.
My ZX Spectrum came with 16k memory which I quickly upgraded to 48k (massive).
I also bought a "Currah Speach Processor" and was delighted to make it sound like Stephen Hawking.
It had a 32Mb hard drive, EGA graphics card, 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives and a 2Mb LIM-EMS expansion card! I got it from Tottenham Court Road and it cost nearly a grand! It had MS-DOS 3.21, Lotus Symphony and QuickBasic.
Before that, I'd had a collection of Spectrums, BBC Micros etc which were all OK in their own sweet way, but with the PC-10 it dawned on me that I could probably make a living at this. Never looked back...
My first computor, at least the first I recall, would have been at work and most likely a PDP11. As far as home ones are concerned, I eventually found the cash to buy an Atari 800. This was followed years later by an Amiga, when I actually flashed out for a HARD DRIVE !!!!!! And then eventually on to cheap reconditioned IBM compatible PCs. (Now-a-days I tend to build my own. No expert but luckily they tend to work first time.)
Also had the 6502 second processor unit for it which ran a 3Mhz!!, and a teletext decoder! plus various upgrade ROMs you could plug into it to give you things like a word processor or graphics programs. it even had a MODEM (2400 baud I think) so I could connect to compuserve (no internet back then)
As a project with my father we built a wheeled plotter for it, which was a little two wheeled trolley driven by stepper motors which you could drop a felt tip pen into the middle of and "program" it to drive about on a sheet of paper to draw things for you.
I actually still have the entire setup in the loft at my parents, I've been half tempted to Ebay it several times recently because fully working BBCs are going for good money these days... but I can't quite bring myself to sell it :)
It sounds like this group might enjoy reading "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe" by George Dyson, which focuses on John von Neumann and his group at Princeton and their attempts to build one of the first computers. Their first effort had 5KB of memory and lots of vacuum tubes.
My computer science class at the University of Illinois in 1977 was the last to submit programs on punch cards - make a typo, try to find it - argh. The next year the school got "terminals" with "keyboards" - we were like the apes before the monolith in "2001."
In 1984 my cubicle at UCLA had an old punch card filing cabinet in it, with 1000s of cards. No one could remember whose they were, and I discovered that punch cards were the perfect size for notes, lists, etc, so I pretty much organized my entire dissertation on the backs of old punch cards. I had several "bricks" of cards held together with rubber bands.
I don't remember much about my first PC except that it booted off of a 5.25" floppy.
I remember saving up and buying the external hard drive for the old Amiga 500... it cost over £200 for a 20MB hard drive and at the time I was wondering how on earth I'd ever fill up 20MB!
I also remember the first hard drive we got. It was for a network of Sharp MZ80Bs, running CP/M. It cost around 3-4 grand for a 5 Megabyte drive. The network used twisted pairs and ran at (if I remember correctly) 2Kbps. Two days after we bought it, all the computer kit was stolen.
the first network I was responsible for was a 10base2 (Coax) network of about 200 apple macs, that was fun, if you wanted to add one more computer you had to disconnect the entire network and a single bad crimp on one of the BNC connectors would take the entire network down.
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