Commodore 64, fall 1983 – I remember the exact date, but it’s not relevant here beyond that it was for my birthday.
Probably half the computer geeks of my generation started on the 64. 😀
I don’t know exactly how my parents paid, but it was after one of the big price drops — we’d been talking over the summer about a Timex-Sinclair 2000 (a US-market licensed re-badge of the ZX81 for our friends from outside the US) but the price had dropped enough that I got the 64 instead.
Initially I had only a tape drive, and an old 12? black and white TV I got as a hand-me-down. Within the next year or so, we added a disk drive (1541), a 300-baud modem (the “Modem 300”, slightly nicer than the original VICModem), and a printer — and my parents upgraded the living room to a color TV so I got the much bigger B&W from the living room for my computer use (and eventually a green-screen but direct composite monitor.)
For my own use I stuck with Commodores a bit past the point it was reasonable – when my first C64 died I got a 128 sometime I think in the ’85-86 or ’86-87 school years. That came to Mexico with us for the ’87-88 school year and we discovered that Commodore stuff was worth more down there used than it was new in the states, so that and the 1541 got sold there. If I’d been smart, I’d have gotten some kind of basic PC with the proceeds and some money from my grandfather when I got back, but instead I got a Commodore 128D and a 1581. Good times, but arguably already obsolete in the summer-fall of ’88.
I stayed on the Commodore platform until the summer of ’91 when I was able to get my folks to get me one of the first inexpensive PC laptops (a Packard Bell 286 — probably a the unimaginatively-named PB286NB although that’s trying to rediscover a model number which I was never clear on) and have been on PCs ever since (although I’ve owned a few Macintoshes, never as my primary system; the dumbest was the LC II I bought because the girl I was dating at the time had a Mac – inflation-adjusted it was far and away the most expensive of them, too.)
The one other machine my folks got for their use (and never really figured out) was the Epson PX-8 Geneva— bought like many people who got one, through the fun old DAK catalog, sometime during the ’86-87 school year. Quickly became loaned to me, and it’s the one ancient machine I still own in original vs. having collected later. Relatively powerful for a CP/M machine, and had an amazingly long battery life… but had a non-backlit, 8-line LCD screen that looked more like a giant calculator or digital watch than a computer’s. I used it to take notes in school all the way into the mid-1990s because the battery life was so good, and because compared to a then-modern PC laptop it was very discreet and obvious that I wasn’t just ignoring class to play games.
My folks got an IBM desktop – I’m unclear if it was around the same time before Mexico or right after in the summer-fall of ’88 – so I got familiar with PCs with that. Actual IBM XT (5160) although none of the add-on boards were IBM – it had an Hercules graphics card (possibly the plus?) and a multi-io card (possibly Everex) and I think that was it – although it’s possible the HDD controller was separate from the multi-IO?. Interestingly, they sold it to us with 640KB on the motherboard, but with the dip switches misconfigured for 256K. We actually bought 384KB for the multi-IO board and then discovered it wouldn’t boot with the extra RAM enabled, which led to discovering the motherboard RAM. My dad tool the waste of about $150 better than I would have. I can’t remember if it had two floppies or one, and the drive was an ST-238.
Re: Quora, I’m slowly deleting my content from their platform, and interesting personal bits will be showing up here, entirely irregularly.