The PC at 20: Remember your first?

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of IBM introducing its first PC, the 5150, the device that really ushered in the use of desktop machines in the corporate world. To recognize the occasion, we surveyed readers to learn about their earliest PC memories, many of which actually predated the first IBM PCs. What follows are excerpts from their tales:

The first thing he did was take it apart

His first PC was a far cry from what he uses in the office today. His current desktop is a Dell OptiPlex GX150 small form factor PC. It features a 933-MHz Pentium III processor, 512M bytes of memory, external speakers with a subwoofer (lots of sound on this baby), Windows 2000 and Office 2000. Who is he? He's Dell CEO Michael Dell.

"I opened up my first computer - an Apple II - on the day I got it to see how it worked," Dell says. "Computers weren't as complicated then; they were easier to figure out. After my Apple, I moved on to IBM PCs and started enhancing them myself. And then I started selling them."

The time before floppy disks

"Seems that my first PC was a silver/gray Tandy TRS-80 Model 1," says John Dunkle, president of Workgroup Strategic Services. "It was the latest and greatest, with the best part being that it came assembled, unlike the Heathkit personal computers. I remember tearing open the carton and firing it up for the first time - with [Power On Self Test] telling me I had a whopping 4K of memory installed. What could I ever use so much memory for? Perhaps, for all those lines of BASIC. I also tried my hand at machine language - you know, 0s and 1s in base 2. After about three months, memory prices started to fall drastically, so I decided that I'd just have to upgrade to a more robust system. So, $200 or so later, I upgraded with a second 4K memory module. Unfortunately, I found that all that extra memory did little to improve loading time of the saved programs from the cassette recorder. Yes, this was before the revolutionary 5.25-inch floppy drives came along."

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The printer was a Diablo daisy wheel . . .

"My first PC was a Xerox 820 with 64K, yes K, of RAM and two 512K, yes K, 8-inch Double Density floppy drives, and a 300 baud modem," says Mark Chagaris, president of Sphinx Consulting. "All of this hardware power was leashed together by the CPM operating system. Believe it or not, the system was reliable and ran WordStar and SuperCalc effortlessly, and although printing to the Diablo daisy wheel printer was slow, the quality of text was as good as an IBM Selectric typewriter. It would be a few years before the Sideways program was introduced and provided the capability to print in landscape and compress the text. I'd still be using it if Bill Gates had not taken that trip to Pacific Grove."

A TI-99/4A for $100, what a deal!

"My first PC was the TI-99/4A. I got it at K-Mart for $100 when the bottom fell out of the market. It was basically a game machine with some programming capabilities," says David Green, a product line engineer for an international communications manufacturing and services company.

"I remember writing a basic script to play a musical scale and thinking I was hot stuff! Of course, I didn't have a cassette tape drive to save off the program, but who cared. I had to resolder the game controller plug wires twice to keep it working. Then I really moved up. I bypassed the Eagle and Kaypro and Compaq luggables to get an Apple IIc, along with a big old daisy wheel printer. I remember using WordJuggler to write out my 50-page Master's thesis - it took forever to print on the daisy wheel printer."

First love . . .

"When I was 17 years old, I mowed at least 5,000 lawns to buy my first PC, an Altair by MITS," says Larry Genovesi, CTO of Network Engines.

"The Altair came as a kit and I put it together and it ran a pirated copy of the BASIC interpreter, had 16K of memory and a paper tape reader. Originally, the only way to program it was by using the front panel switches, and I used to play a game called 'kill the lit bit' that you could play by toggling the front panel switches. When I wasn't working on the Altair, I mowed more lawns to earn the money to buy a used teletype so I could program it more easily. It was my first love."