Back in the very early 80's, my school bought a Bell & Howell computer... Bell & Howell mostly made 16mm film projectors, but apparently at the point they had started either licencing (or ripping off
) the original Apple II. About the same time, my aunt had a TRS-80, and I think shortly after that she bought us a TI-99/4A, if anybody remembers that glorified game machine.
I did actually figure out how to program BASIC on the TI-99, but quickly gave up on it when I realized that our only tape recorder was incompatible to serve as a storage drive...
The first computer I personally bought was an Apple IIe (used) in 1989... $600, and I promptly blew nearly another $400 on the color monitor, because I was damned if I was going to look at that old green phosphor monitor ever again after having to deal with it all through high school... In college I mostly worked on Macs (after giving up Computer Science as a major, where I worked with PC Jr.'s for BASIC and something called an Alpha Micro for PASCAL, COBOL, FORTRAN, etc.), and probably would have bought one at some point if all the cool games hadn't been on PC.
My first PC was purchased late in 1998, and I've had 7 more since (of which I still own 4
).