What was your first computer

My 12 fingers and 8 toes, as accurate as ever. :)

The first, very first command sent to my real computer (built in) was when the Dr slapped on the butt and i yelled out that all was working ok and i was ready to take on the world.
 
so long ago I just remember it had a new 286 processor.

at the time enjoyed playing my favorite songs on 8 tracks and they were all over my car
 
As a student, the first computer I logged on to was a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP 10. You don't keep one of these things in your bedroom! It had 240k words of 36 bit magnetic core memory. The latter is a 3D matrix of wires laced through ferrite rings. Slightly later PDP 10s used semiconductor memory. It did not use ASCII, but instead a 6 bit character code allowing 6 characters per word.

The PDP 10 was the first mainframe to be designed as a time sharing system. In about the equivalent of 1 mbyte of memory it could run something like 45 jobs where a job was a batch stream or interactive terminal session on an ADM 3 video terminal or ASR 33 or similar teletype. Who says today's software is bloated :)

There were compilers for quite a few languages: COBOL, FORTRAN, Pascal, Simula (which is possibly the first object oriented language) and various other stuff that I've since forgotten about.
 
Quote from dcraig:

The PDP 10 was the first mainframe to be designed as a time sharing system. In about the equivalent of 1 mbyte of memory
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First off, the PDP-10 had a 16bit address space, the maximum memory it could have was 65K.

Second, it was a minicomputer, not a mainframe. Nor was it the first mini. It was a successor to the PDP-8, which came out in the mid-60's and was the first commercially successful minicomputer, but it was the eighth in the PDP series.

Last, the first timesharing system, CTSS, came out of MIT in 1961.
 
Quote from jprad:

First off, the PDP-10 had a 16bit address space, the maximum memory it could have was 65K.

Second, it was a minicomputer, not a mainframe. Nor was it the first mini. It was a successor to the PDP-8, which came out in the mid-60's and was the first commercially successful minicomputer, but it was the eighth in the PDP series.

Last, the first timesharing system, CTSS, came out of MIT in 1961.
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You are plain wrong. It was a mainframe, had a 36 bit architecture and ran the TOPS 10 operating system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-10

I did a major is computer science, mostly on the PDP 10, I didn't dream all this up. You should look before you leap next time.

The PDP 11 was the successor to the PDP 8 and ran RSTS or RSX or Unix. The PDP 11 was 16 bit and had many models.

OK, the PDP 10 was maybe not the first time sharing machine, but the first commercial time sharing mainframe. It was very popular with universities, and it brought time sharing to the masses.
 
One further comment on nostalgic DEC machines. The baby of the PDP-11 range was the LSI-11 (Large Scale Integration). It was effectively a micro computer in the days when the competition was 8080, Z80, 6502 etc. The LSI-11 was ridiculously superior to these in just about every possible way and it was a long, long time before Intel, Motorola etc produced anything comparable. DEC was a fabulous technology company and it is a shame it is no more.
 
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