These are the times when you start thinking you are getting old 
Now you can get a Mac Mini M4 for 599 with 16Gb of RAM.
My first Mac had 512kBytes RAM, a 100GByte SCSI was around 1000 and the HP Deskjet was 1590.
And the Intel PCs had a button at the front so you could slow down the CPU clock from 8MHz to 4.77MHz.
Quote from „Lethal weapon 1“: I‘m too old for this sh**
I am definitely getting old! My first job as a computer programmer was on an Electronic Associates Analog Computer. It consisted of adders and integrators programmed with a plug board, Here’s a picture of a little one. Ours filled a large room.
https://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/doc-4372956f185f7/
You are young. I paid an extra $400 to bump the RAM from 8K to 32K on my first personal computer (HP-85) - $3,250 was the base price.
It came with HP-Basic for free. In fact, that was basically the only software that it ran.
Time will only start flying faster.
That was a 100 MB hard disk and not GB! My first Mac didn’t even have a hard disk and I could play floppy roulette.
Oops…of course MBytes (o;
But back then you could easily modify your PC as once an old article written by me and published in c’t (after two years lying in their drawer):
Yeah, at that time Apple didn’t suck and c’t was a great magazine.
The first PC I used at work had a 10MB hard drive.
The first hard drive I owned was a 40MB one for the Atari ST. It cost £400 in 1990 (approx) and to save money, I designed and built my own power supply for it. It seemed to have tons of space at the time.
The relational database that I wrote for Psion Series 5 handhelds (PsiDat) had a 312k download size.
It is staggering how inefficient we’ve become in terms of memory and storage usage.
My first computer was a Tandy 1100FD, no hard drive, just the modern 3.5 floppy disks and 640K of RAM. I bought it at Radio Shack in 1989. It came with disks for GW-Basic, but I couldn’t figure it out at the time, so I just used it write letters to my girlfriend (now wife) that I then printed and mailed.
I didn’t start teaching myself programming until Windows 95 came out. I was a late bloomer at the age of 35, playing with HTML & JavaScript. Good times!
I too created my first work programs on an HP 85. Ours was connected to a plotter. We also had a HP 87 that I rigged to collect data from an Instron tensile tester (through an HP data logger). One program was collecting the data on the HP87, saved the data on a 5.25 floppy. I carried the floppy to the HP 85 where statistical analysis was performed and the results plotted. That was a spectacular advance for our QA folks. We reduced a 4 day task to about a day, mostly executing the physical testing.
edit: I forgot the data logger device.
I still love my HP 97 desktop calculator….
All keys still working like a charm
That machine would have cost a fortune back then in today’s dollars!
The first desktop machine I used was the 1970’s (not owned - it would have been over $10,000 back then which would be about $78,000 today!) :
HP 9830A “Calculator”
Programed in BASIC and had a plotter and digitizer as peripherals, as well as the thermal printer pictured on that page.
One of the things that was hard to comprehend at the time was just how quickly personal computers would evolve. The HP-85 was extremely well-built so as to last for decades. In fact, the machines that still exist in the present day, tend to work.
But in some way, it would have made more sense for them to be made to be disposable. This beautifully made and sturdy object was to be obsolete in 2 to 3 years because the capability and availability of CPU’s and memory was increasing so rapidly.
$11,000 in current dollars.
The first machine I ever used:
The first machine I ever owned:
The first machine I ever used (1972): IBM 1130
The first machine (sic) I ever owned (1977): Motorola 6800 Development Kit (still have it somewhere in the garage).
First computer I sat on (they used to run the UK weather on it once a week):
My first digital computer was mechanical:
3-bit processor, manual clock, programmed with soda straws (short straw = 0, long straw = 1).
My first electronic computer was analog:
My first personal computer was a TI-99/4A. Think I paid around $500 for it at Toys 'R Us. It came with 8 MB of ram and built in BASIC. everything had to be saved to cassette tapes. I eventually bought the expansion box and upped the memory to 32mb, added 5.25 in floppy drive. I used it for a lot of BASIC programming and a few games.
I still own my first computer, an Apple ][ with integer Basic. It was from the first production run, serial number 660. I’ve got it in the original box with documentation and programs on cassette tapes. Also a couple of boards for it and software like VisiCalc. I’m looking to donate it to a museum that would give it a good home.
Just a still working Apple IIc here with the small green display…
Still one of the sexiest Apple machines in my opinion (o;
Though my first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48k where I started writing assembler accelerated graphic routines based on the great graphics chips manuals from Thomson (EF936x family).
The first computer I ever used was an Atari 400. Typing on that was brutal – my fingers hurt just looking at it today.
