What was the first computer you owned yourself?
I got mine approximately 1992 – an Apple IIcx or Quadra 700 I think it was known as…
I had a ProTools 442 Nubus card & interface for 4 tracks lol and a Samplecell 8MB sampler Nubus card – mainly used Digidesign ProTools, Opcode StudioVision Pro and Recycle… only plugins were Waves L1 and Q10… & that weird Hyperprism app
I also had one of those Radius monitors that you could rotate 90 degrees…
32 years ago!
Nice, I would’ve given my eye teeth for one of those Radius displays in the day.
The first computer I owned myself (parental arms had been twisted for an Amiga 500 during high school) was a Windows NT box I built from scratch in my first year of uni.
I was in the magic first year of the student loan scheme when they’d lend all of your ‘course related costs’ in one lump sum if you asked. And what 18yo kid with zero financial literacy wouldn’t ask for it all? Pay interest from day one? No idea what that means.
So off to the store and nek minnit a workstation loaded with a 200MHz Pentium Pro, 32MB RAM, Matrox 4MB graphics card, 17″ NEC Multisync CRT, 8X CD-ROM, Zip drive, 33.6K modem, ESS soundcard was sitting in my cold flat.
Admittedly it was used for some course related work – Photoshop, Illustrator and 3D Studio Max – but it also got hauled to parties for Winamp visuals and Aestesis fed into a video mixer (borrowed from the Natural History Unit). Good times!
Fall of 1990. Mac II nothing. Sound Tools card. 4 channels of audio. Opcode Studio Vision. Also bought the Casio FZ-10m sampler at that time, with SCSI connection to the Mac and Alchemy software. 2 Mb RAM!!!
I was rolling in the cash at the time as the only kid in Montreal who knew how to use a Dyaxis editing system.
Living over a fish monger, everything stank. Somehow that stays in the memory 😉
How awesome!
Love the fish monger angle… that kind of personal history needs to be worked into a project somehow! Opcode Studio Vision was so far ahead of its time…
Vision was such a unique concept of a sequencer, I don’t think I ever really got deep enough into it. It was very clever.
Also had a copy of Turbo Synth… remember that one? I think that was Digidesign as well.
We had an Apple IIe in the classroom at school for basic word processing.
My father bought a Commodore 64 in 1982, but things really took off for me with the Amigas.
The 1000 had a Paint-like program that allowed me to make signs that my favourite comic shop displayed.
Then the 500 had a music program, as well as The Secret of Monkey Island!
An Atari 800xl with Datasette.
Typed out by hand the BASIC code for a Boulder Crush type game from a computer magazine. Did work, some bugs….was it typos or the code….never found out.
16KB ROM was all the rage back then, lots of good video games, some given extra deep level treatment just for Atari (PItfall 2).