This was my family's first computer. My dad chose it because he wrote computer programs and for him this was the purist way to do it at home. Because my sister and I complained all the time, he purchased TI Logo, but it was nothing compared to the Apple IIe version. Some things I remember:
1. Dad programmed games for us and saved them to tape. No disk drive for us, we had a Radio Shack tape recorder that could record his programs. Loading my favorite game, Jungle Jim (a poor knockoff of Pitfall programmed in TI Extended Basic) took nearly 15 minutes to load. And we get mad now when a webpage takes more than a second to load.
2. Parsec was the best game available on the TI. It was like Wing Commander for the Flock of Seagulls.
3. The TI joystick was terrible. IT would often stick so we had to pause the game to pull out the connector and blow on the interface. My sister learned to play Munch Man (Pac Man, except you shat out a chain to fill in the maze instead of eating power pellets) by only turning left since our joystick often didn't go right.
4. We bought a 13 inch color portable TV to use as a monitor which I suppose was overkill becaise the TI only supported 16 colors.
5. We entered a whole new world of computing when we bought the 32k memory expansion card. Sweet!
6. One thing people oftern forget, the TI was portable. You could plug it into any TV and it only weighed about 8 pounds. It was just a pain carrying the tape recorder around.
7. We replaced the TI with a 25 Mhz 386 SX with 1 mb of RAM and a 40 mb harddrive. My dad proudly said, "Son, this is more storage space then you'll ever need!" Ahh, the good old days!

Mmm, I missed out on all the C64 stuff and Amiga systems.

I hardly remember my first computer, it was a XT cpu but I cant remember the clock speed, same as RAM memmory, but it had a 20MB hard disk, and I had like 50 games on it as well, also the main thing I did on it, play games.

Yeah, and now I have 600 GB in my system+server and still not enough :P

I also had a CoCo for first computer at home. Before that I had to put the phone receiver into a portable coupler and dial into local university's computers.

Those cartridges were a life saver so did not have to wait to load stuff from CASSETTE! We had a subscription to some "magazine" that sent us a new cassette each month with a bunch of programs on it. It was fun having to Fast Forward to a certain counter to get to a specific program to load.

Wow! Happy, frustrating days! I initially was taught on one of these. Christ they were slow. I was taught by a really BORING computer teacher with brown socks, brown sandals, brown beard and boring brown car. All I can remember was how slow and complicated it was just to start writing a document. But I persevered despite the fact he kept talking gobbledegook and sending us home with big handouts covered in code commands in 6 point type.

That was in 1985. By 1986 (I think!) I discovered Apple Mac and I never looked back. In fact, I am using one now.

My first computer was a Commodore VIC 20 (1985). My friends all had 64's, which made mine look like a real turd. I had a cassette drive, color tv monitor, and 1 game cartridge--Mission:Impossible. I never solved the game. I could get all the way through it to the last scene with the bomb, and no matter what combination I tried, it always blew up!! I sort of miss those "text-only" games. You really had to concentrate and take good notes. Since then I've picked up an Amiga 500, Amiga 2000 (sucked worse than the 500) and a Commodore Colt from thrift stores. The Commodore's graphics subsystem was FAR superior to the IBM. I don't know what happened there. I still have the monitor.

First computer I ownded was a Timex Sinclair 2068. I went from TRASH-80 (4K) to Sinclair ZX-81 to ZX-Spectrum to BBC Model B before my parents bought me the T/S 2068. My first hardware mod - I put a Spectrum ROM in the 2068! I was another 6 years before I got a "real" pc - A Bleading Edge with a dedicated monitor and two floppies! Of course, I swapped the 8088 with an NEC V-20. It had 512K, a 1200bps modem, and ran MS-DOS!

This was mine - http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibmpcat.shtml