I had an Amiga, briefly, but never really got into it. Seemed pretty cool, but Macintosh interested me more.
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I know we maybe lumping “retro” in with “Vintage” but this is more out of the fact that the next generation deems anything older than two years as vintage.
But with that said it would still be great to hear about ones experiences and systems from the days before the home pc market. So feel free to add those as well.
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My earliest computer that I used in College was called 12" Slide Rule.l,
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Only fair I share mine as well.
So as some of you may already know, I’ve been programming since I was six years old. My first computer was the TRS-80 MC-10 where I was learning to program basic games, do math, and a few “database” programs for my Grandpa’s Library of books and videos. Doing this time I also had the Atari 2600, Nintendo and a C64.
Fast forward a few years of weekends in the computer lab at the library and taking pre-collage course at Community College of Southern Nevada I start making a few friends in the Computer Science program and they allow me to sneak into the computer lab where I start learning about BBS’s, DOS/Windows 3.1 and a tone of other great stuff. Eventually I get my own Ibm clone that had a 286 processor, 2Mb ram, EGA, a 9600 hayes modem, and a 40Mb harddrive where I start to program in QBASIC and start surfing around on bbs’s and uucp sites mostly learing what I could but also publishing a basic game or two that never really went anywheres.
Things for me really didn’t kick off until after I got my IBM PS/2 M55 and INTEL FM-144VR FaxModem to run a Wildcat 6 BBS and started to hang out with LOA on IRC and the Hackers.com forums. Of course this was the later half of the 90’s but honestly I ran my board and early hosting system off a collection of IBM PS/2 model 30/55’s and a few donated 486’s, and Motorola workstations. It wasn’t until I saved up and bought my first P6 board that I could get really serious about IT and UNIX as a whole.
My fondest memories though would be spending all those hours in the Community collage’s lab learning hands on from the guys that actually built out and ran the lab. They had a passion for computers which no one could rival and greatly enjoyed sharing what they knew. That kind of spirit left a large impression with me and its part of what motivated me growing up with these computers right there in my bedroom and when I dialed up some random board or shell account I just found while surfing.
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I used those too.
My first thing called a “computer” was this gadget in the upper-right corner to calculate the altitude of a model rocket: http://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/nostalgia/70est128.html
Later, I owned several programmable calculators, but nobody called those computers.
My very first program (sophomore year) was in assembly language on an IBM 370 mainframe computer using punched cards. At the time, I was really into road rallyes, so my program read an input deck containing route instructions along with time and mileage events and calculated whether I was ahead or behind the designated pace. Never mind that there was no way I was going to get that monster of a machine (physical size-wise) into any vehicle and have it running as I drove. I did not understand what I was doing and somehow managed to get it working.
Luckily, the following quarter was an introduction to microprocessors which made sense to me and showed me the way to the future.
Generally, freshmen took an introduction to programming elective using FORTRAN; that made sense at the time at an engineering school. When my turn came, that class was not offered for some reason and in its place, we were taught a fictional machine with no hands-on lab work.
We were also given access to a DEC PDP-10 minicomputer. Many of us wasted an inordinate amount of time playing text-mode “Star Trek” and adventure games.
Once, a fancy multiplayer space war game appeared. You were assigned a fleet of spaceships seemingly at random and we played against the computer or each other. It was difficult to lose a ship, but they did sustain damage. The fun ended in a scandal when someone discovered that the size and number of ships depended on the number and size of files in our account. As ships suffered damage, bytes were changed in our files; if we lost a ship, a file disappeared.
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Did anybody else attend Mark Haven’s class on BBS systems back in, I think, March? He used to run one out of his childhood bedroom at the time when ANSI graphics was a thing.
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Army ROTC made me take FORTRAN IV to familiarize myself with the “world to come” in 1976. Never used it as a language, gawd I hated key-punching those cards to input program, but it did prove valuable in it taught me somewhat how computers think, at that time very linearly.
IBM 370, that was pretty much the workhorse standard for a lot of years.
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You have not hated keypunch until you drop a deck…
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C64 and BBS’ing from the early/mid-80’s until the 386 PC clone era took off. Just nothing like it before or since… immense innovation in sound, graphics, gameplay, computer art, sampling… just an amazing time.
Overall best C64 game has to be Ultima IV. The goal wasn’t to kill everything but to master the eight virtues and descend into the abyss… armed with a real cloth map and runes you had to translate. Absolutely fantasy of the highest order.
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The vast majority of my younger years was spent using the Sinclair Spectrum 48k+. I still have it (in England though)
Other than that we had the entire Atari family at one point or other, and I spent a fair bit of time on the Commodore C64 and the Amiga which I thought at the time was amazeballs.
One special computer of note that I owned was the Memotech MTX, designed at Oxford University it was special in that it had a subsystem based on a popular English kids tv show 
http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/mtx/techlib/mtx/mtx_noddy.htm
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That part number seemed awfully familiar. This is why: http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/MP_M/MP_M_Index.htm
I have some of those.
The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe.
This is the first computer I ever owned…bought it from Service Merchandise:
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…into a muddy puddle.
I noticed the empty shell of a TRS-80 Color Computer on the table.
I was given several in unknown condition. If we were to have a class on checking out and restoring a vintage computer, I’ll offer those up as guinea pigs.
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I’m glad you brought that up since I was hoping we could do a rebuild night. If you want go a head and put one up on the calendar for the group, or I can get one on there on Monday.
Don’t forget that the Vintage Computer Committee can receive honorarium money, if you schedule the class at least ten full days in advance and select the option for honorarium… Just be sure to word the description so that it’s very clear that participants will be learning something. 
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I have most of the chips for repairing a TRS-80 Color Computer and knowledge of the system. I’v owned my first one back when I was a kid in the 80s. 
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By '89 I was an oldtimer on the C64 online scene… was planning to create a social + technology-focused group based upon game theory and creative collaboration. Something with the intimacy of BBS’es and face-to-face communication… not like Facebook World today which feels like some kind of weird corporate attention-controlling scheme by comparison (which it is).
Perhaps an idea still to come…
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I think I had a few of your demos uploaded to my board back in the day.
Sounds just like what the VCC and XM Core is all about. The current bbs we have is at bbs.dapla.net and telnet://tty.dapla.net. I suggest checking out the board, posting in the message areas and come out to the XM Core dial-in meetups. Oh and tell your friends as well.