[mndoggie]

In 1978 I bought an Ohio Scientific Superboard II. It used a 6502 processor, had 8K RAM and used a cassette tape recorder to store programs. It came without a case and a power supply so I had to provide both. It had a B&W 32x32 character display with crude block graphics. Later I bought the expansion board that provided an additional 24K of ram space for a whopping total of 32K. Also on the board was a disk controller so I could use a 5.25" floppy drive.

Later I designed an interface card cage and added a color graphics board based on the TI 99/4 graphics chip, etc.

Later in it's life I turned it into a dedicated print spooler for my CPM computer....

Yup, I'm old.

I also have a DEC PDP 8 somehwere in my basement.

 

[mndoggie]

As far as the "oldest first computer owned", I think I'm at the "forefront"....

I still have that computer. Don't think it works anymore. wouldn't expect the Disk Operating system or the cassette tapes to have the data on them in a useable magnetic state anymore.

Here's some of the OSI stuff:

http://technology.niagarac.on.ca/staff/mcsele/OhioScientific.html

 

[mndoggie]

An Altair in 75. ASCII tape reader and punch drive ran off a Klinschmidt (sp?) teletype machine. It ran some hardware interfaces that I used to control a telescope mount. All home built stuff back then. Next was a TRS80, followed by a Comadore 64 then a 128, then my first PC in 85.

I avoided the Apple thing because I'd ran into a certain member of Apple in 76 and I felt he was a punk. He made some comments about the uniform I had on that just did not sit well.

Not one to hold a grudge forever, I own a Ipod touch 4 today and think it's cool. There's more computing power in that little thing than all my computer combined up until around 2000.

Your Altair predates my OSI by a few years.

Later I built the CPM based "Big Board" and ran that for a few years. A couple of years ago, I sold it to an IT guy who had one at one time. He wanted to hang it on his office wall. I had two 8" floppys for it.