That is, the first time you ever bought a personal computer? That's my first love, there in the picture. Plus an 18 character per second
daisy wheel printer. I don't really remember the passion that clearly, now thirty years later, but I must have loved that machine, judging from what I paid in 1984 dollars. $2,783.00 discounted from list prices of $5,655.95. Before you choke on that figure, remember that IBM had rolled out its original IBM-PC barely 2 years previously with price point of
$1,565 with just 16k RAM (yes, k as in kilo) no disc drives, no monitor, no software.
I got the works, with RGB color display, the aforesaid printer, word processing, spreadsheet, MS-DOS and those eight inch dual sided floppy disks, storing 160k per side, totaling 640k. You can read all about the system in this remarkably accurate and complete review of the system preserved online in this article from the November, 1983 issue of Creative Computing magazine.
I must have been head over heels with all that computing power. The price I paid, adjusted for average annual inflation of 2.85%, amounts, in today's dollars, to $6,645.24. Before the 80's were over, unsurprisingly, one of its anthems included the line "She's so fine, there's no telling where the money went." Today, for a few percent of what I paid in 1984, my smartphone does a universe of more things, thousands of times faster, but I know, now, its just another quick romance.
Did you have a fling with your first PC that, maybe, you now look back on as a foolish and youthful extravagance? Use the comments to tell us all the salacious details.