My first computer was a TI BASIC. My mom came home with it from a yard sale back when she was unemployed and raising two kids on her own. I learned a little BASIC programming on it, but it was really just a game console that rivaled the Atari. I had a Nintendo Entertainment System that put it to shame so I quickly lost interest and shoved it in a closet. It came from a yard sale and had lots of game cartridges and paperwork with Bill Cosby promoting it (I wonder if those are worth anything these days?).
My first REAL computer was one of those black & white Apple Macintosh Plus things with a low-density floppy drive. The monitor was built-in but at least it had a monitor (The TI BASIC connected to the TV). A family from church gave it to us after upgrading to a modern Mac so it was pretty old. Anyway, it was exactly like they say: You could pretty much only type and paint on the damn thing and both were of limited usefulness with no printer and a B&W monitor. I remember saving a list of local XBAND (A multiplayer modem for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis) players and their email addresses on it (Yes, the XBAND could send email) and my brother learned to paint Diddy Kong pretty well before it too went into the closet. It had no built-in hard drive and we managed to constantly fill up the external one even with simple paint and MacWrite files. We did upgrade the floppy to a high-density floppy drive to install a copy of Word Perfect but with no printer I don't remember why we even bought the expensive software.
Despite being raised on welfare, I did manage to get a Windows 95 PC somewhat early in the game. My mother was in an accident and we went two years with no car. When we finally got a check for the car, the church had already given us one so we got a new Acer Aspire from the Damark catalog. It was an IBM P150 CPU (A Cyrix-based CPU that was probably only 133MHz), 16MB RAM and 1GB HDD. It was almost slower than I could bear but at least it could run Quake in pure DOS (Though I'd lose CD audio thanks to the stupid "may as well be Windows-only" MWAVE soundcard/modem). I was fooled into thinking that it was a Pentium 150MHz CPU by the damn marketing ("P150 CPU") so I always wondered why games ran unplayably when I "exceeded" their reccomended requirements. It wasn't until Feb 28th, 1999 that I finally got a real gamer's PC... That was the release date of the PIII and I built a kick-ass gaming PC together with a local PC shop. Voodoo Banshee until a few months later when the Voodoo3 was release, SB Live!, CD-RW (Kick-ass at the time), Asus P2B, PIII 500 Katami, 128MB RAM. Damn. I was really sad when it fried in 2K1 prompting me to build my P4 and later systems. I can't even remember how many PCs I've built since then (A lot)!