Gotta reply to this!
PDP-8L, given to me when employer closed down. I spent far more time fixing it than I ever did running programs on it. You spent most of the time finding out which TTL chip had blown this week and sucking the solder out without wrecking the PCB. Core store memory – learned about knitting from that – and of course high speed paper tape that could read 9000 holes per second.
I missed out on paper tape myself (saw a lot of it around me, ICL1904S) but did use thousands of punched cards.
But clearly to get proper anorak status here we need to go further back in time 
If we get somebody here saying they started on the 4004
Not 4004 but Z80 (built my ZX81 from Sinclair’s kit) and 8008 (did something at university but I don’t remember what )
But… Nokia lives on in Greece, and here is the proof
Inside the shop is a huge model of the N8…
Apple or Samsung don’t have their own shop!
I started out around 1977 on one of these. Naturally with a 110 bps teletype 33 including paper tape reader and punch.
My first computer was a Nascom-1, later upgraded to the Nascom-2
for which I wrote a custom BIOS and put CP/M 2.2 on it
It ended up in a rack box like this
You might laugh but over some years that machine was used to develop a few products (all in M$ Macro-80 assembler) which sold thousands, at £1000 average price. 30 years ago, that was real money which would have set somebody up for a lifetime of flying TBMs or even light jets. It didn’t do that for me because I was just 1/3 shareholder and we had dozens of employees so money was p1ssing out of every corner.
As I keep saying, to me, a computer is a tool for a job, not a toy or a status symbol
I recently sold my first portable.Comodore SX64 anyone?
Anyway, Nokia’s old slogan is alive and kicking, if a tad changed….
