Mine was a Timex/Sinclair ZX81 with the 16K Memory Module.
I can still remember both the joy and the frustration. Writing programs just for the fun of it, typing in the next-to-last line and having the little bugger either overheat or lose connection either from the power supply or the memory module. Ah, those were the days.

That was not, however, the first computer I ever used. THAT was several years earlier.
In college, they had a couple of Apple ][. If I remember correctly, it had a whopping 6K of RAM, and you had to load the OS in from cassette. The following year, they'd been upgraded with Hayes modems (I think. They were smoke-colored plastic boxes with the ever-familiar rainbow ribbon cables) and Z80 cards so we could use UCSD PASCAL.

Time to boycott. Even if just all the Slashdotters boycotted, it'd be something to see. Or perhaps organize a drone-enabled protest outside.. ;) These jobs used to be filled not just by school kids and retirees, but by anyone looking to get by or pick up a little extra cash. Today there're more and more people clinging to these jobs as their last hope. Things have changed. On 'our' side, its gotten worse. On management's side? Well, let's just say that if the minimum wage had kept pace with the cost of living from 1978 on, $15/hr would look like a sweet deal to them. I'd gladly pay 2 bits more for a burger knowing it was going to a real flesh and blood person rather than to grease and pneumatics upgrades. Anybody feelin' the Bern? ;)

NeoDesk/Geneva Nothing better before or since. Ah, those were the days.

"At what point will we start seeing legislation forbidding the automation of certain industries?"? We won't. The decision on automation will be put squarely in the greedy, greasy palms of business owners and administrative bean-counters, who will see only the bottom line, while leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves, widening even further the gap between the very rich and the very poor. Politics, being increasingly money-driven, will do what it does now, ie listening to the money and allowing those "who know their industries" to write the legislation, rubber-stamping it as "good for the country" and blaming whatever wash-out echelon it creates for any inconvenient issues... such as the customer base able to purchase whatever product it happens to be. Prices will drop, since automation will do it better/faster/cheaper, still leaving truckloads of profit for the big-wigs while the rest of us collect bottles and cans from the side of the highway for a living. Of course, before too long, THAT will become a crime too. Now that I've spread a little joy, time to move along. ;)

Have you done a whois on governmentattic.org? Interesting. Not a word about it. Like it has never existed. Interesting mix of alphabet soup... NSA, NIA, CIA, FBI, FISA, PRISM, POTUS, and who knows what-all else. Curse you, Al Gore, for inventing this thing in the first place. ;-)

Can we PLEASE dispense with the silly encryption bullshit? If I wanted something that was impossible to read, I'd go to FOXNEWS

You beat me to it! I WAS going to say that they must be accounting for inflation and creating five 6.9 million dollar men.

Screw 'em. I fought the same fight for 18 years. Finally I would simply back up the necessary data myself and lecture them without mercy each time (about every 5 weeks on average) they opened a script-containing email or virus loading website. Then I would take my own sweet time cleaning the machine(s) and restoring the required data... Not that I'd dog it, of course, I just wouldn't kill myself to make sure the a-hole boss could check weather.com to see if he'd need an umbrella on the golf course... so he and/or his dribbling idiot sons (He only bought the place so that they wouldn't have jobs requiring paper hats and extensive use of the phrase "Would you like fries with that?") would have plenty of time to complain about people not following the rules (it was ALWAYS someone else's fault, ya know). Hard to believe I've been looking for a job for 3 years now, huh? [chuckle]