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My first computer (if you can call it that) was an Atari 400. It did have a keyboard (albeit a membrane keyboard, which made it very hard to type) and it did come with a cartridge that allowed me to write programs in BASIC, but it had two major flaws as a computer. First, as I said, the keyboard was awful. And second, we didn't have any way of storing data (no floppy drive, harddrives were out of the question... also no printer and no modem). Much later, I found out that a floppy drive and some other peripherals were available for that system, but it was way too late by then.

I wrote my first programs on that computer, but if you spent much more than, say, a half hour writing a program, you pretty much wasted your time because you couldn't save anything. But how much of a program can you write in a half hour with a lousy keyboard?

It was a fun gaming machine with excellent graphics for the day (for example, Pac-Man looked exactly like Pac-Man at the arcade, rather than the weird looking Pac-Man on the Atari 2600). The keyboard definitely allowed an extra dimension to some games that supported it so I had more buttons than just the orange button on the joystick.

I think my parents were sold on the Atari 400 because of the keyboard, giving them the idea it could double as a game system and computer. And it might have with the right peripherals. But I remember that system more fondly than any computer I have ever owned.

My first real computer didn't come along until about a decade and a half later. It was a Packard Bell 486 66Mhz computer running Win 3.11 that became half mine after I married my wife (it was given to her two years before we were married as a college graduation present by her parents).