what was your first computer?
Aug 20, 2005 at 1:48 PM Post #106 of 167
Quote:

A slide-rule


Do you remember those abacus-like hand held calculators where you'd take a palm pilot stylus-like pen and slide the numbers up and down vertical slots? If that's how far back we're going, I guess that was mine.
 
Aug 20, 2005 at 2:00 PM Post #107 of 167
Quote:

Originally Posted by mbriant
Do you remember those abacus-like hand held calculators where you'd take a palm pilot stylus-like pen and slide the numbers up and down vertical slots? If that's how far back we're going, I guess that was mine.


No, but at my primary school we had a mechanical adding machine. all gears and handles and you slid the numbers on notched wheels by hand then cranked the handle , that would have been about 1965. I think pythagoras made it
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Aug 20, 2005 at 2:30 PM Post #109 of 167
Well, I think it was an AMSTRAD CPC-464. 1984 but I got it in 1994 or so I guess. It still works today. My friend had windows 95. I had fun drawing boxes on the screen in Basic, and making and saving games to audio tapes. I can't remember if that actually worked.

We used to play moonbuggy, but the tape broke. Bought a joystick for it ages ago, modern serial pin joystick on this ancient machine. No hard drive, optional floppy disc (well, these were rectangular in shape, like a cartridge I guess). Colour screen at least.

Got a real one in 1998. 1.2GB Quantum Fireball hard drive, pentium 100. 32MB RAM or so and either a sound blaster or Adlib something. I had very few songs. Maybe the offspring Beheaded is one that sticks out. I think we upgraded later on to a 36 speed CD drive. Windows 95. Went through some K6-2 processors from 400MHz to 450MHz or so. I don't know if there were K6-2 500? The computer is still in my garage but not functional.

Now my machine is a 1.3GHz AMD Duron, 40GB drive. 384MB RAM and windows XP, various DVD, CD writers and a media card reader. USB (I remember wondering what the point of it was, serial seemed fast enough). I saw an advertisement with the offer of a free Rio Diamond 32MB mp3 player. I thought what was the point? I had winamp! Now I have a 20GB iPod. Who would have thought, haha. Hardly fit 1 song on that 32MB, now I have 1600 on this one.

Napster can't have been that long ago though, I remember being annoyed because I deleted around 600 files by accident.
 
Aug 20, 2005 at 7:21 PM Post #110 of 167
It was almost a Timex Sinclair 1000 in kit form (http://oldcomputers.net/ts1000.html) because a buddy of mine built one. Instead I bought a Commodore Vic20 w/ 3K ram expander (http://oldcomputers.net/vic20.html). Later got a tape drive, then a floppy drive (it was as big as the Vic20). Then I moved on to a Commodore 64 (http://oldcomputers.net/c64.html), then Apple II+ clone, then a Commodore Amiga 500(http://www.old-computers.com/museum/....asp?st=1&c=65), then XT clone. My first hard drive was 20 megabytes (not gigabytes). After that I have been building/upgrading mostly Intel systems.
 
Aug 20, 2005 at 11:04 PM Post #112 of 167
First was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K then a few months later we brought the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128K with built in tape drive! I remeber waiting 15 mins for games to load only for my brother to walk in and press the reset button on the side of the keyboard the git.

After the speccys we brought an Amiga A500 what a sweet machine, way ahead of its time.

Edit: For the ZX spectrum fans amongst us enjoy: http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/
 
Aug 21, 2005 at 12:17 AM Post #113 of 167
Kinda off topic but how many here actually know what a typwriter is ? I had a big ole' monster Royal in my teens.Had to have some damn muscle to get anything to type out and if you did not watch the ink tape the letters to the edge of the keys would skip.Real nightmare.

Not that I learned how to type anything on it as most here as most here know from my posts.......... :
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cool:


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Aug 21, 2005 at 1:12 AM Post #115 of 167
Quote:

Originally Posted by Oink1
Hehe! - Manic Miner ruled!
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Yeah it was fantastic what a great into tune as well! few of my fav games on the speccy were: Manic Miner, Contact Sam Cruise, Skool Daze, Back2skool, Chaos, Lazersquad, Bubble Bobble, Jet Set Willy and How to be a Complete B*****D

Those have to be some of the best days of gaming for me. I remember staying up all night with my brother trying to complete Bubble bobble. I was rubbish at games back then and I still am today!
 
Jun 12, 2007 at 2:28 AM Post #117 of 167
My first computer was a generic branded second hand system that my uncle bought.

-Pentium MMX 133MHz
-Probably around 48MB of RAM
-Probably a 300-500MB hard disk
-24x CD-ROM drive!!

Came with Windows 95 and Office 97. Not bad at the time, which was before I got hooked onto computers. =P
My current computer right now isn't as nice as most systems and seems rather aged in comparison to others:

Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 512MB of RAM, 120GB Hard Drive, 2x 160GB Hard Drive, 250GB Hard Drive, 48x CD Burner, 4x DVD Burner, Sound Blaster Live!, ATI Radeon x800 Pro
 
Jun 12, 2007 at 2:35 AM Post #118 of 167
Quote:

Originally Posted by Claus1100xx /img/forum/go_quote.gif
286 with a green screen. Very nice and played prince of persia. Had one of those big floppy drives, and I think a whopping 256 or 512kb of ram. Also had a huge hard drive for its time of 20mb. It almost ran Windows 3.11 when it first came out, but I stuck with DOS and NORTON COMMANDER.
I felt so organized with the commander and was in heaven. Word and Excel were things never heard of at that age in time. Internet? What's that? We still had the pulse telephones.
Also the first time I heard my dad's sound card in his ultra modern 386 I was blown away. I remember the first time I heard it was playing Lemmings and I was like "where's this sound coming from"?

AAAAHHH I loved it. Technology is moving so quickly it's almost scary, but very exciting.


Mine was very similar to this, a 286 with a green screen!
 
Jun 12, 2007 at 2:42 AM Post #120 of 167
My first computer was an Apple PowerMac something something.

1.2gb, 16mb ram, 4x cd drive, 28.8 modem, tv tuner card with remote (wow), 15" crt, floppy, colorwriter inkjet and then later a B/W laser. I believe the system was $3k with the inkjet. the laser printer was $400 or $500 later on.

came with MacOS 7.5. upgraded to 7.6 and then to 8.0. Gave it away a few months ago. the heaviest it could handle was warcraft2 and duke nukem 3d
 
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