[hubcaps]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mjg wow, was it a kit, did you build it? i ead about those... People still buy them and make them nowadays, true geeks.

nay, fully built. at least i think it was. it was actually my dads, i just messed around with it... it's the same as the zx-81. http://oldcomputers.net/pics/ts1000.JPG

the first computer that i really used was the commodore 64, for the games of course.

 

[DanG]

Our first family computer was a 286 my dad brought home from work (BGS Systems which is now part of BMC Software). The first computer I bought is the one I'm using now -- a Dell Inspiron 9300 Pentium M 17" 1.6GHz, 512MB RAM, Radeon 64MB video.

 

[thefinder]

A Casio PB700 pocket computer, packaged with printer and tape recorder.

Well in fact that was just a toy when I was a kid. Still remember some simple BASIC programs I did with it.

My first REAL computer was a Mac LC II.

 

[Elephas]

Macintosh, 1984.

Beige one-box unit; tiny screen; no hard drive, just a 400k 3.5" floppy drive.

At the time those 3.5" floppies were rare and expensive. Most of my friends were using clip tools to convert single-sided 5.25" floppies to double-sided.

Wish I still have it.

8/1984 Byte review of the original Mac.
http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/compu...toshbytereview

 

[Skipinder]

The first computer i remember being in my house was an old 386 66, we probably had a computer before this, but was too young to remember.

Next my dad got a 586 through work, wasn't allowed to touch it though.

Next, we got a Pentium Pro 133 by NEC, the xeon equivalent back in the day, cost $2000 a lot for a computer back then, but it was passivly cooled, had a 66 mb/s SCSI adaptec card (lightning fast back then), I think it had 1 or 2 gig fujitsu hard drive, a Creative Soundblaster 16 (or mabye 32), a HUGE 16mb video card (forget make), and a wopping 6x NEC CD-rom.

That computer later became my "own" computer. We got some various Pentium 1s, after that.

Then my sis got a PIII 733 - won't bore you with the specs, this is an vintage comp thread

Finally, I got my current comp, a Athalon 1900+ (Palomino)

I would kill to have an colecovision, commodore, amiga, or early apple, they are just so friggin awesome. I would still use one if I had one, if not for the games alone.

Oh and

lol

 

[shiggins]

Of the IBM PC compatible (he-he), I have vague memories of my Dad's 286, followed by fond memories of our 386 SX 25. Next we had a 486 DX2 66 from my Dad's work. That thing flew but we had to give it back, so we upgraded our 386 to 386 DX with a Turbo button.

Our first CD-ROM was a giant VCR-sized external single speed, then one of those internal two speed - The one you had to push the front in then pull the whole drive out and the top flips up to change the disc. Of couse we got 7th Guest but couldn't play it because our computer wasn't to MPC-2 standard. We had to splurge out for a video card with a whopping 1MB of memory (seemed mad then) - A Trident TVGA8900cl (sad, I remember exactly).

Had a 486 DX4 100 for a bit then we got one of those new fangled Pentium things, 75MHz. Then I saved my pennies and bought my own computer for myself - A Pentium MMX 200 with 32MB ram, a snip at £1600! Still in use today as a Smoothwal firewall/router/proxy. Got a 3DFX Voodoo card and Quake rocked. Next I skipped a few MHz and got a 1GHz Athlon, then got a cheap Pentium 4 2.4 GHz. As of last week, I now have a dual core Athlon!! (Already seeing me look back and snigger at my current awe of the speed).

My timeline is getting all confused, but at some point we got a full-sized E-ISA video card with 32MB of memory - Cost over a grand!

DOS were the good old days - you had to actually type "win" to start Windows. I used to spend days making a boot disk that had a menu asking if you wanted Extended of Expanded memory (EMS or XMS) and tuning the autoexec.bat and command.com to get the maximum amount of base memory I could - 590k and still proud of it now. I even made a full colour ASCII menu for games (remember games boxes full of floppies?).

A few keywords of times past; Compuserve, 9600 baud, null-modem cables, memmanager, 4dos, laplink...

 

[jpelg]

The first PC I owned was a Commodore VIC20. I think it had 8k, or something

. I learned to program in BASIC on that thing. Quote:

Originally Posted by Gord SW Ont ... Amiga A500 and A3000 (the latter is what the original video toaster mentioned in an earlier post was used in).

I had an A500, and ended up modding the heck out of it with after-market expansions (stock it was not very expandable). The "Video Toaster" was first an add-on card designed for use inside the Amiga A2000, which had a full-sized PC-type chassis. A later version was made for the low-profile chassis of the A3000, and later the A4000 (last of the breed

). All great machines. I know many small TV stations that still use them for graphics & video editing. Yeah, the Amiga was ground-breaking, for sure. Commodore had a true multitasking OS that ran in 512k (yes, "k"!) back in 1985, that ran full-frame video (NTSC or PAL), in color, on a Motorola 68000 processor. Windows NT didn't arrive until much later, required far more resources to run, and still couldn't do any of that.

The PC world is littered with technology that should have made it, but didn't (Amiga, IBM OS/2, Alpha processors,...). Microsoft's and/or Intel's fault at each turn.

 

[seeberg]

My first computer is the POS that I'm using now, a Pentium III 750mhz with 384mb ram, and among other things, a main hard drive that DESPERATELY needs reformatted and updated to XP(I dunno how to do it, otherwise it'd be done by now

), assuming that'll solve my compatibility issues within the system before I finally get around to building my XPC FragCube.

Nice thing is though that the tower, monitor and all its other goodies were free, I just had to use its restore pack and get things in order. Apparently it wasn't enough though, and it shows

,
Abe

 

[Enverxis]

HP Pavilion 8502

Celeron A 500MHz
64mb PC-100 SD RAM
2mb onboard Intel 810 chipset graphics
intel board, with no agp slot
Seagate 8.4GB hdd
32x cd-rom
stupid ****ing gay case that you had to take the drive bays out just to put a stick of ram in.
17" HP Monitor

 

[acs236]

IBM PCjr --> 386-20, Amiga 1000 --> 486DX2-66 --> Celeron 300 overclocked --> AMD from then on out.

 

[GWN]

Commodore VIC20 > TI99 > Commodore 64 > Macintosh 128 > Mac 512 > Mac SE > PC's from then on.

 

[mjg]

OK,

but still no one had a trash 80 (trs 80)?

Come on, speak up, don't be embarassed!


Also, who had a real "laptop" or more like a tabletop... Those laptops that literally were piece of luggage, with a one hour battery life... Haha those things were so goofy...


Heh, do you guys remember trying to figure out the software checks to play leisure suit larry, or your first virus infection, the first time you lost everything and freaked out?

Man, i miss the old days, i wanna go back it was fun.

 

[mjg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shiggins DOS were the good old days - you had to actually type "win" to start Windows. I used to spend days making a boot disk that had a menu asking if you wanted Extended of Expanded memory (EMS or XMS) and tuning the autoexec.bat and command.com to get the maximum amount of base memory I could - 590k and still proud of it now. I even made a full colour ASCII menu for games (remember games boxes full of floppies?). A few keywords of times past; Compuserve, 9600 baud, null-modem cables, memmanager, 4dos, laplink...

Haha, you sound like me..

Do you remember the fire that caused a pc memory shortaghe, and the days when a megabyte of ram cost $500-$800 each?

The idea of extended memory was pretty ridiculous, even when the basic dos memory space would be filled up, all of these ridiculous attempts and conventions to find the most efficent ways of sticking the tsr's so as to have that 600 kb free so you can run all the hot games of the time...

I remember reading pc magazines and being so interested ini doing it by hand rather then letting qemm totally automate it... Spending hours on this.

I also remember when dos 6.22 came out, i was so oannoyed because it was the beginings of microsofts attempts to monopolize 3rd part packages like, their version of stacker (double space?), their memory manager (forgot the name), their lousy dos shell, i hated that (stolen desqview/norton commander).... Even then their immitations were either stolen or second rate.

Does anyone remember how great novell/dr dos was...
It's too bad it didn't work as well with games and other dos apps... Was kind of cheesy compatibility. Was sweet of cours. How about geoworks, anyone remember geoworks? I had enough memory on my 286 to use the mouse with it, was sweet man! ; )

 

[periurban]

Atari ST 520
Atari STE 1040
Amiga 1200
PC - 486 40mhz, 200mb HD, 8mb memory, Win 3.1, DOS 6
PC - Celeron 400mhz, 20gb HD, 64mb memory, Win 98
PC - Athlon 1200mhz, 40gb HD, 128kb memory, Win 98
PC - Athlon 2.2ghz, 100gb HD, 512mb memory, Win XP
also
Psion Revo 16mb
IBM Thinkpad - Pentium, 2gb HD, 64mb memory, Win 98

DOS was brilliant. It was faster than Windose, and kept us all guessing happily most of the time. Who knew if a game would run? Sometimes it took days.

 

[Lisa]

All I remember was that my dad had two of these what looked like fat keyboards hooked up together with an awful lot of wires and chips spread out over two desks. The monitor was a B&W TV that was doing double duty as seconds TV for my sis and I until a nerd friend (that guy smelled way too funky) of my dad modded a switch in it that was supposed make the monitor show more text lines and when you switched it over it would be a B&W TV again. Only the last part didn't work. So there went our second TV.

My dad did have some games for us that were stored on cassette tapes like all his other programs but we were hardly ever allowed to play because dad was always busy on his computer.

Yeah, good old days...