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Yes Why?
That was my first one, too...
followed by a Sony MSX
followed by all Amiga models (yes, all) and an Atari ST. The rest of the story is dozens of PCs and Apple computers.
You must be very young :-)
First was a ZX spectrum ... first game I ever loaded was He-Man, so awesome!
I still have a Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, SNES, PS1 all my other retro stuff is gone now
Thats awesome, you know I considered putting up a bunch of tiny 8mb (or less) containers with amiga and c64 emulators pre installed for enthusiasts to make a new micro web using the old bbs software etc not looked in to it much but may still do it some day.
Ahh, turbo buttons
haha they made the end of season results fly by on championship manager though!
I have used virtually all of the systems mentioned above and many more, most of which seem to have been forgotten. My first computers filled large rooms:
IBM System/360, DEC PDP-8, DEC System 10, CDC Cyber (I forget the model number, but I remember that it was a ones-complement system.)
Most were programmed using punchcards. I worked on computers where you loaded the bootstrap code using front panel switches. Memory was core, not RAM. The DEC System 10 was upgraded from 64 to 88 kilobytes of core memory. Large companies rented time on it for $500 per CPU hour.
When connecting to interactive computers, you used an acoustic coupler modem. You dialed the computer from your phone, listened for the carrier tone, and then stuck the handset's microphone and earpiece into two suction cups. If you were lucky, you got data throughput of 300 bits per second.
Two decades later, I remember paying $250,000 for 5 gigabytes of RAM.
Sorry to get nostalgic. I have a few punchcards, an 8-inch floppy, and other computer memorabilia in my closet somewhere. They aren't worth much.
I remember when you got a PC with Windows on it you would remove it because it was never going to catch on. Solitaire/Minesweeper was all it was good for.
@dacentec - what is that an Osbourne 1?
I was slightly after that (though I do remember the System/360). I do have a fond nostalgia for the BBS culture of the 1980s. It was a more intimate, friendly network. The early Internet was somewhat the same though it became the noxious cess pool it is today by 1993 or 1994.
Yep, although I swear the one I had was an osbourne II, this picture is exactly my machine.
I had a 300 baud modem in one of the holes with a ribbon cable that connected it for power and communication with the computer.
Good times, hosting wasn't even a thing... http://archives.thebbs.org/links.html
My was a Victor computer (from Tandy Corporation, that was the third largest pc company back then in the USA).
It was a 386 with 20 Mhz, 2 MB RAM, 52 MB HDD, floppy drive and a whopping 14" VGA screen. It was delivered with MS DOS 5.0, and Windows 3.1 as an option. The price, with VAT was: $1300. But of course, I needed more and more floppy disks (1.4 MB) and the price was from $20-30 for 10 disks.
The computer started in DOS, and I only used Windows like a program. Most of my work (aka gaming) was done in DOS.
Of course, no internet connection before years later. This was in early 1990's. After that I changed to a new computer every second year, still do, but of course, now I don't have one computer, I have 6 here at home.
The fun thing back then was when you upgraded to a new computer, you actually could increase the speed on your computer with 100% or more. That never happens today.
Same with hard drives, did go from a 52 MB HDD to a 250 MB HDD, then a 500 MB HDD.
A funny thing, I wrote a diary back then, I at one point when I got the 500 MB HDD, I wrote, I will never need more hard drive space then that....
My last three hard drives I got last week was three 8 TB HDDs. And I have 100 TB here at home now...
Here is the ad for the computer, a student computer, it's on Norwegian, but you understand the basic. What a stupid ad, but the Victor computers was made in Scotland. And it was solid, really solid. I remember I could stand on the computer without any issue, and I have never been a small man.
LOL CPM v2
I thought computers were born with a C:> prompt...
Acer 166mhz, 8mb ram and 2 gb hd. Everybody told me the 2gb hard drive was overkill and that I would never fill it up. One guy told me "General Motors doesn't need 2 gigs". I got it anyways. Had Windows 95. I remember thinking "how do I know if I'm on the internet or not" I had no idea what the internet was.
I know exactly when it happened: September 1993. That is when AOL cut its customers loose onto Usenet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Timex Sinclair 1000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000
I think I remember building this in that it was a kit not a finished computer. After this I had an Atari with a 5.25" floppy disk.
Next, 1988 or so I had one of the original Macintosh computers.
I remember buying a 386 for $2000 in 1992 or so, and installing DOS, then installing Windows 3.0.
Constantly upgrading the windows machine(cd-rom, sound card, better video card, etc) got me interested in computers, and I started my eBay business in 1999 after discovering I could sometimes sell what came out of my upgrade efforts for more than I paid for the new parts.
The prompt command is an internal command introduced with version 2.0 so it's funny how so many people left it at the default when it takes two seconds to make one's own choice. With ansi/nansi.sys I use $e[31;40;1m$p $$$e[32;40;1m now.
Intel Pentium II 350MHz
20GB HDD
256 MB RAM
Windows 98/ME
=D
I found a 286 with 287 copro in a cupboard here with Windows for Workgroups on it. Still booted but really really slow.
ZX Spectrum 48KB... those were the times - 'load "" [ENTER]'
Intel 386 SX 20MHz, 5MB RAM, 85MB HDD, VGA graphics
AMD 486 DX4 100MHz, later installed a 19.2kbps fax/modem to dial up to BBS's, can't remember the rest of the specs.
Pentium 90 MHz, 28.8kbps modem for fax and dial up to the internet
AMD Athlon 850MHz, ISDN line with 64kbps up/down, Geforce 256DDR
AMD Athlon XP 2500M+ Barton core, overclocked to 2400MHz, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Radeon 9700
Intel Core2Duo E6300 1866MHz overclocked to 2400MHz, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, Geforce 8800 GTS
Intel Core i7 4770K overclocked to 4.3GHz, 16GB RAM, about 3.5TB of HDD's
Quite a ride! :P
Exactly !
Want to relive some of these classics but don't have the hardware anymore? Nowadays, many emulators can run in a web browser!
http://archive.vg/blog/a-big-list-of-browser-based-emulators-and-ports-of-classic-games
@bitseeker: Nice link to those emulators.
For a while, the FAA had a team of people whose full-time job was to scour the country for spare parts to keep their old equipment running. They hit up garage sales, bankrupt companies, salvage yards, any place they could find parts.
I have a friend whose company makes a lot of money writing emulators to replace obsolete hardware. His customers are companies who depend on programs that run on ancient equipment. They turn to his company because they can no longer find parts to maintain the hardware. His company gives them the equivalent of a roomful of hardware on a small PC. The new "hardware" runs orders of magnitude faster than the original equipment. Sometimes he has to slow them down just so they can properly communicate with their external interfaces.
Very cool.
Yep, I remember similar issues when running IBM XT games on IBM ATs. They were way too fast, having been hardcoded for a 4.77 MHz CPU, not 8+ MHz.
IBM/360, Burroughs B6700
Mine was a Compaq Presario 4120 bought in 1997, so rather recent compared to some of the previous posts
It was a Pentium 120MHz with 16MB of RAM, a 1.2GB HDD and came with Windows 95.
If I remember correctly my first PC was a Pentium II at 266Mhz with a HDD of 3.2GB and can't really remember how much RAM it had, but I'm sure it wasn't much.