Old Computers

[ebar]

i recently posted that my middle child was running a p2 and what was shocking was my response i got from a member. He thought that p2 was so ancient... and shuddered at the thought...

so i started to start this thread..

First computer any of you ever remember using..



Atari XE was mine
DOS based computer my dad got from work(when DOS was mainstream).


ah, how we have come in the past 25 years....

[6StringGeek]

Commodore 64. Load the cassette tape, go eat lunch, come back and watch MTV until tape finishes loading. It was awesome!

[ebar]

i got to fiddle around with an old commadore 64 when i was in high school.. For some reason at that time the school never got rid of old computers they stored them... all of them for like 20 yrs...

My project was to fix up all the old computers so we could integrate at least 1 computer per classroom to be linked ... fun class...

[Charles]

The first one I played around with filled the whole room. The operating system was a stack of punched cards that filled a metal cabinet. This was before the bootstrap and to execute a cold boot you had to toggle in the instructions--eight toggles and an enter button, you toggled in the machine code in binary--to start reading the cards and then execute.

Though, that's not entirely correct. Before that I was already handy with the slide rule and abacus.

[svidgen]

The operating system was a stack of punched cards ...
Well, if you're going to bust that card out right away, how are the rest of us supposed to compete!?

Hmm ... I think I used an abacus once back in grade-school ... that's technically a type of computer, I think.

[The Old Sarge]

Yep. First for me was a punch card machine.

[ebar]

maybe we should post time frames on this as well... just to give an idea of how quickly these things have progressed and took leaps and bounds to get there... or rather punches and blows

[Fang]

At Uni we had a terminal connected to a Honeywell mainframe using punched tape.
Still remember the password "hello honeywell"
The Tech guy could visually read the tape, what a nerd!

My first computer was a Dragon 32 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64)
First PC Olivetti M24 (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=535)

[Declan1991]

First OS I used was Windows '95, because before that I was too young to use a computer. I have used a non-graphical UI, and I'm out of practice, but able to use an abacus.

[Mayday]

The first computer I owned was a TRS-80, but prior to that, I recall using university terminals to play the original "Adventure". Man I loved that game. I still remember the first time I killed the vampire with the special sword....

[spiresgate]

Way back in 1973 a major European pharmaceutical company set up a new research centre in the UK. A big feature was the very latest computer. The research block was on three floors and none of the staff would need a calculator as there would be a teletype on EVERY floor.

The computer was a Hewlett-Packard with a memory of 24 k - but no need to worry about future capacity as it was upgradeable to 32 k.

It cost about 20,000 pounds - so that's a pound per byte.

I've had fun over the years working out what modern computers are worth based on that old 73 HP.

The one I'm sitting at right now has a memory of 250 GB or 250 billion pounds and the memory stick in my top pocket is worth 2 billion pounds.

[Quidam]

I'm not that old. When I was 4 years old I was using a computer with MSDOS. I learned the commands to install and start games.
A year later I got win95 and it was time for Quake. ;)

[kiwibrit]

Hmm. First computer I fed any sort of program into was some Elliott mainframe, I think. First one I owned was a ZX 81 - followed by a BBC. Than was eventually replaced by an IBM PC - then a succession of PCs. Mostly use Dells - but have been very pleased with my EEEPC netbook.

[Watts]

TI-99 4A

Same concept as commodore (cassette tape and all)

[JunkMale]

First ever machines I laid my mucky mitts on was a Z80 (380Z) Research Machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z) which was the size of a suitcase and could be programmed in machine code or BASIC.

First computer I owned was a ZX81 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81) with all of its 8 bit processin power in a CPU that had a number crunching 3.25 Mhz of processing power!

First ever computer with mind boggling power was a Honewell Mainframe at my mums workplace. The beast of a machine took up 3 floors in the old offices where she was based, it kicked off that much heat that they didn't need to run any heating, even in winter! The machine supported over 1000 terminals.

This was followed by an Acorn Atom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Atom) and BBC Mictro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro) which was the bigger brother to the Acorn machine.

While at school I helped on networking the BBC Micros that the computer science block had purchaed a boatload of. We had to write our own program that was stored on a EPROM chip stuffed in to the machine that gave it the ability to link to the Z80 machine which was the hub. This was in the days before ethernet and UTP cables!!

I had a Psion hand held as well as a Casio Portable computer, this was when portable computing was a joke and you had to write the programs or the programs were ROM based or you the alternative was to write your own. the casio had tape backup and also had addtional RAM you could buy but that was an arm and a leg, £99 I was quoted for an 8MB chip. This was when £99 was a couple of week wages.

First ever PC based technology I used was a home built job of my brother-in-law with its huge 12 Mhz of processing power and it could also run in turbo mode at a staggering 33 Mhz.

First computer I killed was an Apple Mac, not sure which version of the Mac it was but all I did was touch the keyboard and the jolt of static build up that discharged from me to the machin killed it!

The first computer I built myself was based on an AMD board and the Athlon Chipset which at the time was a top spec machine that cost me £800 to build when same spec machines were selling for more than £2,000. Proof enough that to build your own was cheaper than today. If you do a home build today, it will cost you more than a prebuilt system! What a turn around...

Fastest PC I currently have is 2.66Mhz which by standards now is slow (or for most entry level) when this baby was new, most PC's were clocking arounf 1 Ghz. The machine still runs well but I could do with something with more processing power.

[Shorts]

Apple IIe was my first, DOS and the great stuff known as California Games, Winter Games, Summer Games, Robot Boots, Lode Runner, Print Shop Pro, etc. Oh, it had a 1.44 modem too, cost my dad $2,000 in the '80s. Fist computer built at 10 was an AMD K6, out of two broken AMD based computers. Dad had bought one, it died, year later bought another it died, and then said "That's it, both computers died, not buying another one." So got to work...

[triassic]

My first was a Commodore 64 hand me down from my dad. I was maybe 6, and knew how to load programs such as Grover's Barnyard Adventures and Print Shop. After that I had a monochrome 8088 hand-me-down, then a 386, then a 486, until finally in middle school I got a brand new Pentium 200mhz, which eventually got a Voodoo2 3D card put in it.

[andr105]

MSDOS!!! It was so awful to make all those commands to create something!:eek:

[Charles]

MSDOS!!! It was so awful to make all those commands to create something!:eek:Are you kidding? I pretty much always have one or two instances of the DOS shell open at work. Besides being the best way to do a lot of things, when people walk by my monitor they don't know what I'm doing but they are sure that it's important.

[David Harrison]

when people walk by my monitor they don't know what I'm doing but they are sure that it's important.Hah! Nice, I'll remember that for future reference.

Yeah I use the command line a reasonable amount, but only because a lot of the programs I use do not have a GUI. And sure I'll do the occasional ipconfig or chkdsk or whatever, but most of the time I stick to the mouse and pretty pictures.

Anyway, these are the computers (CPUs at least) in my history:

BBC computer (without a hard drive)
Intel Pentium 166 MHz
Intel P4 1.7 GHz Willamette - bit weak at the knees, might replace it next year
AMD Athlon 1800+ MP Thouroughbred B - soon to be retired for an i7 920
AMD Athlon 2500+ Thouroughbred B - file server
AMD Athlon 3200+ XP Barton - file server
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Newcastle - motherboard died
Intel E6600 2.4 GHz Conroe - (supposed to be a) media centre (isn't though)
Intel i7 965 3.2 GHz Bloomfield - gaming PC

Edit: And ebar, that 1800+ that's getting replaced (in about a week) was itself the replacement for a P2 400MHz machine.

[multimediocrity]

I was born in 1985. I remember using a computer that was hooked up to a TV. You could type and print, and that's about it. I think my dad made some games in Basic.

I remember VIVIDLY the night we got the Windows 3.1. I believe this is my first computer that counts.

First we got a Windows 3.1, and then a 95, and then a 98. I got an XP for college. We got one for my dad as a gift a couple years later. After, I got an XP laptop (my first laptop) in '06. After, my mom got a Vista laptop. I recently bought a new Vista laptop to take over for the '06.

Yes, I am loyal to PCs. I have used both PC and MAC, and every time I weigh the pros and cons of each system, PC wins by a landslide.

[andr105]

The first one I owned was Korvet.It was really aweful!

[multimediocrity]

I loved that 3.1. I remember it well. I think I remember everything I did those first couple days of owning it. I'm surprised how quickly I picked it up... and I was probably about 8.

See? Even the old PCs were easy to use. :)

[Mr Initial Man]

A 286, running MS-DOS.

[Freejack]

Ahh, geek history.

First computer I used was in 1979. A CompuGraphic Editwriter. I was a typesetter in the Army. A field tech showed me how to get into the "OS" and run a few games he provided (Mastermind and Pong were the two I remember most). I used it to typeset character sheets and saved the output on 8" floppies. I took the masters to a printer and he ran off a couple of hundred of each sheet (Magic-User, Fighter, Thief, Cleric, Multi-Classed, and NPC).

First one I owned was a Sinclair with 2k of RAM, a Radio Shack 4" TV and a Radio Shack cassette deck to save stuff. This was around 1979 or 80. The first program I wrote was a menu driven Dungeons and Dragons game monitor. Had a few tables and kept track of character light sources (torches and lanterns).

My first big mistake was on an IBM PC with Dos 1.0 and two 5 1/4 floppy disks. I was typing in a Startrek game (Super Startrek), got done, debugged it, and found I didn't have a blank floppy to write to. You couldn't format a disk from inside Basic so I lost all the work, formatted a disk and typed it in again.

I started off as a programmer in Basic on Leading Edge, Radio Shack TRS-80, and Franklin computers. I was maintaining Survey software. A surveyor would bring his data instrument in, download the points to the computer, the computer would calculate the size and create a Plat on an HP Plotter. A customer bought us a 10 megabyte hard disk for the Leading Edge for a project of his.

Next job was a programmer and Novell network installer. I had IBM PCs (with Emerald crystals to speed the machine up), then XT, XT-286 and then AT's.

Right now my main system (I have 11) is a Windows XP box with an Intel Dual Core 3.16Ghz CPU and a pair of ATI 4870 video cards in Crossfire mode.

http://schelin.org/20081004/

Big strides :)

Carl

[multimediocrity]

Yep. First for me was a punch card machine.

Ha ha ha... the coffee shop at our school used to be one of these computers. My professor told us stories about how they used to hollow out a deck of cards and fill the empty space with chaff so when the night crew who ran the programs put them into the machine, the chaff would fly everywhere. It probably set them back an hour having to clean all that out of the machine. He he he.