your old computer story?

[Icey101]

it all started way back in my early 20s....the Apple 2e had just come out and my mate paid 1400 bucks probably the same as 5 grand in todays money, he just used it to play games on in his bedroom, so not to be out done, i bought a commodore 128D for $925, this was cutting edge, it was designed to be used as an office machine and was portable? it had a handle on it and could be carried onto a flight they said, oh the screen came extra so i had to dish out another $450 bucks for this to sit on top, ummmm now how do i carry the screen to make it portable?....oh well, so next there was suppose to be all this software for the 128D that never came out so i ended up running it in 64 mode and just used it to play games in my bedroom....i sold it years later to the guy who had the apple, for 50 bucks

i wish i still had it for some reason

part 2

when i started working for a comms company we were supplied cutting edge laptops, they were toshiba sx386's we thought we were so cool carrying these grey bricks around that took 5 minutes to boot, one of the trainee's wasnt supplied with one which really got to him... so he arrived to work one monday with a laptop bag in it was a brand new toshiba DX2 66, wow...that was massive speed, twice the speed of ours...i asked how much did he pay, ummmm..... 6 grand he said!!! holy shyte...lol i think that would have been about 15 times his wage, within a year the p60 and p90 chips had come out and all else was made redundant...

[Tituscrow]

About 1983 ish, my brother and I got a Commodore Vic 20. It felt like we'd entered the age of jetpacks and moon holidays. You could buy a 5K 'ram-pack' to increase the memory to play games in colour etc. I later found out what my mum and dad went without for months to afford it.

However, we were trumped by friends who got a ZX81, with a whole...wait for it...1K of memory. I remember a game that consisted merely of being a ^ sign dodging falling asterisks. You could go and have your tea and still the descending 'aliens' would only be half way down the screen.
I remember loading games through a cassette machine that took hours to load, then would crash within minutes.

Some years later, we upgraded to a Commodore 64. Colour sprite graphics, the lot, but the Joneses down the road got a Sinclair ZX Spectrum which was marketed as a 'better' computer but had these horrible multi function rubber keys.

We used to write the most incredibly simple and dull 'games' using rudimentary BASIC. Then I lost interest and got more into guitars. I sometimes wonder if today's IT multi millionaires that are my age started in a similar place to me, but stuck with it.

I too sometimes reminisce about my old toys and would give anything to still have that old Vic 20 to tinker with. Will probably never see one again.

And to think that the phone on which I am typing this post has a memory that would need a stack of Vic's to the moon and back to match the memory...

[DblG]

Ahh, the Commadore 64. Wasted many a day playing Zork and lode runner.

[Icey101]

Originally Posted by Tituscrow

About 1983 ish, my brother and I got a Commodore Vic 20. It felt like we'd entered the age of jetpacks and moon holidays. You could buy a 5K 'ram-pack' to increase the memory to play games in colour etc. I later found out what my mum and dad went without for months to afford it.

However, we were trumped by friends who got a ZX81, with a whole...wait for it...1K of memory. I remember a game that consisted merely of being a ^ sign dodging falling asterisks. You could go and have your tea and still the descending 'aliens' would only be half way down the screen.
I remember loading games through a cassette machine that took hours to load, then would crash within minutes.

Some years later, we upgraded to a Commodore 64. Colour sprite graphics, the lot, but the Joneses down the road got a Sinclair ZX Spectrum which was marketed as a 'better' computer but had these horrible multi function rubber keys.

We used to write the most incredibly simple and dull 'games' using rudimentary BASIC. Then I lost interest and got more into guitars. I sometimes wonder if today's IT multi millionaires that are my age started in a similar place to me, but stuck with it.

I too sometimes reminisce about my old toys and would give anything to still have that old Vic 20 to tinker with. Will probably never see one again.

And to think that the phone on which I am typing this post has a memory that would need a stack of Vic's to the moon and back to match the memory...

the pre commodore 64 era was a whole other world i never experianced lol

[i_got_a_mohawk]

Used BBC Micros in school, and felt so lucky when we got an Amiga 1200!

[Stinsok]

My first computer was a Tandy with a dot matrix printer. I was rockin'.

[MJ5150]

I remember being the coolest guy in the hood when I got a 9600 baud modem.

-Mike

[Big_Daddy]

I remember when the computer would get a virus (thanks, older teenaged brother!) and it would take a looong time to reformat everything.

Anyone remember Netscape?

[jabsys]

I've had a BBC micro, ZX81 & quite a few different 520ste & 1040st, still got a 520ste & woody 2600 in the attic, thinking about the tape drives on the commodore's still makes me want to smash them.

I remember when computers didn't need reformatting for viruses, the OS was on a ROM chip & viruses went in the boot sector. Life was much simpler then

[Brad Johnson]

I remember working on the computer systems at Titan II missile sites in the Midwest back in the mid-70's. I think a dumb terminal was line itemed at around $30k. The missiles were a lot more.

What do I win?


I worked on computers prior to the home variety (duh), then worked as the East Coast tech for a company that sold Durango computers. Had hard drives the size of a large suitcase, 14" platters in multiples... 12 or 24 megabyte capacity. That was ballin' for a small company in the early 80's.

8 inch floppies, 32k RAM, monochrome monitors, dot matrix printers, cutting edge stuff. I repaired the earliest IBM PCs, Wangs, Packard Bells, the Italian made AT&Ts and just about anything in that market other than Apple. And all of the peripherals.

Didn't bother to get my own at home until the mid 80's, a 286 with a 40MB drive and a MB of RAM, SVGA display, sound card. Set it up and played some game I can't recall for about 14 hours straight. It was then that I figured I'd probably best lay off the games and to this day I still rarely play games.

It's been fun to watch this stuff go from pre-Pong to where it is now in a relatively short period of time. I still remember speaking in hushed tones with awe about someday, someday having a gigabyte of hard drive space... a terrabyte was absurd. I still remember Bill Gates quote from way back in the day about how much RAM people didn't need. Fun stuff. Maybe I'll go in the basement, get the breakout box and whip up a serial cable. Maybe set up a Token ring network. With Novell. And WordPerfect.

Maybe I'll install Wolfenstein from a floppy.

[jive1]

I remember when I got a floppy drive for the C64 back in the day. It could hold like 170K, and it seemed like tons of memory.

BTW, I could defeat any of you guys in the following games:
Way of the Exploding Fist
Star League Baseball
Hardball
Bird Vs Dr J
Summer Games
Archon
Winter Games
Mule
Spy vs Spy
and bunch of others that I can't think of right now.

[Joe Gress]

My dad spent more for his first computer than his family car at the time.

[Stinsok]

We managed to play "Reader Rabbit" and print black and white banners.

[James Hart]

first in the house was a TI 99/4A... MANY hours of Hunt the Wumpus and Munchman. Dad (mech eng) had a few clones back in the day. First I bought was an Apple IIc... in 95 when the local BBS got it's internet gateway, I picked up a PowerMac with a 1gb drive and 8mb of ram. I paid a LOT of money for an upgrade to a 10gb drive and a pair of 16mb sticks a year later. I still have my Quark Xpress, Pagemaker, and Photoshop 2.5 installer CDs.

[mmbongo]

I started with an Apple //c, then on to an Apple //gs which I used until I got my first Windows machine...a Gateway 2000 486 DX/2.

I held on to my Apple //gs though. I had it stored in my parents basement. I recently found it and sold it on Ebay for enough to buy me a new bass!

[L-A]

I have several versions of Wordperfect, on 3.5 and 5.25" disks.

[Brad Johnson]

Originally Posted by L-A

I have several versions of Wordperfect, on 3.5 and 5.25" disks.

I loved Wordperfect, knew most of the keystrokes. They just wouldn't change with the times.

[Ziltoid]

My dad still uses wordperfect and refuses to use word.

[MJ5150]

Anyone else have an Adam computer?

-Mike

[Munjibunga]

When my daughter was three (ten years ago) we gave her our old 486 computer to play educational games (like Math Rabbit). I loaded a whole bunch of word games and math games and some that required figuring pathways out. One day, the computer was not keeping up with the software, and my daughter said, "Dad, this computer's too slow!" At three years old (three years of age if you're from Jersey)!

So we gave her our newer Pentium and bought another one for us. Now she has a MacBook Pro, and I sit around wondering where I went wrong.