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your old computer story?

#41
L-A said:
Most big NY lawyers firms still use it. Word isn't exactly a replacement for the power tool Wordperfect was.
Click to expand...

That statement is the bane of my existence currently. I'm in law school and every lawyer I have thus worked for has used WordPerfect. What a crap software... I am very well versed with computers, but even that program has made me scratch my head a number of times.

Being born in 1988, my computer history does not go nearly as far back as most of you, but I still have fond memories as a child of playing 5 1/4 floppys on Windows 3.1 and 95.

I have much more than this lying around, but here's a quick photo of some old software
Link Removed
 
#43
Munjibunga said:
An 8088 was a pretty early computer. I bought my company's first computer, an IBM PC XT, which was the 8088. It's predecessor was the IBM PC, the 8086. We got it with the 8087 math co-processor. Shortly thereafter, they came out with the PC AT, which was the 80286. We bought that for the accounting department. It also had the 80287 math co-processor in it. Four of us got Compaq suitcase computers.

Here's one for you. Accounting said they needed more storage. In those days, the standard storage was 5¼-inch floppies with 360 KB of storage. Then they went to double density at 720 KB. This was even before the 1.44 MB 3½-inch floppies. Anyway, we ended up buying a 10 MB (megabyte) hard drive. The price? $4,000. At that price per byte, that $100 1TB (terabyte) drive of today would cost $400 million. We were paying $160 for 1 megabyte SIMMS to upgrade our computer RAM. At that price per byte, the 8GB of RAM in my machine would cost $1,280,000.

Remember Zip Drives (100 MB) and Jaz Drives (2GB)? My band leader is an IT consultant, and the other day he was transferring a client's Quickbooks files off Zip cartridges onto CDs.

My first exposure to computers was in 1966, when we were programming in Fortran II onto punch cards. We'd leave them in the computer center overnight to be processed on an IBM 360. You had to hope there were no do-loops in your program, lest you'd get a very nasty note from the technicians.
Click to expand...

Ah, math co-processors. I installed/repaired everything you mentioned here. Back when component level repairs were cost effective.


Remember Iomega Bernoulli boxes?
:D
 
#45
James Hart said:
first in the house was a TI 99/4A... MANY hours of Hunt the Wumpus and Munchman.
Click to expand...

We had one of those! And I used to play Hunt The Wumpus too. Remember Parsec? It was a side scrolling game with a spaceship you had to navigate around objects and through caves. there was also a space invaders sort of game I can't remember the name of. I got a book at Radio Shack to program games and spent hours entering lines of code, only to have the game not work because of a mistake. Goto 20. Goto 10.

We begged my dad to get a Commodore 64 because the kid across the street had one. I played a lot of Gunship, Jet, California Games/Winter Games, and Test Drive on that thing. One of my dad's friends copied us a ton of games but a lot of times they wouldn't work. Those old 5 1/4" floppies were so unreliable. My friend and I made a lot of goofy posters with The Print Shop, mostly making fun of our siblings and teachers.

I remember my dad building our first PC around 85. When he installed a 10 meg hard drive it was almost the size of a toaster, and we were like "we'll never fill this whole thing up!" Played a lot of King's Quest (part 3 was my favorite) and Space Quest. The Sierra games were the bomb.

I also remember how fast our computer was when he installed a Pentium I processor, and how we networked the computers in drafting class so we could all play Doom. This was in 1994 before any of us had even heard of the internet.
 
#46
The first family computer we got was an old packard bell 486/66 processor. 250 mb of memory...I remember when we got a second hard drive a few years later I was so stocked that we had HALF A GIGABYTE of space lol
my parents would always get me those 301 games on one cd deals where they were a bunch of shareware games...I remember games like commander keen, hocus pocus, megarace, battle chess, hugo's house of horrors, one must fall, and about a million other games!

My grandma was a librarian at the local high school and she was also in charge of technology for the school too, which meant they gave her an apple IIe to learn so she could teach the kids...I remember Oregon trail, number munchers, quarter mile, dr j vs. Larry bird, and a few others...I remember she had some kind of programming software with the 10, 20, 30 commands...I still don't remember what it was called, but I remember making a program that want something like
10 home
20 print 'enter your name'
30 input x
40 print x 'is stupid'
50 goto 40


I remember being 7 and thinking that was really funny
 
#48
My first computer experiences were in the early eighties. At school we had Trash80's. Shortly after they upgraded to Commodore PET 4032. Used to play a game on those called Dragon's Eye. ASCII graphics, ftw!

Dad bought us an Atari 800 maybe '81 or '82. I went through the cassette to diskette progression. Best thing about the 800 was it's ability to use cartridges for most of the games that were actually in Coin Arcades at the time. I'm pretty sure my Defender high score is well over 3,000,000.
 
#49
superbassman2000 said:
The first family computer we got was an old packard bell 486/66 processor. 250 mb of memory...I remember when we got a second hard drive a few years later I was so stocked that we had HALF A GIGABYTE of space lol
my parents would always get me those 301 games on one cd deals where they were a bunch of shareware games...I remember games like commander keen, hocus pocus, megarace, battle chess, hugo's house of horrors, one must fall, and about a million other games!

My grandma was a librarian at the local high school and she was also in charge of technology for the school too, which meant they gave her an apple IIe to learn so she could teach the kids...I remember Oregon trail, number munchers, quarter mile, dr j vs. Larry bird, and a few others...I remember she had some kind of programming software with the 10, 20, 30 commands...I still don't remember what it was called, but I remember making a program that want something like
10 home
20 print 'enter your name'
30 input x
40 print x 'is stupid'
50 goto 40


I remember being 7 and thinking that was really funny
Click to expand...

I remember some of those games!

Sounds like Comal?
 
#52
hdracer said:
I still have and use my old IBM laptop. 486, 16 mb of ram & a whopping 8 gig hard drive Windows 3.1

Hottest thing on the market at the time.
$1600.00 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have a couple of programs on it that I still use but it would cost to much to update them.
Click to expand...

Should be enough to run mechwarrior 2. So you're still all set to play the greatest game ever made.

I also have a 486 for that purpose. But it's one of those fancy dx2 models.
 
#56
I have no idea what my first computer was. It was previously owned by someone and they passed it on to my family. We had no idea about computers at that point, but from that point on in... I became interested in the technology. I remember having to run DOS to bring up the games that were on it.

After that I think we got an HP... I was able to fix computers to a small degree... However, I was able to break them to a higher degree....

Eventually went to college after a few more years of computer fun, got a crappy E Machines from Walmart for my dorm room. Had to reinstall windows a couple of times through out the 5 years.

I now have a 1.5 tera byte, a previously owned laptop, and I could not be happier!
 
#57
I wish I could a read a thread like this from 50 years in the future!

"So, Jim, what did your grandparents do for computing back in their youth?"

"Why, they had a state-of-the-art 'desktop' with a 150 GB hard drive and 2 Gigabit of memory, running something they called 'Windows XP', whatever the hell that was!"

"What else can you tell me?"

"Well, they used a thing called a 'keyboard' for typing in text, and a thing they called a 'mouse' for navigating on a monitor screen."

"God, how primitive! No speech recognition, no implanted interfaces. How did they ever manage?"

;)
 

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