What was your first PC?

[Cas77]

Ok let's all indirectly reveal our ages here. Did your OS load off a disk because a 20MB hard drive was too expensive ($600 from what I remember)? lol Did you have a math co-processor?

This is my first PC, with a whole MB of RAM.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Atari_PC1_System_s1.jpg

Any Commodore 64 guys in here? Amiga? or some Radio Shack Coco 3? :D

Or do we have more 286/386/486 owners? Any Pentium kids in here?

Thread might be a major fail..but could be fun.

[habs77]

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was such a huge deal it was like buying a home for my sisters and me! We went with Radio Shack's Tandy 1000 SX. What a brute! Here she was in all her glory:

http://img546.imageshack.us/img546/2137/tandy1000sx.jpg

[willy]

Mine was an Apple ][ clone .... Later one, I added a CP/M card to it.

http://oldcomputers.net/pics/appleii-system.jpghttp://oldcomputers.net/pics/appleii-topless.jpg

[jimmy-j]

yeah i remember c64s. i used to go to the library to borrow books with hundreds of lines of code and enter it into my computer just to play nibbles. or you could insert a cartridge into the back of the keyboard to play california games. my my how times have changed.

[DavidY]

Micro Express 386SX-20 with 2 MB RAM and either a 40-60 MB HDD from the early 1990s.

Dave

[letoaster]

ive been playing with a 486 for a while and after that upgraded to an amd k6-2 400Hmz!

[benge42ca]

Depends what you mean by "first"...

First that was de-facto mine? My parent's CoCo 2. Very fond memories of that time where computers had personality and people would defend their whole architecture (and not just OS) against some other people's... and there was no clear winner 'til way later when the IBM PC architecture became dominant. Got a CoCo 3 later.

But man, the hardware was such crap. Expansion bus? Pshaw, let's just extend the CPU data and address lines. Oh, you just pulled the expansion pack without turning off the power? Too bad, you fried your CPU. Keyboard buffer? No such thing, sorry. Disk running? Pulls the CPU halt line, you just lost all your keystrokes, sorry. And don't get me started on those "flippy" floppies :)

First one paid with my own money? Pentium 90 with a crappy, crappy Cirrus Logic video card, a 14 inch monitor (that thing was as expensive as the whole computer!), and a whole 1 GIGABYTE OF DISK SPACE! Man, I was so happy about that!

And I'm not *that* old, just started early. :)

[Mark77]

http://be8bits.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/pc-xt.jpg

Hacked on one of those for a while, until I acquired a 2400 baud modem and started working mostly on Unix through the local university's machines which I, as a pre-teen, managed to beg for access to.

Intel 8088 processor, 20mb HDD, 360kb 5.25" floppy drive, green monitor, and somewhere between 384kb and 640kb of RAM (forget how much was in there!). Wordperfect 4.0 then 4.2. No graphics modes supported in the video at all.

edit: I was on a PC XT -- that might just be a plain-old PC above, I'm not even sure anymore... They looked the same.

[Cas77]

Hacked on one of those for a while, until I acquired a 2400 baud modem and started working mostly on Unix through the local university's machines which I, as a pre-teen, managed to beg for access to.

Intel 8088 processor, 20mb HDD, 360kb 5.25" floppy drive, green monitor, and somewhere between 384kb and 640kb of RAM (forget how much was in there!). Wordperfect 4.0 then 4.2. No graphics modes supported in the video at all.

edit: I was on a PC XT -- that might just be a plain-old PC above, I'm not even sure anymore... They looked the same.

My best friend's dad worked for IBM in the 80's and he had picked up that exact same beast. I remember being amazed by the 2min boot up time. lol

[askimo]

My first exposure to computers came with the the Zinclar ZX81 (3.5hz!!! LOL)

The introduction to the X86 world with the intel i386 (12Mhz)

And I'm not that old either, just started really early

[gnuman]

I had a commodore Vic 20 (I still have it) and hooked it up to the TV. It came with a book where you can program it to play like a piano and some other games. Then got a 8086 with headstart explorer as its GUI on top of Dos 3.1.

[DiceMan]

Commodore Vic 20 with tape drive >> Apple //e clone >> Commodore Amiga 500 >> 386, etc...

Well, sounds like most of us are at least over 30. No one has yet to say that their first computer was an iPhone or something like that!

[sleepyguy]

I used and IBM XT 2mb ram for the longest time in grade 4-6... but the first PC i bought and build for myself.

celeron 300a + BH6 system... paid so much for it but used it for over 3 yrs I think. Those times I loved tinkering with hardware and could to it for hrs on end... nowadays... gimme a laptop and i'm done, lol.

[Mars2012]

Mine was an IBM bought in 1989. We still have it in a box in the attic. I looked up images on the internet and it looks exactly like the IBM PS/2 55SX. If I recall correctly, it was almost $3500 in price (bundled with a dot matrix printer), and it was really a glorified word processor. I still remember all the "syntax error" messages.

[ToniCipriani]

First one I used was an IBM clone with an Intel 386DX overclocked to 40MHz, 4MB RAM and a Conner Peripherals 40MB hard drive. Thing booted into Windows 3.1 like it flies.

But oldest I used was an original IBM PC XT with 512KB RAM

[mysticalinfluence]

Commodore Vic 20 with tape drive.

[Cas77]

Dang alot of geriatrics in here. Soon we'll see hot deal posts for nursing homes. :razz:

[crowTrobot]

New Canadian immigrant in 1996, family couldn't afford a computer until then. It was a Pentium 120 MHz with an S3 64 video card and 1.3GB HDD. I can't remember how much memory it had anymore but it came with a 14" CRT, 33.6K modem, Windows 95, Canon Bubble Jet printer, Compton Interactive Encyclopedia and MS Works for $1999.

[mysticalinfluence]

Dang alot of geriatrics in here. Soon we'll see hot deal posts for nursing homes. :razz:

We might be gericatrics but we can kick your young butt at computer literacy any day of the week. That and we know life before the internet. :razz:

[sandikosh]

We might be gericatrics but we can kick your young butt at computer literacy any day of the week. That and we know life before the internet. :razz:

There was life before the internet? What did you people do waiting for the next day to read the news that just happened?

[Mark77]

There was life before the internet? What did you people do waiting for the next day to read the news that just happened?

The Internet was just fine until around 1995-1996 when all the losers started showing up.

[Cas77]

We might be gericatrics but we can kick your young butt at computer literacy any day of the week. That and we know life before the internet. :razz:

young butt? I'm one of the geriatrics trust me. :cry:

I'll use a command line before a gui any day...that's how old i am.

[xalex0]

What did you people do waiting for the next day to read the news that just happened?Not bothering about unimportant stuff.

[Cas77]

The Internet was just fine until around 1995-1996 when all the losers started showing up.

Ironically:
1995: Jeff Bezos launches Amazon.com and the first commercial-free 24 hour, internet-only radio stations, Radio HK and NetRadio start broadcasting. Dell and Cisco begin to aggressively use Internet for commercial transactions. eBay is founded by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb.

[DougO]

My bud used to make clone Apple IIs back in the day. Never played much with them. Friends had C64s and Cocos (Tandy Colour Computer). I won an Atari 500ST back in 1987. Still have it here in it's box not 10 feet from where I am typing this. Found a local user group and made a lot of friend's, some of whom are still good friend's 25 years later...

Before the net we had Usenet and BBSes. Television and radio still gave instantaneous news, so I don't get the comment about waiting for news. We've had radio for 100 years now...where have you been? :lol:

I do remember taking Fortran and Basic and (I think) Cobol in high school. Maybe that reveals my age a bit...

[MkmBandit]

All I remember about my first rig was that all I could do was play Gorillas in Dosshell.

[Mars2012]

I was earning my education degree back in '92 and one of my assignments was to log onto this thing called the "internet". I don't think it was called that at the time, but from my university library, I was able to access info from another university library clear across the country. Who knew it would have such an impact on our lives?

[JS2K6]

286 20 MHz with 1 MB RAM, 40 MB HD and 14" VGA monitor, in the summer of 1991...

[BooR4dL3y]

C=64 that I had to share with two brothers

[bvit6667]

LOL - any of you guys (or girls) remember the Timex Sinclair 1000 (aka Timex Sinclair ZX81) the one you hooked up to your tv. There was an available additional memory module that connected to the back and you could record your programs onto a standard audio cassette tape...yes I had one, and then a Commodore 64 and eventually a clone IBM XT....Hey...that makes me really old!!

I can remember saving up to get a floppy disk drive for the Commodore 64. I used to start to load a spreadsheet program from the floppy, go make a coffee, have a cigarette and then go back to the computer just about the time the program had loaded!!!

[ijustgotadeal]

Macintosh Performa. Parents also bought a ton of software and peripherals for it.

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg84/scaled.php?server=84&filename=632n.jpg&res=landing

[Anonymouse]

My Dad and I soldered together an Apple ][+ clone as my first computer. This was the first personal computer that resembles what you can buy today, which is part of the reason I run Apples today. Two floppy drives. Had a Z80 card for CP/M, which was promising to be the new new thing back then.

First peecee was a PC/AT clone with a 20 MB hard drive that was considered huge. The word processor was WordStar, which was never surpassed in my experience until I used (X)emacs. I had a daisy wheel printer and all my teachers could never figure out how my "typing" was so perfect.

[guessboi]

386 kid here!

[george__]

The first one I remember was a generic AMD computer built for me by Dad and it ran Windows 98.
First one I ever really played with was a Dell Workstation PC with Dual Pentium 3 CPus, 256MB of ECC memory + SCSI
<--- I'm not old :D

[Ottomaddox]

My first exposure to computers came with the the Zinclar ZX81 (3.5hz!!! LOL)


Several guys (and me) in my class had Timex Sinclair 1000s from Consumers Distributing, blown out at $20 or $30 on clearance.
I still have that computer. I eventually got a TS2068, and hacked it with a switch and an eprom copy from a Sinclair Spectrum.



LOL - any of you guys (or girls) remember the Timex Sinclair 1000 (aka Timex Sinclair ZX81) the one you hooked up to your tv. There was an available additional memory module that connected to the back and you could record your programs onto a standard audio cassette tape...

I had a 16k module, and a 64k module. The modules were so wiggly, I remember keeping a giant thick elastic band around the TS and the module to keep it from moving too much.


I used and IBM XT 2mb ram for the longest time in grade 4-6... but the first PC i bought and build for myself.

celeron 300a + BH6 system... paid so much for it but used it for over 3 yrs I think. .

Had one of these too. I still have the cpu, lol! I remember buying it used from some guy that didn't know about the overclocking awesomeness it had.

I had Atari 800/400/800xl systems for while there too.

My first IBM compatible for myself was part of swap with a pile of parts; this guy had an all-in-one motherboard with a 386sx25, but when he tried to show it to me working, it wouldn't boot. It _did_ boot when I got it home though! I used that for a couple of years, until I got a 486dx33..and yadda yadda yadda

I had a couple of XT laptops without HDs. I think I still have one here somewhere. I have a 286 luggable, with a 5" CRT and dual 5.25 floppies. My first decent laptop was a pentium 133. I had two hard drives for it, which I swapped out depending on what I was doing with it.

My inlaws dropped $2k on am XT w/o a HD. They couldn't believe that I couldn't use anything from that system for upgrading to a 386. We tossed the entire thing to the curb.

Good times, good times...

[george__]

Did you "people" who used the older Atari and 386 computers use ram disk a lot??

[world25]

My first computer cost approximately $2000. Just the hardware itself! It didn't come with Windows operating system. My cousin came over to my house to install Windows 3.1 (took him hours to install it: using A drive floppy disks). I think I had to type: win in the command prompt to log into Windows 3.1. I used free dial-up connection in the past: Tucows, Altavista, NetZero, and etc.

[Mark77]

First peecee was a PC/AT clone with a 20 MB hard drive that was considered huge. The word processor was WordStar, which was never surpassed in my experience until I used (X)emacs. I had a daisy wheel printer and all my teachers could never figure out how my "typing" was so perfect.

Insane...

[Mark77]

Did you "people" who used the older Atari and 386 computers use ram disk a lot??

ram disk? Never had the luxury of having so much RAM.

Even the admins on the Ultrix box (a VAX 3100-40 I think) that I spent most of my time telnet'ed into -- kept harping on me because I'd start way too many processes. 32mb of RAM didn't leave a lot of room when a hundred other people were pounding on the system as well. And we had a whole 56k line to the Internet.

Still remember when they finally broke down and bought a few RZ28 disks for that machine. 2gb's a piece. We all got a major quota upgrade out of that!

[Mark77]

Anyone remember "The Toronto Computer Paper"? These days, it seems to have been replaced with "papers" selling condos. Funny how that goes, eh?

[gnuman]

Anyone remember "The Toronto Computer Paper"? These days, it seems to have been replaced with "papers" selling condos. Funny how that goes, eh?

It was then The Computer Paper used to look all over for it. I think I might have one or two from the 90s. In Quebec we also had Quebec Micro! which sucked though. I'm not an old fogey I started PCs when I was young. My Vic 20 I had when I was about 7. I'm 31 so do the math...

[george__]

It was then The Computer Paper used to look all over for it. I think I might have one or two from the 90s. In Quebec we also had Quebec Micro! which sucked though. I'm not an old fogey I started PCs when I was young. My Vic 20 I had when I was about 7. I'm 31 so do the math...

You're so old :|

[plucky duck]

IBM PS/1 Tower
486 SX/33
4MB Ram?
160MB HD
Intel Graphics??
15" Monitor

Bought it at Futureshop for $4000 in ~1991. Then proceeded to spend another $550 on the multimedia kit, comes with CDROM, speeakers, Microsoft Encyclopedia and Myst game. lol

[jimsmith]

my first pc was a vic 20 with the tape drive I spent countless hours typing in lines of code only to get syntax error after syntax error.

[Piro21]

A 486 my dad bought for about $3,000

[Mark77]

Not to derail the thread...but how did most of you learn how to use these early computers?

DOS wasn't particularly hard to learn from the operating systems' documentation -- but Unix was a terrible struggle at first, because there weren't really many good reference books available, and the ones that were available were quite academic and oriented towards C programmers (which I, at 10-12 years old, obviously wasn't!).

Obviously there was no www to fall back upon, and Gopher wasn't terribly useful as there wasn't really a way of searching it.

I had a professor (now at UC Berkeley) who used to tell us stories about having to 'toggle in' bootup-sequences into the PDP-11. Anyone have to 'toggle in' code to boot up their early computer?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV-7J5y1TQc

[DougO]

I remember Clive Sinclair being knighted for the Sinclair computer. I had been reading about early computers in diverse mags like Radio Electronics for some time and had been interested enough to get the old SWTPC catalogs and ask some questions. My other interests stemmed from an article in Esquire magazine from October 1971 (which I still have around here). That and a really great electronics teacher in high school guaranteed that I would stay in this as both hobbiest and professional. Been a long haul...

Oh yeah, PDP-11. Didn't that use punch cards? We used them in computer science classes in Grade 10 as I recall. Might still have a few of those kicking around here as well. Ah, nostalgia!

The Vic (20)! Been trying to remember that name for some time! Thanks...

...and another weird name just popped into my head "Don Britton Enterprises". Remember them? And their weird plans? My Gawd...

[Cress]

Amstrad CPC 6128... with the original street fighter, International Karate+, Barbarian, renegade, target renegade ... man time does fly...http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQr0Of1qaR2VSBGdGwfmiGBLL5N9lp52 4-cvYRNG0zNvYSAroJq_A

[balance]

compaq 64MB ram, windows 95, 40GB, intergraded graphics, with pentium celeron III?

[Gee]

Damn, I think I am the oldest one here

My first computer was a Commodore Pet with a tape drive. We called it a FAT 40 because the screen had 40 characters.

I upgraded from that to an Apple ][ Plus with Super 5 Drives, CP/M Card, APL 300 Baud Modem and a Roland dot matrix printer

From there I went to an 4.77 GHz XT with a 10 Meg Seagate Hard Drive. It had 640k RAM. I remember paying $3000 for the computer and $800 for the Hard Drive. I was using IBM DOS 2.1

Then I upgraded to a 286 8 GHz with 1 Meg RAM. DOS could address the first 640k, 384k was Extended RAM and that was used as a RAM Drive, till we discovered how to remap the RAM. I also upgraded to a MiniScribe 3650 (40 Meg) but I used an RLL Controller to get 60 Megs out of it.

Then I got a Mac with an AppleWriter Laser and PageMaker

ECS 386
486
Pentium 90
Pentium 133
Pentium Pro 200 (1997)

I have upgraded to every x86 processor since.

I never owned a Commodore 64 or an Amiga.

[P_C]

Damn, I think I am the oldest one here

Nah, could be me. My first PC was a TRS-80 Color Computer that I bought in 1981.


http://i.imgur.com/UpKC9.jpg

And this, my first modem:

http://i.imgur.com/4xrPa.jpg

A real speed demon going at 110 and 300 bauds! At least it wasn't an acoustic coupler.

[Magoomba]

Oh this should be fun -- kinda like "Growing Up Geek" on Engadget.
I'm not old enough to have used punch cards, but I did use cassette tapes, 8" floppies, and cartridges.

First computer was an ATARI 800XL, green monitor and all.
To this day I still remember lining up in front of A&B Sound with my sister in the fricken snow on Boxing Day morning.
Circa 1985 at the Seymour St location in Vancouver. Imagine the sales guy getting harrassed by a snot-nosed 5th grader.
I think we paid almost a grand for that sucker with all the monitor, drive, and keyboard.

Then came countless other computers... too many to remember.
8088XT, 80286-AT, 80386-DX ($2500!), AMD-DX4, and on and on.
OMG, I think I had a Cyrix M1 aka 686 at one point (how embarrassing).

Computing in general, memorable highlights included running my own BBS in the early 90s.
I had 4 modem lines going at one point and my parents not understanding why I needed multiple phone lines or pay "couriers".
Writing my own RPG on BASIC. I think it had over 100,000 lines of code.
Discovering how to use the early internet on NeXT computers... Mosaic, Gopher.
Downloading my first MP3 in 1994 using USENET -- you use to have to decode all the messages and join them manually in UNIX!
Coding my own MP3 player (knock off of Winamp) in C for Windows.
Reading one of the earliest whitepapers on P2P and using Napster for the first time.

Even now as I get ready to upgrade my current desktop to an i7, I still feel like a kid in a candy store.
I love computers!

[Catherine111]

My first pc was Dell Dimension.

[Asad_A203]

Hmm, are we talking about the first PC we used or first PC we owned? The first PC I used was a Commodore something (I actually still have it, will find out model number later on). I didn't really know how to operate it, my brother just used to load games on it. The first PC I actually could operate myself was a 386. The first PC I owned was a Pentium 166 (I primarily used this to just play DOS games even though it ran Windows 95/98, lol). The first PC I bought with my own money was an Athlon XP 2000+ on a terrible ECS mobo and a SIS graphics card (yes, SIS...).

[ed116]

Pentium 2 in like 1996-1998 (i dont remember exactly) but this was back in the motherland
Pentium 3 with Speakers 15" CRT monitor, Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, Windows 98 (866MHz) (128MB RAM) (30GB HDD) Integrated Graphcis that beast could handle gta vice city with sooo much lagg :p

[jimmy-j]

The Internet was just fine until around 1995-1996 when all the losers started showing up.


no, not really. i think ever since the beginning of the internet public access, IRC channels have been filled with pervs. i remember logging on to IRC back in early-mid 90's and seeing tons of crazy channel names relating to child secks and beastiality and all that. every channel u go into it was always a/s/l.

[jimmy-j]

All I remember about my first rig was that all I could do was play Gorillas in Dosshell.

yes haha. dos came with nibbles and gorilla.


Anyone remember "The Toronto Computer Paper"? These days, it seems to have been replaced with "papers" selling condos. Funny how that goes, eh?

i used to scour these papers for bbs numbers lol.

[zijin_cheng]

Yoo so many of you are so old... no offense.

My first was AMD Sempron with a Geforce 4 MX. I remember the days of 3D-Analyze, and that's about as far back as it goes

[dealmooch]

I started with an Amiga 2000 with 9MB of RAM in 1988. Took a month to render a 10 second animation in Sculpt 4D. Cost $4500. Long live the Amiga!

[Gee]

Nah, could be me. My first PC was a TRS-80 Color Computer that I bought in 1981.


http://i.imgur.com/UpKC9.jpg

And this, my first modem:

http://i.imgur.com/4xrPa.jpg

A real speed demon going at 110 and 300 bauds! At least it wasn't an acoustic coupler.

The Commodore PET I had was circa 1977 :(

I remember the Radio Shack TRS-80.
Colour was a luxury.

I didn't own a colour monitor till EGA was available.
I remeber the first ATI colour video card. It was a CGA card that costed $200.
Their first EGA card cost $500

[stillmatic11]

Intel 486, 66 mhz, 14.4k modem and was using MS-DOS. Played games like DOOM, Wolfenstein, Sango Fighter, Mortal Kombat 2 and Lotus.

[infamouskid]

mine was a 486 dx/2 66.
it played leisure suit larry and duke nukem, willy beamish, sango fighter and one must fall.
and i was a DOS Shell user who skipped windows 3.1 and went right into win95.

[recordman]

c=64 w/ 1541 (170k) floppy. Good times.

[Keas]

in January of 96 after returning a couple i settled on an Acer Aspire that had a really cool designed front cover (forget model number) with a p100 and 1mb of video card memory. i had to exchange it 3 times because the hard drive at home made alot of noise when active but not in store and finally found out that the model was using both Maxtors (the noisy one) and fujitsu's , staples where i purchased it was so nice they opened 4 boxes and comps to find a machine that had a Fujitsu in it.

Got the build your own bug when i found out i couldn't upgrade the video card except for upping the memory to 2 megs so bought a new case and a Matrox Mystique 4meg (WOOT!!) and moved everything to it so i could play Diablo the way it should be.

I still wish Matrox was a legit player in the gaming market :(

[ssbtech]

Mine was a Compaq Presario CDS944. 486DX4-90, 8MB RAM. 540MB HDD.

I still remember the serial number from calling tech support so many times.

[malbadon]

....From there I went to an 4.77 GHz XT with a 10 Meg Seagate Hard Drive.
.....Then I upgraded to a 286 8 GHz with 1 Meg RAM.

I like how no one caught that Gee had GHz computers back in the 80's :) It's like we've become conditioned to disbelieve how slow our old computers were :)

I'll join the list of people who started on the Vic 20 with a tape drive, then moved to a 286/12 for ages, then finally my first 486, a DX4-100 (on which I paid $220 for an extra 8mb of ram to play Wing Commander 2 if I recall)

[viss]

First PC was some custom build..can't remember what it was. I remember it was constantly infected with some virus. I hadn't started using the internet yet so how I got it was beyond me. It ran Windows 98 and I played SkiFree and Sim Town on it endlessly. But it was discovering Napster that changed my life! I had 25MB left on the computer and had to choose and delete songs because I didn't have enough space. And waited 20 minutes for a 3MB song to download..those were the days!

[deltone]

Colecovision Adam. I didn't really use it as I had no interest but my husband hacked around on it.

[bembol]

Our parent ls bought us this Generic PC's, I can't remember but it's similar to like MDG. I'm not even going to try time remember the specs. LOL

As for myself, I remember my boy and I at work saw this Dell ad at the back of Toronto Sun. A few days later I have the 17" Dell 8100 Desktop. He ordered a 19" and a bit better specs. I think it cost me $2,100 and his was $2,300.

All I remember is the quality wasn't we expected. After a few months Dell had to replace the Motherboard.

[kaws]

486DX33 then upgraded it to a 486DX266 with 8MB ram, sound card and 2x CDROM! So awesome.. I really liked the MS Encarta that came with the CDROM and Sound card bundle.

After that, it was a Pentium MMX 166.

[Techgeek32]

Few things that I remember of the first PC my parent bought to me is that it was pentium and had a very small HD. The OS was windows 95. I remember I wanted to install Nero one-two years after I got it and I couldn't because Nero was too big for my HD!

[Magoomba]

My worst purchase wasn't a $600 10MB hard drive, but rather one of the very first CD burners.
A Sony 2X CD-R for $900. Every other blank CD was a coaster. And that was when blank CDs were $20 each!
That's what I call Epic Fail.

[Mark77]

My worst purchase wasn't a $600 10MB hard drive, but rather one of the very first CD burners.
A Sony 2X CD-R for $900. Every other blank CD was a coaster. And that was when blank CDs were $20 each!
That's what I call Epic Fail.

Yeah I borrowed a CD burner that basically was one of the first Philips units from a friend (he got it at an Air Force auction for about $100 -- the thing originally cost the AF $16k apparently). The thing had a SCSI interface, was the size of basically a full-sized AT desktop computer, and basically if the screensaver wasn't disabled, or if practically anything happened on the host, would produce a coaster.

There's some stuff I miss about the "old days", but certainly not CD burners.

[time space]

Anyone remember "The Toronto Computer Paper"? These days, it seems to have been replaced with "papers" selling condos.

I think it would be more accurate to say it was replaced by the internet.

[Jimbobs]

Nah, could be me. My first PC was a TRS-80 Color Computer that I bought in 1981.

I may have you by a few years. The first personal computer I ever worked on was a HP 9100A in the mid-1970's which looked like a huge cash register: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HP0100A_1.jpg By 1981, I was working with the Motorola 6800 Microprocessor Development Kit (MEK6800D2) writing assemby code for real time systems, burning EPROM's etc. The next pc I had was an Apple IIe bought in 1983 complete with dual floppy drives and later a Z80 card so that it would run CP/M. Then on to the whole IBM PC family, including DEC's, Compaqs, Toshiba's, as well as various Apples .....

The thing is I never actually "owned" any of these because I could play with them all day at work. The first home computer I bought for my kids in the early '90's was a PC clone with 486DX33 processor. I think the chassis of that unit is still in the basement.

As for the Internet, I worked on that project when it was limited to academic research and military use only and later was involved in the first commercial roll out in Canada in 1993. I used to dial in to a number in Buffalo to show my kids how to connect to universities around the world - text only, of course!

[Mark77]

As for the Internet, I worked on that project when it was limited to academic research and military use only and later was involved in the first commercial roll out in Canada in 1993. I used to dial in to a number in Buffalo to show my kids how to connect to universities around the world - text only, of course!

Yeah we had CA*Net connectivity in 1988-1989 or so. It was pretty neat. Almost a whole Usenet feed could easily come down the 56k line back then (before the sh*t-head spammers started with their alt.binaries cr*p), and the penalties for innappropriate use were severe.

[zod]

My first computer looked like this one:

http://www.maniacworld.com/game_console_history/Compaq_Portable_PC.jpg

My mom had gotten this from work to do some extra accounting work on. Eventually it became mine. Old XT computer. The only diff was that instead of a 2nd 5 1/4 floppy drive mine had a 20mb hard drive. I also ripped it apart once and installed a 14.4 modem into it. We were kind of poor so I used it for a long time. My mom had replace it with a 386, I think I replaced it with my own 486 sx33.

[WattDeal]

I gave my first PC to my sister

[komodor]

First computer I owned was a PC clone AT 286 with 640kB of RAM and running DOS (cost me most than 1k$). I remember buying a high resolution graphics card for the time: the Hercules graphics card (80×25 text and 720×348 graphics and it was only black and white!

[M1K3Z0R]

Mine was a Cemtech 386DX, 8MB RAM, 50MB HDD, 25MHz and 33MHz if you pressed the Turbo button. It actually became noticeably louder on turbo!
It had a massive red power switch on the side, and when I opened it up I found that the cpu didn't have a heatsink, and there is a second cpu slot that remains empty (dual proc capable? never figured that out). Still have it in the basement, and it still works!

After that I spent a disproportionate amount of time on a Pentium 1 233MHz machine, it survived two PSU blowouts (literally, smoke sparks and all) but I learned alot from upgrading it and taking it apart. The best part about it is that it had 4 EDORAM slots and 2 SDRAM slots, both of which could be used together so I could have a whopping 128MB of RAM. 3GB HDD was spacious and the case had tons of space for upgrades, and it still lived on with windows 2000 installed :D

[Calmuser]

had a few radio shack tandys.

then atari st 520 which which got upgraded to a 1020st (wish I kept it!)

then an 486 IBM ps/2 and onto a Pentium IBM Aptiva!

[xalex0]

here is a second cpu slot that remains empty (dual proc capable? never figured that out).FP coprocessor?

[gnuman]

Mine was a Cemtech 386DX, 8MB RAM, 50MB HDD, 25MHz and 33MHz if you pressed the Turbo button. It actually became noticeably louder on turbo!
It had a massive red power switch on the side, and when I opened it up I found that the cpu didn't have a heatsink, and there is a second cpu slot that remains empty (dual proc capable? never figured that out). Still have it in the basement, and it still works!


The extra slot was used for a math co-processor for better FPU execution. Some people would refer to it as a i387. Intel decided to ship it separately from the processor at the time as it wasn't ready.

Funny how Intel sort of re-introduced Turbo modes with the i version of processors which is triggered via software loads and not a physical button like the old days but it did really work the turbo

[Mark77]

Mine was a Cemtech 386DX, 8MB RAM, 50MB HDD, 25MHz and 33MHz if you pressed the Turbo button. It actually became noticeably louder on turbo!
It had a massive red power switch on the side, and when I opened it up I found that the cpu didn't have a heatsink, and there is a second cpu slot that remains empty (dual proc capable? never figured that out). Still have it in the basement, and it still works!


Power dissipations were actually relatively low until the AXP CPU's came along (~1992). (AXP = Digital Alpha 21064 series). At the time, the heatsinks that were being applied to the AXP's were quite enormous (although quite miniscule by today's standards) with dissipation around 30W (no power saving modes back then!). From thereon, increasingly large heatsinks and higher power dissipations became commonplace, with only a very recent emphasis on getting power consumption under control.

[Cachodeal]

it was a tower AT Intel 286 @ blistering 12 Mhz, 640 KB of RAM, a huge a 10MB HD, a 5 1/4 noisy Floppy Drive and Amber Monitor (can't remember the brand but it wasn't Samsung...) that same tower was later upgradede to a 386CX (from Citrix) 1Mb of RAM, a 40 MB HD, a 3 1/2 floppy drive and a 16-bits creative sound blaster... That last system system would also see a NE2000 compatible NIC using coaxial, experimenting with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Microsoft's NetBEUI... :)

[Mark77]

The extra slot was used for a math co-processor for better FPU execution. Some people would refer to it as a i387. Intel decided to ship it separately from the processor at the time as it wasn't ready.


Umm, no, they physically couldn't put both the FPU and the CPU on the same chip, with the yields and densities available on the processes at the time. And to some extent, it was about earning extra revenue as well. Computer companies actually made big $$$ back then and paid good salaries. Quite unlike today.

[Hugh]

Not to derail the thread...but how did most of you learn how to use these early computers?

The second computer I deeply understood was a PDP-8. DEC produced cute little handbooks that explained everything there was to know about the machine (http://apple1computer.blogspot.ca/2010/03/alleged-woz-bible-small-computer.html). Which wasn't that much: typically a PDP-8 had 4K of memory (12-bit words) and a teletype, with no other IO. The instruction set was very small (each instruction fit in 12 bits). I still know some of the machine language and most of the assembly language more than 40 years later.

Kids have a lot of time and energy to put into mastery of possibly pointless skills. Lots have had the same experience with Pets, Apples, Sinclairs, etc. They often fell in love with the first system they grokked.

Now consumer computers are too complicated to learn everything about. This is a sad loss that the Raspberry Pi is trying to rectify (I think that they won't succeed at their original goal, but the project is neat anyway). Arduinos that "makers" are embracing might succeed at this for a few but I don't think that that is their goal.


DOS wasn't particularly hard to learn from the operating systems' documentation -- but Unix was a terrible struggle at first, because there weren't really many good reference books available, and the ones that were available were quite academic and oriented towards C programmers (which I, at 10-12 years old, obviously wasn't!).

Obviously there was no www to fall back upon, and Gopher wasn't terribly useful as there wasn't really a way of searching it.

Unix, when I started seriously using it (1975), had wonderful manuals. Online. A big step above systems I had previously used. They were concise and simple, reflecting the modularity of the system. By now, this has deteriorated: bloat (the systems are massively more complex: more components, bigger components, less elegance) and bitrot (subsequent contributions were not systematically documented in the Unix style).

I actually think that if one wanted to learn Unix (including Linux), one would be best to start understanding by learning 7th edition (circa 1978), the skeleton upon which everything was built. My complete 7th edition manual set (not books) is 3 or 4 inches thick.

It depends what you want to learn about Unix. MacOS is Unix, so there are plenty of manuals for folks who don't want to deeply understand it. Lots of Linux manuals exist, some surely good. All such manuals were written long after I learned Unix so I have no experience with them.



I had a professor (now at UC Berkeley) who used to tell us stories about having to 'toggle in' bootup-sequences into the PDP-11. Anyone have to 'toggle in' code to boot up their early computer?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV-7J5y1TQc
I've toggled in boot sequences. For example, on the PDP-8s and PDP-11s. Unless your program did something screwy, the boot loader would stay there, even when you turn the machine off: they used core memory (magnetized donuts). The PDP-8 RIM loader is only about 18 instructions (section 3 of http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/pdp8e/quickstart.html lists the RIM loader (the program that loads the BIN loader)).

More irritating is my Altair 8800: it uses RAM chips that lose their contents when powered off. But I bought an EPROM card so that I now only have to use the front panel to start the processor at the OS in the EPROM.

[Hugh]

My other interests stemmed from an article in Esquire magazine from October 1971 (which I still have around here).

About phone phreaking? http://www.historyofphonephreaking.org/docs/rosenbaum1971.pdf



Oh yeah, PDP-11. Didn't that use punch cards? We used them in computer science classes in Grade 10 as I recall. Might still have a few of those kicking around here as well. Ah, nostalgia!

The PDP-11 didn't normally use punch cards. Normally paper tape was used for the kinds of things IBM machines used punch cards for. Or typewriter-like terminals (ASR-33, DecWriter, ...).

For school use, some systems used punch cards. For example, Ric Holt's group at University of Toronto configured "PDP-11 on a cart" systems for high schools and they had card readers, I think that the reason was that schools already had keypunch machines (machines for typing onto punch cards), or that mark sense technology allowed card creation "by hand' (i.e. with pencil directly on the card) (I remember an elegant SP/k mark-sense card design they did).

[Matrixvibe]

Pentium 2 200mhz -> OC'ed it to 233mhz on stock cooler LOL
128mb pc133 ram
Ati rage 128 burnt out -> Nvidia TNT2
CD Drive and CD Burner ->later upped to a DVD reader/CD burner combo drive
Generic China case from Canada Computers

Played CS 1.5/1.6 on lowest settings :razz:

[Hugh]

I may have you by a few years. The first personal computer I ever worked on was a HP 9100A in the mid-1970's
1967 for me. The machines I used were not called "personal computers" but the small ones could only be used by one person at a time, and one got physical access to the machine, so I'd say that they were personal.



The thing is I never actually "owned" any of these because I could play with them all day at work
It was hard to see the point of owning a micro when one had free access to a Unix box.


As for the Internet, I worked on that project when it was limited to academic research and military use only and later was involved in the first commercial roll out in Canada in 1993. I used to dial in to a number in Buffalo to show my kids how to connect to universities around the world - text only, of course!
Canadian Government policy was to avoid ARPANET connections because they wanted Canadian networks to go east-west, not be spokes of the US networks.

In my world, Usenet (uucp for email and file transfer, not just news) started up in Canada about 1979 or 1980. I had a uucp-connected Unix box at home from 1983.

[Mark77]

Canadian Government policy was to avoid ARPANET connections because they wanted Canadian networks to go east-west, not be spokes of the US networks.

How much was the 'government' really involved? IIRC, pre-CAnet, basically the "Internet" in Canada was systems hobbled together out of CS and engineering department budgets, for leased lines and such, often at sub-56k speeds. No big government support (unlike the USA) at all. Connectivity to the USA wasn't very easy because Canadian telecoms weren't really set up for it (we still don't have great optical connectivity to the USA).

Most of the fibre we have in Canada today sits alongside the railways, with the regional stuff provided by the electric utilities.

[Hugh]

How much was the 'government' really involved? IIRC, pre-CAnet, basically the "Internet" in Canada was systems hobbled together out of CS and engineering department budgets, for leased lines and such, often at sub-56k speeds. No big government support (unlike the USA) at all. Connectivity to the USA wasn't very easy because Canadian telecoms weren't really set up for it (we still don't have great optical connectivity to the USA).

Most of the fibre we have in Canada today sits alongside the railways, with the regional stuff provided by the electric utilities.
ARPANET was non-commercial: it was for ARPA contractors (University researchers and institutions in the US often had ARPA grants; so did places like BBN, RAND, etc.). ARPA actually funded some projects in Canada and sometimes access came through that. Canadian Military research installations (eg. DCIEM) may have had ARPA connections.

The politics got confusing once ARPANET got attractive to non-contractors. Eventually, what we call the internet was born out of the interconnection of networks, all using or at least converting to TCP/IP. Because they combined almost seamlessly, we eventually thought of them as one thing, not many. But there were lots of hickups (eg. ARPANET not wanting to transit commercial traffic).

Remember other things? Like Usenet (uucp), DATAPAC (x.25), CAnet (? perhaps ISO OSI X.25; ATM in 1996!), Bitnet (IBM protocols) JANET (more than one thing with that name, but the UK one is what I'm thinking of). The internet borged them all.

Specifically trying to answer your question: I don't have inside knowledge. Funding (not my area) was key. All appropriate funding came from the government (mostly NSERC), so it could call the tunes (fast lines were expensive). To me, the mundane traffic of the UUCP network is what made internetworking become interesting: email with people across the world (but not that many people were connected) and net news.

[DougO]

I remember the early days of anime fandom (well within 7 - 10 years of the founding of the C/FO) and their Usenet newsgroup. I still have the Venice Archive disc here somewhere. Without Usenet it would have made things even more difficult to deal with as you had to use snail mail or horrendously expensive long distance phone calling. Kids these days don't realize how lucky they are. Friends at the local university did maintenance on the mainframe, so I had superuser status and could access whatever I wanted, but it was newsgroups and email that interested me the most. Very useful...

Paper tape we used at college back in the 1980s because all the heavy industries used such equipment.

Yeah, the Phreaks article. Inspired people like Steve Jobs as well.

Fun, no? :)

[JS2K6]

It was then The Computer Paper used to look all over for it. I think I might have one or two from the 90s. In Quebec we also had Quebec Micro! which sucked though. I'm not an old fogey I started PCs when I was young. My Vic 20 I had when I was about 7. I'm 31 so do the math...

I used to pick up Toronto Computes and The Computer Paper every month back in the 90's, lol... basically the same age as you. The ads were generally more interesting than the articles but it was the best way to scour for computer deals before all the stores developed an internet presence.

[bmedicky]

First computer here was a Commodore VIC-20 with cassette drive. Next was a Commodore 64. Then a 20 MHz PC clone (386). At school, the first machine I really learned to program was a TRS-80 Model III. Now that really takes me back. I well remember the awe with which my buddies and I gazed at the one machine that had 32K of RAM (all the rest were only 16). Memories ...