The Good Old Days (not the TV show!)

[ajbritton]

I'm feeling just a little bit wikiti wikiti wikiti oooold schoool and I was wondering what the oldest computer any of you guys have owned or used. I'll get the board rolling;

 

First PC I had contact with was a Comodore PET (built in tape drive and silly square keyboard) which my school bought.

 

Then my next door neighbour had an Apple ][ (mmmmmm nice), which I got to play with when he went away on holiday.

 

The first computer I actually owned was an Ohio Superboard II (6502 @ 1MHz, 4KB RAM). When I bought it, it was wrapped in silver foil (to prevent static damage I guess). I brought it home and set it up in front of the family TV. Rather than stand it on the carpet, I thought I would leave it on the foil.....DOH! Fortunately just blew the fuse in the PSU! I did loads of hardware mods on this and learned the basics of BASIC. Also dabbled in machine code to speed up graphics. 'Had to write yer own games in them days ;-)' so I did!

 

Moved on to a BBC Model B (mmm Elite, Defender) then Atari 1040ST (good for Steinberg PRO24 and freebie games on magazine disks).

 

Then used a succession of boring PCs courtesy of my employer until building my own budget rig a year ago (P4 2.8 etc.)

 

So come on you lot, spill the beans....

[Geoff]

Started out on a ZX81 (with the 16k memory pack that fell out the back all the time and crashed the machine). I still have it, in its box, with its manuals etc. Its worth a lot of money now in that state as a collectors item.

 

Moved onto a BBC Micro B+ (a B with 128k of ram like a BBC Master). I bought dual 800k(!) disk drives for it. I then got a dual set of joysticks too. Finally I went totally overboard with it and bought the IBM PC Expansion kit for it. Which gave it 1mb of ram, a 30mb hard drive and a 4Mhz 8086 Co-Processor allowing it to run Dos 3.3 and/or CP/M and associated applications. That was one bad ass BBC Micro!

 

Then moved on to a IBM Compatible XT with Hercules graphics (with its lovely monochrome amber display), a 30mb hard drive and 640kb of ram. I downgraded it from Dos 4 to 3.3 (Dos 4 sucked!).

 

After that, its been PC's all the way.

[E1uSiV3]

Well im only 22 so my comp experience is quite limited in comparison, but i have had a ZX Spectrum, and an Amstrad CPC6128 which me and my dad built a voice synthesizer for (was sooo cool lol), then it was onto a SX/33, DX2/66 then the rest is history lol

[ken_kaniff]

Amiga Forever!

[MkII]

My school had a BBC and the college I attended used a mainframe with tikka tape typewriters in the basement where we wrote our programs. The colleges pride and joy was the rendition of God save the Queen in beeps and a life size print out of Bridget Bardot in 0s and xs. Put me off the subject for 10 years, when I met my wife who had a C64. Got a snapshot cartridge, 2 floppy drives and a damn slow modem for it.

 

We were handed down an amstrad 086 at work, then had a new 286...

[webman]

My first was an Amiga 500, although they were themselves quite old at the time (1996 or something I think).

[steve]

Acorn Electrons at school.

 

I've had an Atari 800XL and 520STFM. Managed to borrow a PC from school for a summer while I was in the sixth form and never looked back.

 

I was sorting through some old manuals the other day and was shocked at the price I'd paid for some computer bits. £250 for a HP 560 Inkjet from Escom in 1995. Ten years later an inkjet for less than £50.

[ajbritton]

I was sorting through some old manuals the other day and was shocked at the price I'd paid for some computer bits. £250 for a HP 560 Inkjet from Escom in 1995. Ten years later an inkjet for less than £50.

 

Hmm... Ibought a 2nd hand teletype (it weighed half a ton!) and managed to get it working on the Superboard. When it finally gave up the ghost I took it bits, which took weeks. I've still got bits of it knocking about in the garage. Ahhh memories.... Emulators are OK, but it's not the same.

[john]

Started with a Comodore C64, then went to an Amiga A500+, then to a 166P1, then a 400MHz P2, then an 866P3, then my current 2.2P4 nortwood, and my 2.6 P4 laptop. I still have all of them appart from my C64, my mum sold it ;( and when we moved, she managed to thrown away my brand new (£60!!) Quickshot joystick for my Amiga! Still looking for one for it, I think it was a python??? but cannot remember, as the box went with the joystick.

[DMcCoy]

Commodore 64 here as well, including the usual joysticks, tape drive, 5 1/2 floppy, printer and a mouse! Also had a freeze machine to copy the games from tape to floppy disk (15 second load ).

 

How does it go? Load "*",8,1

Run

 

Think its still around somewhere.

[john]

Yeah, i had a tape drive, rodent, stick and printer for my C64.

[Jake]

My first was a Commodore Vic20, with a massive 3.5k of memory !!!!

 

From there , I went Speccy mad, through ZX81, to rubber keyboard 48k, onto 128k. I still maintain that speccy games in general had masses of playability , much more so than many of the flashier looking games today.

 

After that, I went to Atari ST, for the utterly brilliant Dungeon Master. Then onto Amiga, and from there to PCs, and been with those ever since. Tried my hand at playstation and xboxs, but the games just never feel as deep as PC ones to me.