webman Posted March 27, 2008 Posted March 27, 2008 Walked into the office this morning to find our junior technician working away on a museum piece of hardware! http://www.craigrodway.f2s.com/photos/Ancient-relic.jpg At just over 2 inches thick and running the latest version of Windows 95, this Olivetti machine sports a single PCMCIA port, parallel/serial ports, a floppy drive and even a CD-ROM drive. The spacious 1GB harddrive had only been filled with 554MB of data. But it's damn quick!
webman Posted March 27, 2008 Author Posted March 27, 2008 Just 32MB of RAM and the total number of USB ports is a whopping zero
tallan Posted March 27, 2008 Posted March 27, 2008 and of course dont forget the x8 speed cd rom very modern -insert hint of sarcasm-
joe90bass Posted March 27, 2008 Posted March 27, 2008 and of course dont forget the x8 speed cd rom very modern -insert hint of sarcasm- Ha ha! Some of us oldies will remember running a 4x CD Rom (or slower!) and wishing for an 8X one
Geoff Posted March 27, 2008 Posted March 27, 2008 My first CD drive was a Panasonic jobbie. It hooked up to the machine via an interface bus on the sound card. At the time, there was quite a market in selling 'multimedia upgrades' which consisted of a ISA sound card and a CD drive that connected to it.
elsiegee40 Posted March 27, 2008 Posted March 27, 2008 Ha ha! Some of us oldies will remember running a 4x CD Rom (or slower!) and wishing for an 8X one * Groans * I can remember my Dad lugging a Commodore PET home from work on a regular basis with 16K (not Meg) of memory and a tape drive (That's C30 cassettes folks!)... that'd be about 1980, I think!
FN-GM Posted March 27, 2008 Posted March 27, 2008 That reminds me of one of my early computers. The first computer I had was an old windows 3.11 then I went over to Windows 95 What was he trying to do with it?
flyinghaggis Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 My first CD drive was a Panasonic jobbie. It hooked up to the machine via an interface bus on the sound card. At the time, there was quite a market in selling 'multimedia upgrades' which consisted of a ISA sound card and a CD drive that connected to it. Them were the days! I still remember getting a Creative Dual-speed (300Kb/s) CD-ROM drive and a 16-bit Soundblaster Multimedia kit for my old 486 DX2-80Mhz for Xmas/Birthday one year when I was in my teens. Think it cost around £250 at the time and I was absolutely over the moon being able to play 'Magic Carpet' and 'Dark Forces' on it Those games both rocked! (That is once you spent several days trying to load the DOS drivers into upper memory so you could free up enough of the 640k base memory to launch them. And obviously setting all of the DMA, IRQ interrupts, MIDI, etc in the sound config file ) I was also amazed that a single CD could hold twice as much data as my Hard Drive!
Michael Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 Reminds me of the 486-DX2 66MHz we had at home (many, many years ago), 8MB of memory running Windows 3.1 Later I upgraded the memory to 16MB and installed Windows 95. Windows 95 was and still is amazing really. All Microsoft Operating Systems still have a Taskbar and Start Menu today!
Joanne Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 oh YEAH?! http://www.theoriginof.com/images/typewriter/typewriter.jpg
mattx Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 I still run windows 95 on a Siemens Nixdorf Mobile 500 - [ dual booted with OS/2 ] Got it running wirelessly too...... tragic ? Yes.
BKGarry Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 Ok my first computer spec Bought in 1997 for £1200 out of my Dads matured shares, from the Tesco Share Scheme. It was an IBM Aptiva (oh yes IBM, cannot remeber which model) Pentium Processor 133Mhz came with a 14" CRT monitor, 12MB ram (2MB shared to the SIS graphics) 1.6GB HDD (nice and big) 8X CDROM (imagine how long it took to install smart suite) had a Sound Blaster Pro (ISA version) Windows 95 with Plus installed. Lots of the aptiva goodies, Even came with Ceaser 2 and the lost mind of Dr Brain, SmartSuite 97, Encarta 96 (American English Edition) Wall Street Journal Installed. It was a beast of a Desktop machine for the time =]
sidewinder Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 My first CD drive was a Panasonic jobbie. It hooked up to the machine via an interface bus on the sound card. At the time, there was quite a market in selling 'multimedia upgrades' which consisted of a ISA sound card and a CD drive that connected to it. Yeah I had one of those, a 4x Creative one I think, on my 486 It was amazing at the time to play some truly awful 'multimedia' games Why was there such a big fuss over read speeds? Was there really that much difference between 2 and 4x? I used that 4x drive until I got my first CD writer in 2000 so I never saw the early, early drives
Domino Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 Why was there such a big fuss over read speeds? Was there really that much difference between 2 and 4x? errrr....double? Wheres this nostalgia fest come from anyway? I'd like to join in - but I hated the old days of computing
comedydave Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 My first home computer was a Commodore plus/4 16. with an old tape drive. Then I went through Commodore 64, Amiga 600. Then I joined the PC using public with a P1 233 "WITH MMX!!" 32MB and windows 95, 2.1gb HDD. Which I later upgraded to Celeron 500mhz, 64MB and windows 98SE with an extra 6.4GB HDD.
Joanne Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 in all seriousness my first computer was a packard bell Pentium 100 erm... 32 or 64mb ram 1.56GB HDD Windows 95 Just about got The SIMS to run on it too! Think it was the only program on there though!! My mum paid £200 for it second hand. (When I was 15) Did the job for my coursework anyways on Works. Never had an anti-virus either...!!
BKGarry Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 Well later i upgraded that IBM to 96mb EDO ram, do you know what that was like on the old EDO checks booting
rhyds Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 Our 1st computer was a 1991 Amiga A500+ with a whole 1Mb of ram and a 7Mhz Motorolla processor. No HDD, and only the single internal FDD, so games were a disk-swapping marathon. Our 1st PC was a cast-off from dad's work, a Mitac 386 with about 8Mb of ram and a 200Mb HDD, that served well untill our "new" machine, a Time with an IBM 300MHz processor, 6.4Gb HDD and a 32x CD-rom drive
Michael Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 I remember some of the machines at college had a TURBO mode. The computer increased from 33MHz to 66MHz at the press of a button - very impressive
ConTheITGuy Posted March 28, 2008 Posted March 28, 2008 I remember some of the machines at college had a TURBO mode. The computer increased from 33MHz to 66MHz at the press of a button - very impressive I remember those, I was very confused at the time! Why would you want to speed your computer up - surely you would want it set at its higher speed permanently! I later learned that the point was actually to slow the computer down - compatibility and all that.
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