Do you remember the specs/price of your first computer/internet connection?

In My Humble Opinion
61

“IBM compatible” pretty much got phased out that the same time Windows became dominant. I’ll venture on Windows 95, because with Windows 3.11, I seem to recall that “IBM compatible” was still in common use. If I’m wrong, it’s only by a couple of years.

Today the use of “PC” is still confused. I’ve finally come to call my Macs “PC’s,” but in popular use, there are still a majority that subscribe to PC=Windows, and Mac=Mac. Not sure what they think of Linux; my Linux box is a PC, I’d say, but it’s not even really that. It’s just my Linux box; it lives in a closet.

62

I got my first computer at Christmas, 1979. Actually, it was a “we will ship this as soon as the store gets it in stock” card.

Atari 800 (you had to plug a cartridge in to get 64k of memory). Cassette player for recording/loading programs. 300 baud modem (all my friends were jealous, because they had 130 baud modems you had to cradle a phone on).

I still have fond memories of programming in basic on that thing.

I also vividly remember the fall of '89, when my friend heading off to college was SO excited about the fact that his IBM had a whole 20-meg hard drive, and that he’d managed to partition it into 2 10-meg sections.

Yes, my friends and I are geeks.

63

Actually, Microsoft dominated the PC OS market since like 1982 with MS-DOS, PC-DOS and then Windows, so merely running Dos or Windows didn’t make it a PC, although nearly all PC’s at the time ran one form of Microsoft OS or another.

In the 90’s Mac’s were distinct from Pc’s in that they used CPU’s made by motorola. When Motorola stopped making chips, Mac’s switched to Intel. With an Intel chip, I think calling a Mac a PC wouldn’t be a stretch, and Macs supposedly can emulate PC’s anyway.
Nowadays, imho, the only consistent difference between a mac and a PC is the price.

64

One memory I have is that the first computer I really wanted was the coleco adam because it came with dual tape drives and a printer, which was a huge luxury at the time. Also, it had a large library of games from the ColecoVision home console.

Another one I wanted was the TRS-80 Model 100, one of the earliest laptops of the day, with a whopping 8k memory.

65

That shows how fallible memory can be. The first IBM PC was released in August or September, 1981 and you could get one 160K floppy with it. I suppose that an external floppy may have been possible. I got mine in April 1982 and I got that single floppy. It came with IBM-DOS, no version number. In the summer of 1982, version 1.05 of DOS was released that allowed the floppy to have 180K (by simply increasing the number of sectors per track from 8 to 9). Then came DOS 1.1. That one may have had support for double-sided diskettes that held 360K, but you had to upgrade the floppy drive. At some point, “half-height” drives became avaliable that allowed you to have two drives. And by the summer of 1982, at least one manufacturer was selling a half-height 5M hard drive. With the first PC you could get a fairly high resolution text monitor or a lower resolution monitor that was capable of graphics.

My computer came with the 160K floppy, I got a printer and a graphics monitor and an extra 48K of memory (16K was standard) and it cost a bit over CAD4000. Eventually, I got two double-sided floppies, jacked the memory up to 640K and got a much better monitor. I still have that computer, but it was most recently used in 1991. I don’t think I have the floppies any more and assume they wouldn’t be readable. Oh yes, I got a 300 baud acoustic modem (you dialed up and put the telephone receiver into a cradle that was specially built for the standard telephone of the day). But using that computer and modem, I wrote a book with a collaborator in Cleveland when mail between Cleveland regularly took 14 days and even special delivery took 7. E-mail would not be available till 1984 (anybody recall bitnet?), but we were able to use commercial data transfer services (Tymenet in the US and Datapac in Canada). Afterwards we were able to calculate that we used nine different editing programs on five different computers to write that book.

66

I can’t remember all the specs, but I do remember that it was 1998, that it was a Gateway, and that I paid an obscene amount of money for it.

And that my new Blackberry has appx 4 times the memory that it had, and has it on a chip the size of my pinkie fingernail.

67

I got to the party kind of late. It was 1993 or 1994 and the computer had a 25mhz 486sx, 4mb of RAM, and 540mb HD. It used Windows 3.1, DOS 5.x or 6.x, and only had a 3.5" floppy drive. It ended up with a 60mhz 486DX, 8MB of RAM and Windows 95.

The next was in 1995 and it was a 60mhz P1, 8mb RAM, and I think a 540mb hard drive. It had a 2x CD-ROM drive and a Sound Blaster 16 equivalent card though! It started with Win 3.11, then 95, 98, and 98SE. It ended up with a 120mhz P1, 32mb RAM, and something like a 1.5 gig HD.

I used that dinosaur until 2001 when I got a 1 gig Athlon with 128mb of RAM that I immediately added a GeForce III and Hercules Game Theater XP to. I think it ended up with about 60gig HD and a 40gig HD side by side.

Since then, the numbering system for processors is less obvious, so I don’t have a clue what all I’ve gone through. They’ve all been laptops though, which I found out may as well be disposable.

68

Why? I’m on a laptop from 2003 right now and I’ve yet to see a compelling reason to upgrade. I doubled the RAM back around 2005 but that’s all I’ve done to it. It’s runs like a charm and boots faster than some new computers I’ve used.

69

The Apple IIe (and all models of the Apple II series) had color graphics built-in. In 16 colors even. You could hook one right up to a color composite-video monitor, or to a color TV — possibly needing an RF adaptor for that, if your TV didn’t have composite-video input.

But it was common in those days to hook an Apple II to a monochrome monitor, if your main purpose for it was office work —word processing, spreadsheets, and the like. Monochrome monitors were much cheaper than color, and the high-res graphics and text modes of the Apple II were much crisper in monochrome.

This might be what you’re remembering.

70

No, both came with monitors, the PcJr had a color monitor, the IIe had a monochrome monitor.

I remember the ability to hook it up to a TV, but I didn’t have an extra TV at the time.

71

The Apple IIe required an add on card for the 80 column screen and graphics. The television is only capable of supporting the 40 column text, as 80 column text was beyond it’s resolution.

There was a color monitor for the IIe, if you wanted to purchase it. You could press a button on the monitor to switch between monochrome and color. This was useful when dealing with text only.

72

Dad got us a Commodore 64 in 1982 or 1983. I had no idea it would launch me into a world of rivalry, bitterness, and rejection. Like a gang initiation.

All of my English schoolfriends had Speccys or Amstrads or BBC Micros (well, the losers among them, that is). The American kids had Atari 400s, 800s, or 1200s. Which our school had. So there was all out war amongst us.

Speccy users usually admitted that the Commodore 64 was a worthy challenger to the Spectrum, though I always made fun of the spongy keyboard and the way you needed to put a milk bottle on top of the keyboard so you could actually touch it. And of course most games appeared on at least the Speccy and the Commodore. Amstrad and BBC tossers were often left out in the cold. Atari users in the UK didn’t get shit (ha ha). So those guys would talk a lot of shit, then show up at your doorstep wanting to play Green Beret or Spindizzy.

We (Speccy/C64 users) also had the two best mags, Crash! and Zzap!64. “Amstrad User?” Seriously?

C64 users accepted the Sinclair dominance in the UK, knowing that we ruled America and you could only get a knockoff Timex-branded Sinclair in the States. (Which I actually considered, because there were a few great titles that were on the Speccy and didn’t make it to the C64 until much later. Like Ultimate Play the Game titles.)

I had a 1531 tape deck, and spent countless hours realigning the head. What a pain in the ass. My bedroom smelled of rubbing alcohol, I was cleaning that fucker so much. I went to work one summer and saved every penny - I didn’t even eat lunch - and bought a 1541 floppy drive. Putting all of those tape games on to disk was liberation. But then you had to worry about the drive knocking.

Christ, I was obsessed with that thing. I think I was able to draw myself away from it around 1988 or so. But for five years that’s all that I did. Play, trade, pirate, type in, nick video games.

My first PC was a Macintosh Centris 610. 80MB HD, 8 MB RAM. I had a 14.4, and then a 28.8 dialup modem. Yahoo! was under a stanford.edu domain. We would dialup Delft University for their archive of girls with big knockers, because there wasn’t real porn on the internet at the time. (Until I discover Usenet, that is.)

I remember getting in a heated discussion with a friend on the appropriateness of including my e-mail address on my resume in 1993. Her response: “What are they going to do with that, send you a message?”

73

My first computer was an Apple ][, which I bought in late 1979. It had a whopping 4Kb of RAM (which I upgraded to 16K), and dual floppy drives. I got the computer free with purchase of a Corvus 10Mb external hard drive, which cost me $5,000. The drive was bigger than the computer. I partitioned the hard drive into 20 512K partitions because I couldn’t imagine ever needing a whole megabyte in one partition.

I later hooked up a “mux” which allowed me to share the drive across five Apple computers.

74

I’ll have to take your word on that but I just meant that, if you held down the C= key when powering up your 128, it would start in the Commodore 64 mode with the blue screen rather than the Commodore 128 mode with the green screen. The two weren’t necessarily compatible and you couldn’t run C=64 software without being in C=64 mode.

Since there was a huge library of 64 titles (including almost all the games) and few 128 titles, owners of the C=128 tended to use C=64 mode most of the time anyway.

75

My parents bought us (me) a used Apple ][+ in 83 or 84. I remember playing Might and Magic (the first one) and Wasteland on it. In 89 I was able to buy myself a used 8088 with a 20MB harddrive. I first got on the internet in the fall of 92 in college, and got at home in 95, from some local company in Bellevue, NE.

76

Depends. GEOS-128 on my 80 column monitor pretty much meant I never had to boot into C=64 mode except to play games. So, yeah, nearly 100% of my game time was in C=64 mode. And, wow, I just realized the amazing parallel of having to boot into Windows when I want to play a non-native game on my Mac.

77

First computer: Atari 400. Hated the keyboard, so bought an Atari 800 soon after.

First PC: 1991/92. Bought solely for the purpose of playing this awesome new computer game I heard about… Civilization.

First internet connection: 1993, Prodigy at work.

78

The first family computer was a true IBM 286. At this point I couldn’t tell you any of the other specs. As for the first internet connection, does calling local BBSes on a 300 baud modem count? Otherwise, at times my parents were signed up with CompuServe and Prodigy before not having a connection from about 1992 to 1995/6, at which point they picked up dial-up AT&T WorldNet. But considering that I was born in 1982 and using a computer in 1986 or 1987, I’d consider that fairly early adoption.

79

No, that’s not an Internet connection, just a direct connection between two points.

80

(edit time expired)

No, that’s not an Internet connection, just a direct connection between two points.

Although services like AOL, etc. eventually went to the Internet, dialing Prodigy or Compuserve directly would not be Internet, either.