After watching “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” the other day, I got nostalgic for old computers. Sure, the iMac G5 on my desk is powerful and spiffy and all that, but it doesn’t have the character. So what computers did you first use?
My first computer was a Toshiba T1000 laptop my dad gave me in the late 80s, after his office moved to Macs. It had a 1.4 MB flash drive for a hard drive - that had to be expensive then - and I used its 2400-baud modem to connect to Prodigy. I remember when it took 20 minutes to download a weather map, but man, it looked cool on the 16-color CGA monitor I hooked up to it. Dad helped me write an AUTOEXEC.BAT file that gave me a menu of programs at start-up.
(When I called to cancel my Prodigy service at the tender age of seven, they guilted me so much I cried. When I called many years later to cancel AOL, the emotion tended more to the homocidal.)
After I got intrigued by my dad’s Powerbook 140, he brought an old Mac Plus home from the office. It died a Sad Mac death after a few months and in the 3rd grade, we went to Micro Center and I got an LC III+. 68030, 33 MHz. I loved playing SimCity 2000 on it.
Later on, I got a leftover Quadra 650, a Performa and one of the first beige G3s. I traded the G3 for a G4/450 in 2000 and got this iMac last year, giving the G4 to my grandmother.
A cute little thing with a membrane keyboard. Has a 16K memory module attached to the back which would work its way loose as you typed, eventually causing a system crash.
It was an old Amstrad PC clone. It didn’t even qualify as a 286. I couldn’t put real MS programs on it, I had to use shareware copies of Word and Lotus 1,2,3.
That was in 91 or so. There were better computers already out there, but I couldn’t afford one at that time.
Now I have two, a little averatec laptop and a custom build desk top, which I put together with the help of my old boyfriend.
Funny thing, I use the little laptop far more than the big fancy best parts money can buy custome build.
That one, as much fun as it was to put together, is basically just my studio for putting together my aerobics and dance class CDs. I almost feel guilty about all those empty gigs of hard drive space. Almost…
Another membrane keyboard, now with 16K built in, color, and a tape recorder. And games on cartridges. Did some serious BASIC programming with this one. Had libraries of very unreliable tapes.
How about the 27 pound Compaq portable that required a hoist from the mid to late 80’s? Or the Osborne (I think trhat is the right spelling) Computers? The first computer I remember working with was an Apple something or other in 1984 that I ran VisiCalc (the forerunner of Lotus 1-2-3 which was the forerunner of - Oh stop already) on that machine. Can’t remember other comapny names but I do recall the first IBM that I used was the IBM-XT with no hard disk and ran everything off of floppies and composed text documents using a program called PC-Write. The PC-Write program file was 23 kb big! Now the programs are 230 MB.
Two, count em’, 5 1/4" floppy drives (no hard drive), 64k RAM, CPM OS and the little 3" black and white screen (to lose your eyesight with). Along with the Kaypro which came out around the same time (around '82), the first “portable” personal computer. What a classic.
Best of all, I still have it. And though it’s been years, I think if I fired it up, it would still work !
My first computer was a Spectravideo, which no one else seemed to have ever heard of and it used to confuse the heck out of people when I told them the brand name (they always thought it was some kind of video player). I remember Armoured Assault as being the single greatest game of all time, although I saw it again just a couple of years back and they must have changed it because there’s no way it was so ugly and boring (I swear it was better in the 80’s!). I used to like copying the programs out of the book into it which at least gave me a good grounding in Basic for when I graduated to my second computer, a 286 (circa 1990/91).
That reminds me, my dad bought a Timex Sinclair at the grocery store in 1983 so he could put “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING” on the TV for the New Year’s Eve party. That might have been the only time he used it. I pulled it out of the closet years later and played with it, but never got very far. That membrane keyboard was a bitch to type with.
First was a radio shack TRS-80 (trash-80). Forget how much memory, but had no sort of drive at all. Although it did have a cartridge slot for games and programs. Best was Dungeons of Daggorath. You could also connect a tape module to it and save data to a cassette tape. Logo (the ‘programming language’ with the turtle) and basic were just about all I had.
Then it was a Tandy 1000. What an upgrade! Two 5.25 inch drives, 384 KB of memory (which I upgraded later to 640 KB - yeah, I was the cool kid for a while). Almost spent about $250 of my hard earned cash (hey, I was about 13) on a 20 MB hard card. But that was right after tthe stock market crash in 89 or whatever, and my mom suddenly didn’t find it wise to spend money on something like that.
From there is was onto 286’s and 386’s. However, the Tandy did give me the best game ever , Starflight. Took me two years to finally finish that game.
I got a Coleco Adam in the mid 1980’s. Don’t remember most of the specs. It was a large monster of a PC, and the power supply was in the printer, so you couldn’t just run the PC, you had to have the printer plugged in and attached as well. It came with tape drives (audiotape cassette format), but I later upgraded it to have a disk drive.
I did use it for a couple of years as an undergrad. It beat going to the computer lap to use the mainframe text editor from H*ll. Once they started stocking the labs with Macs, I stuffed the Adam in a closet and didn’t use it again. I gave it away when I graduated.
First one was a VIC-20, Then a Commadore 64. Anyone remember Compute! magazine? Went from the 64 all the way to a off-brand 386, then a Packard Bell 486, Then another off-brand Cyrix chipped 586. Started building my own systems after that.
I remember installing Windows 95 on the 486 the week it was released. After a few days the CD-ROM stopped working. Took it in to Sears for repair(Don’t laugh we bought it from Sears, and they fixed it for free). They replaced the CD-ROM drive, but also reloaded the hard drive with the original image. I reinstalled 95, and a while later the CD-ROM stopped working again. This time they replaced the CD-ROM, and the motherboard. Again wiping the hard drive. Again the CD-ROM failed. Took it in and they basically replaced the entire system except the case, and monitor. Even gave us a new keyboard and mouse. Again CD-ROM stopped working. I decided too fix it myself this time. I found out that Windows 95 will not load multimedia drivers if getting low on memory. With only 4MB of RAM we were at minimum requirments. Went out and bought another 4MB for $107.
First computer Dad bought was a true IBM 286. I was four, so I can’t give all the specs. Though I do remember being scared when I pushed a button and the power supply failed simultaneously. Dad had to send it for repair, something I’ve never done in the 18 or so years since then. (When the power supply in my Dell failed, I paid through the nose for a properitary power supply and put it in myself within 15 minutes.)
I had one of these which got replaced by a Trash-80 Color Computer, with its glorious 32k of ram, chicklet keyboard, and external tape drive (later replaced by a 5.25" floppy drive mounted off the game controller). It was a POS, really, though if I’d known the right crowd I guess I could have installed a real operating system on it and made it do more than run the fairly cheezy BASIC programs I wrote for it. (Did you ever try to write a spreadsheet app in BASIC? Don’t bother…a simple sort on a 200 point data set would result in a system crash.) Needless to say, I envied the Commodore 64 crowd, and later the Amiga. I was never particularly hot about the Apple, though. For years after my final and most successful attempt and running away from home my single “computer” was an HP-32s, but since I was attending one university or another soon thereafter I had access to PCs and Macs of that era.
Now I’ve got a mishmash of Intel x86 and PPC machines performing, or more often failing to perform, various tasks. To hell with the “good old days”; I like the Linux and MacOSX graphical desktops.
Trash 80 color computer with 4k of ram. However first 1k was taken up by system addresses and video memory, and last 512 was the stack. Didn’t leave too much to work with.
Although the computer was designed to upgrade to 32k it could address 64k. After I bought new memory chips, I had some friends that made the necessary modifications to allow 64k memory. They had to bend up one of the pins of one of the memory chips and soldered a wire from that to some other spot on the circuit board. Then, in my programs I had to toggle a bit in memory to swap between the upper 32k and the ROM that occupied those same addresses (which provided the BASIC language/operating system).
We had an Apple IIe. I remember using Bank Street Writer for word processing, obsessing over Infocom’s Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide, and spending hours playing Taipan. (Bad joss, Taipan! You’ve been blown off course!)
The first new computer we ever bought was an LC 575, in 1994. I still remember driving home with it… 33mhz 68040 CPU, 8 megs of ram (eventually upgraded), I forget how much hard drive space. No modem for the first couple of years, then a 14.4, and finally a 56k modem. The floppy drive died after a few years, and it ended up just being cheaper and easier to get an (external) Zip drive to replace it. We called her “Elsie.”
I used that computer until almost six years later, on the day I got it’s replacment, a G4 that I’m typing on now. About a year or two ago, we tried hooking it up again so my mother could have something to type on, but the hard drive, which had been getting more and more finicky in it’s later years, finally died.
We have it in storage, right now. I have no intention of ever throwing that computer away.
I remmebre the SpectraVideo from around about the time of the Commdodore 64.
I got my first computer in those days, it was a Texas Instruments TI49A. But I really did want a SpectraVideo because it had an incredible 128Kb of RAM. 16Kb was the norm in those days.
