Remember Those Old Computers?

[Jonathan Randall]

http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/

Has pictures and descriptions of old computers - including such favourites (not!) as the TRS-80 and VIC 20. Personally, I miss my Commodore 64.

 

[Hand Sword]

The Commodore 64 was cool! I still, on occassion, want to play some Atari 2600, and Coleco Vision games.

 

[ajs1976]

I didn't see and Adam listed, that was Colecovisions computer.

But they had a NeXT.

 

[Carol]

The Commodore 64 was cool! I still, on occassion, want to play some Atari 2600, and Coleco Vision games.

I spent hours playing Adventure on the 2600. Wandering through those damn catacombs...

 

[Jonathan Randall]

I didn't see and Adam listed, that was Colecovisions computer.

But they had a NeXT.

NeXT was the stuff! I saw a Cube back in 1990 and it absolutely blew Windows 3.1 out of the freakin' water.

Apparently the Commodore 64 still holds the record as the most purchased computer in world history at 33 million.

The museum only has those the owner has personally aquired working models of, unfortunately, so the Adam isn't yet there.

 

[Carol]

The C-64 just ROCKED.

Adventure games with secret codes of XYZZY

I'm having flashbacks....sniff....

 

[OnlyAnEgg]

I wasn't nearly as big a nerd as you guys. I had an old TI comp with a tape drive; but, my first pc was a Mac+. 1 bit graphics and a screaming 8 MHz processor and no HD. It was sweet. I eventually sold it for $50 more than I paid for it to some guy in New York that turned it into a clock.

 

[Grenadier]

Ah, the good ol' days...

My first computer was a TRS-80 (affectionately known as the TRASH-80). Very feeble, and the software library was ever so limited.

My next computer was an Apple //c, with its whopping 128 kilobytes of memory, and (gasp) a 5.25" floppy drive! No more cassette tapes! That computer actually lasted me from 1984 to 1990. No upgrades were done, since this one was very limited in what could be upgraded.

My next computer came in 1990, and was a Packard Bell (angrily known as Packard Hell or Packard Smell) computer, which had an Intel 80286 CPU running at a screaming 12 megahertz. 1 whole megabyte of memory, dual floppies, VGA grapics, and a HUGE 42 megabyte hard drive. Things started dying on me, true to Packard Bell form, and the only things I was able to re-use were the floppy drives. Even the memory was useless, since it was soldered on.

After my awful experience with PB, I decided to learn how to build my own. I built my own system in 1992 that had an Intel 80386 SX-25, 2 megabytes of memory, 89 megabyte hard drive, a sound card (Mediavision Thunderboard), and now a whopping 1 megabyte of memory on my Western Digital video card (yes, they did make vid cards back then). Suddenly, I was king of the hill, able to play games such as 4-D boxing, very smoothly, and could even run Ultima VII.

Alas, this happiness was not meant to be, since more demanding games came along. X-Wing was probably the game that pushed it over the edge, and I ended up forking over the money in 1994, to upgrade. Now I had a huge 16 megabyte of memory, a blazingly fast AMD 486 DX-40 CPU, and now a VESA local bus-based Diamond Speedstar Pro video card. Wow, true color! This computer did very well, even with Descent, DOOM and DOOM II, along with Heretic and TIE Fighter.

In about a year or so, though, Quake came along. Pentium-90 time...

I've gone through many CPU's since then:

AMD K6-II 300 MHz
AMD K6-III 450 MHz
Intel Pentium III 450 MHz
AMD Athlon 650 MHz
AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz
AMD Athlon XP 1700+
AMD Athlon XP 2500+
AMD Athlon 64, 3000+ (current CPU).

Whenever I do an upgrade at home, the previous components get transferred to my work PC, which I built myself as well. So far, though, this Athlon 64 CPU has been holding firm for almost two years now, despite my enjoyment of FEAR, Half-Life 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II, and so forth.

 

[Swordlady]

http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/

Has pictures and descriptions of old computers - including such favourites (not!) as the TRS-80 and VIC 20. Personally, I miss my Commodore 64.

Hey...he doesn't have a Commodore 64 yet! My dad bought one in 1988. Dual 5.25" floppy drives, no hard drive and green screen (don't remember the technical term for it). We also had a dot matrix printer. You had to put in a boot floppy, and switch out floppies with different programs. I did a few of my junior and senior year essays on that computer, using Wordperfect 4.0. Dad continued to use this computer...til 1999. He refused to get another computer for 11 years, because the Commodore did his Lotus spreadsheets perfectly well...thank you! He finally broke down that year and bought a CompUSA PC with a P-III 500 mhz processor, 20 gig HD, and 128 MB of RAM. He is now on his second PC, a Dell with a P-IV 2.4 Ghz processor, 40 gig HD, 512 MB RAM.

I didn't know much about computers, and didn't own a PC at all until 1998. I started dating a guy who was a computer tech, and he gave me an old Toshiba laptop. Specs: 486 processor, 256 MB HD, 16 MB RAM, 7" color monitor with 640x480 resolution. No sound card. And a card modem, running at 33.5 Kbps. It used to run Windows 3.11, but he installed Windows 95 and Office 95.

I soon got tired of not being able to surf the Net for more than a half-hour (the cache totally overwhelmed the meager memory space), and bought my first PC the following year. It was a generic Digitech, with an AMD-2 350 mhz processor, 7 gig hard drive, and 64 MB RAM. I started playing with upgrades, and pretty much upgraded this PC to death. I switched the processor to an AMD-2 500 mhz (didn't really notice an increase in speed), added another 64 MB of RAM, and installed a 16 MB videocard (as opposed to the onboard soundcard). That is pretty much what I do to my PCs nowadays; I throw in more stuff and see if it sticks.

My current PCs are a Sony Viao (P-IV 1.8 ghz, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive, 64 MB All-in-Wonder video card, DVD-R drive) and an upgraded Dell (P-IV 2.6 ghz, 1 GB RAM, 300 GB hard drive, 128 MB All-in-Wonder video card, DVD+R drive).

 

[Kacey]

My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 with a tape drive, although I learned to compute on a Radio Shak TRS-80 (which we also called a Trash-80) in high school - they were hooked into the mainframe at Vanderbilt University. I sold my VIC-20 to my uncle when I started college - my cousins used it as a game machine - and my uncle, bless him, insisted in paying me what the computer had cost me, plus mailing costs.

I bought an Apple //c in college which came in a package with a dot-matrix printer... all too soon, however, professors started insisting that work not be turned in if it was printed on a dot-matrix printer; they said it was too hard to read... although we discovered that if you ran the pages through a copier, the dots ran together and it looked like it had been type-written - that got me through college.

My mother bought a new computer and gave me her old one, which was my first experience with Windows, but I can't remember what it was - I've had PCs ever since.

 

[crushing]

My first computer was a C= 64. I started with the tape drive, but loved it when I finally saved up enough $ to get the 1541 disk drive. Doubled my storage capacity by notching those 5 1/4 floppies.

I didn't have a printer for it, but a typewriter my parents had actually had a computer interface that worked with the C= 64. This must've been around '85 or so.

After the C= 64 I was an Amiga zealot for a while. I bought an Amiga 500 at a PX (I think it was at Robinson Barracks). Brilliant graphics and sound and multitasking in those things for their time. Even though I was an Amiga guy, I bought a used Packard Hell 386 SX/20 just to have some PC experience too. Piece of ****.

I also had an Amiga 4000 for a while, but not much was happening with Amiga after Commode's bankruptcy and the technology was passed around to a few companies, so I sold it.

Should have held on to the C= 64 and Amiga stuff. People are getting mad money for that stuff on eBay.

I miss the Amiga.

 

[DavidCC]

I've got something even more rare than all of that.

I have an IBM XT-286. Yes, this genetic mutation does exist. I'm not sure they wewe ever sold to the public but a friend of the family was an IBM salesman and somehow this thing ended up in my Mom's office 20 some-odd years ago. It was so unusual I kept it all these years.

So now who is geek enough to know why I call it a "mutation"??

 

[Bob Hubbard]

I cut my programming teeth on the Apple II way back when.

My first PC was an Atari 800XL with tape drive, LOL. A Commodore 64 and later 128 followed. Friend of mine had an Amiga 1000, was a wonderful system, great OS. I ended up going with an IBM PS2-30, one of the least expandable systems ever. A series of clones and home built systems followed. I'm now running on an HP laptop.

But I still remember the C64 fondly. I wrote several tile-graphic based RPGs on that beast. *sigh*

 

[Grenadier]

I've got something even more rare than all of that.

I have an IBM XT-286. Yes, this genetic mutation does exist. I'm not sure they wewe ever sold to the public but a friend of the family was an IBM salesman and somehow this thing ended up in my Mom's office 20 some-odd years ago. It was so unusual I kept it all these years.

So now who is geek enough to know why I call it a "mutation"??

For a second, I thought you mis-typed "AT," since XT's were *supposed* to only have 8088's in them.

Very, very odd, indeed, but yes, such beasts did exist. Even though AT-spec motherboards weren't supposed to fit in XT cases, there were quite a few clever wags who managed to get them to fit!

 

[crushing]

I ended up going with an IBM PS2-30, one of the least expandable systems ever. A series of clones and home built systems followed.

Bob, Besides adding a token-ring card, what kind of expansion would you ever need for a model 30? Also, don't forget your reference disk!

 

[Bob Hubbard]

I wanted to add a modem, but it only worked with 2 IBM modems. Also, wanted to upgrade to EGA graphics, but again, only IBM cards were accepted. Man, those were the days or proprietary cards and compatability headaches. LOL Kids today got it easy.

 

[John Brewer]

When I was about ten my Dad traded our Ham Radio for a TRS 80. We were so mad at him! He talked us into playing a game called termites. We spent what seemed like a whole bunch of time entering code and then when you hit enter the screen went from white to black one pixel at a time. Boy that was fun.

 

[Sukerkin]

Should have held on to the C= 64 and Amiga stuff. People are getting mad money for that stuff on eBay.

I miss the Amiga.

Don't tell me that!

I just threw about £15000 worth of Amiga kit and software in the council tip last month (vga monitor, Amiga 1200, Amiga 500, Amiga 600, Video Toaster, Analogue sound/video streamer, external harddrives etc etc etc).

I'd kept hold of it for a decade or more because it was such good kit that I couldn't bear to part with it (especially having invested so much hard earned cash) but I finally convinced myself that I was never going to use it again .

I thought of trying e-bay but never got around to actually looking and took hearsay eveidence that Amiga stuff was worthless these days, altho' the C-64 was gaining value. That'll teach me to take others word for something without checking it out myself :cries:.

 

[phlaw]

I still have working computers of the following:

3 Commodore 64s, one is actually still in the box and as far as I know never used. I still love playing games on that system!

an Atari 800XL with about 200 floppy disks and even a 300 baud modem.

2 Amiga 2000's.

And I believe also an Amiga 1000.


I always wanted an Adam, and even thought about buying one on Ebay.

My wife think I should stop collecting these?

 

[Xue Sheng]

I still have a working version of this in my closet

http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/ibm_5150.html