Retro: what was your 1st Home Computer?

I would have only been 2 or 3 then.

Nice <b><font color=green>Lizards</b></font color=green> <b>crunch</b> Trolls cookies....... Yummy!!

Don't quite remember but it was a 386 i believe it was a 25 or 33Mhz DX with 1mb of memory and a 256 or 512k video card and a 20mb hdd. 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 floppy. dos 3.4 that had a graphics program called splash. It was awesome. I was only about 7 when we first got it. I remember it cost an ungodly amount of money. Something like 4 or 5k.

Nice <b><font color=green>Lizards</b></font color=green> <b>crunch</b> Trolls cookies....... Yummy!!

Long live the Z80 then!

Commodore 64 was my 2nd micro. However, I couldn't afford a 5 1/4 floppy, so I had to stick with the tape. That sucked. That floppy was a midnight summer's dream for most of my friends. (Unfortunately, it was not until my 3rd upgrade that I had the chance to have one.)

It was a fine little machine though. Wonderful sound and graphics, horrible Basic.
I still remember those games.
Although restricted by the 64Kb memory, programmers used to do miracles.
Those 8bit micros' games were by far the most enjoyable ones. I still have a Spectrum emulator in my PC and play some occasionally!

LONG LIVE VIC 20
load
run
ARGH forgot to rewind the tape
GO SPY HUNTER

Blame the newbies not the technology

WHAT? How old are you? That computer is only 3 years old! Are you in your early teens?

<font color=red>God</font color=red> <font color=blue>Bless</font color=blue> <font color=red>America!</font color=red>

lol, that's relatively new!!!!
My first PC was a 486DX/33 with 4MB RAM and a 50MB hard drive, I think. I don't remember, because I don't have it anymore. I'm only 15, btw.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

yeah, lol. Don't forget Commander Keen!

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

Commodore C-64 with "turbo tapestation", I guess it was called something like that...you could "calibrate" the "head" that read the tape for otimal result!

Aaah, lovely memories!


- Forever young -

don't remember all the specs (did we really care about specs back then?), but it was a 16Mhz 386 NEC (BEFORE THEY MERGED WITH PACKARD BELL, THEY WERE AWESOME), 1 MB of memory (and the system took up 640K of it), Dos 3.3 with Windows 3.0 . 40 MB Hard drive with a compression utility to make it act like 78 MB. Came stock with a 5.25", i upgraded it (upgrading at age 8, honestly, i was born for this ) by adding a 3.5"

Althons and Pentiums are just melted rock. Who’s rock is better? Who cares, let’s play some games

Indeed i am. As the semester jumps the midpoint, i find that i want to use some free time here instead of racing digital porsches (don't ask me why, i think i'm confused too). I'll post a "i'm back" msg in the other group.....as soon as i scroll through the 9000 other posts *sigh*.

Althons and Pentiums are just melted rock. Who’s rock is better? Who cares, let’s play some games

I got a Dell 486 DX 33MHz system way back when dinosaurs stilled roamed the earth. After a few months I upgraded it to a DX2 66MHz and doubled the RAM to 16MB. It actually ran Windows 95 faster than my dad's Pentium 90MHz. w00t!!


<font color=red>"I'm not gonna launch a $2 million missile at a $10 tent and hit a camel's butt." -Bush</font color=red>

a good old zx81. took me a long time and many head aches, but at last i managed to get a really dodgy space invaders game running in 1k. lost interest in them for about 4 years then got a job writting educational software for the local schools and "liberated" a BBC micro i had on loan when i left.

Although it has a lot of good ideas, beer doesn't know anything about computers!!!

Bally Home Library Computer, anyone ever hear of that one? I bought it in 1976. It boasted a Z-80 chip, 20k of RAM, and the promised expansion unit (that never materialized) had dual cassette decks! The base unit was not much more then a glorified game machine, and cost $299. But, it did have the best designed game controller of any system, todays included. Bally abandoned the Home Library Computer when Atlantic City became a reality, and put its resourses into building casinos.

Next computer (in 1977) was a TRS-80 model 1, with 4k of RAM. This was a great learning machine, having assembler language as well as Basic. It was soon upgraded to 16k of RAM, then to level II ROMS, which supplied the most advanced version of BASIC available at that time (Microsoft, of course).

I eventually upgraded to the TRS-80 model III, then the IV. Radio Shack supplied schematics to those who wanted them, and detailed manuals on the inner workings of the operating systems, for those who wanted to experiment. As I said, a great learning machine! All before the appearance of the IBM PC.

By the way, I still have all of my original TRS-80 software. It still runs, on my Athlon system. How? There are many good TRS-80 emulators on the market today, many as shareware. They even boot up from a floppy disk (if you have a 5 1/4 in floppy). Try one. Great fun!

<font color=blue>This is a Forum, not a playground. Treat it with Respect.</font color=blue>

I still have P-75. It's at wiggys house cos I ain't got room for it.

I wanna be a hippie and I wanna get stoned yeah.

HA1 I had a Timex, the one that came out about the same time as the Vic 20, but it was much smaller (no drives) so that the entire thing fit into the back of the keyboard. It used a standard 1/8" minijack connector to connect to a tape player for programs. It operated using BASIC, and hooked to a television. Even though you could hook it to a color TV, it's output was greyscale. I actually had two of these, one was a portable (even smaller). Later on I upgraded to a Zenith 386-16.

Back to you Tom...

I learned how to program in BASIC on a Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 model 4. Monitor, keyboard, innards, 2 5.5"floppies all in the same case. The durn thing NEVER crashed! It had an external modem that you put the handset on after you manually dialed the number. The tape drive worked fairly well. The died because they weren't IBM compatible. Saw one in a computer store the other day all polished up and running. My first "computer" was PONG. Anyone remember that? My first "modern" computer I purchased this last April. It was a Compaq (I know, I know, live and learn), 1 month later I raped it for parts and built my own. After numerous upgrades, the only thing left is the monitor and speakers.

Unngahhh! Fire good-blue screen bad

LOAD"*",8,1
SEARCHING FOR *
LOADING
READY
RUN

<font color=green> I LOVE INTEL. It tastes like chicken </font color=green>

yep, we started with the Commodore 64, then to the 128 (much easier scripting/basic, 64 emulation boot mode) and got a 2nd hand commodore 8086 to take to uni. I remebmber I had it setup to squeeze and extra track or two onto the FDDs just to get that little more storage. God, had like a thousand 3.5" 720Mb disks in those days (Only a 20MB HDD). That was when you needed a floppy drive. I think it had a hercules 265 colour vga adaptor. Remember the days when the only decent tool for managing a file system was XTREE Gold? God that app pulled my ass out the fire a few times!

Those were the days when gameplay had to be addictive because graphics sucked. Ahh, the old times. I remember at work playing with a 486 I'd managed to secure myself (from the 386 I was allocated), trying to manage dual boot 95 beta and WFW3.11 had a 25->50mhz overdrive in it that I then overclocked to 66Mhz. 2nd 100MB HDD and that was a real PC! Can't remember if it was 8 or 16MB of memory. Of course, then the Pentiums came out and we were relegated to the back rows once more.

I still recall getting approval to buy a 150Mhz Pentium, which we ran pre-release NT4 on, testing out Exchange and SMS, IIS and such. Those were the days....

-* <font color=red> Under Offer </font color=red> *-
email for application details

Back in the day I had a Sinclair Spectrum +2 and no less! Before that I used to play on my freind's earlier Spectrum, the one with the rubber keys (that I have forgotten the name of... 48 or something).
It was what I learned to program on too, I first learnt BASIC when I was 11, I have since left such amateur languages behind and I am now a junior C programmer, hehe. I remeber hacking together my own version of Pong and my own psudeo OS to play with. I then left computers and got a NES, PC sucked compared to a NES if you were a kid. Besides, you got beat up if you didnt have a NES in my hood. Then I started with computers again when my dad got a PC about 4-5 years ago (old 486 he had from work, with which I refounded by BASIC skills through QBASIC). I bought my own PC about 3 years ago (after a long line of consoles).

<font color=red>Cyrix 166 + 8MB RAM + 14k baud + 300MB HD + Lynx under MS-DOS...</font color=red><font color=green> Jealous?</font color=green>