Remember When?

[Kerbear]

I thought it would be interesting to see what people remember and maybe make a thread to talk about it. I'll start my own remember when. How many people remember when the first Pentium's were coming out, the 60 and 66mhz systems. The word on the street then was that Intel had taken the x86 architecture as far as it could go. They were at the end of their rope. They said there's only so far you can go with it like this and Intel is at the end. Does anyone remember? The reason I mention it is because now I hear people saying the same thing about AMD. I'd like to hear some more remember when's from other members too.

 

[JoeHead]

Well no progress blockers here. Just remember my dad's first PC. A HP125. You had to write a string for the word processor to change fonts, margins, test, justification ...
Then there was <b>Visicalc</b>. Let's see if anyone knows what that is. I'll give you a small clue, you would recognize in a snap today.

<b> Fragg at will!!! </b>

 

[RavenPrime]

I remember programing this HP computer to collect data for my research. It had a 10 MB hard drive. My post-doc told me that was huge and that we would never fill it.
I was programing in basic on the HP and basica with DOS 1 using an incredible IBM AT at 16MHz--it had a color display, too!

James

 

[Kodiak]

>> it had a colour display

I still fondly remember my Hercules, B&W monitor for 16Mhz 286... it was a great energy saver -- you could turn off the monitor and still read it for another 10 seconds (much longer if its night and you turn off the lights
Technically it was one-colour I guess -- if the pixel's on, it's white... not 16 shades of gray -- WHITE. Period. End of Story...

meantime, my cousin paid one third the money for his Amiga500 with 32768 colours, optional TV connection for games, 8-bit digitized sound, joysticks, etc... I didn't even have a mouse

what a dumb-ass decision purchasing an IBM-compatible PC was at that time

 

[Guest]

I remember reading about the first 386 with a wopping 16 mb of internal memory.
Games like wolfenstein and of course my c64 ! Man that computer ruled.. Adnto an extend still does even with its hopelesly outdated graphics.

my two cents..

Hey man i dont know .. i just think i do !!

 

[Guest]

I remember getting my first 10MB hard "card" for my 8088 XT. I used to back it up to 99 360k 5.25 floppies. I thought that was so cool. But not as cool as when I got my first CGA (4 color) monitor. My boss said"What do you need all those colors for?".

 

[yoda271828]

I bought a $2500 pentium-60 when they first came out, your know the ones that added 1 + 1 = 1.9999 Intel did send me a new CPU eventually. I wanted to upgrade the RAM from 8MB to 16MB, but it cost like $100 for two 4MB SIMMs! I still use that computer for sharing my cable modem connection. Times have certainly changed. You can get a good PC for under $1000 now.

 

[Guest]

I was probably the first proud owner of a Pentium 60 in my town

 

[Guest]

> it cost like $100 for two 4MB SIMMs

I remember when I bought 16 MB RAM for my 386-25Mhz. Cost me $664 ($166 each).

 

[BGates2B]

I remember being at Office Max on the day that Windows 95 came out. I ran out and bought on and tried running it on a 486 DX2-66 with only 4MB of RAM.

I, sigh, remember spending around $180 for a 4MB non-parity SIMM to bump me up to the 8MB necessary for W95 to run right. Out of curiosity, I asked a memory buyer/seller at a local Marketpro show and said he would pay me only 50 cents for it now.

I guess that was a poor ROI

 

[RavenPrime]

The HP was black and white only but I was very proud of the IBM with its awesome 16 color capability.

James

 

[Kerbear]

I remeber when I used to work as a consultant and 16mb of memory was like 900 bucks. Now it's much closer to 9 bucks. You folks all have some great memory's. I thought you might. I occasionaly like to by an old system just to tinker insider it and see what I can find. I had a Mac, geesh what was it? An LCIII, when I opened the case I found on the aluminum inside all the signitures of the folks at Mac like Steve Jobs etc. They were engraved there. I thought it was a cool idea. I wondered if they did it to all of them? Keep the stories coming, I'm enjoying seeing what everyone else has for cool memories.

Kerbear

 

[Guest]

Hey, this is bringing back memories. I bought my first PC in 1990, I think. Paid a little over $3000. It was a 386-25 and I paid an extra $250 for a motherboard that had 64K of L2 cache. Man was it fast! I was still using XT's and 286's at work, as were many of my friends. I was the envy of them all. Came with both floppies, 2 meg. video card, 4 megs of RAM, a 65 meg RLL hard drive and a 14" Sony that probably had about a 12" viewable area. I think IDE drives were just coming out then.

I really remember purchasing my first shareware. One was a game called <b>Mars</b> written, I think by Scott Miller of Apogee Software. Just called up and they sent all four games (Mars 1-4) on one floppy and included an invoice. Plus there was always a bonus disk. My little girl and I used to play it for hours.

The second was a file browser called <b>List</b>, by Vernon Beurg (sp?). I still use it! It's great!

Mike

 

[ledzepp98]

i remember when a 1 gigahertz processor was the fastest on the market and ram was as much as a dollar a meg.

 

[Guest]

Around when the Pentium 60/66 came out, I was still using an AMD 486 DX-40, and was using a SoundBlaster Pro with it's proprietary CD-ROM drive (from Matsushita). I spent $180 for the sound card alone and it was only 8bit stereo at the time. I never realized it, but when my dad got a 386 SX-25, I thought we were getting Intel, but years later I opened the case and saw that there was an AMD processor inside.

Even before the AT machine my dad brought about, my first "computer" was the Texas Instruments Home Computer which was basically a keyboard with a cartridge slot on the side. I hated it because my parents would only buy learning software for it (Math etc) and not games like Space Invaders.

 

[Guest]

I am one of the ancient ones in this "incredible field". The first computer I had the pleasure of working alongside was a Univac 1103A Scientific. Vacuum tube circuits versus transistors. Input was punched paper tape only, unless you wanted to stand for hours in front of a lit register access panel and punch in Assembler code. It resided in a massive air conditioned room and we used it to track the Soviet Submarine Fleet in the very early 60's. You can see it today in the Smithsonian Institute. But I'm still just as eager today to be in the presence of my home computer, with power that we couldn't of even dreamed of in those days.

 

[Grizely1]

You beat me to it, AlwaysLearning! Was going to post something near the same.

When I worked in Heinz back in the 60s and 70s, we kept records of stuff in a computer. It had to be fed paper with cut out holes and triangles and stuff. LOL I wouldnt' even call it a computer.

 

[rep_stosd]

Ok, i'm not that old(24) but i do remember when we got our Tandy 1000RL. It was an 8088 running at 10.5Mhz. It came with 640k of ram and a 1.44mb 3.5inch floppy drive, 16color TGA graphics, 4 sound channels and 3 8bit isa expansion slots. We upgraded the ram to 768k and i later bought a 40mb hard drive for it(~$300), which i had to partition into two 20mb drives, an 8bit sound blaster and a 2400baud modem. Man, i remember staying up late playing King's Quest IV, space quest 3 and the first wing commander on that thing... great times indeed.

 

[Tormented]

I remeber my first 386-40 thought it was intel turned out to be an AMD... cool.
Man that computer smoked with 4 mb ram and 1mb Video Card
and 200 mb of space.. first games played on it were Cosmo and jill... (first compute seen was atari with cassetes )

(pretty young in compare to otheres here(at least in mind))



<b>-----------------------</b>
-<font color=red><b>R.K.</b></font color=red>

 

[Guest]

<b>...I had the pleasure of working alongside was a Univac 1103A Scientific. Vacuum tube circuits versus transistors.</b>

Ha! That's nothing! For a simple addition problem, I remember when we used to place a few small, fragile pieces of flat stone in a woven, grass basket. Every time the Great White God of the Night Skies was his fullest, we'd sacrifice a few chickens, throw the basket over a cliff, and then recount the pieces for the answer.

Computing was a little slower and less precise back then.

Top that!

Mike

 

[Guest]

Can't top that one. You must have been raised in an abundant society, seems like a waste of perfectly good chickens, when you could have used your toes and fingers to count. Probably would have been more precise also. Just curious, have you been involved in the ELECTION RECOUNT, in Florida??

 

[Kerbear]

I used to work on a system like that in the Navy. I trained on it in the late 80's. I used to turn it on by fliping the switches in the proper order to go through the boot sequence. Trouble shooting it was a gas! We had the harddrive's that were like Cake pans that held nothing to speak of. Each individual platter was like a third of an inch thick. I'm going to guess this is the updated version of the one you are talking about?

Kerbear!!!

 

[Kerbear]

I was shopping for a computer in that time frame to. I knew nothing about them. The system I bought was an Atari ST Mega2. The two meant it had two megs of ram. No harddrive. one 3.5" floppy drive. Back then we used to get software to try. It wasn't shareware though. I used to use a program called "Rambo" It would crack the program so you could play it. I remember the words when you got it going best. It would say, "Prepare to be boarded you scurvy dogs". Now for those that don't remember stuff like that I should mention something. The hacker code then was different then it is now. If you liked a program you went out and bought it. If you didn't you just erased the program. Maybe that's where shareware started?

kerbear

 

[Guest]

I retired from the navy in 81. At that time we were multi-tasked, and I was involved in the Navy's first version of the Internet. It was called the WorldWide Military Command and Control System. We were just getting into reliable network packet switching. An offshoot of the Old Army ARPA network, which was I think the true father of the internet.

 

[Guest]

Mid 60's: My first and only slide-rule.
Had a TI LED calculator with 32 cells of mem.
Took my first computer class using Radio Shack TSR-80s and cassette recorder for long term storage.
My first pc was a Packard Bell 8088 with 2 floppies and no hard drive. I later upgraded with a 10 Meg HD for over $200.
Second PC was an IBM 286 with 512 KB of ram and a 20 meg harddrive for over $2000. Another 512 KB module cost ?? well... pretty expensive.
Third pc was a 486 50MHz with 4 MB ram which I upgraded to 8 MB at $40/meg.
Got a P133 now and hope to get my 5th pc soon.
Amazing what I read today about Intel's 400 million transister processors in 5 to 10 years.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Bupkas on 12/11/00 05:01 AM.</EM></FONT></P>