What was your first computer?

dblshockpwr 8/23/2008, 3:30 pm

Mine was the good old Commodore 64!!

I was the neighborhood master of Dr. J Vs Larry Bird........

Now I'm sure some of you old-timers remember when they took up 3 stories of the building down the street. booya

cravnravn 8/23/2008, 3:58 pm

E-Machine

Agent 99 8/23/2008, 4:04 pm

dblshockpwr wrote:Mine was the good old Commodore 64!!

I was the neighborhood master of Dr. J Vs Larry Bird........

Now I'm sure some of you old-timers remember when they took up 3 stories of the building down the street.

Damn........ I forgot all about Dr. J Vs Larry Bird!

Guest 8/23/2008, 4:26 pm

Well, the first computer I worked on was an IBM 360/40. Disk drives on this baby consisted of 10 large platters (about 18 inches in diameter) and they held a whopping 100 MB of data. The computer itself had 64k of memory and could actually do two things at once -- run one program while printing reports from already-completed programs. All of this was in the early 1970's. Of course, we used punch cards to run all programs and many programs generated output on punched cards (so these could be fed into later programs). Neat, huh?

What was your first computer? Ibm360_40

The first personal computer I purchased was the original IBM PC. I ordered it the day after the announcement (Byte Magazine covered its birth) from the IBM center in Philly. No Circuit City, Computerland, or such stores at that time folks. It took me 3 months to get it and I had to drive to Philly to pick it up. It had a graphics card which supported color (imagine that) and 320 x 200 resolution, two 5 1/4" floppy drives each of which stored, I believe, about 60k of data -- they were single-sided. The dual-sided floppies came later. Memory? I maxed the machine out at 64k!! Wooo Hooo! Oh, and I could not get any sort of graphic monitor for it then -- IBM only sold the little green screen ASCII character display monitor. Thus the graphics card. I stopped at a Radio Shack on the way home from Philly and purchased a video adaptor which converted the RGB video signals into TV video then stopped at a discount store and bought a 10" color Panasonic TV -- that was my color monitor!

For all of this I paid the small sum of about $3200 as I recall...and these were 1982 dollars. Over the next year I upgraded the floppy drives, added memory, bought an Epson 9-pin impact printer, and then bought an IBM color monitor when they finally came out. Eventually even added a hard drive when DOS supported them. I figure I had well over $5000 in that machine over the 4-5 years that I had it.

Imagine what you could get now for $5000. happy2

Swanshaft 8/23/2008, 6:09 pm

Ahhhh, the good ol' Commodore 64, brings back memories. Besides MJ vs Bird, does anyone remember California Games? Good times.

Swanshaft 8/23/2008, 6:27 pm

So this topic made me search for a minute, and I found a site that has classic 8 bit Nintendo games to play online. California Games, Techno Super Bowl, etc.... Brought back more memories....

http://www.nintendo8.com/

Magic 8/23/2008, 11:21 pm

LOL....well I remember playing Pong when I was 17 back in 1975 (it came out in 1972 but my Mom would never have got something like that for us kids)

The first time I ever messed with a computer was in 1986 at my then girlfriend place of work (Ross Perot's Electronic Data Systems that he sold to General Motors) and when I saw that room full of computers and what they did I thought damn this is just a fancy way of saving shit you used to write down on paper and it's a pain in the ass and boring as hell

I was still a satellite junkie which I started doing in 1982 and still do that today with my satellite dish farm here.

Then when I met the current Mrs. Magic in 1987 she had that no fun at all Microsoft MS dos with the book as thick as a NY phone book.

After that in the 1990's my fellow mad scientist neighbor tried talking me into getting a computer and he had the Windows 95 and I refused to get one mostly because I wanted my Son to learn things the good old fashioned way........brain+paper+pencil=figure something out and learn what the book is telling you about.

But then finally in 1998 I bought a Windows 98SE and it had the PIII 500 which was actually a fast machine back then and I ran that for several years until I had some OS problem.....then learned how to fix it and then the processor finally gave up (that was the pc I was using when I first met 99 and Blue and the gang back then including our visitor mighty_colts )

After that I turned into a pc geek (and anti Apple clown steve jobs)

So I got another new pc in november 2001 the day that Windows XP came out with the AMD 1600+

It croaked on me thanks to a damn processor fan quiting and the pc booted up while I was not home so it was toast.

Then I got another XP with an AMD 3200+ which is next to me hard at work and also got this first store bought pc from Walmart just because I was there one day in 2003 and they both are working great.

Only change was a new and better processor fan for the AMD 3200 and I made my own copy of XP Pro to mess with.

And then in 2006 I got my first dual core P4 3.20 and that and the AMD 3200 have 1.25GB of RAM and the dual core has a fancy processor fan and 3 other fans and a 750 watt power supply with XP Pro.

Next will be a quad core machine as soon as I get a real good deal on the fastest quad core processors out maybe this winter....or my birthday in January

And I have all of mine running 24/7 since the beginning until they die.

Doing data processing for the Einstein Project and the Large Hadron Collider (since I am a founder and a particle physicist and astrophysicist who doesn't make money like certain Union workers )

So when you get hooked you have to teach yourself all of the things from registry editing to website design and all the source codes which is pretty fun after you do the work and look at it and see everything work.

Blue and Mighty can attest to that part

dblshockpwr 8/24/2008, 6:17 am

Ahh I like the Pic of the old Computer room Blue, reminds me of when I was a kid and the bank where my mom used to work.... (she was a prgrammer) and she used to feed the punch cards into the machines.... Good stuff....

I also remember when my dad brought home the Apple II for my mom (paid for with that good old Union money LOL) and it was the darling of all of her computer geek friends LOL... (of course us lowly childern were not allowed on the high dollar Apple.... we got the Commodore 64...)

I remember saving all of my money as a kid so I could buy the Commodore CASSETTE drive and my dad feeling sorry for me and buying a 10 inch color tv for us to use with the computer too... And then of course we actually had COMPUSERVE....... (because of my mom's work with computers and she worked for the bank... so the bank paid for it.)

She gave up on Apple after the Lisa though and went PC instead.

dblshockpwr 8/24/2008, 6:21 am

Now fast forward 20 years into the future and I am on a Pentium mobile dual core 1.86 Ghz... with 4gb of Ram and a 320 GB HD.... all wrapped up in neat Compaq A900 17inch laptop.. wireless express card for the mobile broadband... built in card-readers...webcam built in.....

and I use Skype to video conference with old friends and family all over the country...........

What a cool world we live in eh?

Guest 8/24/2008, 6:22 am

freakin' geeks

dblshockpwr 8/24/2008, 6:24 am

BTW that Dr J vs Bird game took right at 30 minutes to load from the cassette drive.... LOL

And the really funny thing is this... I STILL have the old Commodore system..... and it still works (tried it out the other day) even though the old cassettes are trashed and don't work anymore.....

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