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What was your first computer ?


Bruno

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Guest LilBambi

Ah, yes, those were the days ;)What a great variety of 'where we came from' and where we are, eh? Variety is the spice of life!It's amazing to think that in the later 80s I was starting to learn computers, and on a CoCo, and now I have Windows (various ones), Linux (various ones) and my Mac Mini. So many of us are that way now I think. Able to use a wide variety of OSes and hardware.

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My first one was a self build pre-historic model Cosmicos build around a CDP-1802. I spent many hours with that one, you literally had to built every piece of it your self from components from the shop, but it was fun to do and afterward really see something work. The first real computer was a Commodore VIC20 with a separated cassette tape drive as storage media. It took ages to load a program from the tapes. Next was a MSX model, these got quite popular over here in Europe. Followed by a dumped IBM with Windows 3.1, then came around a Packard Bell disaster box (don't ask...) with windows 98SE. I then had it with all those crap and started to build myself again, ended up that time with a self build rig with an Athlon XP1600/Epox mainboard, 1gig RAM and windows 2kPro. Nowadays I have several of these machines, the fastest is a machine with P4 2.4GHz and 2gigs of RAM on an Asus main board which I use as a spare machine. My main system nowadays is a laptop with Core2Duo 2GHz and 2gigs RAM.

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Turns out that 70 factorial is 'too large', producing an error display because the exponent exceeds ten to the hundredth power. Some of those older scientific calculators would need several seconds to crunch the numbers. :hysterical:So we engineering students were some of the earliest to produce 'benchmarks'. :thumbsdown: :fish:
Windows Calculator says: 70! = 1.1978571669969891796072783721689e+100
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My first computer was the family computer - Compaq 386sx, 4 MB RAM, 96 MB HD, Windows 3.10It was eventually replaced with: Pentium II 300 MHz, 64 Mb RAM, 4 GB HD, Windows 95. Over time we gave it a few upgrades - 60 GB HD and Windows 98My first laptop: 500 MHz AMD-K6-2, 96 MB RAM, 6 GB HD, Windows 98 which I eventually upgraded to : 192 MB RAM, 30 GB HD, Windows 2000. For a while it served as an experiment subject for installing Linux. Currently on my network as a shared hard drive.The old 386 still works at is sitting in my closet back at my parent's house. It smells funky after it spent several years in the basement. My laptop still sits on the desk next to this computer. I use its hard drive on my network for additional backup storage.

Edited by DarkSerge
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  • 2 years later...

Looks like it's been awhile since a post. But I love reading them.My first computer was a TRS-80 model III with an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. Had a 300 baud modem and connected to several bulletin boards that you had to join. Typed in tons of programs from magazines. Got Info world, PC Mag, Byte, and I don't know how many others.First PC was a Leading Edge. 8mhz 8088 and 10mb hard drive with a CGA color monitor. Ready for this? It cost $3,100 in 1984. That's about 4,000,000,000 in today's dollars :) Also had a Tandy Daisy Wheel 410 that produce wonderful copy. I ran a mortgage broker business with this machine. Amazing how many hours I poured into it. Built a flat file DB for the business with a program called Nutshell. Use Leading Edge Word Processor, which was very good. Super Calc 3 for a spreadsheet. Then Paradox for a DB.Here's a laugh the access speed of the 10MB HD on this machine was 156ms. That's about 2 ms slower than a 5.25" floppy disk.Then a 286 with 20 seagate 20mb HD and a 1200 baud modem and windows 3.1Then .....well that's enough. Today I use a self built E8400 with an ASUS MB and 4GB RAM and a couple of 500GB drives. Phew! what a trip.First computer I worked on was analog. EX-16 for the F-8A Crusader. First Digital was a Univac 1108 mainframe. I'm scaring myself, gotta go take some Metamucil or something. hehe

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  • 1 year later...

Well, if I didn't post already. I started off using the family Tandy 1000 EX with an interal 5.25" 360K drive, an extermal 3.5" 720K disk, and the track-fed dot-matrix printer (black and while). It had DOS 2.11, GW Basic, and Tandy's Deskmate suite with a mono and then later the 16 color CGA. My lastest build is a well loaded Phenom II x6 1090T. And several others. I do have a P75MHz w/ Win 3.11 (and yes, I can still surf the web with it.)

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State of the art stuff for me way back in 2004. Cost me a whooping £0.01. Notice the hi-tech cordless keyboard integrated with the tv remote.

An folk wonder how I became a computer wizard :hysterical:

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Guest LilBambi

Want some fun, go back to read the whole thread and check out where so many of us started. :lol:

 

My entry was here.

Edited by LilBambi
Added link to my entry earlier in this topic
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  • 7 years later...

I feel old. I was cleaning out my pre-production room today and came across some Pentium III boards. Coincidentally, a first-year hardware course was running so I handed one off to the instructor to show his students the pinnacle of computer hardware from 25 years ago!

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V.T. Eric Layton

Yeah, memories of tweaking an 8085 and Z80 comes to mind. My first actual desktop was a 486. The first one I actually surfed the WWW with was a Pentium I back in 2000. I was a latecomer to the WWW. I was cruising BBS's back in the early 80s on a Commodore SX-64, though. Fun daze! 😎

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I remember when I was a philosophy undergrad at McGill in 1993 we had to apply to the Computer Science Department to get an e-mail account. By doing that allowed one to use a modem to dial-in to their SLIP modem-bank to get an Internet connection. I had to use a DOS and then Windows 3.1 terminal emulator to check my e-mail. Then I would then browse their WAIS for links to information. I might then use Veronica and Gopher to search for and download files from FTP servers. It all seems so arcane now.

 

Sometime in 1994 I read an article in WIRED magazine about something called the World Wide Web and this amazing piece of software called Mosaic. When I returned to school in the fall I went back to the computer science department and asked them how do I get on the World Wide Web. They quite happily gave me a floppy diskette with some software called SPRY AirMosaic. It installed something called a TCP/IP stack into my Windows 3.1 system and a web browser that was a re-branded Mosaic. At that point I knew CompuServe was doomed. :bye2:

 

I also realized my two year-old 386-DX wasn't gonna cut it so I started looking for deals on a 486 and started my foray into building my own systems for the next 15 years.

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V.T. Eric Layton

Gopher was already gone by the time I got on the WWW, but the University (I forget which) still had the entire database that was accessible online back in 2000. I'm pretty sure it's probably gone these days.

 

USENET was my big fun time when I first came online in 2000.

 

It all sounds archaic because it is. ;)

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USENET. Ah, yes, the earliest form of social media. There was a notorious murder trial happening in Toronto in 1994 which had a media ban. I was on USENET reading first-hand accounts from spectators, commentaries, etc surrounding the particulars.

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I can remember on-line banking in 1995. I asked for and received special software from my bank. Once installed, it dialed out to the bank's modem, connected, and downloaded new activity in your account since your last visit. Seems to me it uploaded activity too, but I can't remember what. I don't think they were doing on-line bill pay then, but I don't know what else would have been uploaded. Shoot--I'm old too and my memory's going!

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I first got online with Prodigy, which had its own proprietary connection protocols. After Prodigy left Canada, I signed on with a local ISP, took hours to download Internet Explorer for Windows 98. I was screaming along at 56K with a dial-up Winmodem. My daughter went to the University of Guelph, got a T1 Ethernet connection and blew me away. Now 200 Mbps seems slow at times. Go figure.

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  • 3 months later...
securitybreach
On 9/26/2019 at 12:41 AM, Peachy said:

USENET. Ah, yes, the earliest form of social media. There was a notorious murder trial happening in Toronto in 1994 which had a media ban. I was on USENET reading first-hand accounts from spectators, commentaries, etc surrounding the particulars.

 

And now it has went full circle. Usenet/nzbs have now replaced torrents as the preferred way to pirate. It's no longer newgroups and such but they are now sites that look like torrent sites but host NZBs instead. Basically you pay for usenet access and then use a client to download the files. I use usenetserver.com along with sabnzbd (client).

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securitybreach

NZB is an XML-based file format for retrieving posts from NNTP servers. The format was conceived by the developers of the Newzbin.com Usenet Index. NZB is effective when used with search-capable websites. These websites create NZB files out of what is needed to be downloaded. Using this concept, headers would not be downloaded hence the NZB method is quicker and more bandwidth-efficient than traditional methods

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZB

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Cluttermagnet

It was fun to go back and read all the original posts. Mine appears on
Page 3. Basically my first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 and my
first 'real' computer was a 486-66 running Windows 95. Got a lot of
good use out of that slow moving box... P II and Win 98 was much
better, and by the time I had my first Pentium 4 box I was fairly
satisfied with the speed and capabilities of a desktop PC. It's only
gotten better since then!

Clutter

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  • 2 months later...

You guys go waay back. I got my first computer maybe 14 years ago, I don't even know its specs. My mothers friend was buying basic computers for her business, but it did not work out so she just gave us one, I was around 8, but I could be mistaken. Yet I remember clearly, my brother installing me Dragon Ball Z : Mugen, a 2D fighting game and later on CS 1.6. I remember that bad boy being so loud that we could not play it on later hours just because it would wake up our mom ahaha.  Those were the days. 

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Some of us go all the way back to IBM 360s, FORTRAN, punch cards, job control lots,dot matrix printing. All that means is that we are older than dirt. We've learned a lot...and most of it doesn't apply anymore.

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7 hours ago, raymac46 said:

Some of us go all the way back to IBM 360s, FORTRAN, punch cards, job control lots,dot matrix printing. All that means is that we are older than dirt. We've learned a lot...and most of it doesn't apply anymore.

 

😄  Yup.  And Cobol and BAL.

Edited by Ed_P
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On 4/15/2020 at 7:48 AM, raymac46 said:

Some of us go all the way back to IBM 360s, FORTRAN, punch cards, job control lots,dot matrix printing. All that means is that we are older than dirt. We've learned a lot...and most of it doesn't apply anymore.

Ah, yes, I remember those days well. Some of us go back even further:

IBM 1130

My first tech-related job was keypunch at an engineering and construction company using FORTRAN on an IBM 1130.

 

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I remember a 200 statement program I wrote in FORTRAN that would not compute, no matter how many times I checked the logic. A friend discovered I had punched one statement out of alignment by starting it in the comment field. All he did was look at the deck under a bright light where the misaligned card was obvious.

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