Retro Computing Memories

[e_lion_1]

so, I thought it would be neat to see who has used what over the last short/long while. I started with computers at school - an Apple IIe to be exact. Hmmm Apple Basic....hmmmm...kermit....posting on the world wide web via a BBS through a 2400 buad modem on a green monochrome monitor...ATDT....5 1/2" floppy disks....640K of RAM....

 

What's really odd - for the mundane computing tasks I find myself going to a green or orange terminal (or xterm) on either of my tower units...

 

Where'd everyone else start?

[Alexia]

Magnavox 286 12mhz with 32mb hard drive. I forget the rest of the specfifications.

[Smoken Joe]

Apple at school too. Yea one that actually had floppy floppy drives. command line games with no pics. The first home computer was a 486 if I rember correctly firt on the block with a modem and a X2 CD reader. My pop still uses that computer he doesnt turn it of either it takes too long to boot up.

[red930]

Sanyo 1500 CPM machine with dual 5.25" floppies and 64K of RAM. Ran my business on that thing for two years.

 

NEC color computer with 8088 processor. 256K of RAM and a COLOR composit output.

 

IBM PC 5150. Still runs to this day. 10MB hard drive(that's megabytes).

[Luc@z]

Our first home computer was an Atom which took cartridges and tapes. I loved that thing. Used to play Grog's Adventure and Buck Rogers on it all the time. One of the tapes had some word processor on it, but I was about 5 at the time so I never had use for that.

[southmine]

We didn't have computers when I was in school,(yeah, I'm that old )

but when my kid brother brought home a Vic 20, we played the adventure games on cartridges that plugged into the back, for hours and hours at a time. Go north, go east, go south, open door. Still have all the maps I drew by hand.

Every now and then I check EBay for one in mint condition. I think it'd be cool to have one sitting beside my current machines, just to show how far we've come (and to see if I could finally get that damned tape drive to work).

[Vista]

Most evil hack, there was a program for the Commodore 1541 "Intelligent" 5.25" floppy drive that would cause it to eerily whine out the song "Daisy" by oscillating the r/w head at audible frequencies. The cool thing was that the program was resident on your floppy drive CPU and RAM. Of course your head alignment was probably whacked after that, but all C64 users were use to field stripping and performing head realignment by that point.

 

Also the Poke of Death for the Commdore PET.. you could walk up to a PET, type in a few characters at the prompt, and BAM! The video chip would shut down and the CPU would spiral OC upwards out of control until it burned up (literally, smoke coming out of the housing).

[cpuz]

TRS 80

[Skip04]

Tandy 1000 for me.

http://www.oldskool.org/shrines/pcjr_tandy

The Tandy 1000 and 1000 HD are actually slightly *slower* than 4.77MHz -- my testing shows them at about 4.6 MHz

[cronocrash]

apple2e's at school 386dx2 at home hooked ever since.

i remember reading or doing homework while waitin to boot or sign on.

[Shinobi]

My first computer experience was the Sinclair ZX81, which had about 1k of memory But they did do a 16k upgrade pack lol.

Spent a lot of time on my mates Commodore Vic20 too when i was about 4years old.

 

My own first home computer was a Sinclair Spectrum 48k. These were HUGE here in the UK and were the main gaming systems for years... Its where a lot of the big gaming developers started off, developing games for the Spectrum, Rare and Codemasters being a couple of them... That was the time of the Bedroom Programmer.

 

When i was at school we did our IT GCSE's on BBC-B's

One classic game was made on and for the BBC-B, Elite.

[Angry_Games]

Commodore64

 

i spent almost a year straight playing Bard's Tale III

 

then i found the best game of ALL TIME...

 

Wasteland

 

to this date, the ONLY other game that has ever come close to being as good as Wasteland is Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis (SNES version sucked so badly)