Think back... I mean, WAAAAAAY back...

...to the first time you sat down and fired up a computer...

How long ago was it? A year? Five? Ten? More?

What brand was it?

What were the specs on that wonder of technology?

My first computer, contrary to what some here may believe, was NOT an abacus...

It was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I can't even begin to remember what all the tech specs were for it... I'm sure I could Google it to find out, but that defeats the purpose in this case... But I did anyways... Check out this wonder of early 1980's technology HERE

What I do remember is that you had to hook it up to your TV (tuned to channel 3 or 4), load programs, games, and apps via a tape drive, and if it failed to load, you had to rewind and try again, waiting for another 5-10 (or more) minutes... It had a memory add-on module of a whopping 16K... A total footprint of about 16"x12", and all the games were written in BASIC, and played out on your TV screen in ASCII-based "graphics"...

Living overseas, telephone rates to call "home" to the 'States were astronomical, even with my parents' income translated into the local currency to the tune of a small fortune... So we called a friend who had a HAM radio, who knew a guy with another HAM radio near our family/relatives, and they called local, then the whole thing went out phone-radio-phone... Took some doing with time zones, but we made it work... Also where I got used to using "OVER" well before my time in the Army...

That was about, oh, lemme think... 25, 26 years ago... Damn, how time flies and technology advances...

Flash forward to the present... I'm piddling around on a C2D laptop, with 1440x900-resolution graphics, 2GB of DDR2 memory, 240 GIGABytes of hard drive storage, playing games that take up gigabytes of hard drive space, Instant Messaging my wife at her job, Skyping to tell my daughter "Good Night, Boo" face-to-face (sorta), checking my email, and posting nonsensical ramblings about tech nostalgia from halfway around the world...

I wonder when I'll look back and think that what we have now is TRULY for the dinosaurs...

Later!

I had some friends in the USAF that had computers in the early 80's. They were
playing games off of cassette tapes.I wasn't really impressed though I remember
playing a Mario type game. My 1st computer was a Commadore128, actually it
was my brothers but I used it like I owned it. My next PC was a Treasure Chest
386DX16/40. It ruled with a 1x CD/ROM :-)

Commodore 64...and I remember being baffled because it didn't have an "Enter" key but rather a "Return" key.

Commodore Vic-20

Had a cartridge slot in the rear and an external cassette tape drive.

Commodore VIC-20 computer

I used to play omega race for hours.. :-/

YouTube - Boray plays some Omega Race

Shatner is cool, lol YouTube - Commodore Vic-20 commercial

Paradroid was one of my favorite commdore 64 game. It had line of sight, ai, and a great sense of exploration. The reprogramming minigame was a cool way of up-leveling by chassis swapping.

YouTube - Paradroid - Commodore 64

My first computer was an IBM 8086. I don't recall the stats off hand, but I remember the RAM booting up in Kilobytes. I remember my early gaming days including "Zork: The Underground Empire" (Still one of my all-time favorites) and Depth Charge when the Hercules Graphics Card became available.

I remember adding a Math Coprocessor to my 386 to be able to play DarkLands...

I remember playing some of the first graphical games there were...

Hell, I even remember having Pac Man fever...

Flash forward...

I just bought "Chakan" for my Sega Genesis for $1.00 on Amazon.com auctions... just got it today... I've been wanting to play that game since I was like 13.

Learned Basic (can't remember any of it) on an Apple IIC with tape drive, Still have a functional Apple IIE with color and a 5 inch floppy drive, a IIGS with dual 5 inch floppies (where in the world is carmen san diego). My first PC (roughly 1996) was a used Compaq with an intel dx2 running 16mhz, windows 3.1, 256 color, and a cd drive (maybe 5x).

Magnetbox 386/16. 40M hard disc, 1M memory, and the highly underrated GeoWorks environment. I recall it took like a year to learn how to start at DOS so I could run Railroad Tycoon off of three 360k discs.

Quote: Originally Posted by vf1000ride Learned Basic (can't remember any of it) on an Apple IIC with tape drive

We (meaning my Dad, as he so eloquently put it, He with the Gold makes the Rules) upgraded to a //c a couple years down the road, but I seem to remember it had a built-in 5" floppy drive... Regardless, that was the last Apple-branded computer I would ever "own"...

In college, I had a choice of using a Mac or a PC to do my essays and whatnot on, and the PCs were usually easier to get on at the computer banks in the library... Destiny, fate, blind luck, even...

As for BASIC...

10 PRINT "Hello!"
20 PRINT " "
30 GOTO 10

(If I remember, it makes "Hello!" flash up in the top left corner of the screen, until you use the BREAK command...)

I got a bit more in-depth with programming in BASIC during my Computer Technology class in high school (eons ago, it feels like), but that was like one of the first little "programs" I had to come up with as an in-class assignment, and it stuck with me...

(wish we had a smilie for feeling older than DIRT...)

My favorite basic program.

10 PRINT "Home"
20 PRINT "Sweet"
30 GOTO 10

Quote: Originally Posted by GrandpaNoob72 We (meaning my Dad, as he so eloquently put it, He with the Gold makes the Rules) upgraded to a //c a couple years down the road, but I seem to remember it had a built-in 5" floppy drive... Regardless, that was the last Apple-branded computer I would ever "own"...

The IIc was basically a moderately well-configured IIe (with the 128k / 80-column card and one disc drive) in a small nonexpandable case. I've got one somewhere, but I lack the 5.25" floppies of MECC games it needs.

Quote: In college, I had a choice of using a Mac or a PC to do my essays and whatnot on, and the PCs were usually easier to get on at the computer banks in the library... Destiny, fate, blind luck, even...

When I went to college, it was the last year the public labs had three computer choices: Windows-based Dell PII-PIII boxes, gumdrop iMacs, and HP X-terminals connected to a big PA-RISC box. My Unix know-how let me skip the queues and go straight to an X-terminal, many of which also featured enormous 20" screens. The queues for a Mac or a PC were 30 minutes typical, the Macs usually a bit shorter, so I'd usually get one of those.

They dropped the X terminals to provide more Dells the next year

Quote: As for BASIC... 10 PRINT "Hello!" 20 PRINT " " 30 GOTO 10 (If I remember, it makes "Hello!" flash up in the top left corner of the screen, until you use the BREAK command...)

Nope. Unless there was a "clear" character (i. e. Commodore style) in line 20, and even then perhaps not, you'd probably need a delay loop before and after line 20 to see flashing.

For an Apple II, I'd say:

10 HOME
20 FOR I=1 TO 500
30 NEXT I
40 PRINT "HELLO!"
50 FOR I=1 TO 500
60 NEXT I
70 GOTO 10

10 PRINT "Welcome to PCApex.com";
20 GOTO 10

I had something similar to what you had there HTRN, it was early 80's i believe.
Had a tape drive for it, to load games etc. Regular c60 or c90 cassettes.

Then in school i took "computer classes".
Well this how a normal 40minute computer class would look like:
You and your partner shared a vic64.
If you were lucky, you got your favorite game cassette first, if you were not so lucky, you had to wait until others had loaded it on their computers.
Lucky version: Loading the game 10min
Play the game for 15min
Your partner played for 15 min
Unlucky version: Others loading the game 10 mins
Us loading the game 10mins
Me playing for 10 mins
Partner playing for 10mins

And thats all we did in these classes, and thats why i put quotes around "computer classes".

My first PC was a Compaq Presario Desktop for 3k
Specs: Pentium MMX 166Mhz
16 Mb RAM
1Gb HDD
1Mb Graphics
I later bought another HDD - A Quantum fireball 5.1GB, another 16Mb RAM, and a S3 graphics card with a whopping 4Mb of memory.

I do remember insane phone bills - I once called a girl in California, she was there as an 'Au Pair'. Well i called her from a buddy's house, or rather his parents house. We talked for 3-4 hours, no biggie. 1 Month later, my mom get a call from my buddy's parents, they wanted her to pay for my $150 phone call.

When i first got internet, we paid per minute, like a regular phone call - my bills used to be in between 150 - 200 bucks. Few years later i got ADSL with 2 phone lines, could surf Al Gores invention at a whopping speed of 128kbs - paying double price for the 2 phone lines.

I remember downloading mp3's for hours - a piece.
Now i download an album in the same amount of time as it takes me to go take a leak and get a new beer.

The cellphones back then was about the size as a mini tower computer today.
The TV remote was a curtain rod, and we dubbed our cassettes at 2x the speed!

As I'm getting older, and slower, I'm glad the speed of computers and internet has increased, without it, i wouldn't remember what i had downloaded when it finally finished.

Quote: Originally Posted by GrandpaNoob72 We (meaning my Dad, as he so eloquently put it, He with the Gold makes the Rules) upgraded to a //c a couple years down the road, but I seem to remember it had a built-in 5" floppy drive... Regardless, that was the last Apple-branded computer I would ever "own"...

It may well have had one, this was computer class in like fifth or sixth grade. We used cassette tapes as they where still cheaper in those days than the 5 inch floppies. (taken with a grain of salt as that was a loooong time ago)

IBM 360 using punch cards.


Now get off my lawn!!! *shakes cane*

I don't know the exact brand or specs of the first one I used. But the computer took up an entire office room. The media was the size of a cake, had monichrome monitors around the office. Games, yep: "You are in a maze of twisted passages that all look alike."

The original Adventure game, in all it's green and black text only goodness.

Later on I got a Radio Shack Color Computer. Loading games from a tape recorder was SLOW... I am with you on this GrandpaNoob, what the heck will we have in 20 years?

E

WHO YOU CALLIN' LAST CENTURY BUBBA !!!


Commadore 64 - played a game that had a flying pirate ship in it , cant even remember the name. Also played a game that had surfing in it and "Wipe Out" as backround music. Up until about 10 yrs ago when it finally died , I'd turn it on and let it play the music for my babies to dance to , my girls loved it.

TI 99 - Dont remember the games , but they were all Dongons&Dragons type games

The Apple Macintosh Quadra 605 features a 25 MHz 68LC040 processor, 4 MB or 8 MB of RAM, and either an 80 MB, a 160 MB, or a 250 MB hard drive in a compact "pizza box" case. The consumer version of the Quadra 605 is the Performa 475 series, and the educational version is the LC 475.

Quote: Originally Posted by BeetleMan The cellphones back then was about the size as a mini tower computer today. The TV remote was a curtain rod, and we dubbed our cassettes at 2x the speed!

Back then you didn't have to worry about being mugged, you could just bludgeon the bastard to death with your brick of a phone!

As for games... I remember shooting hundreds of stupid animals in Oregon Trial and then the Austrialian knock-off version too. Lake O'Dell was pretty great too.

I remember downloading a 10MB game and it literally took 13hrs... I also remember the golden days of shareware...

the first computer i had was an old Radio Shack Tandy 1000 couldnt tell you what the specs were on it the year was 1984, i was in 4th grade, and all it was was a keyboard that you hooked up to the tv via rf switch it had an exturnal modem and a big program book that you could write programs with and even use turtle(which was cool at the time)

my dad liked because i made a program up that would pick his lotto numbers out for him, he won a few times with that also

man it was cheesey

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Official first - Commodore 128.

My real first (as in I purchased at the tender age of 14) - NEC Ready: Pentium 120, 8mb of EDO ram, 1.2 gig HDD, 8x(!!!!! most of my friends had 4x) optical drive and one of teh very first 56k modems

The first computer I remember using was my dad's old compaq that ran windows 3.1 and had a floppy drive. It was amazing because it had the coolest games of all time on it; Lode Runner and The Incredible Machine. It was great till I killed it. Still not sure how that happened. :S


After that there were a series of computers my uncle scrounged together for me until I was able to save up enough to get an HP with a Geforce 4(MX!) and an AMD Athlon 2800 for $500. That lasted me for about 3 years and was probably one of my favorite computers of all times. Then the hard drive finally died after clattering itself to pieces for over a year and I made the jump to AM2, then a Pentium D and now a Core Duo laptop.