Old School Computers

[Loki]

In celebration of the fact that I am older than the World Wide Web, I thought I'd start this thread.

 

What was the first computer you owned? Not games console, actual computer.

 

For me it was this:

 

 

Compaq Portable 3

 

An early portable, but not really laptop, though it packed away into this neat luggable size:

 

 

It has a 286 processor, 640k of RAM, and a red monochrome screen. It booted like this.

 

 

 

I played Indianapolis 500 in glorious monochrome and wrote shit essays. It was the bomb.

 

 

A friend of mine relayed a great story to me. He works for a software company, and they were moving offices this month. The secretary, who's 19, found something behind a cabinet and held it up saying "What's this?"

 

 

She had genuinely never seen one before.

[Halitosis Romantic]

First computer I had was the good old Spectrum 48k+ (the one without the rubber keys).

 

Oh, and I was astounded to see a submission on someone's desk from a relatively major sci fi writer - hard copy, and floppy disk, with another for images.

[Richie]

We had a lovely Commodore 16

I spent far too long as a 9 year old play x-zap and Punchy.

 

The first PC I owned was a 486-DX2, I got it in 1993 after leaving college, it had 400mb of hard-drive space and 8mb of ram. You'd have to boot step it for certain games to load as you didn't want too many non essential things running and clogging up the masses of ram. It ran windows 3.1.1 and that came on something like 12 3.5inch floppy discs.

[Loki]

Yeah, not Speccys and C64s lads, as we know we all just played games on them I mean a PC, or possibly Apple, something you bought or were bought with the intent of doing work on it.

[Steve Justice]

We had a lovely Commodore 16

I spent far too long as a 9 year old play x-zap and Punchy.

 

Exactly what I had. Kick Start and some primitive version of Paint were mostly played on mine.

[Halitosis Romantic]

Yeah, not Speccys and C64s lads, as we know we all just played games on them I mean a PC, or possibly Apple, something you bought or were bought with the intent of doing work on it.

 

I used to make all sorts of patterns with the color blocks

 

Well, in that case, it was a brick of laptop, couldn't even recall what make or model. My mate Ollie accidentally killed the fan on it, and it used to give me shocks when I touched the bar to open it.

[Rey_Piste]

My first computer was this bad boy.

The Mattel Aquarius, a computer considered to be underpowered when it was released in 1983. This secton from Wikipedia is most telling.

Aquarius was announced in 1982 and finally released in June 1983, at a price of $160. Production ceased four months later because of poor sales.

I had the RAM pack and the paddles, so it looked likle this.

I wanted a Speccy and instead got this for christams in 85, I was still really happy with it though, since it had some good clones of popular games like Space Invaders and Pac Man on it.

[Tim Healys Chutney Spoon]

I remember using those sluggish BBC computers at school. Christ they were good for their time......

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

[Richie Freebird]

At the risk of sounding like a fresh faced young whippersnapper, the first computer I owned was a beautiful Amiga 1200 (though my lack of owning any previous computers was due to my family being poor). I did play a bit of Speccy at my next door neighbor

[Halitosis Romantic]

My mate's dad had us going for years, claiming that he'd originated both Grannie's Garden, and the BBC Micro adaptation of George's Marvellous Medicine. When I questioned this, he said that he'd been gypped out of it in the pub one night, got pissed and signed over the rights. I don't think I even believed him aged six.

[patiirc]

First PC type effort we had was a 486 Re-conned Toshiba going cheap from my mum's old work in around 1996 or so.

 

Windows 3.11 and the Halycyon days of Premier Manager 3/Champ Manager 2 followed when they came out.

 

Many of my mates were into their computing and there were several who were early adopters to the P2 after switching up from their Amiga 4000's just before they went to University

 

The first home computer we had was the C16+4 which was lovely, so cracking games on it. Used to type in games from those Osbourne Manuals. they werent great, but there was some satisfaction of creating your own text adventure et al

[gmoney]

Our first home pc had a 5 1/2 inch and 3 1/2 inch floppy drives, and some sort of tape drive that took these bad boys:

 

[Your Fight Site]

Can't remember the exact model as I was about three when my parent got rid of it, but it was tape-loaded and remember playing Q*bert on it. Next one after that was a Compaq machine loaded with Windows 3.1.

[Richie Freebird]

Can't remember the exact model as I was about three when my parent got rid of it, but it was tape-loaded and remember playing Q*bert on it. Next one after that was a Compaq machine loaded with Windows 3.1.

 

Could have been quite a few things, that. Possibly an Amstrad / C64 or Speccy?

 

There was even a tape adapter out for the Atari 2600, which definitely had Q*Bert, though the system, itself looked more like a Darth Vader inspired piece of furniture than a computer.

[air_raid]

I marked out the first time I came upon a 5 inch floppy disc. I felt slightly giant. Our first was some shit 386/486 that ran a word processor called QA, before we progressed Windows 3.1. I hated '95 in comparison for a while. Where the fuck is File Manager?? We also had Microsoft QBasic which my mate programmed to create a rudimentary Space Invaders. He was a fucking genius, he somehow created a similar one on our Casio Scientific calculators which certainly brightened up A-Level maths.

 

I got a D in the end.