| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/16/2006 7:37:10 AM | The very first computer I ever owned was a small black box with a chicklet keyboard and a cassette tape for a data drive, whopping 4K of memory...
I pretty much cut my teeth on a neighbors Atari 800, then in 1994 as a Freshman dumped the majority of my savings on the ORIGINAL mac: 128 K and the first commercial 3.5" hard shell floppy mech w/ 12" B&W screen...still have it...though the powersupply (I think) went bad--wouldn't start when I dragged it out of storage. Also bought the Color Imagewriter II that day.
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/16/2006 4:24:52 PM | Sinclair ZX81
Firmware: 3.25 MHz Zilog Z80A CPU 8K ROM, 1K RAM externally expandable to 64K (56K usable)
Display: 24 lines x 32 character text display Monochrome only
Sound: None
I/O: Z80 bus, 250 baud cassette interface, UHF television out
Storage: External cassette recorder
oh how we have grown. | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/16/2006 8:25:24 PM | A commodore 64. I have never felt a personal connection with any computer since that one. Some people might not understand that this was my most precious posession, for years. That computer took six months of work, as a fourteen year old, delivering classified papers, to pay for the Commodore 64, which I bought at Canadian Tire. I would put it away in its original styrofoam and cardboard packaging every night when I was finished with it. I got the "programmer's reference guide" for the Commodore 64, and memorized everything in it. In those days, there was so little to know, that you could become an expert in your computer's hardware internals. These days, few professional software developers even know how all the stuff inside their computer works, in theory, let alone in every last detail.
Maybe somebody who worked on their first car, and knew every little thing about that car would understand what that is like. Maybe somebody who flew a plane, and knew every bolt and every nut, every part of that plane, and how it worked, how to fly it and fix it, would understand it.
I should never have gotten rid of it, My Commodore 64, my first love. But I cheated on it with an Epson Equity 1. I'm sorry Commodore 64. The Equity 1 was an IBM PC compatible, with a 4.77 mhz 8086 processor, 640 kb of RAM, and a 20 meg hard disk. Hard disk. Can you ever forgive me, my Commodore 64? I guess not.
My current computer has enough ram to hold over thirty thousand commodore 64's worth of information in memory at once, and can do mathematical operations eight thousand times faster than the commodore 64. What would I have thought if I saw what computers would be like in 2006, back in 1983? But it's a commodity PC. It's a grunt, a beast of burden. I feel no connection to it, it has no importance.
FroggyWoggle | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/17/2006 3:49:00 AM | Firmware: 3.25 MHz Zilog Z80A CPU
I'd originally said my Sinclair (actually a TS1000) had a 1Mhz Z80 processor but then I saw your post. You're right about the 3.25Mhz, but the CPU was a Zilog clone; specifically, the NEC µPD780C-1 CPU. Look it up on Wikipedia.
I swear, that little computer was instrumental in breaking up my first marriage. In fact, she threw it out on the front lawn along with all my other stuff and it got rained on & ruined. Heh. | |
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WNC8
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Joined: 11/17/2005
Msg: 181 | |
| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/17/2006 7:10:34 PM | My first:
sinclair ZX-81
1K RAM
Black & White (hooked up to a TV)
membrane (flat) keyboard
No sound
Cassette interface for storage (highly unreliable)
paid around $100
My, how times have changed! | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/18/2006 9:43:06 AM | | no clue but i remember the key board and the moniter were all one unit and all you could do was type in green on a different color green background | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/21/2006 4:45:12 PM | Atari 800
it connected to the TV and even used an audio tape deck as a storage drive!
i remember there was one game i had on tape that took 30 mins to load!...LOL
and it maxed out at i believe 48K of memory!
but i could play Star Raiders on it so i was happy! | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/21/2006 4:48:05 PM | | Lets seee. My first pc was my Brothers ZX Spectrum. Goodness what a machine that was... 3 hours to load a game from a tape. How old school can you get lol. | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/22/2006 2:26:41 AM | Commodore 64 --------------------------------IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
UNKNOWN (mostly 8086, 8088, Z-80, 6502 CPU) IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Texas Instruments TRS-80---------------------IIIIIIIIIIII
Commodore Vic 20-----------------------------IIIIIIIIIIII
Apple II (various)------------------------------IIIIIIIIIII
Timex Sinclair (various models)-----------------IIIIIIII
486 (Various brand)----------------------------IIIIIIII
386 (various brand)----------------------------IIIIIII
Atari Pre ST models (400, 800)-----------------IIIIIII
286 (various brand)----------------------------IIIIII
Pentium Class (66-233 MHz)--------------------IIIII
Pentium Later (500 MHz +)---------------------IIIII
Texas Instruments (various, not TRS-80)--------IIIII
T1 99/4A--------------------------------------IIIII
IBM PS2---------------------------------------III
Commodore (other; 128, PET)------------------III
Brother ZX Spectrum--------------------------III
Altair-----------------------------------------III
ATARI ST-------------------------------------II
Macintosh (various)---------------------------II
Osborne--------------------------------------II
Not a computer (etch-a-sketch, webTV)-------II
BBC Micro-------------------------------------I
Radio Shack DIY-------------------------------I
Coleco Adam----------------------------------I
ORIC------------------------------------------I
ENIAC-----------------------------------------I
KIM I------------------------------------------I
MINIVAC---------------------------------------I
Commodore Amiga------------------------------I
UNIVAC I---------------------------------------I
Acorn Atom------------------------------------I | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/22/2006 7:46:09 PM | Power Mac 6100/66, 8 megs of RAM, later upgraded to 24 megs. 350 meg hard drive, System 7.5
Of course, that was the first computer that Dad brought home for me. I used an Apple II and programmed in BASIC starting around 1st grade.
I miss Speedway Math and Odell Lake, but am kind of afraid to get them running through an emulator - somehow I doubt they'd still have their appeal.
Later on I bought my own Windows PC, a Pentium 200, then got a Power Mac 8500, then a graphite iBook, then a Pismo Powerbook, then an iMac lamp, then a Powerbook G4 667, then an iBook 800, then a Powerbook 1.0, then a Powerbook 1.33, and now a Powerbook 1.67. Corporate is sending me a seed unit black MacBook on June 1. :-P | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/26/2006 1:59:15 PM | @VeryPrivate: Now I feel really old.
Okay, prepare to feel younger
Sinclair MK14 with ½k ROM Monitor, 256 bytes RAM (yes, that's bytes), Red LED seven segment display, 20 key keyboard and reset switch. Clock speed ? 4Mhz
Oh, and build it yourself | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/26/2006 4:18:30 PM | now i did NOT own this "computer" but i did have to use it!....
anyways, back in junior high school in the late 70s we took a "computer class". and believe me, we are not talking about computers like we are talking about now!...LOL
there was the big old computer in the class and it had no monitor display at all. i think it was made by Olivetti. what you had to do was take punch cards and punch them in to form mathematical equations and then feed them through this machine and see if you did it right. i really have no idea how it worked exactly but i do recall the punch card thingy...LOL
i remember the highlight of the class was when some kid brought in their Tandy computer for all of us to gawk at!...LOL... and i think someone also brought in an Apple II but i can't be absolutely certain. this would have been about 1978 and i am not sure if the Apple was out then or not.
anyways, this thread does bring back a lot of memories! | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/26/2006 5:06:23 PM | Power Mac 6100/66, 8 megs of RAM, later upgraded to 24 megs. 350 meg hard drive, System 7.5 I had one of those! Pizza box model. My best friend's ex wife threw it away. Great little computer. Never had a single problem with it, other than it not being able to defend itself from a witch. Upgraded it a bit. It had a 2 gig hard disk, OS 8.5, and 32 megs of sim ram (seems like it might have had additional ram on board...can't remember). It might have had OS 9.0 on it (I can't remember). I used it to build my first website (back when that was slightly unusual).
i remember the highlight of the class was when some kid brought in their Tandy computer for all of us to gawk at!...LOL... and i think someone also brought in an Apple II but i can't be absolutely certain. this would have been about 1978 and i am not sure if the Apple was out then or not. They were rare (Apple II) but they existed back then. | |
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rowlie
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Joined: 5/18/2006
Msg: 193 | |
| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/29/2006 12:21:39 PM | | Had a ZX Speccie then a ZX + 2 Speccie.Then an Atari ST, later a ST 1040, then a 386, then a pentium 2, followed by a pentium 3 amd now this Pent 4 Dogs B*******S thing. Still have the 1040. An old and trusted friend that one is! | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 5/31/2006 11:15:32 PM | The very first computer I ever had was a 486DX2 with Windows 3.11 and DOS...I can't remember anymore than that, because it was atleast 10 years ago.
The first computer I ever bought for myself is the one I'm using right now.
It's a Seanix with a 2 GHz AMD Athlon 3200+ (64 bit) with 1 GB DDR RAM, 160 GB HDD and 128 MB nVidia FX5200. I've since added a second harddrive (80 GB), a new videocard (256 MB 6800GT), an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard, and just today increased the RAM to 2 GB. The big harddrive is for Windows XP Home, while the second is for playing around with other OS's...so far I've only tried a few types of Linux; the current flavour of Linux is SUSE 10.0. | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 6/1/2006 5:50:44 PM | The first computer that I owned was the original IBM PC (that a Charlie Chaplin look-alike introduced to the world). I got it in 1987. It had 256K (yes that's K) of RAM, and 2 5-1/4 inch floppy drives. There was no hard drive. I got a color monitor adaptor and Mitsubichi monitor, think it was VGA. It ran PC-DOS and I used a program called Kermit to dial-up to the mainframe at work. It saved me many, many trips to work evenings or nights.
The first computer I worked on (in 1970) was an IBM 360 Model 65. I had the good fortune to be hired as a computer operator trainee and that machine was our pride and joy. I worked on mainframes for 31 years, retired in 2001. | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 6/2/2006 5:48:50 AM | @NasaArmstrong: 48k spectrum man that was awesome
48K.. wow ! that was just a twinkle in my bank manager's eye !! And talking of 'specs', some of those early displays were so small, that's waht you needed to see them | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 6/2/2006 12:29:19 PM | First computer I ever remember:
Vic 20.
First computer I ever used on a regular basis:
IBM 286. I think it had a 20 megabyte hard drive. 640k memory. 4 color display. PC speaker sound (until I threw an Ad Lib sound card in it later).
First computer I ever bought:
My current Athlon 64 system. $1000.
(The others were gifts for a starving high school/college student that IN NO WAY had $3000 to blow on a computer at any point during the last decade. Hehe.) | |
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| What was the specs of your first computer??
Posted: 6/2/2006 9:13:25 PM | First for me was an Apple ][e. 128K RAM dual 5.25" floppies.
Though the first I had on the internet was an IBM 3151 Dumb Terminal plugged into a modem. No mouse, no floppies, no harddrive, only a ROM with the programming to talk to a serial device. You dialed into a unix or VM box and used that. | |
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