The old days......

[Jingo Jaden]

Any of you remember when haveing several 100 kilobytes was considered to be extremely modern? Any of you have a old computer experiense you want to talk about?

My first computer experiense was with an Amiga I think. Now it is so long ago that it is hard to remember, but I think haveing a few megabytes was very modern at that time. The OS pretty much lacked any form of color other than blue in terms of background, but the folders and such where there. Also some very, very old games, that where actualy pretty fun at that time. Any of you remember the old days with the computers, and how modern you got the feeling that the computers where then? If so care to share your story?

[blkmage]

My first computer was a DOS box. Windows couldn't be installed on it, it was that old. So as a result, I had some exposure to the command line for a long time, until around the year 2000, when I got with the times and got a box that could run Windows 3.1.

[creed4]

my first computer was a 486 slc man I was happy when I upgraded to a dx4, at that time getting a math co processor was good.

[EricTheFred]

I was the only kid in my school with a computer in the house (check my age to see how that could be possible.) For a while, my father and his friend were trying to run a data processing company out of our basement. We had a Computer Automation minicomputer (more-or-less the same thing as a PDP-11). It had magnetic core memory, a paper-tape reader for boot-up, and that marvel of modern technology an Eight Inch Floppy drive!!!

Really. I'm not kidding. This was in 1975, by the way. I wrote my first computer programs on this antique, in good old-fashioned Basic.

My first computer that I actually owned myself was an 8086-based XT. I upgraded to a 386 a couple years later, and had my first online account on that (using a modem dial-in service called "Prodigy".)

[Kaligraphic]

I started on a Commodore 64. The command line also let me write stuff in BASIC. Later on, we used the monitor for NES output.

[Mithrandir]

We had a Computer Automation minicomputer (more-or-less the same thing as a PDP-11). It had magnetic core memory, a paper-tape reader for boot-up, and that marvel of modern technology an Eight Inch Floppy drive!!!

Really. I'm not kidding. This was in 1975, by the way. I wrote my first computer programs on this antique, in good old-fashioned Basic.

You cut your programming teeth on a CA mini?

You win.

[Kenshin17]

My first computer that was mine and mine alone was an old Compaq laptop.

I mean old.

This sucker had a 33 mhz processor, 2 megs of RAM (I think...might have been less), a 40 MEGABYTE hdd (Windows 3.1 messured it in kilobytes) and a black and white LCD.

This sucker was so old it didn't have a built in mouse of any kind.

However....We have an old Apple II and I used to game on that sucker a lot, I even got a book and programmed a bit on it. Copied a couple of cool programs from the book and made them work. Also played around a bit with writing my own programs...so yeah my first exsposer to programming was on that Apple II, I think it was Basic...

Oh that Apple II had dual 5.25 inch floppy drives and NO hdd, no clue on the other specs...though my dad did replace the green monitor with a color screen.

[Shao Feng-Li]

At school we had these ancient Macs. Green lines for graphics. (At home I could have been watching dad play Quake 2 though). I remember playing Fury 3, Hellbender and Kid Pix.

We have some old laptops here... well had. We've taken apart most of them. There's one left and it still works fine and I think the HDD has gigabytes of some sort.

[Ingemar]

My first computer was an Amiga. The dern thing didn't even had a hard drive. There was one available as an option, with a whopping storage capacity of 20 MB.

[Mithrandir]

I guess my first actual computer I coded on was an old Apple II. I was so young that I don't remember what kind it was. I could probably go look it up, if I wasn't so lazy. The first computer I had of my own was either an old Apple IIgs or an old 8086 box (neither had a HD or even a meg of RAM).

[Shao Feng-Li]

How did you store anything without a HD? Floppy disk?

[uc pseudonym]

Memory is a funny thing. I question the actual value of high definition, but people seem wild about it and I think they can keep increasing resolution quite a bit. Also, certain procedures seem to absorb more memory than seems reasonable. I recently discovered that in a decent evening of writing the computer makes 15+ megs of backups.

[righteous_slave]

My mom was (still is) a teacher, so once our tiny little school got Apple IIe's in the classrooms, I got to toy around on those after school. I remember the little BASIC programs to make smiley faces and the like. Eventually we bought a IIc for home, and I did more of the same. Too bad I didn't stick with learning coding.

[Alexander]

Ahhh, my grandma's Apple II.

When I was six I played paint on it all the time. That's all I did, but I thought it was amazing.

And I'm young for the computer age! XD

[termyt]

My first computer was an Adam - made by Coleco. It had two - that's right 2 - tape drives in it and a decent word processor. But I mostly played games on it like Buck Rodgers.

My second was a Tandy 8088. It had two floppy drives so you could leave the OS in at all times - much less flipping floppies that way. But it became the bomb when I got that 20 meg harddrive - 20 MEGS! Man, how would I ever fill up that much free space?

[EricTheFred]

You cut your programming teeth on a CA mini?

You win.

I sometimes feel like my obituary will read like those I remember as a kid. Back then, if someone in their nineties or so passed on, the paper would say something like, "He was born before telephones or phonographs or automobiles, and before he died, Man had walked on the moon."

You don't really think about it, but it's amazing how things change. A conversation I had a few years back with my kid went something like this:

Kid: Dad, what kind of games did you have when you were a kid?

Me: Well, we played things like Monopoly and Rook and Checkers, or we'd go out and throw a ball around...

Kid: No, I mean like video games.

Me: ...

Kid: Dad?

Me: Well, a buddy of mine down the street had this thing called 'Pong'...

[creed4]

pong, I told I was setting up an Attari 2600 at 3 yrs old