I was rambling through an old box in my office and found the receipt to my first computer. It was a Commodore 64, 8 bit 64 k memory with a screaming 1 MHz of speed!!! Bought it in late 1982. I remember waiting 10 to 15 minutes for one of my games to load up before I could play. The days when you wrote your own software and searched for others doing the same so you could swap.
IBM PC (an 8088 I think) with 10 MB hard drive and TWO, count 'em, TWO floppy disk drives, A: and B: (And the floppies were floppy then.) You'd boot up to a C: prompt and you'd better know at least the basic DOS commands. A really hot machine at the time.
mine was a 386 w/turbo! which brought it up to a blistering 33mhz i believe. man,we take those cd players for granted now,i had the 31/2 and 5'' floppy drvs. it would take it 15 min. to boot,then another 5 or so negotiating around win 3.1 the (50 lb.)hard drive blew out and at the time it cost so much to replace it,i saved my money and bought a new machine when win98 came out. (still using it)
Take Skull... Yep...same thing here. Couldn't do much with them, but those old text adventure games were the most fun you could have with a simple 'verb/noun' command... >What do you want me to do? Kill Troll >What do you want to kill 'troll' with? with sword >troll is killed. You see: >Bag of Gold >key >skull >What do you want me to do? take Gold ...and so on. It was like the Golden Age of Radio. The 'graphics' were all in your mind. At the time, it seemed magical.
Mine too.... finally got a Coco3 (Radio Shack Color Computer) and bought a hard drive for it. Taught myself programming on it and was "online" when it was ALL text based.
mine was a Packard He!! 386. I am still waiting for them to pay me the settlement for using used parts and setlling it as new. It came with a 2400 baud modem, 2mb of ram upgradable to 4mb. And i think the hard drive was a 10mb. It ran windows 3.1 and dos 5.0. it came with a 24pin epson printer and cost about $2.200.00
The first computer I ever built from scratch had a 20MB hard drive in it. Now I create files in AutoCAD that are bigger than that hard drive... amzing how technology has developed.
Same here, I saved up money to get it and thought I was really something when I got it. Packrat? You can probably throw that away. And probably alot of other stuff too.
TRS-80. Then moved up to the C-64 with 4 1541 floppy drives. Bought a CMD 20 meg hard drive for it for $800. Then moved to the C-128 and then a 286/12 The computer before the C-64 i believe was the Vic.
I actually have a Commodore 64 still in the box. I also have an external drive that goes with it. 5.25 drive to be exact. Worth anything these days??? Museum pieces?
I had one of the first Trash (TRS) 80's also. Mine had 4k of memory and an external tape drive. I also remember seeing my first PC when I was a sophmore in high school. We had 3 or 4 in the entire school! It had a 8" floppy, not that little 5 1/4". When I moved to NJ, we had Apple with external tape drives. In the Navy, I learned on main frames that you fed a paper tape into a reader. God! I'm old!
1st: Commodore C16 w/ backup tape drive 2nd: Commodore C64-C w/ dual 1541-C floppy drives 3rd: Packard Bell, P100, 8MB RAM. 1.2GB HDD 4th: Compaq Deskpro, PII 350, 256MB, 19G 5th: custom box (spent a little much, but bought lots of little parts and tools)
