Its probably an urban myth, but some say the average PC has more storage capacity than Nasa did when they went to the moon!
Your first computer
- Thread starter Miss Chicken
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Its probably an urban myth, but some say the average PC has more storage capacity than Nasa did when they went to the moon!
I had an Amstrad PCW, green screen, disk driven. Used 3" disks, until I managed to upgrade to a 3.5" drive, and eventually a colour printer.
People used to laugh at me for having a PCW, but I loved it, and I used it for years, I only bought a PC when the internet reared it's ugly head.
I still have my old Ammy somewhere...
People used to laugh at me for having a PCW, but I loved it, and I used it for years, I only bought a PC when the internet reared it's ugly head.
I still have my old Ammy somewhere...
Oh, that brings back memories... I got it later of course, but its probably the computer i used the most.
Rama and Santaman: My phone has 32gb memory. And my oldest machine has 19540bytes(!). Meaning i can write 19540 letters before the harddrive is full. I think i take the trekbbs record, yeah?
For now..
I like my old machines.
And an average graphical calculator has more processing power than the computers in the apollo spacecraft's.
IIRC, Apollo 11 topped out at 64K.
An Atari 800XL with external floppy drive and a "letter quality" printer - basically a noisy-ass automatic electric typewriter, but it did look more professional than dot-matrix!
The floppy was a brilliant piece of design. The drive mechanism used a pulley system and one side had no groove, so the rubber band would periodically slip off and you'd have to open it up to put it back on again. I had this happen after writing a 20+ page paper that I hadn't saved yet. Needless to say after having to completely re-write it I saved often!
Following year I had traded up to a friend's IBM 8086 with two dual-sided dual-density floppies - no more disk-flipping! I replaced one of them with a 3.5" floppy, but DOS didn't have drivers for that so it treated it like a high-capacity 5.25", meaning I could only write 1.2MB to it.
Ah, memories.
The floppy was a brilliant piece of design. The drive mechanism used a pulley system and one side had no groove, so the rubber band would periodically slip off and you'd have to open it up to put it back on again. I had this happen after writing a 20+ page paper that I hadn't saved yet. Needless to say after having to completely re-write it I saved often!
Following year I had traded up to a friend's IBM 8086 with two dual-sided dual-density floppies - no more disk-flipping! I replaced one of them with a 3.5" floppy, but DOS didn't have drivers for that so it treated it like a high-capacity 5.25", meaning I could only write 1.2MB to it.
Ah, memories.
^^ No drivers needed, XT's only ever supported Double Side /Double Density drives so you had to mess around with driveparm.. or a program called Biosptch... the latter could also modify the way how floppies were written so on a DS/DD drive you could actually safely write up to about 830Kb without too much problems, if you tried to write more than that some drives simply destroyed themselves which was bitch ass expensive in those days...
I started out saying firmware (meaning BIOS in this case), but changed it. Drivers are a modern solution to that issue, I forgot.
That was my computer until the mid-90s when I got a Sony Vaio which cured me of ever wanting to own a Windows computer again. I probably would have gone Linux, but Apple decided to make a consumer OS built on a BSD core and I've not looked back.
I had an 800XL, but never did get a drive. It always seemed unfair to me that tape-based fastloader compression techniques never became widespread (or indeed, available, IIRC) for the Atari as they did for the Spectrum and C64. Still, you could get the kettle on and rustle up some grub while it was loading.
^^ I've got an Atari 800XL with floppy drive and tape drive, a 65XE which is about the same machine but it looks more like the ST series, also I've got two ST's a 520 and a 1040ST..
I very much remember the floppy loading.. especially annoying if after 15 minutes an error popped up and you had to rewind and start all over and hope the %$@!@!! thing would correctly read the tape..
My brother and I started with an Atari 260 ST which had a PC card mounted so it ran (most) DOS programs, we traded it in for a Philips NMS 9100 8088 PC which had a 21Mb HDD, a 720K floppy drive and a wonderful Paradise 8 bit VGA graphics card.. we still have that machine, it works fine, those old XT's are incredibly reliable.
I very much remember the floppy loading.. especially annoying if after 15 minutes an error popped up and you had to rewind and start all over and hope the %$@!@!! thing would correctly read the tape..
My brother and I started with an Atari 260 ST which had a PC card mounted so it ran (most) DOS programs, we traded it in for a Philips NMS 9100 8088 PC which had a 21Mb HDD, a 720K floppy drive and a wonderful Paradise 8 bit VGA graphics card.. we still have that machine, it works fine, those old XT's are incredibly reliable.
My first was the original Macintosh 128k w/ no hard-drive. Just an external floppy to supplement the built-in floppy drive. I tend not to count it as my actual first, because it was so limited by not having any real drive-space.
My next was a 386 from Hyundai, w/ about 256k of RAM, and a whopping 20 meg hard-drive. (The drive took up two full bays, and when it came on, you could hear a dull "clunk" as the heads swung into place.)
And I swear they made the the case of the damn thing out of the same gauge steel as their cars, 'cause the bastard weighed a freakin' ton.
My next was a 386 from Hyundai, w/ about 256k of RAM, and a whopping 20 meg hard-drive. (The drive took up two full bays, and when it came on, you could hear a dull "clunk" as the heads swung into place.)
And I swear they made the the case of the damn thing out of the same gauge steel as their cars, 'cause the bastard weighed a freakin' ton.
Oooooh, how I fucking miss that sound!
I still have most of my computers..
This one is my first, I actually bought two of those, both are IBM PS/2 Model 30 machines, 8086, 640 Kb RAM 2x 720Kb floppy drives and no harddrive, I later on found one which had a 21Mb ESDI drive and an external 5.25" drive..
I've installed repaired and thrown away dozens of those things. If I recall correctly we got them because you could get a japanese keyboard with more keys on it. Mean time to failure negative time. Soooo many of them were fritzed straight out of the box.
A
Amaris
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My high school typing class used those. I actually rather liked them.
the IBM XT and the Philips P 3105 later on.
The IBM of course is a 8088 at 4.77 Mhz, the Philips has a NEC V 20 chip at 8Mhz
The IBM has a Seagate ST225R RLL drive, the Philips the far more common Seagate ST225 MFM drive, both 21Mb.
I never actually bought a computer until 2002, usd to get them from work. First one was either a 5150 or a 5160, it ran DOS so probably 5150 but it had 2 10 meg hard drives which points to it being a 5160 but you could get an expansion kit for the 5150. I remember my boss had a 286 which he wouldn't let me touch, I inherited it when he got a 386.
At the same time though I had a decommisioned IBM System 7 to play with as well as an in service IBM Series/1 and a PDP-11/24.
My high school typing class used those. I actually rather liked them.
They looked nice for that era, I seem to recall that they were also quite light and they worked fine if they worked at all.
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Not at all, mate. That was not my intention. But I'd never pass to be old enough to use that thing when it came out. I was born in '92 after all... And I think it stupid that people act like they're older on the internet, just to give themselves more "adult-points".
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