First PC? really? Then what did Apple make before the Mac?

I think the Amiga was ahead of the IBM PC and Apple, wasn't it? And I think Commodore sold the crap out of them before IBM got into the biz, allowed Microsoft to put the oil in their anus and made the world a blue screen of death for all of us.

espiaboricua , read the thread, you are late to the dance.

/Daggorath rules

BigTuna

Sniff... wipes tear from my eye. When I was 6 my parents bought mine second hand from my aunt and uncle when they upgraded to an 800. My parents still have it and it still works, at least when I tried it out last Christmas.

Soon after I upgraded it to 32K, then it was a computing machine to be reckoned with:-) I thought that if only you could get a computer with a few hundred K you could then build a brain... hehe, dopey kid.

It's the good old trash 80 :). I had one of those too.

And now I play my old infocom games on my palmpilot. Ah, how things have changed.

2006-08-11 12:28:58 PM cornreaper

ROFLMAO, i don't even know what that means, but ROFLMAO!!!!


heh, check it out here :

http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/nigeria.asp

Hunt the Wumpus and Parsec on TI-99
anything and all Infocom
Xyzzy
Call Clear WTF?

I'm really surprised this hasn't reared it's ugly head in this thread yet. Seems appropriate here than in any other.

Mine was my cousins Commodore Vic20


Does anyone remember the ADAM computer, came with monitor and printer, you could buy it at K Mart

That's hilarious, tothekor.

2006-08-11 11:24:44 AM savonola
/Nerds represent!

HP48SX with equation card library - programmable with IR interface! (still going strong).

Commodore64 - alive and well and collecting weather info. (waiting for it to die like forever).

/learned Fortran by avoiding syntax errors in my punch carded programs (IBM360/70)
//recently received nice check due to the ABIT settlement - replaced all the bad caps myself so the boards are no longer generating irreproducible errors/ AND received reimbursement
///just keep byting away at the beast
(slashy overflow line 30)

the Desktop Computer is 30 years old last year.

Primus
My pc had a soundblaster 16. I never did figure out why it was so slow. The 386 33mhz was the minimum requirement for doom if I remember correctly. I think that the video card may have played a role since it wasn't even capable of 256 colors, 16 max haha.

Yes, Garanimal, it did, but didn't officially release it out of PARC. It was spun off to a couple of engineers who saw it's true value.

savonola: No this was a REAL calculator


IIRC, and I think I do, if you took the sqrt of a number and then squared it, it didn't even come back the same number...

but it was still cool.

tothekor

That must be the computer people used to search the internet.

/I hear the internet has been around since the 60's

akazanar
//wrote my own text based football game which I saved on my AUDIO CASSETTE TAPE BACK UP

I wrote a text-based basketball game for my C64, in BASIC, that was 11 pages long when I printed it on the old dot-matrix. You picked a starting five from a list of 20 NBA or college stars (I updated the list occasionally based on who the best players were). They performed based on their stats (which were saved to floppy disk after each game and retrieved at the beginning of the game); if the guy shot 40% from the field, he had a 40% chance of making it. Unfortunately, I didn't think about the fact that a guy who kept making shots would have an increasingly better chance at making shots and would effectively "approach perfect". So then I had to write a separate little program to allow me to adjust stats.

This being the 1980s, Ronald Reagan cold war era, the all-star team you chose played against a faceless "USSR" team.

And me being an early teen, the most important part was having about 10 different written descriptions of slam dunks. I even had one where the backboard shattered and there was a 10-second "time out for the backboard to be replaced" before play resumed. (rolls eyes sheepishly at what a loser I was)

The sad part was that it would actually give me an "out of memory" error when the score reached the 20s. So I eventually had to give in and make the game "first team to 21", to keep from locking up the machine.

/my best NBA starting five was Isaiah, Magic, Bird, Dominique, and Olajuwon. Jordan hadn't quite hit his prime yet.

I take my recommendations from Bill Cosby. Fxck IBM

Hollaback: I still remember spending hours typing pages of lines in basic from my issue of COMPUTE! magazine, only to be followed by "error in line 375" etc. Then after more time fixing it, I was finally able to play some godawful game with craptacular graphics.


I wrote some of those for a TI99/4A magazine back in the day, but my google fu is insufficient to find out the name of it (possibly it was a multi-format magazine). My TI baseball game was also sold in a bunch of computer stores in the region. I sold bagged copies to a local store who then distributed them to other small retailers. The coolest thing to come out of it was a letter from a guy in Australia asking how I got the "physics" to work (I'm sure he didn't use the term at the time). I was amazed my little program written in Eastern Kentucky had made its way to Australia.

/For the record, there were no physics in my primitive little program. I just wrote hundreds of different ball paths and divided them into three categories. One of those was randomly chosen based on the timing of the swing (a early set, a right on time set, and a late set). If the path chosen sent the ball over one of the three outfielder's heads, the player could catch the ball if he hit catch button while the ball was in contact with the fielder. It was as primitive as could be, but at that time gave the illusion of really playing a baseball game. I was very proud of it (more so than my crappy Crazy Climber clone).

Driving down the road a couple of years ago, I saw one of these PC XTs on the side of the road left out for bulk trash pickup.

I tossed it in my car and took it home. The thing was in gorgeous shape -- 4.77mHz CPU, original CGA monitor and original IBM keyboard (the thing weighed like 5 lbs alone).

Plugged it in, booted right up on its 10mb hard drive (probably not original). All the data was still there.

Listed it on eBay and sold it for $250.00. Quickest profit I ever made.

The 800 was a full blown 8 bit computer based on the MOSTEK 6502A processor running at 1.70 MHz with up to 48K of user RAM installed. It had a standard QWERTY keyboard with 62 full-travel keys and 4 special keys to the right of the keyboard.

My first machine was my beloved Atari 800.
8-bit processor
1.7 MHz 6502A CPU
Upgradeable to 48K of RAM

My cost? $365 in 1983.

M.U.L.E. and Destiny: The Cruiser ruled my world.

Commodore 64, Shmomodore 64.....This is where it was in the early '80s.



Also was the first computer with the best game ever!!!

Not available for comment.

Commodore 64, here!

/C-64 still holds the record for most units of any single computer model ever sold!

Crazy Lee: /learned Fortran by avoiding syntax errors in my punch carded programs (IBM360/70)




Crazy Lee: at the office

My first home "PC" was the 1983 1.79mhz Atari 600xl. Its still around somewhere, I think.

pitfall - pfftt. that's for snobs. behold- the best action game ever:
jumpman jr. for atari 1400 & commodore 64

My first home computer:
http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5155.html


My dad worked at IBM and brought that home one day. Actually he had a 8088 before that, but we weren't allowed to use it much. This was the first 'family' PC.

When I was in high school, my dad gave me a 386-sx16 MB (the CPU was soldered to the MB!) and I dropped it into this case, along with a 20-MB Seagate ST-220 MFM hard drive, a 2400b modem, and an EGA graphics card (w00t! 16 colorz!!!) . That was my BBS rig for the next 2 years.
AaAHhhh god those were the days

Close the "You're the 1 zillionith " window.

http://hey-hey-16k.freeonlinegames.com/

Not a game. Click "play the game"

Didn't Kevin Costner do an ad... or a training film... for the direct precursor to the Macintosh?

Yeah, the PC I'm using right now is pretty farking old...

25 years later and still the best keyboard ever.

/clickity click click

had an Atari 400 - stupid membrane keyboard - R, X, and D stopped working as did the RETURN key. luckily i was still able to play Pac Man, Centipede and a host of other games on it.

next was the Commodore 64. that was my work-horse in the mid 80's in middle school.

in high school got a 286 and then a 386 - college saw a 486 - i was one of only a few in my dorm that had a computer - most everyone else had sega.

now i'm an IT professional. i should have learned a valuable skill - computers are teh suck

/!!!11!!!!!!15011!!!
//da baron

Somebody post the "Aww, Geez, not this shiat again" guy.

I use Windows boxes becasue that's what they give us at work. If they issued us Mac or Linux or a bloody abacus, that's what I'd use.

I'm not sayin' I'm happy with the Microsoft hegemony, but to be fair, I've not had a BSOD since we moved everything to XP, and only saw 2000 Pro BSOD once over some wierd shiat.

/Looking forward to when my child (now 3) can take the time to teach me Linux.
//Played around with Knoppix some before the birth.

I would be remiss (see my username) if I didn't chime in here.

BigTuna: 10 PRINT "The beginning of my programming career, circa age 8."
RUN

Here's the beginning of mine (not my actual machine):



The 1200XL, when I was maybe 12 or 13, around the time of the first videogame crash. Bought from Long's Drugs with a $100 rebate. Remember when even drug stores carried computers? And grocery stores had arcade videogames?

Good times, good times.

I used one of these at work in the late '70s.
The first portable PC.
Sucker was portable by virtue of a big shoulder strap carrying pouch. The thing weighed like 50-60 pounds. It was about 2.5 feet deep and full of big power supplies. No obvious card slots.
It had a switch on the front that would let you switch between Basic and APL languages. External storage was a continuous-tape cartridge drive in the front panel.
It was the 5000 series. The IBM PC to follow later in the early '80s was the 5100 series.

The PC 5150 was definately IBM's worst album.

I was in an IBM Research lab in about '83. They had an IBM 9000 sitting on a table.
I think we can assume that the guys at IBM had a sense of humor, probably naming the machine after HAL 9000.
Ran off a Motorola 68000, and expandable to 5MB of RAM.

More info at http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/cs9000.html

tolenfark: I wrote some of those for a TI99/4A magazine back in the day, but my google fu is insufficient to find out the name of it (possibly it was a multi-format magazine).

It was probably 99'er or Enthusiast '99. I recall both printed BASIC programs in the back, and at various points I sent stuff in to them but was never published. I still have a couple of 99/4As in a box somewhere, along with several years of each magazine and a bunch of carts. Never got the expansion box and disk drive though; I was strictly a kid working from cassettes.

My first PC was a Packard Bell Pentium 100 with 16 megs of RAM. I know, I cry every time I think about how much of a sucker I was back then but take solace in the fact I learned quickly how badly I had erred.

My most bad ass PC of all time was my gaming Pentium II 450 system with 128 megs of PC100 SDRAM, a 10 gig IBM DeskStar 7200RPM hard drive, a Kenwood True52X CD-ROM drive, two 12 meg 3Dfx Voodoo2's, a 32 meg nVIDIA RivaTNT2 Ultra, an Aureal A3D 2.0 sound card, a 3Com 10/100mb NIC, and all of these bad boys were plugged into the awesome Asus P2B Intel 440BX chipset-based mainboard.

Noobs.



/get off my lawn

2006-08-11 02:01:37 PM savonola
Crazy Lee: /learned Fortran by avoiding syntax errors in my punch carded programs (IBM360/70)

If I'd spent less time learning the `grammar' I'd gotten even older than I did waiting in line with the other arseholes to physically load the program in the accumulator over and over and over...

/dual floppy IBM 8088's... Thought I'd gone to heaven - everything since has been this ADA/COBOL cargo cultist's dream

Koggie, I'll see your Impossible Mission and raise you the original Archon as the best C=64 game ever (technically, it came out on Atari 8-bit first, but the C=64 version is generally considered the best, with the best gameplay). Indeed, arguably the best computer game ever, on any computer, including game consoles.

It had the best aspects of chess, D&D, and arcade shoot-em-up action, combined, with a cohesive story and setting and very well-balanced rules.

And that opening theme song played on the SID chip!

Anduril: the awesome Asus P2B Intel 440BX chipset-based mainboard.

And awesome it was. I kept upgrading that rig until it had a Celeron 1.4Ghz, 786 megs of RAM and I can't remember how many peripherals.