Ancient PC History

[ThomasW]

A friend at work gave me this link the other day, spent quite a few hours on the site looking at the old PC's.

http://oldcomputers.net/

My first PC it was an Apple ][+ and I got it with 48k (couldn't afford a floppy at the time #$#@$).
I will never forget the salesman asking me "Are you sure you want that much memory, 48k is an awful lot of memory you know."

memories...

[Buddha]

My first computer I ever got my hands on was TRS-80 in 1977. Think I still have around here somewhere too. It had a whooping 4kb's of memory.

[ThomasW]

My mom's school had a TRS-80 (1979-80), why?? No idea, no one knew what to do with it, but I would beg her to let me take it home on the weekends sometimes so I could mess with it.

The first time I ever saw something actually useful on a TRS-80 was a program a friend of mine had called Eliza, the therapy program. We used to spend hours typing in "problems" we had to see what it would say back to us and what our problems were.

[Jonathan]

I forget the first PC I ever used was...

I know it was just when CD-ROMs were coming out;
it had a big ol' 5" floopy drive and I ran, was some pre-95 Flight Sim by Microsoft.

[bd2003]

C64 with a screaming 300Bd modem and the ever-so-reliable cassette tape drive!

[Eric]

I had a Xerox 820 I bought a bit at a time (main unit, monitor, keyboard). I found a good deal on some 8 inch floppy drives so I bought 2, and connected them with big ribbon cables. The power supply I bought wasn't fully enclosed, so that was OK until we had kids. I ran CP/M and Ward Christensen's "Modem7" SW with a 300 baud modem. I learned Pascal on that box.

It was pretty exciting to make it all work!

[bhills]

amstrad

The first one I ever bought was an Amstrad that booted up to the CPM operating system from a floppy. No hard drive at all. And I wrote and sold a lot of stories on that computer. It was the first one to use the revolutionary hard floppies, rather than the soft 5.25 inchers that you could bend. I can still remember the sound of the floppy drive as it worked.

[ThomasW]

A freind of mine had a C64 and had a floppy drive for it. I never understood why but that drive was about the size of the C64 and weighed about 300 pounds...
He still has it over at his parents house...maybe we should go over and play the Olympics cart?