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Does anyone else remember the 286s or is it just me?

first computer was a new ZX Spectrum 16k, while using BBC Micro's at school

1st PC that I owned was a Dell 386 (and tried upgrading to a 486SX and fried the SX instantly lol), lost count of how many pc's and laptops Ive gone through since then :)
 
My first job was configuring IBM XT286 and AT/ATX PCs. Many of these ran from single or twin 360K 5.25" floppy disc drives. The worst bit was 'chipping up' Intel Above Board memory expansion cards (1MB of RAM in addition to the main memory - awesome for Lotus 123!). You had to install all the DRAM chips individually (usually 64K chips) and then test it (which took ages). If it failed you'd have to check every single pin on each chip in case one was bent! It was always the job you gave to the new bloke!
 
My first one was a Dragon 64 when I was a kid. My dad got it for free from the bank

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_32/64

Later on, when I was a teen, my parents got me an Amstrad CPC6128, and that's when I did my first programming in BASIC.
Now I'm a software developer

ah, the good old days
 
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My first computer had a massive 1k of memory and a flat keyboard, we upgraded with a 16k ram pack held in place with a bit of blue tac to stop the infamous "ram wobble" ZX81 they were the days, my first PC was an AMD 5x86 133mhz about the same speed as a Pentium 75, 1mb s3 virge graphics, 1gb hd and 16mb ram, I didnt have a cd rom until about 2 months later.
 
my first pc was a 486 sx 25 clocked to 40 :) on some pc chips mother board,
was great and had it for years played doom networked and herertic ( i think it was called ) them were the days :)
 
Our first PC was a 486 DX2-66 but have used ones a little earlier than that. Have to love the turbo button :p My first one was a Cyrix 686 100Mhz - terrible processors!
 
Wow I don't feel so old here any more. Most techies I come across, have never heard of a ZX81, ZX Spectrum, C46 or even a BBC Micro.

OMG Duke you have reminded me of the Turbo button. I always kept mine on. Why turn it off anyway? And Cyrix, I had forgotten about them. I did have at one point a Cyrix CPU but I can't remember which one.

Next someone will remind me about intel overdrive.

Oh but you cant beat the days of the spectrum, with its dodgy interface port.
 
My first was a P3-533 machine from the purple shirted staff store

The oldest machine I used was an old IBM XT in work, it came with a green screen monitor, maybe 256kB of ram but did come with a 10MB hard drive. It was already about 10 years old when our department got it as a hand me down. We used to run some ancient spreadsheet software on there for our reports.
 
My first machine was a Packard Bell XT running an Intel 8086 processor at 4.77Mhz with 640k of RAM (well it was 1MB really but back then we didn't know about stuff above 640k). Dual floppies and no Hard disk.

Them's were the days.

:D
 
my first pc was a 286 sx16 with a 2mb memory board that ran the width of the case (you could pull out the memory chips on it to upgrade it :) ), a half mb cirrus isa gfx card and a 20mb rll hard drive that took up 2 5 1/4 bays :eek:

oh how much fun i used to have with dos drivespace telling me i had plenty of space left then installing something and findling out that it couldn't compress **** and i had ran out of room :mad:
 
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sybaris said:
Correct me if I am wrong but a 3.3Ghz processor would be what ? a hundred times faster?
Click to expand...

100 times the clock speed but due to different architectures a lot more than 100 times faster. Subsequent generations of Intel cpus are almost invariably faster than the previous generation clock-for-clock, with the possible exception of the early P4s (Williamette) which was arguably slower than P3 Coppermine/Tuatlin.
 
Vipernet said:
I'm reminded everyday by my wall :)

mobos.jpg


My first "pc" a 486 is still in a cupboard somewhere. Slowest thing on the wall is a socket 7 mobo with old isa and edo memory slots!
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lmfao u NERRRRRRD :p i always sold my old gubbins on, tho i do have some old junk somewhere, quite a few of those slot one celerons and pentium2's. cant really do anything with them now :/

ive never owned a 286 but used 386's at secondrry school, my family bought a pentium 60 from escom for over a grand lol. my first that i bought myself was a cyrix m2 300 with 8mb onboard gfx, god it was dire, i couldnt play quake3 on it or anything, so i saved and built myself a celeron 433@540 with a tnt2ultra which just got released back in 1999. not long after i upgraded and found ocuk and bought a slocket of them for a p3 500 i bought and overclocked to nearly 900mhz and i had probably the fastest pc available. used to talk to spie from here back then and he used to play quake3 with a bunch of us lol
i tell u i dont miss the days of having a pentium 3, i could never go that slow again, but alas i am left behind at the moment and although my single core a64 @3200mhz is still good for bf2 and cs and doing normall computery things, im well aware i need an upgrade as i cant play any new games :( oh well maybe one day when i can find a good job i will get upto date and get that computer hardware bug like i used to, always wanting the fastest things hhaha
 
I remember when I was very little (I'm 25 now) we had some sort of PC with 640k of ram. Played some pretty cool games on it for a while, but eventually it broke :(
Had some other stuff too, but I don't really remember it!

First proper PC was a Packard Bell Pentium 75 with 8 megs of ram. A friend of my brothers had a spare Pentium 120 going from his shop (god knows how, it would have been expensive back then?), but the mobo didn't support 120 and it only ran at 100mhz! ^^
 
Anyone remember having to set dip switches and jumpers to get the right front side bus / memory / voltage settings :p
 
In 1991 I had a 286 - 12.5MHz by Philips with a 40Mb HDD 640k ram 384 extended ram and I upgraded it to 2Mb ram for £70 (£70 per Mb).

In 1993 I had a 486DX 33MHz with 100Mb HDD and 4Mb ram, Vesa local bus graphics,

Several updates through 486DX2 80 (40MHz with 2x multi), Pentium P60, AMD K6 233 and 450, AMD Athlon XP1500+, 1700+ OC (2 no.), XP2800+, Athlon 64 X2 3800+ leads up to date with hexcore 1055T. needless to say quite a few mobo, ram, graphics, HDD upgrades along the way also

andy
 
My PCs

> 386 running windows 3.1
> 166 cyrix with 1.2gb drive and a cirrus logic GFX card
> 400 AMD with a Voodoo 3
> 2500m AMD OC'd to 3200 Spec
> Opteron 146
 
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