Random computer thread chat

I've probably posted these before. My first computer was an Acorn Atom. I think it was about £120 as a kit, which is about £500 now.

This one to be exact.

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It came with half a kilobyte memory which was expandable to 12KB on the board.

I built a 24KB expansion card.

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Looks neat, doesn't it? It wasn't just a case of buying the board and plugging the memory chips in. I literally built it from a circuit diagram in a magazine, did all the wiring on the back by hand.

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The base clock speed was 1 MHz.

This switch overclocks it to 2 MHz.

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I sold it in 2011 on eBay for considerably more than I paid for it in 1980.
 
dowie said:
A decent Mac Studio or MacBook Pro if you compare it in real terms so quite a lot more for your money these days.

Computer hardware has gotten far, far cheaper since then even with the recent spikes in GPU/memory prices in the past few years.
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I was probably a little naive even at 39 years old viz computing. My previous experience was with 8086 and later cpu's at work in a design office in the late eighties and early nineties. However it was a fair price going by the magazines of the time. It was bought at a small shop in Stockport, Gtr Manchester (or Cheshire).

I quickly outgrew the memory, upgrading it to 2mb for about £70, again from a lockup shop in Manchester. A year or so later i had built my first PC, a 486dx33 and the rest is history, the start of 30 odd years building and tinkering with clock speeds, programming and a bit of gaming. As well as work of course.
 
I came into computers quite late as I wasn’t really interested in them but needed one at university around 1999. I got it new from the small ads at the back of one of the mags. AMD K6-2 400, maybe 32MB RAM, onboard graphics, 6.4GB hdd, floppy drive and a CD-ROM. Ran stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator just fine.

No internet in the halls back then. We networked them together with coax leads neatly run in the trunking where the fire alarm system was run. They told us to take it out so we daisy-chained it outside through our windows and I got it over the other side of the halls by tying an orange into the end of a 20-odd metre coax lead and throwing it over the roof! Fun times!

All gone now. They closed my campus in 2007 and it stood derelict for many years. It was redeveloped about 5-6 years ago into a gated retirement village.
 
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Retro6 said:
I remember back in 2001 I got given an old AST computer which I think was a 486 100MHz CPU 8MB RAM 1.5 GB HDD running Windows 95 and it was very slow. 8MB RAM was about the minimum requirement to run WIN95 but 16MB was recommended for smoother operation. I remember trying to upgrade the RAM in that machine but it would not post with any other RAM.
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my first PC was an AST, bought at Byte in Hermiston Gait retail park in 1995, I do remember looking in to upgrading the RAM few years later but it was a specific part listed in the manual
obv was ages ago but pretty sure this came pre-installed on it, if not it's very similar

 
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Having owned a Sinclair Spectrum+2 and Amiga 500, I left school aged 16 in 1995. I then was able to buy my first PC thanks to my parents.

£703 for a desktop, monitor, mouse and keyboard from German chain Escom. A 486 DX2 66Mhz, 2MB RAM, 540MB HDD. Got it home, didn’t work! Took it back and they gave me the next model up, that had a CD-ROM and sound card. Cooking on gas. Dual boot Windows 3.11 FWG and IBM OS/2 Warp.

I used to use the IBM OS to play games because it could emulate more base memory and up the 640k limit, meaning I didn’t have to have had complicated autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

A year later, I upgraded to a DX4 100, 4MB RAM and 810MB HDD.

Those were the days.
 
Hagar said:
In 1992 I bought a 286-12.5mhz PC with 1mb ram and a 40mb hard disk with a 14" vga colour monitor and a local bus 256kb graphics card, keyboard and mouse, Dos5 operating system for £900 with a few educational games.

What could that buy now?
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£900 today would definitely buy you something more powerful than that.
 
I remember RISC OS which in my opinion was better than Windows 3.1 but I preferred MS DOS 6.22 if only MS DOS had programming in Basic built in it would have been amazing but RISC OS had all of that.

I'm going to dig out my old homemade RISC OS PC tomorrow and revisit my previous work I did on it. I had an issue with having no audio and I also needed to solder in some 580 ohm resistors for the LED indicators and re-do the ROM its been a long time since I worked on it. I was going to do it today but other things came up so I didn't have time. I need to have a clear out and tidy up first so I'm hoping I will find it while I'm clearing things out tomorrow.
 
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mejinks said:
In 1993, being in school, I got an Olivetti 486/33 with 4Mb of Ram and 120mb hard disk. No cd rom, no sound card. It broken and the engineer they sent out replaced the motherboard but did such a bad job, it ended up going back to them where they upgraded me to a dx2 50 iirc. With this, I added another 4mb or RAM and a triple speed cd rom drive with 16 bit sound card. The cdrom plugged into the sound card in those days and I can remember being blown away by the rich media playback when using encarta. I used the heck out of that machine with its 14 inch vga display.

Total paid over the 3 years I "rented" it was about £1500
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Did your Olivetti come with any games? I can remember my dad buying an Olivetti 486 with an Intel SX 33MHz, double speed CD-ROM which was connected via the sound card and 4MB of RAM. I'm quite sure it came with Windows 95 installed, which required a laughable amount of floppy discs if you wanted to reinstall Windows - but back in those days, we didn't really think anything about inserting 13 floppy discs to install Windows, you just got on with it and made sure those discs were kept safe. It also came with a game, called Return to Zork, which blew me away. :o

I can remember about 6 months from buying the machine, my dad upgrading the RAM from 4MB to 16MB. That was a good day, because it sped the computer up so much.
 
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My dad used to work for the local IBM factory so we had quite early IBM PS/2 PC's in the house which had CGA graphics, less than 640k ram etc etc.

The first one that one that really grabbed my interest in the PC world was a 386sx with co-processor, 4mb of RAM and a 128mb hard drive. It couldn't run the first doom which needed a 486 iirc. I remember by dad coming home with OS/2 Warp ... which installed over via 20+ 1.44MB floppy discs ! The space on the HDD was limited so you had to select which elements / features of the OS you wanted to install. I remember win 3.0, 3.1, NT, windows 95 coming out, Hayes modems at slow baud rates like 1200/2400bps on text based dial ups.

The first computer I bought would have been a Thinkpad laptop around £700 for uni in 1997. I worked and saved all summer for it. I remember it having 4MB of ram, and a crap VGA colour display.

After that I started building my own. I think the first had a pentium 2 in it, the slot cartridge cpu design. The system cost a fair amount less than 900 though IIRC correctly.


Ahhh, happy days.
 
My first computer was a 48k ZX Spectrum, with rubber keys. I was a keen gamer back then. I sold it on ebay about 10 years ago. Before that I had an Atari games console, I think it might have been a 9800, it had slot in cartridges like Space Invaders and Defender, with faux wood on the front.

I'm not that into fixing computers, and I have three old desktops and about 8 old laptops, which I should probably do something about. I just used them until they broke in some way, and then replaced them. One of the desktops was quite good at the time, I bought it as a custom build online, AMD processor and 1GB of RAM, probably Windows Vista. The idea was to use it for music, but I never got it working with Cubase properly. One of the other desktops is a Compaq, Intel Celeron, that I have put on its side and it makes a good under desk side table for putting drinks on. I don't think I've spilt anything on it yet so it probably still works, I think it's Windows 98.

Oh yeah, had an Acorn Archimedes too, which I used mostly for Word Processing.
 
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I have owned a speccy 48k, Amiga 500 & Amiga 1200 before getting a pc

which was a (rubbish) IBM 486 DX3 75 "Blue Lightning" (which was a rebranded cyrix) with 420mb HDD for .. iirc £1099 in 1994

I then at the same time bought a 2speed CDROM/ sound blaster 16 combo for probably £300 (which came with SIM city 2000, strike commander, wing commander 2 and an ultima game all on CD. (I still have that disk I think)

it was such a bad pc that I swore never to buy another again and learned to build them myself. for a couple of years I built them to sell each time putting 1 second hand part from my pc into it and replacing it with a better part in my pc until eventually ingot a top end pc for free.
 
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ZX80, ZX81, ZX81 plus 16kb memory pack, Acorn Electron, wrote an actual letter to Software Projetcs re: will Jet Set Willy for the BBC platform work on the Electron (no, it will not), had the code for the same game's music (Moonlight Sonata, Beethoven), published in Acorn User magazine (no, this is not a joke), got a C64, ruined hundreds of Quickshots (thank you Daley), got an Amiga 1200 then an actual PC, and then spent the last 20 years talking about everything other than those events on a computer forum.

Hell yeah.
 
I bought an Apple computer back in 1978 for £2000 (I think) and used it for accounting and gaming (little squares on the screen for my character and the different monsters).
 
I like my old 486 machines, I have two of them but I haven't used them in a while, the first one is a mini 486 machine 90MHz processor and 16MB RAM Sound Blaster and an IDE to CF Card adapter on the back for easy file transfer, I only run DOS on CF Cards. I have a bunch of CF cards with MS DOS 6.22 DOS 7 & FreeDOS. My other 486 has 4MB RAM and a 2GB CF Card as its HDD 25MHz processor and that one is better for playing Wing Commander as my other 486 doesn't run Wing Commander too well because the specs are a bit to high to run the game. I also have a sound blaster card in that too. I still run a lot of old games from floppy as its nostalgic for me to do so but I have all my games backed up on another CF Card with DOS on it. I think it took about 8 floppy's for the Wing Commander game.
 
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My computer history and random memories

First computer was a ZX Spectrum+. The memories of having to wait what felt like hours for games to load off cassette tape. It developed a fault at some point (can't remember what) and dad took it to a shop for repair. For some reason they just replaced the entire PCB. When I got it back, the startup screen that should have been black text on a white background was all yellow. It ran everything fine but all the colours were messed up. Dad took it back and they refunded him. This was in mid 1990 and I had my 10th birthday coming up so my parents bought me the Amiga 500 Batman Pack. Had that for several years until Commodore went under they got my first PC from Tiny (anyone else remember them?). It was a Pentium 100mhz with 16MB Ram and 1GB HDD

I remember going round a friends house in the late 90s. His dad was really into MS Flight Simulator 98. He had a force feedback joystick and 3 monitors. It was way beyond what his system was capable of running. It can't have been running more than 2 FPS. Didn't seem to bother him though

Today I'm running an i7 14700, 32GB DDR4, RTX 5060ti 16GB, 2TB nvme and a couple of old storage SSDs/HDDs
 
My first hard drive was for my Atari ST and it cost £450 for 40 meg, I had no idea what I was going to put on it at the time because it was so large.
I bought a 486DX266 processor for £450.
16 meg of memory cost me £400 for a PC, I actually got that cheap.
A graphics card cost me over £200 for 2 meg.
I went in with 4 other people to buy the first 1x CD writer with two 1gb hard drives that cost £7000.
My very first purchase from Millennium (OCUK) on the day it opened was a 4x SCSI CD writer for £450 and a SCSI card to control it for £150, the blank CDs were £10 each at the time.

Don't need to go into Spectrums, BBC Micros and other stuff.
 
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I have quite a few Acorn Electrons I used to buy them when they were going for 5 to 10 pound each, I have one that fails to read data but the keyboard works fine and I have a box full of old Raspberry Pi's mainly Raspberry Pi Zeros and Pi 1 & 2 versions... I can feel another RISC OS project build coming on... I could mount a Pi inside the faulty Acorn Electron but getting the keyboard to work with the Pi I'll need a board in between the Pi & the Acorns keyboard, something like a development board... I'll have to look more into it.
 
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RetiredGreyFox said:
I went in with 4 other people to buy the first 1x CD writer with two 1gb hard drives that cost £7000.
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Slightly related, in 1992 I travelled by train from Edinburgh to Newcastle to buy a DAT machine for the band I was in at the time. We were using a drum machine (BOSS DR 660) but had so many songs it ran out of memory so I spent 5 hours on the train and 10 hours recording the drum parts to DAT, all for it to look like we were miming when we played live :/
 
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