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Sinclair ZX80......how old oes that make me feel....went for the builg it yourself kit which was £80 as opposed to the £100 for the pre-assembled one......death was faster than that thing 
How far have Personal Computers Really Came?
- Thread starter Emphacy
- Start date
Soldato
My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 with the add on RAM pack. Then I defected over to the ZX Spectrum 16k and after that a 48k version. Eventually went back to a Commodore 64 and progressed to an Amiga 500. Then I kinda left computers alone for a while.
My first proper PC was some sort of Pentium MMX thing which on looking back was rubbish!!. I then bought a PIII - 500 system which had an ATI Rage XL graphics card in it. If I recall correctly that PC cost me @£1400!!!!.
My first proper PC was some sort of Pentium MMX thing which on looking back was rubbish!!. I then bought a PIII - 500 system which had an ATI Rage XL graphics card in it. If I recall correctly that PC cost me @£1400!!!!.
Sinclair ZX80......how old oes that make me feel....went for the builg it yourself kit which was £80 as opposed to the £100 for the pre-assembled one......death was faster than that thing
Well all depends what you were attempting...
Tic-Tac-Toe was blistering.
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We had a massive 286 desktop which my dad bought to play Microprose Silent Service II on. The screen had an amazing 256 colours.
It just about ran Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis which I still think might be the best game ever. That and Commander Keen or Dizzy the Egg
I remember my dad's work giving him a 486 DX2 2 66 mhz laptop with 8mb RAM, Super VGA screen and soundblaster 16, running Windows 95. It was bleeding edge at the time, except it didn't have a CD drive. He bought an external CD drive for an extortionate £200 as a 'family xmas present'. MS Encarta was amazing back then and copying and pasting bits from it made up most of my school coursework, rather like Wikipedia probably does for kids now. It couldn't quite manage Command and Conquer which I was devastated about as it needed 16mb ram or something.
I remember crying on Xmas day because we installed my brand new C&C and it wouldn't run. Even with a load of messing about with MemTest and releasing cache or something in DOS. Had to go back to playing Syndicate and X-Com and instead.
Af ew years after we got a Cyrix 686 150+ through my dad's work which was supposed to be a Pentium beater. Unfortunately it was rubbish at 'floating point operations' or something and couldn't run 3D games like Quake at anything better than 320x240. It lacked the MMX required for playing POD too which was gutting.
One Xmas we got a 4mb 3Dfx card for £100 from Electronics Boutique(!) to go in it so we could run Tomb Raider with nice smooth textures. We couldn't get the card to work until about the 28th December. No tears that year though.
Those were the days, tecnological advances were so much more exciting back then. Nowadays, unless you can teleport a dog to the moon I'm not that bothered.
It just about ran Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis which I still think might be the best game ever. That and Commander Keen or Dizzy the Egg
I remember my dad's work giving him a 486 DX2 2 66 mhz laptop with 8mb RAM, Super VGA screen and soundblaster 16, running Windows 95. It was bleeding edge at the time, except it didn't have a CD drive. He bought an external CD drive for an extortionate £200 as a 'family xmas present'. MS Encarta was amazing back then and copying and pasting bits from it made up most of my school coursework, rather like Wikipedia probably does for kids now. It couldn't quite manage Command and Conquer which I was devastated about as it needed 16mb ram or something.
I remember crying on Xmas day because we installed my brand new C&C and it wouldn't run. Even with a load of messing about with MemTest and releasing cache or something in DOS. Had to go back to playing Syndicate and X-Com and instead.
Af ew years after we got a Cyrix 686 150+ through my dad's work which was supposed to be a Pentium beater. Unfortunately it was rubbish at 'floating point operations' or something and couldn't run 3D games like Quake at anything better than 320x240. It lacked the MMX required for playing POD too which was gutting.
One Xmas we got a 4mb 3Dfx card for £100 from Electronics Boutique(!) to go in it so we could run Tomb Raider with nice smooth textures. We couldn't get the card to work until about the 28th December. No tears that year though.
Those were the days, tecnological advances were so much more exciting back then. Nowadays, unless you can teleport a dog to the moon I'm not that bothered.
Hmm let's see. I started life with a Sinclair ZX81, before moving swiftly on to a Toshiba T3100 which had a monochrome orange display, an 8 MHz 286 CPU and 640 kB RAM running DOS on a 20 MB hard disk. Eventually I upgraded to an IBM PS/2 Model 70 with a 16 MHz 386 CPU and a 60 MB hard disk, but I forget how much RAM it had. The PS/2 ran OS/2 which was very awesome. OS/2 in turn ran DOS! After that there was a wide variety of IBM Thinkpads followed by Compaq Deskpros, too numerous to list.
I'm only 22 years old, so the list above is a testament to my awesome very early childhood, considering I was using these beasts before I could read and write.
I'm only 22 years old, so the list above is a testament to my awesome very early childhood, considering I was using these beasts before I could read and write.
Soldato
I think my first decent computer was a 486 DX2 66, eventually upgraded it from a 200mb to a 2GB Samsung boot and 4GB Quantum bigfoot (LOL) storage hdd and 4X CD-RW! Got 32MB RAM and it ran Windows 98, slowly but it did it 
Biggest jump for me was going from that PC to a Pentium 166 MMX with a whole 64mb of RAM, i think my first Athlon machine at 850 (650 Goldfinger overclocked) was the first true.. 'woah' moment as i managed to afford 384mb of RAM and an IBM 20GB 75GXP and Radeon 7500 (back then it was just called a 64mb VIVO lol), truly fast bits at the time.
Biggest jump for me was going from that PC to a Pentium 166 MMX with a whole 64mb of RAM, i think my first Athlon machine at 850 (650 Goldfinger overclocked) was the first true.. 'woah' moment as i managed to afford 384mb of RAM and an IBM 20GB 75GXP and Radeon 7500 (back then it was just called a 64mb VIVO lol), truly fast bits at the time.
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ZX Spectrum was my first in 1982. Followed by the Amiga, whenever that was, then 286/386 and all that malarky.
Speccy and Amiga were my two favourite pc's of all time.
Speccy and Amiga were my two favourite pc's of all time.
Have you read anything preceding your post?
Do you know how uninteresting your input to this thread has been?
Worst still - you sound old enough to know better.
Soldato
Bit harsh is it not?. 
Bit harsh is it not?.
Nah - I'm flirting
Soldato
Hmmm. Okay.
/scratches chin
/scratches chin
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Please I want to be your friend.
pah my first proper pc was one of those amstrad 2086 8 hmz beasts!.. 1Mb ram and i dont think it even had a hard drive.
No idea what it was, but it was an amstrad with the green and black screen, which didn't do a lot.
I don;t think we will see a real use for a massive increase in speed. Think the near future is all about size, portability and a new way of doing things. Maybe along the lines of a minority report screen, more use and power in things like kinect that sort of stuff.
Embedded systems - the stuff that washes your clothes, chills your beans, heats your beans, pulls the flush after your visit to the toilet... that's the new wave in 'connected' electronics.
I. Cant see it rfid is well established and cheap. The first sign of embbeded ystems will be rfid in supermarkets, so you don't need checkout and fridges that can read it. All been devloped and available, but lack of interest. Would be great if I'm wrong, no more queing at a supermarket.
Caporegime
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Soldato
Prior to 8086 based computers I had a mixture of Commodores and Sinclair’s but I got my first actually PC 18 years ago. It was a Toshiba T3100 laptop (manufactured from 1986), it featured a 8 MHz Intel 80286 CPU, 512K of memory (yep K not Mb), 20Mb harddrive, 3 ½ inch low density floppy drive and a monochrome 9.6" gas-plasma display with a resolution of up to 640x400 pixels.
Used it doing by first year of college and did me well for all my coding work (Pascal iirc) and assignment write ups. Wasn’t until the following year that I moved to a 486 Dx33 system mainly because I started using a Object Oriented version of Pascal that wouldn’t work on the laptop.
What really did impress me was despite such a low spec it still ran all the main types of apps, spreadsheet, relational database, WYSIWYG (wow that’s an old term) word processor, and a copy of Autoroute UK. (although the 4 colour gas-plasma screen was no good for looking at smut )
Used it doing by first year of college and did me well for all my coding work (Pascal iirc) and assignment write ups. Wasn’t until the following year that I moved to a 486 Dx33 system mainly because I started using a Object Oriented version of Pascal that wouldn’t work on the laptop.
What really did impress me was despite such a low spec it still ran all the main types of apps, spreadsheet, relational database, WYSIWYG (wow that’s an old term) word processor, and a copy of Autoroute UK. (although the 4 colour gas-plasma screen was no good for looking at smut )