How far have Personal Computers Really Came?

GSXRMovistar said:
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.

t3100b.jpg


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 )
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"I moved to a 486 Dx33 system "
"did me well for all my coding work (Pascal iirc)"
"WYSIWYG (wow that’s an old term) word processor, and a copy of Autoroute UK"

Sorry - I was going to write a rebuff to all that - but having reread it I shan't bother.
 
ZX80, then we got a ZX81 and, later, the 16kb memory addon. I had a VIC20 then an Electron and a C64, and - although I never owned one - I do remember programming a massive program in to a friend's Dragon32 (which, of course, didn't work).

Then it was an Amiga (Zool, what a game!) and then, finally, a PC.

So yes, we've come a long way.
 
Amstrad PC2286

Processor
16-bit Intel 80286 CPU, 12.5MHz

Memory
1 MB RAM

Hard Disk
40 MB

Graphics
VGA adaptor supporting MDA, CGA, Hercules, EGA, MCGA and EVGA

I/O
Serial, parallel, 5.25 inch or 3.5 inch FDD, mouse

Operating system
MS-DOS 4.01

Microsoft Windows 2.1 and Microsoft GW-BASIC

a lot of Lemmings & Wolfenstien 3D played :P DOS commands & Filemanager
 
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AndyT said:
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.
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That is so true. Just going from 8 bit to 16 bit sound, and the additional MIDI voices that were built in was just a huge difference in experience.

I remember upgrading from a 14.4k modem to the US Robotics 33.6k. Wow!!! Of course, they were no match for the 75 baud modem with the Vic-20. :D

Those were the days when you had to remove a game as soon as you got bored with it to make room for a new game. Hard drives just weren't big enough. Not to mention going through the BMP and PCX collection and blowing away old pictures just to clear a few extra MB. JPG didn't exist then, and it was hard to get a viewer for GIF files.

Tweaking the autoexec.bat and config.sys to load drivers into high memory so you could make enough room in the 640k base memory to play a game. I think all computer geeks got their start that way.

Funny you should mention the Cyrix 686. I upgraded my 486DX2-66 to the AMD 486DX-133 and it definitely rivaled the P90. The Cyrix benchmarked better, but the AMD was just so stable in comparison. I used that CPU for years.

Oooh, and my first laptop. An Acer 486SX-25 with a passive-matrix 256 color 640x480 display that was about the size of a cheap digital photo frame these days. 3-1/2" floppy, one PCMCIA card slot, 4MB RAM and a 120GB hard drive. $2600 in those days. It worked for what I needed it for, but the kicker about that thing: I knocked it off a workbench onto a concrete floor one time. SMASH!!! The scroll-lock key popped off! That was it. Otherwise completely unharmed. You can't do that with a laptop these days. :)
 
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Mp4 said:
Amstrad PC2286

Processor
16-bit Intel 80286 CPU, 12.5MHz

Memory
1 MB RAM

Hard Disk
40 MB

Graphics
VGA adaptor supporting MDA, CGA, Hercules, EGA, MCGA and EVGA

I/O
Serial, parallel, 5.25 inch or 3.5 inch FDD, mouse

Operating system
MS-DOS 4.01

Microsoft Windows 2.1 and Microsoft GW-BASIC

a lot of Lemmings & Wolfenstien 3D played :P DOS commands & Filemanager
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GOD are you not listening??
There are so many people posting pre-1990 stuff and their experiences. What the hell do you think you're doing posting stuff like this?
 
Khaaan! said:
These days people put in the latest PC game DVD and install and play. Back when I first played the first round of PC games you had to insert the CD, then type in the relevant command in a RUN dialogue to get it running!


Oh yeah and I also played Robocop off a freaking TAPE CASSETTE!
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These days we just download our games and don't even have to install them before clicking play thanks to Steam :p
 
It's funny - only in the vintage computing territory is smaller better.

We lads can argue about who had the smallest RAM and clock speeds.

I've worked in the embedded sector for many years and it's growing.

Does anyone here know what the embedded controller market is?
 
Personal Computers have come far from a hardware perspective, there's obviously no denying but in many other aspects, not very far at all.

How different is this forum to the old early 90s bulletin boards?
The Internet is faster because of communications advances not the PC.
The Internet is only slightly faster because it's now full of badly written bloated websites.
Email is practically useless because of all the spam.

Business computing has hardly changed. In the early 80s, I was a sysadmin on a 286 with 512KB of Ram that ran 8 users concurrently doing accounting, sales order processing and secretarial. Today, you'd spend probablymore to do basically the same thing. Of course the displays would be full colour and WYSIWYG but the function would be the same.
 
2bit said:
GOD are you not listening??
There are so many people posting pre-1990 stuff and their experiences. What the hell do you think you're doing posting stuff like this?
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1st pc i owned so get over it ...

As i said before i learnt to use DoS and manged to play some random games


And computer will carry on to run our life and become stupidly expensive ... pritty much like now really for a decent one.

And OS advancment has grown a lot also
 
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