In Years Gone By

Margaret · 29 Dec 2006 at 02:07

In 2003 I had at least a 40GB.

In around 2000/2001 I remember having like a 1gbx2

Azagoth · 29 Dec 2006 at 03:15

....and yet Elite was on a single 5.25" floppy!

How times have changed!

Meridian · 29 Dec 2006 at 07:40

Azagoth said:
....and yet Elite was on a single 5.25" floppy!

How times have changed!

The OS that played it was on a 2k EPROM, which is even more impressive when you think how big OSes are these days.

I remember buying a 20Mb HDD for the company in about 1991 to go in a 286 computer. It had just been reduced from £250 to £125 because the huge new 40Mb drives were out. Around then you could get the original Sim City - on four floppy disks. The copy protection was that every few minutes it would ask you to look up a name from a list of cities and enter the six-digit number next to it.

Mind you, to prove that size isn't everything the god-like Nethack is still only about 2Mb.

M

Kiyoshi · 29 Dec 2006 at 09:12

I remember my first 1 kilobyte hard drive, it cost me 8 milliiooonnn pounds.

*wins*

FatRakoon · 29 Dec 2006 at 15:52

Duke said:
I have a receipt for a 500MB drive - about £200!

Hehe... I got a 4MB RAM upgrade from 512k and a 500MB HD that cost me £1500

Yup, a grand and a half!! :eek:

You cheapskate!

Good old Atari ST

silverskyline said:
I remember my first 1 kilobyte hard drive, it cost me 8 milliiooonnn pounds.

*wins*

Thats cos oyu got it on OCUK This week only!

The rest of us had to pay the full price! LOL

Nutbusta · 29 Dec 2006 at 17:43

My oldest PC (thankfully not my first) was an IBM 3270 which had a 4.77MHz 8 bit CPU, a whopping 512kb of ram and a full hight (2x5.25 brive bays) 10MB hard disk made by Seagate.

Back then a HD was considered perfectly good for retail if it had 10% bad sectors so the astronomical amount that someone payed for that 10MB HD and it probably only came with 8MB after bad sectors, FAT and formatting data :eek:

Just think, just 8MB hard drive and to put it into perstective, the latest NVidia display drivers are over 45MB

KPeh · 29 Dec 2006 at 19:39

Stellios said:
My first PC, probably about 7-8 year ago only had a 1GB HDD

Surely further back than that? 7-8 years ago is only 1999-2000. Which is rather scary :!. A dell I had in 1998 had a 13gb hard drive. Still works too.

KPeh · 29 Dec 2006 at 19:41

silverskyline said:
I remember my first 1 kilobyte hard drive, it cost me 8 milliiooonnn pounds.

*wins*

Pfft. My first hard drive was a slab of slate, given to me after 15 years working down the mines. Even then I had to scribe binary manually in by my feet. Luxury.

Edit: hmm. should probably have just edited the previous post. :-\.

Zefan · 29 Dec 2006 at 19:43

I remember playing the half life demo on my 133 with 16mb of ram and 3gb hdd

I'd really like to go back and see what it actually looked like :|

I remember being really chuffed with it running so well but I mean it can't have been more than 10fps :\

Meridian · 29 Dec 2006 at 20:17

KPeh said:
Pfft. My first hard drive was a slab of slate, given to me after 15 years working down the mines. Even then I had to scribe binary manually in by my feet. Luxury.

That's enough Four Yorkshireman sketch...

M

FatRakoon · 29 Dec 2006 at 20:17

Zefan said:
I remember playing the half life demo on my 133 with 16mb of ram and 3gb hdd

I'd really like to go back and see what it actually looked like :|

I remember being really chuffed with it running so well but I mean it can't have been more than 10fps :\

Aye, apart from Doom & Quake, the one game that really opened my eyes was UT Classic... I played on that using a Cyrix 333 in an M590 Mobo using the onboard SIS6236 Graphics... I was very happy with it as it was funnily enough... Until I saw my mate playing it on a MaxiGamer 3D ( Voodoo 1 ).

I got hold of an AGP SIS6236 card a year or so back, and threw it into a Pentium 3-450 and could I play it??? Could I heck.

DanMc07 · 29 Dec 2006 at 21:54

surely peoples pc's hdds wernt that low.. back in 2000 my old pc was equipped with a 40gig, back then the pc was awesome, now its a pile of junk

Meridian · 29 Dec 2006 at 22:42

DanMc07 said:
surely peoples pc's hdds wernt that low

Birthday:13th Dec 1988

Sorry mate, but the early PC HDDs were about 5MB. That's meg, not gig. And before that computers didn't have HDDs 'cos they were two expensive. In 1979 or so my school raised £2000 (when a good car cost under £1000 new) to buy a Research Machines 380Z. It ran off two 8" floppy drives.

M

HangTime · 29 Dec 2006 at 22:59

I think he's talking more about the size of the drives around the year 2000. He has a point, as by that time large drives were fairly affordable, I got my 7200rpm 30gigger for around £169 then I think.

BigB@dJ@y · 29 Dec 2006 at 23:30

Back in 1998 I paid almost £1200 for my first PC. Its specs were:-

9Gb HDD
128MB PC100 ram
Pentium II 300MHz
Intel GFX card
plus peripherals etc

2 weeks ago I bought a PC for my old dear (she wants to learn how to use the t'internet!!) from these forums. Its specs are:

2 x 10GB HDDS
256 MB PC100 ram
PIII 600 MHz
onboard GFX

plus keyboard and mouse

it cost me £20 plus a tenner delivery!!???! :eek:

Still, I remember waiting in a local computer shop whilst they upgraded my Spectrum from 16k to 48k....so that I could play Manic Miner!!!

FatRakoon · 31 Dec 2006 at 12:39

Ok, I just found some of my old Receipts...

Another couple of items I bought in the past...

CDRW & Software = £900

Also in 2006 alone get this...

For My Falcon
68060 CPU @ 90Mhz upgrade kiit = £300
Replacement Keyboard = £70

For my TT
8MB STRAM ( Upgraded 2MB to 10MB ) = £150
32MB TTRAM SDR Kit ( Allow me to use SDR instead of the old 30 pin sims ) = £99

stinka · 31 Dec 2006 at 12:50

its mad how fast technoligy is moving atm

i remember my dad buying this mitsubish 166mmx in like 98 from that big 'computer franchise'

i got this game for it called the journey man project, i thought it was ace :confused:

wnb · 31 Dec 2006 at 13:50

mY first pc was a 386dx 25 with 4mb of mem and 40mb hd, my first upgrade was an adlib sound card, 2nd was a 120 mb hd. Most memorable upgrade was buying the first 3d card forgot what the make was but the company no longer exists.

KraniX · 31 Dec 2006 at 13:58

i remember paying nearly £200 for 4MB of RAM for my old Amstrad SX2 50Mhz beast!

And I remember my first 3D card, (well add in card), was a Matrox M3D, man it made Quake 2 look amazing...

FatRakoon · 31 Dec 2006 at 15:38

KraniX said:
i remember paying nearly £200 for 4MB of RAM for my old Amstrad SX2 50Mhz beast!

Yeah, My father paid something like £450 to upgrade his PC1512 to 1640 ( Thats from 512K to 640K for those who dont know )

Does anyone remember the upgrade kits that ******s did for the ZX81?

Keyboards, RAM, Turbo ( Probably taking it to 1.1Mhz LOL ) and even giving it colours too! - was it 4 or 8? Somethign silly out of a palette of 16 I think? Cant remember now?

But to be fair, there was all kinds of really weird and wonderful upgrades you could get for a lot of the old 8 bits... Who had 320K on the CBM64? I did. And in fact, some 10 or so years ago, I saw at an Atari show, some german dude who had an Atari TT running on 4GB of RAM????? - WTF??? Even today, on an Atari you can have a full Multitasking OS, browsing the web, EMailing and running a full DTP Package on just 4MB, so why 4GB??? - in fact, you can do all internet browsing etc on just 512K ( 1MB if you are needing scripting / Java etc ) which is amazing really.

Wonderful stuff.