Old Computer and PC Brands

Bubo said:
Intergraph, anyone remember them? Our office had a couple of these CAD stations when I first started.

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I remember doing work experience at an engineering design company, when I was 14. I spent a week using CAD software to design/redesign structures for offshore platforms. They had 22/24” flat screen crt monitors, when offices normally had 14/15”. Each designer had two of them - they were huge and very heavy, needing extremely large and sturdy desks.

Never saw the setup above, but it totally brought back memories. When I finished my week, the company boss said as a reward for working hard, I could take home something from his office. Thinking asking for his PC would be bad form, I ended up with a sealed big box version of AutoCAD and Turbo PASCAL. That rather cemented my initial future in computers and software dev. Good times.
 
had a tangerine microtan (6502). Electronics weekly published a space invaders program for it that had to be keyed in using a HEX keypad, think it was about 1K of machine code. Get it wrong and it likely corrupted and you had to start again. No tape back-up, so want to play it again the next day ?...had to type it in again.

Had a lynx (z80).

Also had an Amstrad (z80) CPC464.

In the early days we bought several PCs from Dan Computers.

I remember in the early 80s at my tech college a guy on my course a few years older than me was doing some work in the university, and came back one day drooling about this fantastic furturistic computer the uni had got. Had fancy graphics instead of text, and used a thing you moved about in you hand. And it even knew when you weren't there any more and shut off the screen.

It was an Apple Lisa, which was one of the earliest implementations of WIMP, which became the basis of human/computer interaction ever since.

en.wikipedia.org

Apple Lisa - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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Thinking back to the computers we had when I was young and the biggest brand gone from the PC market is IBM, who invented the PC in the first place. Other brands gone are Olivetti and Commodore (I'm sure I wasn't the only one with an Amiga back in the day).

One curious one is Elonex, I was given a fairly old by super high spec Elonex 486 in the mid 1990s. I've seen their name of giant adverting screens but I don't now if they still do PCs.

Someone mentioned Evesham, I had to support quite a lot of their machines at one time. In the industry they were known as Evilsham. Another brand that I really hope has gone they way of the dodo is Tulip, they made some awful PCs.
 
Armageus said:
Research Machines (RM) are still around and primarily in the education sector.

Another that I thought was gone but it still around is Viglen

en.wikipedia.org

RM plc - Wikipedia

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en.wikipedia.org

Viglen - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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I used to work for RM in the MSP side. Nightmares of decommissioning hundreds of their AIO computers (RM ONE). Must have been made of lead
 
tangey said:
had a tangerine microtan (6502). Electronics weekly published a space invaders program for it that had to be keyed in using a HEX keypad, think it was about 1K of machine code. Get it wrong and it likely corrupted and you had to start again. No tape back-up, so want to play it again the next day ?...had to type it in again.

Had a lynx (z80).

Also had an Amstrad (z80) CPC464.

In the early days we bought several PCs from Dan Computers.

I remember in the early 80s at my tech college a guy on my course a few years older than me was doing some work in the university, and came back one day drooling about this fantastic furturistic computer the uni had got. Had fancy graphics instead of text, and used a thing you moved about in you hand. And it even knew when you weren't there any more and shut off the screen.

It was an Apple Lisa, which was one of the earliest implementations of WIMP, which became the basis of human/computer interaction ever since.

en.wikipedia.org

Apple Lisa - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
I bet you wished you'd bought some Apple stock back then ;)
 
Ollie83 said:
I bet you wished you'd bought some Apple stock back then ;)
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It woulda been lovely of course, but this was the mid 80s, at least 10 years before the internet, and probably 15-20 years before on-line trading, and the stock market was some fanciful place inhabited by a rare breed that you occasionally saw clips of on the news frantically rushing around waving bits of paper in a big open room on wall street.
 
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tangey said:
It woulda been lovely of course, but this was the mid 80s, at least 10 years before the internet, and probably 15-20 years before on-line trading, and the stock market was some fanciful place inhabited by a rare breed that you occasionally saw clips of on the news frantically rushing around waving bits of paper in a big open room on wall street.
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Yeh, I am not sure how you would have even gone about that back then.
 
Ollie83 said:
My dad had an official Apple clone from ComputerWarehouse in 1997. Think they only made them for a year but they were legit, can't imagine Apple allowing or needing to do that now!
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Apple allowed several clones in the 1990s. Motorola made one and so did Umax. It was different times. They would not allow that now.

As for other defunct PC companies, my first PC was an Opus. I think they are long gone now.
 
Husky Hunter. Used to use one of these with an old thermal camera at work. That's the cameras display unit it is attached to. This used to be attached to a running barrow to wheel it about, I kid you not. Its sole function was to display the temperature of an isotherm on the display unit. Had a C/PM OS I recall. Was kicking myself for not robbing it when they chucked the old thermo gear out after I moved on from that department.

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RevBillyG said:
Dragon 32 user here. 1st PC. It was terrible :D
Also have a DFI Lanparty MB up in the attic.
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Haha I remember those thought about buying one at the time at the time but decided on something else. Not a PC though. Lost out to the better specced BBC Micro and Spectrum

Stripedcat said:
Apple allowed several clones in the 1990s. Motorola made one and so did Umax. It was different times. They would not allow that now.

As for other defunct PC companies, my first PC was an Opus. I think they are long gone now.
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Opus. Remember them too. Viglen was another was surprised to hear they're still around as a company
 
I remember Watford electronics, IIRC Aries computers was their in house line, my dad bought our first computer from their Watford store way back in the day, an Acorn Electron with the Plus 2 (rom pack and accounting software) and a serial printer that had both him and a neighbour who worked for ICL swearing for several hours.

Re Apricot, we had one of them, a 386 sx 16 from memory, and to upgrade it's memory it was a doddle all you had to do was take the top of the case off, take out the hard drive and floppy drive, removing the retaining bar that provided extra strength when you sat the CRT monitor on it, remove a couple of other bits and you could fit the 2mb upgrade module in over the existing 640k of ram to give you 2mb of memory....
I also remember it being the first time I realise that a certain large computer place was both clueless and willing to lie when they told me there was no way to fit an IDE hard drive controller in the machine so it could use IDE drives rather than the MFM drive it came with (the mfm drive being prone to not booting if the room temperature dropped much below 20c, we had to be careful not to place it near a window).
 
Let's not forget:

Commodore - 64, Amiga 500( plus), Amiga 1200
Sinclair - ZX Spectrum
Amstrad - CPC

I really wanted an Amstrad for some reason as a kid, ended up with a BBC B initially (which was a bit dated at the time) then an Amiga 500 then a couple of Gateway 2000 PCs.

naefeart said:
Acorn - Obvious one, I still have my BBC B 32k and my BBC A3000 (Archimedes)
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I think I still have the BBC B somewhere too, certainly, the Amiga 500 plus is still in my childhood bedroom.

Acorn isn't completely in the graveyard though - RiskOS still exists (and can run on Raspberry Pi) - there are also ARM-based laptops like Pinebook it can run on.

And of course, ARM itself is massive now, most modern phones and tablets are thanks to Acorn or rather their spin-off company ARM.
 
naefeart said:
I was never fond of Amstrad's foray into the PC market (PC1512 and 1640 come to mind), letters pages of PC Mags of the time were always awash with owners complaining about unreliability and cheap/non-standard components limiting upgrades. There is however one PC that Amstrad made that did apeal to me (I was a kid afterall) - The Amstrad Mega PC. A fusion of 386 and a Megadrive.
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I had one of these, 386 version, cant believe I got rid of it about 10 years ago ffs.
 
A Packard Bell was our first family PC, I remember it had their own Navigator app running over Windows where it was like a 3D house and you had to move around different rooms to find your programs. That was weird until a family friend told us we could remove it and just use Windows underneath :p

Had a Mesh after that, think it was a Pentium 3 and a Radeon 9700 Pro, that thing was so fast compared to the Packard Bell that came before it!
 
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