Old Computer and PC Brands

Takes me back to when I would buy Computer Shopper! Almost like a mini telephone directory sized mag back in the nineties!

Dan - These always looked like quality machines. Expensive.
Viglen was another.
Mesh (not googled) but I think are still going. When I bought a Mesh, they used all known quality brands, weren't cheap. I bought a Mesh laptop, and it was a mistake; it was okay but should've gone with Sony or whatnot. Mesh desktop was good though!
 
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My first PC was a MESH Pentium 75Mhz! I remember waiting an extra 2 weeks so it could be upgraded to either 8 or 16MB RAM :eek:

After that, my Dad would take me to computer fairs and I would start building my own.
 
sx_turbo said:
Don't remember them.

But sound similar to special reserve,

Dabs.com was once awesome aswell, then BT bought them out and promptly killed the business
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Yes! Totally remember Special Reserve, I bought my Gameboy and my GameGear from there. Couldn’t afford any of the more enticing items.

Dabs was my go to for years, long before the rainforest. My nVidia 6800 Ultra came from there.

That reminds me that Play.com used to be good too in the early 00s. Great for DVDs etc. but they also expanded later into electricals and other things.
 
naefeart said:
Tandy is another I remember as a kid, they even had a shop in my local town.
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My Dad worked at Tandy for years and so when I was growing up our house was full of Realistic/Tandy/Memorex gear.

He still has loads of his old Realistic hi-fi and even the Tandy 1000SX from when I was young.

tandy.jpg


I remember as PCs became more common in homes my friends had plenty of Packard Bell, Time and Tiny machines. Probably the most common Packard Bell I remember was the Club 30, with a Cyrix 300 CPU. They came bundled with Windows 98 and was when dial-up Internet was becoming mainstream, so usually ended up on Freeserve. They were pretty awful machines and very slow!

I fixed a fair few Tiny machines which had MSI boards fitted from around the time of the great capacitor plague in the early 2000s. I always fancied a Dan machine but no way I could afford one and ended up going down the custom build route instead (starting with a Cyrix MX 266 and then moving up to a K6-2 400).

Another friend had a Siemens Nixdorf PC, I believe the brand was later sold off and became part of Fujitsu Computers. Another name I remember is AST.
 
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Don't think they've been mentioned yet but my Dad had an AST PC in the late 90s, that was a decent machine for its time. I seem to recall they sponsored a football team at some point.

bainbridge said:
E Machines was another. Not great but ok for browsing using windows explorer on w95 :)
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My first own PC was an eMachines: Celeron 633Mhz with 64GB of RAM, 15GB HDD, Intel graphics and a DVD-ROM drive. I upgraded it a few months later with birthday money to 192MB of RAM and added a 32MB GeForce 2MX PCI graphics card. That lasted me a few years though towards the end it was pretty hopeless with newer games, and it came with Windows Me which gradually destroyed itself over time.


picnic said:
Don't forget Research Machines and the venerable 380Z. We had one appear at school the last year of my A-Levels so 1980.
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My secondary school had a room of RM machines, I can't remember what class we took there (it wasn't for Computing lessons as that was a different room with newer systems), I seem to recall that for some reason if one crashed/froze it took them all out so they had a master switch on the wall that killed power to all machines at once. Used to happen most lessons. :p
 
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agw_01 said:
My Dad worked at Tandy for years and so when I was growing up our house was full of Realistic/Tandy/Memorex gear.

He still has loads of his old Realistic hi-fi and even the Tandy 1000SX from when I was young.



I remember as PCs became more common in homes my friends had plenty of Packard Bell, Time and Tiny machines. Probably the most common Packard Bell I remember was the Club 30, with a Cyrix 300 CPU. They came bundled with Windows 98 and was when dial-up Internet was becoming mainstream, so usually ended up on Freeserve. They were pretty awful machines and very slow!

I fixed a fair few Tiny machines which had MSI boards fitted from around the time of the great capacitor plague in the early 2000s. I always fancied a Dan machine but no way I could afford one and ended up going down the custom build route instead (starting with a Cyrix MX 266 and then moving up to a K6-2 400).

Another friend had a Siemens Nixdorf PC, I believe the brand was later sold off and became part of Fujitsu Computers. Another name I remember is AST.
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I totally forgot about Cyrix!
 
agw_01 said:
My Dad worked at Tandy for years and so when I was growing up our house was full of Realistic/Tandy/Memorex gear.

He still has loads of his old Realistic hi-fi and even the Tandy 1000SX from when I was young.

tandy.jpg


I remember as PCs became more common in homes my friends had plenty of Packard Bell, Time and Tiny machines. Probably the most common Packard Bell I remember was the Club 30, with a Cyrix 300 CPU. They came bundled with Windows 98 and was when dial-up Internet was becoming mainstream, so usually ended up on Freeserve. They were pretty awful machines and very slow!

I fixed a fair few Tiny machines which had MSI boards fitted from around the time of the great capacitor plague in the early 2000s. I always fancied a Dan machine but no way I could afford one and ended up going down the custom build route instead (starting with a Cyrix MX 266 and then moving up to a K6-2 400).

Another friend had a Siemens Nixdorf PC, I believe the brand was later sold off and became part of Fujitsu Computers. Another name I remember is AST.
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That looks absolutly fantastic! Tandy used to have a repair centre in Wednesbury which i sent my Spectrum in for repair when it went faulty. The repair site was later brought out by Carphone Warehouse and turned into a mobile phone repair centre which i ended up working 13 years at!
 
Can I add vintage Internet and its precursors. Never used CompuServe myself but I was on CIX before Demon Internet started their Tenner-a-Month dial up Internet there. Obviously there were hundreds of independent BBS systems way back when as well.
 
I'm going to throw in Epson as well best known for printers these days they used to make a "pc clone" as they were known back in the day as well I can still remember the full page ads in the pages of PC World magazine I think it was those of us running our home computers Speccy's and the like used to look with envy at the PC magazines they were for the business and corporate users with prices way out of our price range though the graphics were nothing to write home about with a colour CGA adapter if you were lucky

Apricot! That was another. And Olivetti

Never knew they were british. 256kb of glorious RAM!

n.b also heard the sound of 5 1/4 floppy drive chirping away on another vid instantly took me back
 
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I used to get a magazine called 'New Computer Express' when I was at school and one of the things I did was memorise the specs of all the PC's in it. Doubt my brain could do that now but used to get people to pick a pc and I'd tell them the specs from memory. Clearly, one of the cool kids.
 
Apricot, Bull/Zenith, Copam were computers I was selling at the start of my tech career. The early Apricots were not IBM compatibles either, but they became that and produced some really nice machines. Copam were an early compatible manufacturer that arrived with fanfare (I recall the launch event at The Dorchester) but didn't last that long as they were made to a price and though cheap had a few issues. I remember getting given 6 of the old Zenith portables and then selling them to my customers at 1K a pop in my back pocket in 1990ish. That was like a million pounds back then and I bought an entire street in Cannock off my takings....I think.
 
....I also recall a sale to some chap in a lock up in London near Heathrow, no idea where the 10 AutoCAD systems went, but they did ask if I had any free designs they could 'load' for a super gun with Iraq language.....allegedly :)
 
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naefeart said:
Does anyone remember Silica Shop? They had stores in London and Sidcup iirc. They used to sell everything from Atari Sets and Amiga to games consoles and even PCs. Used to have rather colourful and eye catching adverts in many magazines back in the 90s and 00s.
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yes. I used to pour over their adverts for Amiga and ST stuff back in the day. They eventually got subsumed into Debenhams as a kind of sub outlet in some of their shops. At one point towards the end of the ST lifespan they listed one, yes '1' Atari ST game in their catalogue. This was absolutely Total Defeat (tm) for me when my friend used it as the final stone thrown in our ongoing ST vs Amiga arguments during high school.

heres link that shows some of what happened to some brands mentioned above. : https://www.alphr.com/features/368092/seven-british-pc-makers-that-went-bust/
 
Former colleague of mine was a founder (I think) of Silica Shop. There adverts on the back of most computer magazines in the early 80's were memorable.
 
Intergraph, anyone remember them? Our office had a couple of these CAD stations when I first started.

1mTgzUd.jpeg
 
Bubo said:
Intergraph, anyone remember them? Our office had a couple of these CAD stations when I first started.
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I did a thick sandwich degree course back in the early 80's and I worked at Westinghouse in Chippenham as part of that. I remember the CAD room being converted to house several of these. Never used one, just looked at them in awe.
 
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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