my first computer

marky · 19-07-2005, 14:32

was a sinclair zx81 with a 16k memory ram pack.and i was made up with it, apart from letting it cool down i spent hours righting simple programs in basic

i am posting this because my daughter thinks all computers older than a couple of years are usless and no fun at all
please help me enlighten her with you old computer nightmares and fun

grandmaster · 19-07-2005, 14:38

My headteacher had the same one,

He was friends with my uncle and he would lend it to me...
spent hours programming a box block to go around the screen.

Great fun,

marky · 19-07-2005, 14:41

a bit like the ad with the 2 geeks whatching the boxy green pic of a rabbit grow " woooo wicked fast"

Graham M · 19-07-2005, 14:49

My First Computer, an Amiga 500, was a single unit (apart from the screen, it could also be plugged into a TV, video was RGB out; not VGA) It had a full sized QWERTY keyboard, the "F Keys" only went to 10 and instead of a full set of Home, End, Delete, Pageup/down keys, etc. ; it had simply a "DEL" and "HELP" key; I never worked out what "HELP" was for, it never did anything in any programs. It had a built in 3.5" Floppy Drive which used Double-Density, Double-Sided floppy disks which weighed in at a meaty 880k, none of this High-Density lark

By default, it had 512k of RAM, which we had upgraded with a plugin board the size of an average graphics card today which upgraded the memory to 1MB and also had a battery backup for the Real Time Clock allowing the Amiga to ACTUALLY KEEP TIME WHILE TURNED OFF! WOW! The board was always falling out, im amazed it carried on working 'til the end, it was secured in using a rather large blob of Blue Tac

Well with all that blurb, you may think; Wow! what a pile of poo. But the games on it were fantastic, I emplore you to download an Amiga Emulator, Kick-Start ROM (Only if you owned the originals

) and a few games (Only if you owned the originals

) and give it a go, the Amiga was something special, I dont know where we'd be today without it. The film E.T. wouldn't have been produced in the same way without one for one

Gareth · 19-07-2005, 17:03

Started with a Speccy 48K, so a bit better than the ZX81, but still miles behind Zeph's Amiga. That little thing rocked. I would spend hours re-typing snippets of code printed in the back of Your Sinclair magazine, only to find out that I'd typed a B instead of an 8 or a zero instead of an O somewhere, and the whole thing would fall over. VB it wasn't. No fancy IDE, no colourful text as you typed commands, and no helpful debugger either.

I also have fond (er... kinda

) memories of listening to the screeching sound of loading games by tape, only for it to fail and you'd have to start all over again.

I still remember rubbing out the keys by playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon so much and hammering the keys repeatedly

Oh, and ruining loadsa Kempston joysticks too when playing things like Outrun or Combat School or Uridium or Green Beret or Zaxxon or....

mick70 · 19-07-2005, 17:05

My first home pc was a "Dragon", any one remember it?

Stephen · 19-07-2005, 17:08

my first home computer was the Toshiba MSX, I used to love making up small progams and stuff.

Paul K · 19-07-2005, 17:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gareth

Started with a Speccy 48K, so a bit better than the ZX81, but still miles behind Zeph's Amiga. That little thing rocked. I would spend hours re-typing snippets of code printed in the back of Your Sinclair magazine, only to find out that I'd typed a B instead of an 8 or a zero instead of an O somewhere, and the whole thing would fall over. VB it wasn't. No fancy IDE, no colourful text as you typed commands, and no helpful debugger either.

I also have fond (er... kinda :err) memories of listening to the screeching sound of loading games by tape, only for it to fail and you'd have to start all over again.

I still remember rubbing out the keys by playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon so much and hammering the keys repeatedly

Oh, and ruining loadsa Kempston joysticks too when playing things like Outrun or Combat School or Uridium or Green Beret or Zaxxon or....

Same here, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128, Commodore 16, Commodore 64, Amiga 500 with Extra Ram bit that you had to shoe horn in and then try to wedge the panel in, and then I bought a Compaq in 1994 that went back within a week after which I learned a valuable lesson by buying my 1 and only Packard Bell which went in the dustbin within 6 months of purchase. 1995 onwards I built my own PCs so that I knew what I was getting.
Lost track how many joysticks were snapped playing the old "waggling" games and how many keys on my keyboard failed after playing games like DT's decathlon lol. Man, Your Sinclair magazine and the old type in codes, I spent a week typing in thousands of lines of code, double checked it all, ran it and watched it fail for no reason only to find in the next magazine they had typo'd

Tape loading games with the pychedelic coloured bars flashing around the screen all the way to the tape stopping as it ran out before the game finished installing. lol the good ol' days

__________________

Quote:

Originally Posted by mick70

My first home pc was a "Dragon", any one remember it?

Which one

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/default.asp
64
32
or
200

marky · 19-07-2005, 17:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by mick70

My first home pc was a "Dragon", any one remember it?

dragon 32 yep

Bifta · 19-07-2005, 17:20

I started with a ZX80 kit which my dad helped me build, then a prebuilt ZX81, then I got wise and moved to Commodore, had a Vic 20 complete with Assembler cartridge then a C64 followed by a C128 then an Amiga 500 then I inherited my old mans Amiga 4000 when he moved to a 486.

marky · 19-07-2005, 17:31

i bet non of you had one of these with the plug in games a greenie for the first one to name it

MadGamer · 19-07-2005, 17:37

My first PC was a Vanillia 333MHz Pentium 2 with Windows 3.11, which we the went to Windows 95 and finally 98. It had 32mb video card from what i remember.

jamesclarke555 · 19-07-2005, 17:37

ah the memories, started out with some Acorn, can't remember what model, I was too young. Soon moved on to the good old Commodore 64

My first PC was an IBM 486DX 100MHz with 12MB of RAM.

Monster Jedi · 19-07-2005, 17:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by mick70

My first home pc was a "Dragon", any one remember it?

I must have married your first pc

Graham · 19-07-2005, 17:50

The first computer I ever used was an 8k Commodore Pet (the one with the built in tape cassette drive!), I also subsequenly used the schools "build it yourself" UK 101.

The first one I owned was the good old BBC Model B.