Post your computer history

raggie33

*the raggedier*
Joined
Aug 11, 2003
Messages
13,453
For instance your first computer specs and it's price. Reason I ask is for 99 bucks I had a Amazon fire hde 10 shipped with a 32 gig micro we card. And a voucher for a free custom case. I mean at one point in time even a 32 gig hardrive was a few hundred bucks
 

Wonder

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Apr 6, 2009
Messages
88
Location
upper midwest
HP pavilion desktop. Pentium 166, S3 Virge graphics, 8 megs of ram, 2000 meg HD, CD ROM, 3.5 floppy, keyboard/mouse, monitor w/speakers. About $3,000 USD. Hey I got a free mouse pad! BTW it was a POS so I built my own shortly after. Cyrix P166+, 16 megs of RAM, 2 1.6 gig WD Caviar HD's, CDRW, Tseng labs ET6000 DOS accelerator with 2 3DFX Voodoo 2's in SLI, Sound Blaster AWE 32. Any/all DOS and windows programs/games played smooth as butter unlike the HP. DUKE 3D, Quake, Quake 2, Need for speed 2 etc. Most have never herd of Cyrix. They were the original inventor of the Pentium Processor. Intel just stole the design then suede Cyrix claiming it was their design. Since Intel had the money Cyrix eventually ran out of money and folded. To get full performance out of the Cyrix CPU I ran a TSR that tricked windows into thinking the CPU was Intel. Reason being most MS compilers used non optimized code on non Intel CPU's. Since the Pentium was really a Cyrix CPU in the first place many programs had greatly improved performance. In most cases My 166+ was 10-20+ % faster than a Pentium 166 when running the TSR. Those were the good old days!
 

raggie33

*the raggedier*
Joined
Aug 11, 2003
Messages
13,453
HP pavilion desktop. Pentium 166, S3 Virge graphics, 8 megs of ram, 2000 meg HD, CD ROM, 3.5 floppy, keyboard/mouse, monitor w/speakers. About $3,000 USD. Hey I got a free mouse pad! BTW it was a POS so I built my own shortly after. Cyrix P166+, 16 megs of RAM, 2 1.6 gig WD Caviar HD's, CDRW, Tseng labs ET6000 DOS accelerator with 2 3DFX Voodoo 2's in SLI, Sound Blaster AWE 32. Any/all DOS and windows programs/games played smooth as butter unlike the HP. DUKE 3D, Quake, Quake 2, Need for speed 2 etc. Most have never herd of Cyrix. They were the original inventor of the Pentium Processor. Intel just stole the design then suede Cyrix claiming it was their design. Since Intel had the money Cyrix eventually ran out of money and folded. To get full performance out of the Cyrix CPU I ran a TSR that tricked windows into thinking the CPU was Intel. Reason being most MS compilers used non optimized code on non Intel CPU's. Since the Pentium was really a Cyrix CPU in the first place many programs had greatly improved performance. In most cases My 166+ was 10-20+ % faster than a Pentium 166 when running the TSR. Those were the good old days!
I used to build mine own to. Last one was a 16 core and thread ripper it was insane
 

aginthelaw

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jan 28, 2007
Messages
2,655
Location
NJ, USA
Store built 386 with 5 1/4 drive...around $2500. My mother needed it for her business and i was close to the store owner, so I chipped in too. And that was a discount price. The next one was the same price (486?). A few years later, I built my first computer and gave it to her.
 

StarHalo

Flashaholic
Joined
Dec 4, 2007
Messages
10,927
Location
California Republic
Got two Fire HD 8s and two HD 10s for the kids, they had two 7s before that; very solid little tablets, does everything you expect a tablet to and that's about it. My own tablet is an iPad Mini 2, and this computer is a MacBook Pro.

Should also mention: If you're an Amazon Prime member, you already have 5GB cloud storage with unlimited space for pictures included with your plan.

Edit: Oh you meant first, not current computer; the first computer I owned was a leftover 8088 IBM PC from my mom's workplace; it had a 40MB hard drive that took up two 5 1/4" bays and weighed eight pounds; it could play the then-new Simcity. After that came the 386 with GEOS operating system, so it didn't even come with a Microsoft operating system. I installed DOS and an 8-bit Sound Blaster card for Wolfenstein 3D, and then a 2400 baud modem to live it up on the BBSs.. Never used Windows until I got my 486-66 after that [this was when the processor was brand new and so fast it was considered a serious network machine only, I just wanted it for games but this was long before the concept of "gaming computer" - when I ordered the desktop direct from the company, the guy on the phone didn't understand why an enterprise network model was being sent to a residential address..] and it was around that time I got into AOL and the internet, that was when AOL went base-fee and exploded in popularity overnight, I remember just leaving the AOL redialer running for ~20 mins at a time just to get online. A pentium came next, I had an external CD-ROM writer for that one that connected via parallel port - only 20-40 mins to write a CD!

Rolling into the night under Pentium power with multiple AOL IM windows open ~20 years ago; anime figurines and Steve Irwin wrestling a crocodile atop the monitor, Star Wars Phantom Menace Legos across mid-shelf, yes that's a land line phone on the left of the shelf unit:

eKAawSF.jpg
 
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jabe1

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Apr 25, 2008
Messages
3,093
Location
Cleveland,Oh
The first one that I remember in the house was my father's trs-80 4p, sometime in the late '70s. We could link into the local university's system with a cradle modem, 9600 baud I think; type a message, hit send, go eat lunch, return to check for a response...
A bit later he bought an early IBM thinkpad, upgraded hard drive- 4gb- $2800.
The first one I owned personally I don't remember clearly enough, 386 I'm sure. A friend and I would build our own. Recently I found an old Zip drive box in the attic 🙂, we've come a long way quickly. I do remember being exited when hard drive costs were down to $1/ gb. That was around the year 2000.
 

LeanBurn

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Feb 3, 2010
Messages
1,355
Location
Alberta
Pentium P3 1GHz with 4M of RAM, 20G hard drive...ran Windows 2000, upgraded sound card and graphics card. Built in the components myself at the time for $1K.

Our phones make these things such weak sauce... :shakehead
 

raggie33

*the raggedier*
Joined
Aug 11, 2003
Messages
13,453
I was thinking today if I had this Amazon fire he 10 inch in 1988 could I sell it for 100000
 

SCEMan

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Nov 6, 2005
Messages
1,873
Location
Treasure Valley, Idaho
To the best of my memory...
Gateway 386SX (1990)
Gateway 486-100
Sony Vaio Pentium III
Several Dell desktops (e.g. XPS) since then.
Numerous Dell & Toshiba work laptops too.
 

Alaric Darconville

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Sep 2, 2001
Messages
5,377
Location
Stillwater, America
When new (in order of acquisition):
65C10 (Commodore 64) '83
Am386DX-40 (and Cx387DX-40, on a PC-Chips M-321 with 128K of cache and (eventually) 32MB of 70ns parity RAM) '90
Cx486DLC-40 (Upgrade to the 386 system above) '92
Am486DX2-80 '94
Pentium 100MHz '95
Pentium 200MHz (Upgrade to the Pentium above) '96
Celeron 300A (overclocked to 450MHz, then later to 454MHz when it was near-ready to be replaced) '99
Tualatin-core P3 1.4GHz 2000
Athlon 2500+ (Barton Core) '03-ish
Pentium M 1.4GHz (Inspiron 6000) '05
Core i7-920 '10
Core i7-6700K '15
ARM Cortex-A53 1.2GHz (Raspberry Pi B3) '17

Others I got when they weren't new (roughly in order of performance)

Intel 8088 (Tandy 1000SL & IBM PC Jr)
65C816 (Apple IIgs)
Intel 186 @10MHz (Tandy 2000, the MS-DOS 2.11.13 system that wasn't quite IBM PC compatible. 10MB external HD. Yes, it's an 80186) Used it in '90
Intel 286 (some kind of laptop)
Motorola 68000 (Macintosh 128)
Ti486SXL-40 (PGA 132 (fits 386 socket) with 486 instruction set and 8K of 2-way set-associative cache. No FPU, uses a 387 if present) Using as an upgrade to the 386DX system above.
Intel 486SX2-66 (it just 'appeared'; I think it was an old gf's mom's computer that she bought a replacement for and knew I was "into computers" and so gave it to me)
Pentium Pro 200MHz, 1MB L2 (Very recent acquisition. My first Socket 8 system)
Intel Atom N270 (in a 10Zig thin client)
Various mobile Pentium systems that I got at Habitat ReStore and haven't messed with much
P3-Xeon @550MHz "Tanner" (x2) (IBM x3650 7979)
 

Wonder

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Apr 6, 2009
Messages
88
Location
upper midwest
Store built 386 with 5 1/4 drive...around $2500. My mother needed it for her business and i was close to the store owner, so I chipped in too. And that was a discount price. The next one was the same price (486?). A few years later, I built my first computer and gave it to her.

Hope the 486 was a DX not an SX.
 

aginthelaw

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jan 28, 2007
Messages
2,655
Location
NJ, USA
Hope the 486 was a DX not an SX.

Can't even remember. I was using computers of all kinds since 1977 because of different programs i was in (i used to be a genius) even using the Internet before it was the Internet (in the military) in 1981. I do remember the commodore, Apple 1&2, and trash80 during that time but I didn't own them. I interned at bell labs in high school in the 70's when they were using laser discs and some computer with exposed wires, a green (oscilloscope) screen, & calculator keypad that moved a cursor around the screen. We used it to play a tank hunter game.
 

Exit32

Newly Enlightened
Joined
Oct 28, 2004
Messages
65
I learned how to write BASIC programs on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 computer during my junior year in high school in 1964.

Since then:

-- IBM System 360 mainframe while in college
-- Univac 494 mainframe for large-scale time-sharing system
-- Univac 1108 mainframe for batch processing
-- Data General Nova minicomputers for key-to-disc systems
-- Digital Equipment Corporation VAX series for CAD/CAM systems
-- Numerous Apple laptops and desktops
-- Too many personal computers to list
-- Microsoft Surface tablet

BTW, I have many computer souvenirs from the olden days including:

-- Punched paper tape
-- 8-inch floppy discs
-- 1200-ft spools of magnetic tape
-- 200MB multi-platter disc pack (yes, 1/5 of GB and it's about 16" in diameter and a foot tall)
 

Johnnyh

Enlightened
Joined
Jan 5, 2017
Messages
922
Location
Upstate NY
Hope the 486 was a DX not an SX.

LOL! I remember those days!

My first computer was a Commodore C64...about 500 bucks.
I remember how amazed I was to be on a Bulletin Board, talking to someone in Finland! Blew my mind! Even the sound of "You've got Mail" was thrilling!
 

StarHalo

Flashaholic
Joined
Dec 4, 2007
Messages
10,927
Location
California Republic
I remember how amazed I was to be on a Bulletin Board, talking to someone in Finland! Blew my mind! Even the sound of "You've got Mail" was thrilling!

In the 486 days, my high school got a handful of shiny new PCs with Microsoft Office on them; only the one in the back of the library was actually connected to the internet because no one was sure how to deal with that yet. I logged on to AOL with that computer and showed the librarians a chat room - they chuckled and pretty much wrote it off thinking that it was such a silly novelty, people talking to one another over computers..
 

scout24

Flashaholic
Joined
Dec 23, 2008
Messages
8,869
Location
Penn's Woods
My father used to bring a punch card machine home from work on weekends. With CASES of cards. Used to take up the phone line all weekend... Fast forward to the late 70's, I wanted and got what I recall as a self contained tiny unit that plugged into the TV. I remember spending more money to get the version with 2k of memory. I thought it was too cool being able to type and have it show up on screen! Everything went to hell when my father tried teaching 10 year old me the APL programming language. I walked away until I was in my late 20's, but to this day computers aren't my thing...
 
Joined
Mar 12, 2010
Messages
10,208
Location
Pacific N.W.
Our first family computer was a white-box built by a friend, probably around 1999. I've never been a knowledgable computer guy. However, I do click around pretty good. ;)

While reading through a filling box of our church's history, I came across these brochures. Does anyone know what year these were offered?

~ cG


1SELNpR.jpg


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JWjLyKX.jpg
 

StarHalo

Flashaholic
Joined
Dec 4, 2007
Messages
10,927
Location
California Republic
While reading through a filling box of our church's history, I came across these brochures. Does anyone know what year these were offered?

That 486-66 is close to the same specs of the one that I had, but mine was much earlier; the version of DOS and mention of Pentium means the ad is from around '93 - pretty much the exact time DOOM came out, the golden era of PC gaming.
 
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