I posted this info in a response to another thread, I had to as the thread brought up memories of my first PC that I owned. So I thought just for fun that I would start a new thread about it. Post your specs (if you can remember) of your very first PC that you owned.
Mine (purchased in 1989):
I purchased this PC from one of my buddies in the Army for $25.
PC (Brand name???): 8086
Memory: 512K
Hard drive: 30 Meg (that’s right I said MEG)
2 - 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives
Graphics card: EGA (the original post I stated VGA, but after thinking about it, it was an EGA).
Sound: pc speaker
Operating system: DOS (just DOS, no numbers after it).
And my first game that I played was Might & Magic (1), if I remember right it was 4 colors? Played completely from the 2 floppy drives, and I think I had the option to save my game to the hard drive.
I remember thinking that I would NEVER use all that space on the hard drive. Makes me smile thinking back on this system.
It was some really old win95 machine, got it in 2001.
Dont remember the specs, it was ancient anyhow.
It lasted about two years then we got the old Emachine
On Thu, 26 Mar 2015 16:48:37 +0000, flymail wrote:
> On 2015-03-26, almcneill <almcneill@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>> Post your specs (if you can remember) of your very first PC that you
>> owned.
>
> Sinclair ZX81:
>
> CPU: Z80 @3.25MHz (8-bit).
> RAM: 1 kB.
> ROM: 8 kB (ANSI Minimal BASIC operating system).
> Storage: Cassette tape.
> Video: 24x32 characters; 64x44 pixels. Monochrome.
> Audio: 50 baud (cassette interface).
That was the first computer we owned - with the 16KB RAM expansion pack.
Ours needed a rubber band to hold it in place, or it wouldn’t stay put.
First desktop computer I used was a Commodore PET - our school had a few
of them. Lots of hours spent playing Oregon Trail or Hangman on those
systems.
I had the atari as well, but I did not consider that to be a pc.
Star raiders, wasn’t that the one where you flew to different star systems and would shoot down
Enemy fighters with blue/white balls of plasma?
>
> I had the atari as well, but I did not consider that to be a pc.
> Star raiders, wasn’t that the one where you flew to different star
> systems and would shoot down
> Enemy fighters with blue/white balls of plasma?
>
I suppose you could say that it was not a PC in the strictest sense as
that term was limited to IBM PC’s and clones but it was a computer for
personal use. Many people (present company excepted, of course) seemed
to think that Atari only made games consoles.
I recall Star Raiders having three views you could switch
between, fore and aft plus plan view. I can remember ducking as
enemy fighters flew “overhead”. Another great game I had was Eastern
Front.
Anyway, the 800 was also my first “PC”. I think it cost about £800.
Still have it. It, or a future development, might have been
almost everyone’s first PC as IBM considered taking over Atari and using
it as a basis for their first PC. Pity they didn’t.
–
Graham Davis [Retired Fortran programmer - now a mere computer user]
openSUSE Tumbleweed (64-bit); KDE 4.14.5; Kernel: 3.19.1;
Processor: AMD Phenom II X2 550; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using
nouveau driver); Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
I agree, there was more to the Atari. Mine had a casette attachment and I purchased my first programming book back then “Teach yourself Basic”, and I would write programs using the basic cartridge and save them to the casette. Sometimes I miss those days, they were actually quite fun.lol!
Amstrad 6128 with 128KB memory and CP/M Plus when it came out in 1986; the second 64KB held 4 16KB banks which were switched in and out of the main (64K) memory so that, for example, the keyboard layout could be changed on the fly. It was a real family computer with plenty of games for the children and capable of running WordStar, Supercalc and dBASE; the first I was already using for work and the third I began learning on a Masters course later that year.
CP/M Plus allowed up to 16 users, had the equivalent of root and users and a sophisticated command line which made DOS look positively antiquated in 1986, all of which meant that finding Linux was like returning to my computing roots, conceptually at least. I was also using vector graphics on CP/M in the 1980s - something I only found again when I started using Linux. The lack of vector graphics on DOS was one reason why I went straight from CP/M to Linux, only using a PC as a back up for creating disks to send to customers. (I had, and still have, a CP/M program that writes to DOS disks).
If the Atari 800 counts, that was my first one. My first “real” IBM clone was an 8088 with a whopping 1MB of RAM, a 360K 5.25" floppy drive, and a Hercules monochrome graphics card. Later I added a 30MB hard drive for $300. I was amazed at how fast it booted up! I think I had MS-DOS 3.3, can’t remember that far back.
Ouch, quite a typo. Of course it was Mb!
Interestingly it was years later that I was the first person in our state to put a 1Gb drive in a personal computer. At least that’s what the drive manufacturer told me when I bought the drive.
On 2015-03-26 17:48, flymail wrote:
> On 2015-03-26, almcneill <almcneill@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>> Post your specs (if you can remember) of your very first PC that you owned.
>
> Sinclair ZX81:
Oh, yes. I remember that one, but it was not mine: a friend had one and
I used it a bit. Later I could use its successor, the Spectrum, at a
library. We had to reserve time in advance to use one.
I was stunned when we managed to run a flight simulator on it (the same
program that later became the microsoft flight simulator). It took
perhaps 15 minutes to load from tape, maybe more. Then somebody tripped
on the mains cable. If looks could kill…
The first computer I owned was an Amstrad PC.
512 KB ram, two floppies, no hard disk, CGA monochrome text and graphics
(with an improved mode (more resolution or colours) that nobody knew
about, so it was useless). An 8086 processor (not 8088) at 8 Mhz. Nice
machine, noticeable faster than others at the time (16 bit buses, not 8).
In 1982 I purchased a pair of TI-99/4As for my children. I wrote a little Pascal compiler for them but never did much
work on them.
In 1984 I bought a SAGE-II computer for my own work. It had a 68000 processor, 512k Ram, and Dual floppies that could
be formatted to 640k each. You had a choice of operating systems. CPM, USCD p-system and Idris. Idris is/was a Unix
like OS. I mainly used UCSD p-system as it there was better support for that OS. I had compilers for FORTRAN, Pascal
and Modula-2 under the p-system. Iris had a C compiler.
On Thu, 26 Mar 2015 18:06:01 +0000, brunomcl wrote:
> Ah, memories… Atari 800, circa 1978. And the wonderful Star Raiders
> and Missile Command cartridges.
>
> Will never forget the first time I saw “READY” in white letters on a
> blue background in the TV.
C64 was our second computer. No diskette drive or tape drive for the
first year or so, but we still had a fair amount of fun with it.
