Classic computers

matu

some good old classic here and even some you may never heard of
http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibm_pc.shtml
good if your bored and just want to relive your youth with the old micro's

Ruu_Old

Class a 5.25" floppy disk drive. I had a 386 with the turbo button, bleedin' rapeh!

Enright

its a full height 5.25" floppy, the white collett was a devil for leaving hubrings on the diskette. There was a precursor to the 5.25", ye olde 8". I still have one of the disks, or diskettes as they were called. The older commadore PETS used the standard cassette tape as storage. thats my trip down memory lane finished. goog website though

crosstownk

Great link! Brings me back to my school days - Apple II and ZX81. A pity there's nothing on the BBC micro!

Mrs. MacGyver

I remember those old apples from school in the early 90's. We thought they were so cool, there was a sinclair spectrum as well with the tape deck. I loved typing in DOS (i think it wascalled) like line 10 command etc. Remember creating pictures and telephone directory...ah....those were the days...

matu

do any of you remember typing in a load of code and making you name flash on the old micros
ah the enjoyment

sometimes I thing the simple thing where the best

generalmiaow

I have a 5.25" drive on my fastest computer Found it in a skip in UCD. XP can't handle them without hiccups but you can still more or less read them. I was copying over paratrooper and some old text adventure games I have on 5.25" floppies!

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Ruu wrote:

Class a 5.25" floppy disk drive. I had a 386 with the turbo button, bleedin' rapeh!

LOL, were'nt those turbo buttons fro slowing down the computer so that old programs which based their timings on the CPU's clock speed wouldn't go all crazy and fast

Ruu_Old

sean_keevey wrote:

LOL, were'nt those turbo buttons fro slowing down the computer so that old programs which based their timings on the CPU's clock speed wouldn't go all crazy and fast

They were indeed.

colm_mcm

Those turbo buttons were very handy for slowing down Commander Keen and Duke Nukem to slow motion speed for really tricky bits (such as they were)

Jambo

I remember my 1st pc an old wang 386 one of the first £1000 pc's after the ESB seemed to start the trend sometime aroung 1991 , barley able to run win 3.1 and running great old games like carrier command , and aces of the pacific , duke nuken and crystal caves !!

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Jambo wrote:

crystal caves !!

I loved that game, played it solidly till I completed it. Ahh the joys of being 8

matu

crystal caves wasn't that like boulder dash?

esskay

I remember the 1st computer I had was an Amstrad. It was an 80086, same as the IBM PC shown on that site but without the maths co-processor :-) It had 640k of ram and no hdd, had to boot off a DOS3 disk and take it from there. I remember when windows came out it was too slow to run it, needed a 80286 minimum lol.

Mrs. MacGyver

Apple imac g3 will definately be a classic if it isnt already!

Ruu_Old

Jambo wrote:

I remember my 1st pc an old wang 386 one of the first £1000 pc's after the ESB seemed to start the trend sometime aroung 1991 , barley able to run win 3.1 and running great old games like carrier command , and aces of the pacific , duke nuken and crystal caves !!

I had a wang 386, it had Windows 3.1 on it. I managed to run Windows 95 on it with a struggle though. I always had to end up compressing the drive because it was tiny!

FranknFurter

esskay wrote:

I remember the 1st computer I had was an Amstrad. It was an 80086, same as the IBM PC shown on that site but without the maths co-processor :-) It had 640k of ram and no hdd, had to boot off a DOS3 disk and take it from there. I remember when windows came out it was too slow to run it, needed a 80286 minimum lol.

I could be wrong, but I think the model was the Amstrad 1512 ?
The had an 8086 chip I think.
I had the 1512, and I think a 1640,........ 2 x floppies?
I remember taking one of the two floppy drives out and putting in a tiny hard drive to save having to boot it from a disc etc.
I got one really cheap and decided to use it for WP only.
Had another Amstrad before that iirc, problem was it used these funky little 3" discs (as opposed to the normal), that you could'nt buy anywhere, another silly / stupid Amstrad idea

Twas an interesting little machine for its time, like all Amstrad products its marketing was non-existant and it died a death that stopped a (for its time) passable machine from ever having a chance to become popular.

Interesting little retro linky for ya -> www.amstrad1512.co.uk/

But Im fraid, my heart belonged to my old and various Commodore machines.

b

Flukey

My first computer was a good old rubber keyboard, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. It started my interest in computers, and I still have it, (both the interest and the Spectrum). The Spectrum is up in a box in the attic now. The cable coming out of the power adapter and into the Spectrum itself was always very light and got damaged easy enough. That was one design flaw. They should have made it is a bit more durable. It would cut out sometimes which was annoying, especially if you'd spent several minutes trying to load something.

insight driver

crosstownk wrote:

Great link! Brings me back to my school days - Apple II and ZX81. A pity there's nothing on the BBC micro!

I happen to have a Sinclair ZX-80 in it's originial shipping box.

I remember at a job I had that I had an 80286 XT clone that was turbo. I was pleased because I had the fastest computer outside engineering. Back then it was when companies were first starting to integrate digital stuff into their analog products.

For ten years I used an Apple IIC. One of my all-time favorite games was lemonade stand.

me and the biz

Flukey wrote:

My first computer was a good old rubber keyboard, Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. It started my interest in computers, and I still have it, (both the interest and the Spectrum). The Spectrum is up in a box in the attic now. The cable coming out of the power adapter and into the Spectrum itself was always very light and got damaged easy enough. That was one design flaw. They should have made it is a bit more durable. It would cut out sometimes which was annoying, especially if you'd spent several minutes trying to load something.

Ha mine (or rather my dads) had that wire fault aswell. Used to take ages to set up and load up.

Then the first computer we bought (for something like £100) it was 25 mhz and had a button on it that that slowed it down to 20mhz, always confused me as to why you'd want to have this button on a computer before someone explained it above. We got windows 95 working on it though.

matu

insight driver wrote:

I happen to have a Sinclair ZX-80 in it's originial shipping box.

I remember at a job I had that I had an 80286 XT clone that was turbo. I was pleased because I had the fastest computer outside engineering. Back then it was when companies were first starting to integrate digital stuff into their analog products.

For ten years I used an Apple IIC. One of my all-time favorite games was lemonade stand.

I think that Sinclair ZX-80 maybe worth something if the box is good condition hold on to that.

GreenHell

I have the shell of my first pc around here somewhere, upgraded it for ages becuase there was so much space in the damn thing. Turdo button was legend, 8mhz to 12 mhz at the press of a button, a harddrive half the size of an xbox. Thems were the days.

CiDeRmAn

I have a got a whole bunch of old stuff set up in my gamesroom, a Dragon 32, Amiga 600, Speccy 48k, Speccy 16k, a laptop thats bigger than a desktop, with a little mono screen on a hinge.
Always remember watching Murphys Micro Quizm and the crap computers they used to use, think they were BBCs, and the ones they'd give away, while the rest of the world was playing C64 and Speccy they were giving away Enterprises, at least I think thats what they were, had a built in joystick, ohh, ahh!
One thing I remember from my speccy days was fiddling with head levels on the tape deck to get copies to work, the sense of satisfaction after spending an entire Sunday morning to finally get a dodgy C90 with Atic Atac to work.

insight driver

matu wrote:

I think that Sinclair ZX-80 maybe worth something if the box is good condition hold on to that.

It was given to me, and I've had it for 20 years. I ought to hook it up to see if it still works. Since I'm handy with electronics I could, if it seems to have failed, change all the old electrolytic capacitors since those are the parts that wear out with age.

SeanW

Bit younger here

my first computer was a Pentium 1 - you could still have called them 586 and ppl actually knew what you were talking about, well some anyway.

Equally capable of running Windows 3.1 and 95 I preferred the former.

This thread reminded me of it because, a custom build, it had a turbo button both on the case, and IIRC on the keyboard as well. I never knew what it did though, because nothing went faster when I pressed it ...

Ah, those were the days, graphics cards that didn't need heatsink/fans, getting 16MB of ram and 2 GB Hard drive and wonder what on Earth you were going to do with ALL that space

FatherTed

Had this classic:



Used a tape recorder to load the programs. Couldnt believe how great it was when we upgraded to the 16K memory.

barneysplash

We should combine these two threads to make a super retro computeratronic thread.

It BeeMee

matu wrote: »

some good old classic here and even some you may never heard of
http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibm_pc.shtml
good if your bored and just want to relive your youth with the old micro's

I had almost that PC, except only 1 floppy drive (5 1/4", 360k) and a 10mb hard drive....
If did ahve a cga colour card in it, soit had a colour monitor!!!!!

There was a cleanout one at home recently, I must check if it survived....


The first "proper" AT machine I used in work was a Samsung 286 with 20mb hard drive, and a cool Orange monitor. That puppy ran at around 8mhz if I recall correctly.....

The next machine was an Olivetti 286 with a massive 40bm hard drive. The hard drive had to be partitioned as DOS 3.2 couldn't read anything over 32mb...
Full VGA colour screen, and running at a blistering 12mhz, I was the envy of the company.....


PS: anyone remember the original Norton Utilities? You could do stuff like Unerase files, fix bad sectors on the hard disk etc
It also had a "speed test" section which would show how fast your processor speed was...

Musha

http://www.vintage-computer.com/ti_99_4a.shtml


This was my second after the ZX1 Sinclair (loved that 1k memory ) which i think is still at my mums house

I was handy that my aunt taught in a school with these computers and she used to borrow the ROM cartridges during the summer for us to play.
We could not afford to buy them ourselves.

We justed loved spending 4 days writing BASIC code from a mag only to get sintac error line 1

Fiach Dubh

My first ever computer was a VIC-20 when I was 4 years old, loved it. Still have my Amiga 500

BJJDUB

I had a ZX81 then I followed that with the VIC20, Sharp MZ80K, 48K Spectrum, C64, Atari 520 ST, then moved onto the early PCs. - In that order.

Friend of mine had an ORIC 1 and an Acorn Electron.

I still have the 48K Spectrum and boxes of games etc.

I wish I had kept the rest.

jmak808

http://www.vidgame.net/COLECO/COLVIS.html

had 1 of these babbies prob stil in the attic had sum quality games