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Who here has either had or still has some rather ancient computing systems?  What kinda system was it? What could it do?  What kinda games/software could you/did you play/use?

I had several.  I had two different Commodore 64C computers, one which had two 5.25 Floppy Disc Drives!  I played my very first rpg on this system: Pools of Radiance.  I also played games such as Ikari Warriors, Bard's Tale III, and dabbled with the GEOS programs. 

Then in the late 80s, I upgraded to the Amiga 500 wooo.  This game system was leaps and bounds above anything else at the time.  More colors, better graphics, better game play, better controls, and more game titles made this a good game machine.  I played games such as Swiv, Speedball 2, Projectyle, Hired Guns, Eye of the Beholder I, II, and III, the Black Crypt, Heimdall, Zool, Lemmings, and many more.

Sometime in the early 90s I upgraded to an Amiga 1200, which had a few better games but wasn't overall much of an improvement over the 500.  I'd have this some odd years before finally switching over to PC.

I've had more than 5 PCs, each now in various stages of working order.  I still have a couple of my Amigas and boot one up every now and then and it still works lol.

My very first programmable computing machine was a BASIC cartridge for my Atari 2600.  It had 64 bytes of memory a limited pseudo BASIC/ASSEMBLY type language.  Even with only 64 bytes, you could program some pretty neat stuff.  My personal favorite was a 'clock' that displayed on the TV.  Writing something useful within a 64 byte memory space taught me some valuable lessons about programming that proved very useful later in my professional life.

I was given a Timex Sinclair 1000 for Christmas one year; also included was the 16 kB RAM pack.  Very cool system, and among computer enthusiasts from 'those days' you'll find a lot of fond memories.  There are still some out there.  This computer was Z-80 based (same processor in the early TRS-80's), so though small and almost toy looking, was actually quite a powerful computer.

I also had a TRS-80 Model I.  This one had 4kB RAM.  For the most part, I wrote some accounting programs for my Dad's little side business, so I guess he used it more than I did.  I did play around with learning programming on it, though quickly hit its limitations.

Then we upgraded to TRS-80 Model III, the one that was keyboard and monitor and computer all in one unit.  It had 16kB RAM.

I was in high school at this point, and took a computer science class (the first year my school offered it) learning to program on Apple IIe's and TRS-80 Model II's.  The TRS-80's were actually networked!!

My next computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer II.  What a hot machine!!  For its day, it had one of the most advanced microprocessors made; to contrast, the Motoroloa 6809 in the CoCo (as they are affectionately called) had an ASSEMBLY multiply instruction, something the then-leader Z-80 did NOT have (you had to do multiplication by repetive addition).  The register space was deeper, and this thing had abstract addressing modes I STILL, after 25 years of programming, don't know how to use.  It was essentially 'killed' by the first generation IMB PC's, due in part to lack of business software.  Incidentally, this CPU is the grandfather of the Motorola 68000 used in the first Macs; 68000's are still in use, after 20 YEARS in process control and programmable calculators (like the TI-89, 90 and Voyage 200).

So, to meet the business needs my Dad had, I then had a IMB PC (no hard drive, had to boot off floppy).  Following that was an AT and then 486 and Pentium based machines.

Others: My sister had a TI-99 and she asked me to write some of programs for it.  I think she also got a Commodore 64 at some point.  I had a neighbor who still loved his Amiga when the 386's were out and popular.

I have a Timex 1500 (same as the 1000 with a bigger case and keyboard) with a 16k memory expansion and a 40 column thermal printer.  Lost the cassette some where over the years. I also have a TI-99/4A out in the store room somewhere.  I really never did much these other than play around with them a bit.


I started my career in computer service on something a little bigger.

You'll notice the 8" floppy to the right of the workstation, the next module to the right is a 10MB hard drive.

Wow - that's a pretty cool evolution of computing there!  I had friends and relatives wtih some of those later systems you mentioned.  I think one of the early Tandy's was my first chance at programming - a friend had it and we got some stuff out of a magazine.  When I got my first Commodore 64, I kinda taught myself to program in BASIC because it was realitively user friendly and had great documentation to study.  My friends and rivals had other systems: Tandy, Atari, and miscellenous.

I went on to a Data Processing program when I was in high school and we learned to program PASCAL, COBOL, and RPG on either PCs (4 color at the time) or SYS36 Mainframes, but I kinda switched directions away from programming after those years.  Fond memories though -that's for sure.

I never saw an Atari 2600 Basic cartridge!  I feel left out! heh.  How was the interface on that?  I could just imagine having to select each letter with a joystick or worse, that dreadful game paddle. I had a couple of Atari 2600s and even a 7800 -never remember seeing any programming languages though - that would have been cool to have.

My first system was the Timex Sinclair...I didn't much like it as games were weak (LOL!)  so I wound up trading that in on a Commodore Vic-20...complete with....TAPE DRIVE! Holy crap...I had this game called Snakman (yes, a rip off of Pac Man but so fun) that was actually on a cassette...it used to take about 4 minutes to load it. I had game packs for it for games like Gorf and Missile Command...it was a fun system. I actually still have it all boxed up and in my closet. Too many memories to just throw it away.

In HS I took computing classes and got A's in them...I was good at that and showed promise. So anyway, I was a bum and did what I did and never pursued computers as more than toys.

In 1997 I got an IBM 200mhz system with a whole 4 GB hard drive...wow...but I was lost...for knowing everything I knew about BASIC systems and then not touching a computer for years and jumping right into Windows...it was a shock.

Now when I'm stuck with something computer related, I ask Ulthar, Skaboi, Trek, or my cute nerd girlfriend...lol

Interestingly, the cartridge came with a little keyboard that plugged in where the joysticks went.  It was a cool little cartrige/game, designed mostly for building basic games like your own "Pong" type deal.  There was a mode that you inputed graphics shapes and stuff, so all your 'program' had to do was the game loop.  You could not much with 64 bytes, but it was a pretty cool little learning tool.

I had a Vic 20 and a Commodore 64.

Wow ...never knew of anyone that had one of those.  A keyboard for that system -never would have guessed.  Most people I knew had a joystick without the top covering lol.

Found an Amiga commercial on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yckH20ngY4Y

Funny stuff!

Most of my early computer experience came from friend's computers, and not actually my own.  I didn't own one until '95 as my parents felt that the whole computer thing was a "fad". 

I had a good friend who was just eat up with old PCs.  Tandys, Apple IIs, etc.  We used to screw around with them for hours on end.  We'd pick up books about programming and such and create small little programs.

As I said, 95 was when I got my first PC.  133Mhz Packard Bell w/ a 14.4k modem.  It was with that PC that I first connected to the internet and began doing webpages and stuff.  I fondly remember connecting to the local bulletin boards.  That PC was what really led to my PC gaming.  Doom, Wolfenstein 3d, ROTT, Blood, etc.  A bunch of us would get together and have extremely primitive LAN parties.

I started off learning BASIC on a dumb terminal hooked via audio coupler modem to a relatively nearby college (the terminal belonged to the school, not me). In college, I was put in charge of the Apple ][e lab without ever having touched one before, so I kind of had to do a self crash course to learn enough to help others with software and hardware problems. I bought a used Apple ][e, the first computer I owned. In 1991, I bought my first PC, a 16Mhz 286 with a 40 meg hard drive. I got no manual with it, little to no software, and no training. After my experience with Apple's BASIC-based DOS, it took me a while to get Bill Gates's version of DOS. I learned it, though, and progressed to a 386, then a 486, and now through various Pentium/AMD setups. I still think that my ][e was an awesome computer, and I almost wish I still had it; it provided me years of fun.

For a long time, the only computer that existed was the Apple IIe, because that is what the school systems would buy and a friend of mine owned one. I didn't have a computer, so was pretty much restricted to these two options.

One day, however, salvation came through when my great uncle said he was going to give us the computer he had. That system ended up being the Osborne 1 (http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html). While historically interesting nowadays, it was dreadfully disappointing to my eight-year-old self, since the only thing I could figure out how to with it was use the word processor. It pretty much languished in the closet, impervious to my attempts to tinker with it.

The first "real" computer I remember having had the Intel 8088 processor in it, was capable of EGA graphics, had no sound card, and had the first hard drive I'd ever heard with the staggering amount of memory of 20MB. The first computer game we had for it was King's Quest IV: The Peril's of Rosella, which continued a trend of Sierra titles for several years. I remember having to delete almost everything on the computer to install the original Civilization.

The rest of the computers I've had over the years have been less interesting. I'm not super computer literate, most of what I know was culled from years of making boot disks and screwing with config files just to get certain games to run. I've built one computer from scratch, but that's about it. I mostly just wrote the above because this thread sparked the memory of that crazy Osborne.

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. The cool thing about it was that as the Sinclair ZX81, it was already a big hit in Britain. My school library had loads of books full of BASIC games written specifically for it. No worries about them being in a slightly different flavour of BASIC. Also loved the graphic elements on the keyboard. I could write my own games fairly simply, and they actually looked not too bad.

I graduated to a TRS-80 CoCo 2, which is still in the pile of miscellaneous electronic equipment in my basement, waiting for the day I find something fun to do with it. I still have fond memories of playing Canyon Climber.

My school had a single TRS-80 Model 1 around 1980, and added several Model 3s over the next couple of years. The real treat was when the school board's travelling collection of Commodore PETs came around for a couple of weeks each year. There were enough for a whole class, and they went from school to school. Funny thing is, I saw a bunch of PETs and miscellaneous equipment in a local surplus store in the mid-90s, with what I'm sure were school board identification numbers on them. They were going for five bucks apiece. Had to fight off a wave of nostalgic temptation.

Perhaps the biggest curiosity was the computer lab at my high school in the 80s. Very cool, networked system running on UNIX or something like it, with a file server in the teacher's office, shared printers, etc. But what was really interesting was that the computers were Unisys ICONs. These were specially developed for the Ontario Ministry of Education, back when they were looking for one standard computer specifically designed for schools. Not a bad idea, but I don't think they expected off-the-shelf computers to approach that goal so soon after.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/Unisys_ICON_computer_system.jpg)
That's the ICON (and yes, that's an integrated trackball on the right). A stylish machine, if not an enduring one. Read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON)

Somewhere in storage I still have a old Sharp Laptop that weighs about 20 lbs, and a couple of old PC's a TRS (Trash) 80 and a Commodore 64, the first computer I got was in 1979 and ran BASIC and another that ran DOS 1.0 which I still have the disc. More junk taking up room in my life I need to get rid of.

edit:tYp0

Speaking of the old Apple IIe's, in my high school class we had a game called "Three Mile Island." (This was 1982-3).  It was a reactor simulator and fairly sophisticated. We had a blast playing that game (no pun intended).

Your score was based on how long you kept the plant from melting down.  After starting the game, little things would start going wrong, like a cooling pump failure, etc.  You had to take the "proper" action, and in the meanwhile, something else would go wrong.  It was interesting if from nothing else it taught us a lot about how a nuclear plant works from an engineering perspective (we played a lot in my physics class, which was in the same room).

Karma to Mortal E for starting this nostalgia thread...   :cheers:

For a long time my grandma had this really old computer with Windows 3.1 on it. It's gone now. I used to play Solitaire and Minesweeper on it.

Trek, is that a PDP-11 or something of that ilk?

The first non-micro I seriously used was a PDP-11 running RSX-11.  The PDP we had had an 8" floppy and a 10 MB hard drive, also.  I did log on to a VAX before that, but really only for some remote access testing and the like.

From the PDP-11, my big iron experience began...back with VAX for a while, then a Convex Supercomputer with (iirc) four processors, then the big daddy, the Cray Y-MP64.  It was pretty incredible to log on to the Cray from my home with my whopping 2400 baud modem and run in a few minutes what would have taken weeks on the VAX.  I use those calculations now (cutting edge research at the time) as quick and dirty tests to check software upgrades and stuff..   :teddyr:

What's funny is that we thought the Cray was the most awesome thing to hit planet earth (at the time, it really was about as fast as you could go computing wise), whereas now, my small cluster runs in about 2 seconds what took that Cray over 3 minutes to run.   :smile:

I hope you're joshing, threnody.  he says, with that annoying teeth whistle of old folk.

My first computer was the Radio Shack TRS 80 CoCo, where you saved thing on a cassette tape.  I still have that computer.  Even earlier than that I took a programing course at the local community college (one of those get the kids out of the house on the weekend in the summer programs) where we saved our programs on punch tape.

In the 80s I owned an Amstrad CPC464 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_cpc). It was an 8 bit computer, just like the C64 or the ZX Spectrum. It wasn't a big deal (green monocrome, tapes instead of disks) but software was very affordable (around $5 per game) and I ended up with around 120 games, most of them arcade conversions or film licenses such as "Operation Wolf" or "RoboCop". I have great memories of that era, although I craved for an Amiga computer for years.

I used this computer until the system's demise around 1993, then bough one of the first generation Gameboy consoles, and happily bought like a dozen titles until I got my first PC around 1995. It was a 486/66 with DOS and Windows 3.1, and I've been using PCs since then. This one (Athlon64 3400+, Windows XP) is my fourth or fifth, counting hardware upgrades.

I'm very interested in older systems and retrogaming, and an avid emulator user. I even finally got to use an Amiga this way! Not to mention an MSX2, a Super Famicon and a lot of truly amazing machines that now live on my hard drive.

Don't take me wrong, I like playing "Call of Duty 4" as much as the next one, but now and then I want something even more straightforward, and many of those games still hold well, specially those Genesis / SFC titles.

BBC model B with 5.25 inch floppies was first

 after that i've had the following, spectrum(rubber KB and +3), commodore(64, amiga500 and 1200), atari jaguar, sega(game gear, megadrive, 32x), gameboy, PS1, PS2 and PSP, xbox and xbox360

and ofc my PC's since 486's

That's a Wang 2200 which ran on Wang's Basic-2 . This was the first system I was trained on.  When I got back from four weeks of training in Lawrence, MA  I had to work on one of these. Well at training all they systems had the covers off, so I couldn't figure out how to get that table top off of the hard drive.  It was sort of embarrassing.

Hee hee! I still remember laughing at Wang in high school. I remember one class where we were supposed to look at the want ads for some reason. I think to see how many computer-related jobs there were or something. Anyway, one company advertised that they were looking for a "WANG PROCESSOR." That was the bold heading.

A couple of us started giggling like Beavis and Butthead until a classmate who was geekier than we (which is saying something) set us straight in a really p**sy tone. Good times.

Hehe, computers and high school.  :teddyr:

That's when I first used a PC, a 286. I used to complete the assignments rather fast, then used to spend the rest of the class playing "Gorillas", the only decent game Microsoft ever produced.

(https://i.imgur.com/Z8e0MOj.png)

Found a TRS-80 Model 100 a few years ago. It doesn’t work, but it did when I bought it. Nice machine, fairly easy to use, with a cool (& loud!) keyboard.

How did you bring up this old thread?

Went to the last page in the forum, then moved forward till I found something interesting.

Unfortunately, I don't have room to store my old computers. However, having a pretty modern setup has its perks, like recreating older PCs with PCem:

(https://i.imgur.com/PjLGjuL.png)

Tandy model running Deskmate.

(https://i.imgur.com/fxIK6EN.png)

Amstrad PC and GEM.

(https://i.imgur.com/Pcv68nj.png)

My first-ever PC, a 486/66 with a Sound Blaster 16.

GEM & Digital Research deserved a better fate.

Is Deskmate the ugliest GUI ever, or is it just me? It looks cool; don't get me wrong, but it doesn't look good.

One of the first things I wanted to try when I heard of the Tandy 1000 line is DeskMate. I don't know what I would have thought of it at the time, because then I would have sold my soul for a GUI that made things like file management easier. Now it seems to me a good idea but a so-so product. However, if you take into account that it ran on a 8088 computer with only 640 Kb. RAM, it's quite the achievement.

(https://i.imgur.com/Iw5YBdc.png)

GEM... I also want to like it. I used DOS for many years, and until the arrival of DOS SHELL and Norton Commander knockoffs any GUI would have been a lifesaver. But from what I hear from people who used it at the time, it was not very good. Of course now it has its fans, if only because it was one of the few alternatives to Microsoft DOS.

From what I've read GEM 1 was better than the later versions; it had an actual desktop, resizable windows, etc. It looked a lot like the Mac desktop, so Apple sued them. To get out of the suit DR modified the DOS version of GEM; later versions just outlined your hard disk in two fixed-width windows.

For some reason the Atari ST got to keep the desktop, resizable windows, etc.

I've used Atari ST emulators. However, I can't say I've used GEM often, most of the software boots from floppy and completely skips the desktop.

Still you have to admire what some of this computer manufacturers tried to avoid users the sight of of C:\_ My favourite desktop is probably the one IBM added to their PS/1 computers. It had a four screen interface leading to file management, system info and even a word processor.

(https://i.imgur.com/ePUWnE7.png)

It had its disadvantages too. It ate too much conventional memory and made upgrading your DOS a nightmare.