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[LotharGR]

What was your first computer? What do you remember most from your early computing days?

My first computer was a ZX spectrum. My parents bought it when i was 8 years old in 1983 ... I remember waiting for a half hour for the spectrum to load from the cassete games like "jetpac" "jet set willy" etc ...

my next computer was a Amstrad cpc6128, after that a Amiga 500, and since 1993 i am inside the world of PC's ..

[rlbell]

My father bought a clone of the 6502 based Apple ][. After many years, it was replaced with a clone of the IBM XT, with a Hercules graphics card. The first computer I paid for with my own money was a Mac+, with a whopping megabyte of RAM, in 1988. Eight years later, I purchased an i386 based PC clone from a university surplus sale. It came with one of those funky IBM keyboards that would click for each keypress (so that word processing would more closely resemble using an IBM Selectric typewriter), so I still use it, after ten years. The i386 was replaced with an i486SX2 system, which may still work, but the power supply started to electrify the case, so I have not switched it on in four years. As both the VCR and the TV set came out of long term storage no worse than expected, the 486 PC may still work. In early 2002, I upgraded its memory to 20 megabytes, and might have the memory sticks to push it to 28. In 2000, I purchased my second new computer, as part of an employee discount plan, so I got a topflight IBM computer (with base peripherals) for only can$1500. In 2003, I purchased a lease-return of a better IBM PC (but only for the 2000 model) for can$400. Back in January, I was tempted to spend can$530 for a system on sale that would have had a modern motherboard and CPU, and probably a quantum leap in graphics and sound, but I did not have the money and it came with XP.

I remember thinking that BASIC was a neat way to interact with a computer. Although, fortran was a better way to crunch numbers. The highschool that I attended had a Digital PDP-11 computer with six dumb terminals that could only barely keep up with your flying fingers. The devices that handled all of the jobs run by the class were a card reader and a very fast dot matrix printer.

The only assignment that I remember was a program that identified all of the perfect numbers (positive integers that are the sum of all of their factors, except themselves) less than, or equal to one thousand (the first one is 6). The factorization algorithm given to the class was a brute force method that kept trying possible factors; until, you got to the largest possible factor-- half of the number that you were looking at. I thought that it was a silly way to do it, as once you found one factor, you could quickly find another one, so you could stop at the square root of the number, after ensuring that the root of a perfect square was only counted once. While PDP-11's were not especially slow machines for their day, it was slow enough that you knew it was working. Everybody else was getting statement counts of seventy-thousand, or more (sometimes lots more), so I was shocked when the computer printed my sourcecode, the results, and the summary without any pause, at all. It took just under two thousand statement executions for my small (or so I thought) optimization of the basic algorithm to work through the first thousand positive integers. From that point on, I understood the difference between O(n^2) algorithms and O(nlogn) algorithms, even if I had yet to learn order notation. The teacher, who normally taught mathematics to students in the last year of highschool, was also suitably impressed.

[Borodin]

Tandy 2, I think, back around 1982. Moved to an Atari 800, started reviewing games professionally. Moved to a PC when I began reviewing regular applications software and not just games.

[kajjj]

Atari 800XL with the tape-recorder... 1984 I believe
Then 286
Then 386
Then 486
Then Pentiums, all of them one by one...

[gregor]

Originally posted by LotharGR@Apr 30 2006, 12:05 AM


My first computer was a ZX spectrum. My parents bought it when i was 8 years old in 1983 ... I remember waiting for a half hour for the spectrum to load from the cassete games like "jetpac" "jet set willy" etc ...

actually those games need about 5 minutes to load. sometimes less. and not half an hour.

I had:
- ZX Spectrum + (still have it)
-Dialog (slovenian made computer based on ZX processor and MS-DOS operationg system)
- 286 SX 12 (borrowed from cousin)
- 486 DX 80 (still have it)
- Pentium 2 400Mhz upgraded with Celeron 1400 prcessor and various other stuff (current one)

And my brother has a Celeron 800 notebook.

and if you ask me there is just too much of them here. why can't they make them more upgradable??? why everything must be new???

[Quintopotere]

Pong clone
Atari 2600
Amiga 500plus :wub:
486 DX4 100MHz
Pentium 133MHz
Athlon 850MHz

... and I hope to add soon another step with an Athlon64 3500 or better...

[LotharGR]

Some games needed a lot more than 5 minutes. I cant remember now what games exactly and how much time exactly ... Its been over 20 years and also back then my father played more than me LOL <_<

[swiss]

1982 - 1988 (?) Atari Pong -> Commodore C-16 then Commdore VC20 then Commodore C128 the Commodore C64 (I think about 5 or 6 in a row) then a 286 with 8 Megs RAM and 12 Mhz (that was a rocked those days)

after that a 386 SX 16 -> 486 SLT 33 -> 486 DX-66 -> 486 DX4 80 -> Petium 60 -> Pentium 133 -> Pentium 2 - 233 -> Petium 2 (or 3?) 400 -> AMD 1Ghz Notebook -> AMD 2,4 Ghz Notebook ->

Today AMD Athon XP 3200+ Desktop and a Samsung Pentium M 1,73Ghz Notebook and a Pong clone and a Sega MegaDrive and an ATARI 2400 and a Phillips G7000 (I love retro)

pfffieeww ... I fear I left some out ....

So does anyone matter?


damn ... thinking about all this I come to just one point: I AM OLD NOW

[Mara]

My father being a computer fan, we had one at home for as long as I can remember.

the fist one was an appelII , it was great. Ah! where are pick a dilly pair, droll, fortress, and all these great games !!

then we get pc, and began the "my father looks the computer with a password cause my sisters and I where fighting to play."

I play monkey island, sam & max, loom,, day of the tantacule, full throtlle, all these games

then two PC (and two network cards and a coaxial cable)

then, the pc began going down, from my father to my sister, then to me, and then to my little sister, no more fights to play

[moogle]

I only remember that I played Wing Commander and Lands of Lore...