Guess the Year

[dave m]

The year I bought my first PC...
It had an LED display to tell me the speed of the processor.
Why did it need 3 digits?
A turbo button, 4Mb RAM, a 512Mb hard drive.
A mechanical key on the case to lock the keyboard.
And it cost £1500
The 4Mb memory upgrade I bought it the following year cost £100, and the 2Gb hard disk was more than that...

Today I bought a 64Mb USB key for £12.

Times change



Dave

Edit: got my k's and M's muddled

[Technoid]

id say 94?

and you have the weirdest HDD sises I've seen

[dave m]

OK technoid, I got them wrong, just re-edited, but you beat me in

It was March 1995, couldn't work out why anyone would need a processor that would do 100, ie a new fangled pentium, it was a DX 486 66.

I was just looking at the old box tonight and deciding whether it would ever be rebuilt, we need something to run our home security and it was the most reliable box we've ever had, maybe I'll keep windows for workgroups on it

Dave

[dave m]

Re: GuchiGoh's thread on the internet: yep, it was that year:

AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and other on-line services take off, making heaps of cash. Microsoft execs begin thinking: "Maybe we should look into this internet thing".

[UtwigMU]

93.

500MB HDD, 486/66, 8MB of RAM, 2MB videocard and 17" monitor was teh win then.

EDIT, I noticed it was 94, then the Pentium was at arround 100 and AMD had DX4 and DX5.

[Technoid]

Originally posted by dave m
OK technoid, I got them wrong, just re-edited, but you beat me in

It was March 1995, couldn't work out why anyone would need a processor that would do 100, ie a new fangled pentium, it was a DX 486 66.

I was just looking at the old box tonight and deciding whether it would ever be rebuilt, we need something to run our home security and it was the most reliable box we've ever had, maybe I'll keep windows for workgroups on it

Dave

awwwww..............
my dad bought a P75 in september 95, could have sworn I saw "your" computer in magazines in 94

[dave m]

Yes, technoid, probably right on the button. We probably read the same mags as your dad, spent too long thinking about it and bought into older technology at just the wrong point

Been upgrading ever since

Dave

[KvHagedorn]

1926?

[Brian Ellis]

Having worked earlier with PDPs, my first personally-owned computer had a 1 MHz CPU, 8 kb RAM (7 kb available), 9" mono screen and a mini-cassette tape deck for storage. It had its OS and a basic Basic in ROM.

Year?

The following is a description of my next personal computer, which I started to use professionally and my company bought many tens of them for scientific work:
The xxx was a famous all-in-one computer which met a great worldwide success thanks to its high reliability and ease of use. It featured a 8 bit processor, 16 KB of RAM (14 kb available), a built-in 5" CRT display, tape drive, thermal printer and four I/O ports.

The custom processor had 64 8-bit registers but no accumulators. Even slow, it offered outstanding performances in math calculations.

The display offered a full screen editor and and a ROLL key allowing to scroll the screen window up and down through a 48 line (three full screens) buffer .

The quiet and quite fast printer could print a hard copy of the screen in text or graphic mode as well as direct programs outputs.

The built-in tape cartridge system used a common DC100 data cartridge that could hold 195 KB of program files, binary files or data files. Up to 42 file names could be stored in the directory of the tape. A searching function made a file to be found in less than 1 mn. When the system was switched on, the tape drive automatically searched a program called 'Autost' and ran it if found.

The maker also provided a large range of interface modules to be plugged in the expansion slots. The system could then manage several peripherals through GPIB or Serial ports: FDD unit, printers, plotters, etc. A 'ROM Drawer' module allowed up to six ROM chips to be inserted. They expanded the capabilities of the internal enhanced BASIC scientific interpreter with many Fortran functions, provided additional languages (Assembler, Pascal), and I/O routines for external devices.

A quite special "feature" of it was that the screen blanked whenever the printer was printing or the cartridge was accessed!

Year?

My first PC, as such, had a 4.77 MHz CPU, 128 kb RAM, text modes of 80 x 24 and 640 x 200 CGA graphics mode to a 9" mono screen with orange display. It had a 10 Mb hard disk and a 5-1/4" 360 kb floppy drive. The keyboard had 84 keys. It was made in Taiwan and claimed to be IBM compatible. It was supplied with a DOS OS which was probably a pirated version of PC-DOS.

Year?

[NetSnake]

My first PC was an Amstrad 1512 with 512kb of RAM single disk drive, no hard disk and a b/w monitor..
it was in the late 80s, cant remember the exact date anymore

[The PIT]

Vic 20 was mine. Everyone looked at me gone out when I bought 20k extra ram saying I'd never use it.