Typing in vic20 programs from the back of compute magazine.

[Wolfie]

I do have to admit. The first computer I remember having in the house was a 286. The monitor barly had 16 colors. The case was HUGE. And the Key Board was the coolesy sounding thing in the world. Klickity klack 😛

The worse thing about that machine....... It was $2300!!!!! And this was when 386 where starting to come out. Sad I know.....

I still have this machine. It sits in a box but every so often I get an itch to take it out and play some Barnystein!!!

Wolf

 

[cory]

i spent about $3500 on my 386 33mhz system

200 meg hard drives cost $800.

my friend at the same time bought a 486 25mhz.
it cost him $1800 for just the motherboard,case and cpu.
$800 for 16 meg of ram.

i had one of the first compaq 386 16mhz machines.
used static column ram. cost $4000 for 4 meg of ram.
i added another 4.5 meg of dram in the same machine
and had a 60meg and a 70 meg esdi drive along with a
6 port serial card. (i think the whole system cost about $10,000)
i ran a bbs in my basement on this machine.
i had 6 2400bps modems(really screaming)

also how about spending $800 on a usr 9600 baud modem.

so when i decided to build my cluster. i thought for
what i spent on my 386 i could build one hell of a machine.

 

[Vader2K]

Man, this take me back. I have a small computer museum at my parents house, with everything from an my first computer, a TRS-80 model 1, to a prototype IBM computer that was supposed to replace the PC Jr., which I also have. I remember typing in programs from the back of BYTE magazine for my old Trash80. To this day, one of my all-time favorite PC games is Taipan, which I played on the TRS-80. I remember going in and rewriting some of the code so I could defeat the pirates a little easier. I can't remember how much memory that thing originally came with, but I ended up getting the memory expansion board for it, which took it to 48k, and having to build the thing piece by piece. I literally had to solder every individual component to the board, and this thing was the size of a modern day motherboard. I eventually got the floppy drive for it, as well as a speech synthesizer box, and a joystick (converted Atari joystick). Believe it or not, this thing still runs. Not bad for a 23 year old computer.
I've got 2 of the first IBM luggables, basically the first laptop, though if you ever wanted children then you would have never put them on your lap. They had the old Vic20 processor, which I think ran at 4 or 8Mhz, and had a built in 6inch amber monitor with a full size flip down keyboard. I remember buying a 54 meg hard drive for it for around $1200. I ran a BBS off of that thing for about 2 years on a high speed😉 1200 baud modem.
All this really makes you appreciate how fast computers have actually gotten over the past 20 years. Hell, look how fast they become in the past 10 years. We've gone from a 8 Mhz 286 with an average of 4meg of RAM, to a 1.2Ghz Athlon (would this be considered a x686 or a x786) with and average of 128meg of RAM. Remarkable!!!😎

--Vader2K

 

[cory]

i remember that taipan game.
i dont remember what machine i played it on but it was prob
an apple 2.