What was your first rig?

Here we go, and not showing my age at all! My first rig was an Apple IIe, a real beast as you can see from the specs below...NOT.

I remember when we really started to get into computers in the UK Government, we had 20MB HDD PC's and our beast business processor machine was a desk pedestal size 100MB unit, unbelievable when you consider we now have 16GB HDD's in mobile phones and don't get me started about what mobile phones used to be like!

Technical specifications

Microprocessor

• 6502 or 65C02 running at 1.023 MHz
• 8-bit data bus

Memory

• 64 KB RAM built-in
• 16 KB ROM built-in
• Expandable from 64 KB up to 1 MB RAM or more

Video modes

• 40 and 80 columns text, white-on-black, with 24 lines¹
• Low-Resolution: 40×48 (16 colors)
• High-Resolution: 280×192 (6 colors) *
• Double-Low-Resolution: 80×48 (16 colors)
• Double-High-Resolution: 560×192 (16 colors) *

*effectively 140×192 in color, due to pixel placement restrictions
¹Text can be mixed with graphic modes, replacing either bottom 8 or 32 lines of graphics with 4 lines of text, depending on video mode
Audio

• Built-in speaker; 1-bit toggling
• Built-in cassette recorder interface; 1-bit toggle output, 1-bit zero-crossing input

Expansion

• Seven Apple II Bus slots (50-pin card-edge)
• Auxiliary slot (60-pin card-edge)

Internal connectors

• Game I/O socket (16-pin DIP)
• RF modulation output (4-pin Molex)
• Numeric keypad (11-pin Molex)

External connectors

• NTSC composite video output (RCA connector)
• Cassette in/out (two 1/8" mono phono jacks)
• Joystick (DE-9)

hah, luxury! about 1980 or thereabouts an sinclair zx80 which had no hard drive, 1K ram, upgraged with an expansion pack at more cost than the original unit. no monitor your television did that. ran on basic, but could run machine code very fast and with memory saving techniques you could do a fair bit. programs were hand entered or loaded from tape..well that was the theory. subject to static discharge and a general pain but it was a goodie for its day. the timex version a year later or so in north america had a whopping 2K memory. sadly, I sold mine to a store catering to collectors in Florida about five years or so ago, mistake on my part.

well, if you can call it a rig....this was it



what a powerhouse.....



:)SK

Rumour has it that this was z3r010's first computer