Computer Nostalgia: Do you remember......

LMiller7 said:

With a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor, 64k RAM, 80 character x 24 line green monochrome display
2x 160k 5-1/4 Floppy drives (hard drives were not available) and ROM BASICA

That was a more advanced model than some. The PC could be purchased with as little as 16 K RAM and without any floppy drives. 64 K RAM was expensive, as were floppy drives. Data storage was a standard cassette recorder and was very slow. The system booted into the resident ROM basic. ...

Yep. The early IBM machines such as the PC, XT, AT and XT-286 all had BASIC built in to ROM so the machine didn't need any disk drives or cassette to be able to boot to a command prompt, which technically meant that no OS was needed. However, without an attached cassette there was no way for the ROM BASIC to save and retrieve programs so you would need to type them in each time which wasn't particularly useful. The ROM BASIC also couldn't access a disk drive, in order to do that you needed to boot DOS and run BASICA from the DOS disk.

This was my first system - a Zuse Z11 in 1958 at my University.

Our first home system:


The Tomy Tutor, I bought it "for the kids" in '84. It was actually a TI-99 clone and used the TV for a monitor. Along with the games that came with it, it would program in BASIC and you could save the programs to the cassette drive. I wrote a tone generator program which incremented by 10 hz each step. Found out I was deaf from 6000-10000 hz.

This was my first computer ... I used it to write software for a trucking company...

This is the first computer I ever got my hands on, an HP 1000 Minicomputer. Used it in one of my college classes on computer repair in the mid 1970's. No keyboard, monitor, storage, etc... Just the computer. Front panel switches for input, blinky lights for output.

Wolfgang you got us all beat with a computer in 1958, I was 10 years old.

Britton30 said:

Wolfgang you got us all beat with a computer in 1958, I was 10 years old.

Yeah, I was 21. I wish now I would have been 10 then. LOL

well im feeling rather young and spritely! I was -31!!

Joan Archer said:

The first one we played with was an Amstrad, I think it was the 464, it had a cassette player for the games, the kids loved Jet Set Willy and another couple of them, one to do with a school and one to do with in a mine, can't remember the name.

Probably Manic Miner and School Daze. Loved those games! I played them on the Spectrum 48k

Manic Miner:



School Daze: