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#21
back in about 71-73 I was at school, playing with a prototype PC from Philips - loaded from a tape drive, it had almost no RAM, and only 200 bytes of addressable memory.
A couple of the guys still managed to get it to play tic-tac-toe :) I can't find any pictures of the beast..
It required a professional-grade monitor (Black&white!) to display the I/O - and the 'Keyboard' was a set of capacitance switches (so no moving parts).
IIRC, Philips manufactured about 10 of these - my school had 2(!), one of which was rumoured to be kept under the head of the Maths department's bed!
They were apparently 'worth' about £5000 each in those days.
The school also had access to Oxford Uni's mainframe for an hour or so a week - which required booking well in advance.
When I started work at ICI Slough, I started using teletype terminals for accessing the company's mainframe...
From that I gravitated via the IBM PCXT, COmmodore PET, C64, and Amstrads, to all sorts of IBM-compatible hardware at work, but the first machine I actually owned was a Dragon 64...
Dragon 32/64 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (my wife had a Commodore 64)
My first IBM-compatible was a Gateway2000 machine - based on the infamous P75 chip with the floating-point error. When I claimed a swap of the chip, Intel demanded that I put a £400 deposit with them until my chip arrived back at their shop (I'd elected to do the swap myself).
That got replaced by another Gateway2k machine based on a PII/300 - which I had until 2007 after maxing out the RAM (384MB, and adding three or four extra HD's)
Aaah - the memories!