What was your first Experience with a PC/OS ???

[darkassain]

Well as for me my first machine i ever touched was the Mac OS (i believe it was 6.0...)
that was in elementary (1996... yes we were behind the times, this school didnt have much money...) then in 98 to upgraded to Mac 7 and finally to 8.....

That was the last i saw or heard of the Mac until OSX and the Ipod ...(never got one..., now i think it was a better not spending a fortune for an mp3 player..lol)

Well as for my machine it was a 1.2 ghz duron running with 128 mb ram (i thought that was fast..lol) IGP S3 Savage (hated that till the day it died...lol) 1 32gb harddrive (still works till this day....the only existent from my old computer...)
had Windows 98 and then to ME (its not as bad as most people make it think i dont know why people bash it...:huh

so what is/was your first computer and if you didnt own it then which was your first PC you bought and your experience???

 

[Joan Archer]

Well it was in 1998 and it was a Windows 98 PC that had a 2.1GB hard drive with 32MB RAM and came with Lotus SmartSuite

Then went onto WinME, which I still have running, then XP still going strong alongside my Vista Home Premium SP1 x32bit.

 

[johngalt]

Ummm, are we counting *real* PCs or anything that was a PC?

TI-99/4A (personal) and a couple of old HeathKits that my buddy down the road had (well, that his father had)....

 

[darkassain]

anything....lol

 

[Yoder54]

In 1983, I bought an Epson. Hot box. 128K RAM I think, and maybe a 5MB HD. Ran MS DOS, some little word processor, and BASIC. Thing cost me about $2500.

 

[johngalt]

Yeah, my first real PC was the Tandy 1000 EX - dual 360K 5.25" floppies and a whopping 640K...and since it was a Tandy, it was really only about 94% PC Lol

I simply cannot count the TI as it saved data to a cassette *and* ran Basic off a friggin cartridge - I played more Space Invaders on it than anything else....

 

[baarod]

In 1983, I bought an Epson. Hot box. 128K RAM I think, and maybe a 5MB HD. Ran MS DOS, some little word processor, and BASIC. Thing cost me about $2500.

Heh. An "Equity"?

Vic20 that my friend had. Hacked the non-standard RS232 port to run a robot arm made of electric motors from Radio Shack, Popsicle sticks, rubber bands and glue. Fun! Played Zork on TI99/4A WITH the peripheral expansion box! That was my cousin's. Finally sealed driveways all summer to afford my C64. Then on to 1541 drive(s), modems, BBS, FidoNET, etc. Long hours typing in code from Compute's Gazette...

Wrote my own frequency response graphing software for my car stereo install business using the Thiel-Small algorithms in BASIC for the Epson Geneva laptop I bought from a pawn shop for next to nothing. The guy thought it was a typewriter and couldn't figure out where the paper went in

 

[smarteyeball]

The guy thought it was a typewriter and couldn't figure out where the paper went in

lol, did you ask him to bend over....

I don't suppose an Atari 2600 counts? Or the original space invaders coin-op machines

First 'real' PC was a C64 with a datasette. No fancy floppy drives for me. I liked to wait up to half an hour and watch psychedelic, seizure causing loading screens just to play something POKE

Second actual real PC was a 386SX25 with 2mb Ram and a 40mb HD. The power! The space!

The machine I've hated the most was my first 486. It had a CYRIX chip. Of course I didn't know how utterly bad those were until after I had one :sarc: God, how I hated that chip. I couldn't even play Doom...

 

[johngalt]

I had one of those (Atari 2600) and a ColecoVision as well - bu I don't count them as 'computers' any more than I do my TI, even though I did use BASIC to program the Yankee Doodle song....

 

[baarod]

I had one of those and a ColecoVision as well - bu I don't count them as 'computers' any more than I do my TI, even though I did use BASIC to program the Yankee Doodle song....

One of what? A Geneva or 2600?

Mmm... Zaxxon on ColecoVision. Fond memories. Constantly borked controllers. Not so fond...

I was really wanting the Adam there for a while. All things considered the C64 worked out. Begged my Mom for the Programmer Reference Guide for Christmas that year. She couldn't quite stomach spending so much on a book but finally gave in. I learned the basics of digital computing POKEing sprite data...

 

[davehc]

I am not sure if a Sinclair ZX80 would properly be classified as a PC. I bought a kit around about 1981. It ran its own form of DOS and you needed to know a mass of key combinations to get anything on the screen (which was usually your TV)
I moved on to the the Apple 2, which was probably my first authentic PC, but company policy decided we would change to IBM so we, and I, moved into those. First attempt was with DR dos and then PC dos. After that the usual path 286 - 386 - 486 and on.

 

[baarod]

I am not sure if a Sinclair ZX80 would properly be classified as a PC.

Oh. Hell. Yes.

The Sinclair 1000 was so cheap and ran off DC that we rigged it up in a big toy truck with the computer, batteries and four electric motors at each of the wheels and programmed it to navigate an obstacle course. If only we could have figured out how to integrate the sonar sensor we ripped off an old Polaroid camera we'd have had primitive adaptive routing autonomy for under $100.

 

[limneos]

Well as for me my first machine i ever touched was the Mac OS (i believe it was 6.0...)
that was in elementary (1996... yes we were behind the times, this school didnt have much money...) then in 98 to upgraded to Mac 7 and finally to 8.....

That was the last i saw or heard of the Mac until OSX and the Ipod ...(never got one..., now i think it was a better not spending a fortune for an mp3 player..lol)

Well as for my machine it was a 1.2 ghz duron running with 128 mb ram (i thought that was fast..lol) IGP S3 Savage (hated that till the day it died...lol) 1 32gb harddrive (still works till this day....the only existent from my old computer...)
had Windows 98 and then to ME (its not as bad as most people make it think i dont know why people bash it...:huh

so what is/was your first computer and if you didnt own it then which was your first PC you bought and your experience???

Lots of things in common here with Darkassain!

The first time I laid hands on a computer was a Mac too, my english language school was using some of them for educational puproses. Unfortunately I was too young to know the OS version... (1988), but it seemed semi-hightech even then(!)
I never heard of it again until OSx and iPod too. (Running Dual Boot Leopard and Vista now on one of my PCs at home)

Then, my uncle (who was then my age now) had bought an Amiga 500, and I had an Atari ST/FM at that time, until I got to get my Amiga too. (1989)

So my first PC was in 1992 , when I was experimenting new things and wanted to see what that 386 with 8MB Ram was up for...Soon, I found it could do nothing much a kid expected (CGA video I remember) and was then a year or so later replaced with a Cyrix686, 200Mhz could be...Pentium processors had just arrived, though I went for Cyrix!! I loved that PC...When it broke, I couldn't bare to wait have it fixed, so I opened it myself...that move marked my life as a computer technician ever since....

 

[johngalt]

I am not sure if a Sinclair ZX80 would properly be classified as a PC. I bought a kit around about 1981. It ran its own form of DOS and you needed to know a mass of key combinations to get anything on the screen (which was usually your TV)
I moved on to the the Apple 2, which was probably my first authentic PC, but company policy decided we would change to IBM so we, and I, moved into those. First attempt was with DR dos and then PC dos. After that the usual path 286 - 386 - 486 and on.

lmfao - if I can count a TI 99/4A....

Oh. Hell. Yes.

The Sinclair 1000 was so cheap and ran off DC that we rigged it up in a big toy truck with the computer, batteries and four electric motors at each of the wheels and programmed it to navigate an obstacle course. If only we could have figured out how to integrate the sonar sensor we ripped off an old Polaroid camera we'd have had primitive adaptive routing autonomy for under $100.

Nice - that would have been fun.

I want to either figure out how to use a couple of play station Cell cores or else us CUDA and my dual GTX 260s to do that in a robotics competition sometime really soon - if I can figure out the place to get some grants to do this....

Lots of things in common here with Darkassain!

The first time I laid hands on a computer was a Mac too, my english language school was using some of them for educational puproses. Unfortunately I was too young to know the OS version... (1988), but it seemed semi-hightech even then(!)
I never heard of it again until OSx and iPod too. (Running Dual Boot Leopard and Vista now on one of my PCs at home)

Then, my uncle (who was then my age now) had bought an Amiga 500, and I had an Atari ST/FM at that time, until I got to get my Amiga too. (1989)

So my first PC was in 1992 , when I was experimenting new things and wanted to see what that 386 with 8MB Ram was up for...Soon, I found it could do nothing much a kid expected (CGA video I remember) and was then a year or so later replaced with a Cyrix686, 200Mhz could be...Pentium processors had just arrived, though I went for Cyrix!! I loved that PC...When it broke, I couldn't bare to wait have it fixed, so I opened it myself...that move marked my life as a computer technician ever since....

1988 sounds like models *after* the ][C and ][e, unless I am mistaken....

Original Macintosh machines, perhaps?

 

[limneos]

Yes, original Macintosh SE....They were those that had a floppy drive onboard on the crt screen/computer...as for the years, I'm not quite sure about them , just a quick estimation considering my age then and my memories from back then...

 

[johngalt]

I worked on a few those for a friend, because different models had different ICs on the motherboard, allowing / disallowing for SuperDrive use when the SuperDrives were first introduced.

 

[darkassain]

Yes, original Macintosh SE....They were those that had a floppy drive onboard on the crt screen/computer...as for the years, I'm not quite sure about them , just a quick estimation considering my age then and my memories from back then...

that little box design
brings back memories...lol
there was a room in our library with i think it was a OS 4...lol

looks just like that...

 

[baarod]

I worked on a few those for a friend, because different models had different ICs on the motherboard, allowing / disallowing for SuperDrive use when the SuperDrives were first introduced.

Opening one up (the right way) required the infamous "case cracker tool". We used to use the SE/30 version 60030 20MHz as email servers when I worked for CE Software.

 

[johngalt]

60030 versus 68030?

Yeah, case cracking tools - never used one though, as these machines I worked on were already 10 years old when I was working on them - and were already 'cracked'

 

[baarod]

60030 versus 68030?

Yeah, case cracking tools - never used one though, as these machines I worked on were already 10 years old when I was working on them - and were already 'cracked'

I'm getting old -- what's one extra loop? Looked OK to me Have you seen this? Motorola 68060 processor family

The original PowerPC Macs sucked so bad that people were screaming for Apple to go back to the 68000 line of CPUs at the time.