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

[NoelDP]

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!

 

[Joan Archer]

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:

Yes it was Manic Miner but the school one doesn't look familiar, I think the one the kids played was something like Schools Out.

We also tried out the Sinclair ZX but that belonged to someone else so didn't have it for long, I'm sure as well we had some sort of Atari because I remember them playing ping pong on the television.

The first actual PC we had was a Hewlet Packard running the first edition of Windows 98 with Lotus 123 installed. That machine introduced me to the joys of computers, had to reinstall the thing twice in the first six months of having it, for some reason after that, even though the kids used computers in school and hubby had used one during his work, I was the one who had to sort everyone's problems out.

 

[Britton30]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned one of these slipsticks.

 

[Stephanie]

This is my oldest computer (given to me by a friend whos daughter went to university at the same time of having the PC delivered) its in mint condition made in 2003 - Compaq, presario s5200uk, AMD Athlon XP 2.60 GHz, 30GB HDD, runs perfect and hardly used and Im keeping it

 

[A Guy]

Webtv Plus

A Guy

 

[strollin]

In 1984 I was the 2nd shift manager of a 3 shift dept at IBM and the 3 mgrs shared 1 PC. The 1st shift mgr was the only one that actually used the PC (I had no use for it) and had gotten this new software called Lotus 1-2-3. Only problem was that our PC had only 128K of memory and the new software required 256K. He was going to order the extra memory, then call in a tech to install it. I told him that I would be happy to do it, I had 10+ years experience as a tech but had never worked on a PC. He told me no, the PC was very expensive and he didn't want me to touch it because I might screw it up. I waited until he left work, went over to the parts dept and got the necessary RAM chips, opened the PC and installed them. Then came the hard part, figuring out how to set the switches on the motherboard that told the system how much memory was installed. Got it working and our PC now had a whopping 256K of RAM. Why does the forum software strip out the new paragraph that is supposed to start here? Shortly after that, I started to teach myself how to use the PC and within a short time became very proficient with Lotus 1-2-3 to the point where others were coming to me for help. From there I took a C programming class and within 3 years gave up my management position to take a job as a programmer.

 

[NoelDP]

Anyone remember Multiplan?

 

[whs]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned one of these slipsticks.

Those are very familiar. We used them daily. I still have a couple and even remember how to use them.

 

[Britton30]

In 1984 I was the 2nd shift manager of a 3 shift dept at IBM and the 3 mgrs shared 1 PC. The 1st shift mgr was the only one that actually used the PC (I had no use for it) and had gotten this new software called Lotus 1-2-3. Only problem was that our PC had only 128K of memory and the new software required 256K. He was going to order the extra memory, then call in a tech to install it. I told him that I would be happy to do it, I had 10+ years experience as a tech but had never worked on a PC. He told me no, the PC was very expensive and he didn't want me to touch it because I might screw it up. I waited until he left work, went over to the parts dept and got the necessary RAM chips, opened the PC and installed them. Then came the hard part, figuring out how to set the switches on the motherboard that told the system how much memory was installed. Got it working and our PC now had a whopping 256K of RAM.


Why does the forum software strip out the new paragraph that is supposed to start here? Shortly after that, I started to teach myself how to use the PC and within a short time became very proficient with Lotus 1-2-3 to the point where others were coming to me for help. From there I took a C programming class and within 3 years gave up my management position to take a job as a programmer.

Try enter?

 

[strollin]

In 1984 I was the 2nd shift manager of a 3 shift dept at IBM and the 3 mgrs shared 1 PC. The 1st shift mgr was the only one that actually used the PC (I had no use for it) and had gotten this new software called Lotus 1-2-3. Only problem was that our PC had only 128K of memory and the new software required 256K. He was going to order the extra memory, then call in a tech to install it. I told him that I would be happy to do it, I had 10+ years experience as a tech but had never worked on a PC. He told me no, the PC was very expensive and he didn't want me to touch it because I might screw it up. I waited until he left work, went over to the parts dept and got the necessary RAM chips, opened the PC and installed them. Then came the hard part, figuring out how to set the switches on the motherboard that told the system how much memory was installed. Got it working and our PC now had a whopping 256K of RAM.


Why does the forum software strip out the new paragraph that is supposed to start here? Shortly after that, I started to teach myself how to use the PC and within a short time became very proficient with Lotus 1-2-3 to the point where others were coming to me for help. From there I took a C programming class and within 3 years gave up my management position to take a job as a programmer.

Try enter?

Tried it here.
ENTER
ENTER
ENTER
ENTER

Interesting. I am posting this from my desktop running Win 7. The previous post was done on my laptop running Win 8.1.1.

 

[MrWhoopee]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned one of these slipsticks.

I still have my trusty old Pickett. We wore them strapped to our hips like a Colt .45 and called our physics instructor "coach". We were macho geeks.



Pictured here next to its hi-tech replacement, the TI-11, which was a vast improvement. It did squares and square roots, not to mention the precision.

 

[NoelDP]

You mean you never worked out how to do powers and roots on a sliderule? <eg>
I can remember having to teach our Aussie maths master at school how to use logarithms (we were 14/15, and he was an exchange for the head of Chemistry!)

 

[Ranger4]

The first electronic hand held calculator I had was in 1973, I think. It was a Casio brand & had fluoro tubes & not LCD so battery consumption was shocking, but it did have an AC adapter, so using that certainly saved the batteries.

 

[MrWhoopee]

You mean you never worked out how to do powers and roots on a sliderule?

I have a vague recollection of spending a lot of time working out square roots, but after I paid $110 (in 1973) for that calulator, I killed off all of those brain cells (and a few more, just to be sure).

 

[mohavepc]

My first was one like this 5155 that I actually connected to BBS's back in the day. (still love playing D&D style games on BBS's today). This one was donated by a customer for our museum. A new power supply capacitor and memory and this little beauty fired right up and loaded my Lotus 123 5.5" floppy.

 

[strollin]

Nice 5155 you have there. Up until about a year ago I had 2 of those in my collection. I see you also have an IBM 5140 Convertible to the left in the picture, I had one of those as well.

I had quite a collection of early IBM computers but decided to give it all up and moved on to a different hobby because they were just taking up too much room to store. I had 2 5150 PCs, a 5160 XT, 2 5155 Portables, a 5140 Convertible, 2 4860 PCjrs, 1 5162 XT 286 and 2 5170 ATs. I also had a few other older computers like a Compaq Portable and a couple of early Tandy machines.

 

[mohavepc]

I indeed do have a 5140 up there. That one also works but I am looking for another hinge assembly. I have all this in our store / museum. Ibm 5155, the 5140, an Apple IIc, Apple IIe with color monitor (I play Donkey kong on that one). There are 2 Toshiba laptops with 95 on them that I play Leisure Suit Larry on. 2 more IBM's full towers with Win 3.1 and 3.11 for workgroups that need memory. 2 iMac Colors one consumer 1 Edu that run os9 and OSX (yes it has had a memory and hard drive transplant and a few various parts pieces from 80 up. I need to come up with a better way to display this stuff so I can show it working.

I know it's a disease (d)

 

[NoelDP]

I recently acquired the full User's Guide for Windows for Workgroups (3.11) - complete with COA sticker on the front! - one of the copyright dates in it surprised me.... July 1996! (well after the release of Win95)
I also acquired at the same time the manual for the basic Windows 3.1 - copyright date 1993

 

[mohavepc]

I'll have to post a picture of my library Noel