The first computer I used was a Tandy 1000 EX that my father bought for $2000. It was an 8088 with 128kb built in ram, upgraded to 640kb, for an additional $300. It had one built in 5.25" floppy, with an external 5.25". I had a 720kb 3.5" floppy drive for it for a while, but I returned it to Radio Shack.
The first computer I bought was a screaming fast Cyrix 120 Socket 3, with 16MB ram. It came with a free upgrade to 2GB, from 1.6GB because the store where I bought it from was out of stock. I even bought the extra 5.25" floppy drive for it so I could use the Tandy programs. It also had a 14.4 modem, the web didn't seem so slow back in '96. Funny thing is that I paid $2000 for it as well.
Now a small PDA outclasses them both. Change is fun.
I too went through the Commodore Ranks(at an early age) - When my dad upgraded - I got my 1st PC--- the wonderful VIC-20 with a 300 buad modem and a tape drive. Then the c-64 ... etc and the my 1st IBM PC ---- a Zenith 248.... an 8mhz 286 with a freakishly huge backplane and all the processing was done on separate cards.... woohoo....
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Hmmm, my brother bought a Timex when I was around 10....still remember typing on that tiny keyboard in DOS. My name scrolling down the screen.
My boyfriend (now hubby) had an IBM xt which was SOOOO much better! But it didn't have a HD and sounded like a coffee maker. And those big floppy disks!
When we were married we were so excited to buy cutting edge technology - a 30mhz clone with 40 mb HD!!!! And only $3000!!!! Such a deal. (I think this was 1989 or so....)
Technology is an amazing thing....:D
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486SX33, 4MB RAM, 250MB HD, 2x CD, 9600 modem, Win 3.1 ... $2500-ish. I remember my first upgrade cost $900 to double the RAM and replace the CPU with a 486DX66. Unbelievable.
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That's right folks, BASIC at its finest. 4K of RAM -- upgraded to 20K (wowza!) with the 16K expansion slot. Also outfitted with tape recorder for saving programs, and a roll printer for printing them out. (you get to type them back in again! Yay!)
Me, my brother and father actually wrote some nifty programs for this -- I developed a couple of gambling games, my father did a lot of statistical analysis on the lottery (the numbers that haven't come out yet are due, they're DUE!), and my brother coded a PEEKd and POKEd version of the game Tapper.
My first computer was in High School and was (I think) an IBM minicomputer, probably System/3 (the pre-cursor to the System/34, 36, 38 and AS/400) which had a punch-tape terminal connected to it. This was about 1977. When you typed in your program (Basic or Fortran), it created a yellow paper punch tape that you could take out, and then when you wanted to run the program, it had a punch tape reader to read the tape and run the program. Then, in college, punch tape was replaced by punch cards.
My first PC at work was a Tandy that had 2 floppy drives, no hard drive and an 808X processor. The Tandy was barely IBM compatible, as it had a proprietary keyboard and other weird Tandy-ness to it, but did run MS-DOS from one floppy (can't remember the version - probably like 3.0). This would have been in 1986 or 1987.
My first one at home was an Intelec 386-16mz with a 20mb hard drive, 4mb memory, and ran Windows 3.0. Because I didn't jump on the 286, and waited for a 386 instead, I got much more mileage out of it. I ordered it mail order around 1990-1991 from a PC clone builder called Intelec in Miami that I found in Computer Shopper. It came with a 14" VGA color monitor, and had both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies in it.
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Remember the days when we thought
"What in the world are we going to need a 50 MB hard drive for? A floppy works just as well!"
And how about the little turbo button? The one that zipped your computer to the zoomin' fast speed of 48 MHZ?
Anybody ever hear of a "Digital Group" computer? My dad had one in the basement a long long time ago. It had a tape drive- it was only turned on once, but it was the neatest thing I ever saw!
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