Anyone remember the really old computers...?

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2003-08-06 07:21pm

We had a 486DX/33. Great machine. I still have a lot of the components laying around, and we upgraded it all the way up to a K6-3.

Exonerate · Post by **Exonerate** » 2003-08-06 07:36pm

I remember the old Apples.

I've heard stories from my history teacher, about modems you had to stick next to the phone so it could work, and university accounts having 25kb of memory for each person.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-08-06 08:00pm

Howedar wrote:We had a 486DX/33. Great machine. I still have a lot of the components laying around, and we upgraded it all the way up to a K6-3.

We also had a 486DX/33 (with 32MB of RAM

). That got upraded to a P166, but the AT case was hard to work with and we later abandoned it, more or less.

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2003-08-06 08:17pm

Mine went through the following steps:
1. 486DX/33
2. Cyrex 150mhz (P1 clone)
3. Pentium MMX 200mhz
4. K6-3 500mhz

Post by **LadyTevar** » 2003-08-06 09:55pm

My school didn't have computers. To learn anything about computers, or get to play around with one, you had to be in the "Gifted Program". That's where I got to play with my very first C-64.

Never did get the hang of programming in Basic. Or just programming, period.

In college, I once again met up with the C-64, and with its big brother, C-128/64. Friends in college had turned their dormroom into "the Lair of the Electric Squid" and ran a BBS off the C-128. I would use the C-64 to connect at a whooping 800baud and type messages to other BBSers......

.......... Ya know.. BBS's haven't changed much in 15 years..... Just had the programs get prettier.

Anyway, I remember seeing one of the first Amiga boxes and being way impressed... and I recall the owner of the C-128 bitching about the lack of backwards compatibility between Amiga and Commodore....

HemlockGrey · Post by **HemlockGrey** » 2003-08-06 11:53pm

When I was five, we had this massive computer that opened like a laptop(but was the size of a small table), only had a floppy drive(for the really floppy, big disks) and you could only type.

But my grandmother remembers working with computers and using punchcards...

Crazy_Vasey · Post by **Crazy_Vasey** » 2003-08-07 07:03am

I still have a fully working C64 in the cupboard. Great machine.

Baron Mordo · Post by **Baron Mordo** » 2003-08-07 09:21am

LadyTevar wrote:My school didn't have computers. To learn anything about computers, or get to play around with one, you had to be in the "Gifted Program". That's where I got to play with my very first C-64.

The Gifted kids at my school had a bunch of UNISYS ICON machines in a LAN. They even had a chatroom program for them.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2003-08-07 12:36pm

phongn wrote:
Howedar wrote:We had a 486DX/33. Great machine. I still have a lot of the components laying around, and we upgraded it all the way up to a K6-3.
We also had a 486DX/33 (with 32MB of RAM ). That got upraded to a P166, but the AT case was hard to work with and we later abandoned it, more or less.

Jesus, Phong, 32 megs?!?

I had a 486/33 with 8 megs. Ran Windows 95. Took awhile to do some things, but by god, it did them. When I upgraded to a 486/66 (heh, now THAT was fun, prying the damn chip out with that weird little tool... oh and the chip was some engineer's demo or something like that that wasn't supposed to leave Intel

) I could *notice* the difference in everything.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-08-07 01:04pm

i remember the day when you used PUNCHCARDS and TOGGLESWITCHES to program computers!!!!! Keyboards? FEH! You got no keyboard. Monitors? HAH! You got blinking LIGHTS!

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-08-07 01:29pm

Uraniun235 wrote:
phongn wrote:
Howedar wrote:We had a 486DX/33. Great machine. I still have a lot of the components laying around, and we upgraded it all the way up to a K6-3.
We also had a 486DX/33 (with 32MB of RAM ). That got upraded to a P166, but the AT case was hard to work with and we later abandoned it, more or less.
Jesus, Phong, 32 megs?!?

I had a 486/33 with 8 megs. Ran Windows 95. Took awhile to do some things, but by god, it did them. When I upgraded to a 486/66 (heh, now THAT was fun, prying the damn chip out with that weird little tool... oh and the chip was some engineer's demo or something like that that wasn't supposed to leave Intel ) I could *notice* the difference in everything.

Ah, yes, the "Low Insertation Force" chips of yesteryear. Ugh.

My dad did a considerable amount of work on the machine, neccesitating 32MB of FPM DRAM.