Does anybody remember the Dark Ages of computing...

[Elheru Aran]

I was talking last night on the AIM chat, and it occurred to me that most of the people here on the boards wouldn't have been around during the so-called "Dark Ages"...

anyways, I still remember my parents' old Commodore 64 with fond memories... it had this great Olympics game, and Pac-Man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then there was this OOOOOOOLD IBM running MS-DOS... used floppies... I'd play Carmen Sandiego on it! Fun stuff... there was also LHX, this helicopter game, and a flying game... Yeager Air Combat. All fun, even if seriously old.

Anyways, I was wondering... what's the oldest comp y'all have ever used? And if there were games on it, was it fun?

[lazerus]

Commodore 64, which is pretty good considering how I'm not even 20.

--

It's like watching a documentarey about the stone age.

[sketerpot]

I once used this old computer which had "Zenith" written on it. I was too young at the time to remember what model it was, but I do remember that the screen consisted of a bunch of horizontal lines, all green. There were two floppy disk drives, and one floppy was labeled "games" (all the others being filled with weird parental stuff that I didn't understand, or care about). I had fun back then, with a knockoff of pac-man and this weird castle adventure game that I couldn't figure out how to play. You would go around picking up the golden goblet, getting a helmet, getting in a fight with a snake, then giving up from sheer bafflement. "You hit the snake! The snake strikes you! The helmet helps." What sort of a game was that, I wondered?

And that is how I came to use the command line: to type "pacman" and "castle", the only commands you'll ever need.

[SCRawl]

Ah, the C-64. I used a VIC-20 back then, too, and other similarly ancient hardware. The oldest equipment I've ever used, though, came in my fourth year digital logic class (back in 1993). I forget the name of this thing, but it was programmed by flipping toggle switches. This is your basic 1s and 0s programming, kids, not for the faint of heart.

Still, the Commodore 64 was a useful tool. It had a decent word processor, and some fun games.

Anyone ever use the "Icon" computers? They mostly ran WatCom BASIC, and were used in public schools in Ontario.

[YT300000]

The first I used was a Packard Bell XT. 5" floppies on that one, 256 colour monitor.

The oldest I used was an Apple II, about 6 years ago.

Pretty good for a 14 year old, no?

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

My elementary school had a bunch of old Apple IIs, and until I was in 4th grade, (around 1997-98), they were the newest computers in the school. And they came with a bunch of those 5 1/4" disks with some familiar games, and a bunch of wierd obscure ones.

[GoldenFalcon]

Apple IIc, I enjoyed crashing the school computers way back when.

No one could figure out what went wrong when it started some screwball version of BASIC.

[RedImperator]

In kindegarten, they had some ancient Tandys, the kind with the keyboard, moniter, and floppy drives all together as one unit. They were old when I started, and that was in 1986. Then we had an Apple II/c at home--expandable to one megabyte of memory!

My first actual PC was a Packard Bell something or other with a 100Mhz Pentium I and 8 megs of RAM, which we got my freshman year of high school. It actually stuck around for a while as the family computer. I don't think it got replaced until my sophomore year of college, by which point the thing barely ran. Now its replacement, which was never a great rig (lots of penny pinching in the specs), is due to be transfered to the garage.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Well I remember ASCII trek, punchcards etc.

of course that was before microsoft so purhaps I remember the Roman Empire of computing....

[Mayabird]

I remember playing on a Apple IIc in first grade. It was the reward for getting all your work done first, and everything was ridiculously easy (it was on a first grade level, after all) so I was the only person to EVER use that computer.

[Howedar]

Apple IIe, and some Sanyo thing.

[Drooling Iguana]

Anyone ever use the "Icon" computers? They mostly ran WatCom BASIC, and were used in public schools in Ontario.

I have some fond memories of those old Icon computers, with their bigass trackballs in the corners of the keyboards, and that little square that would appear in the corner of the screen when the network was being accessed.

Unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to find any information on them now, since it's pretty tough to turn up anything useful by doing a Google search for "icon".

Of course, my first computer was a CoCo 2. That computer kicked ass.

[Sharp-kun]

I have fond memories of my old BBC.....

[Daltonator]

Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail on the Apple ][e...those were the days.

[Comosicus]

The first computer I used was a HC-91, some sort of Commodore/Spectrum clone IIRC. It used to load games from audio tapes. It also had a variant of BASIC installed.

The first PC I used was an Packard Bell 286 with color display back in the 6th grade (1993).

I bought my first computer in 1998, a Cyrix 686 233Mhz.

[2000AD]

I'm guessing my Amiga 500 counts as Middle Ages rather than Dark Ages.

[Vympel]

My personal Dark Age began with Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom on some old piece of shit (is there such thing as an 086?), graduated up to EGA Gunship 2000 on my 286, and then I got my 486 (in 1993)- and lo, my friend brought over his X-Wing on floppy disc.

And all was well. Doom followed soon after, and thus began the glorious golden age of gaming, which continues to this day.

[Chris OFarrell]

First computer I had was a DEC Rainbow. Had probably as much power as my wristwatch does today (if not less), stood a meter off the floor, had 2 5.25 drives...

I remember the day my Dad brought home an RGB monitor for it. AN RGB MONITOR! It had one input for red, one for blue, one for green. It was amazing. There was a frigen cool game called SCRAM. You were a guy in zero G who had to get down to the reactor and lower all 4 control rods. You have to navigate through about 5 screens of travel. You basicly entered the screen at the top, then had to get to the airlock at the bottom the cycle it to get to the next stage.

Problem was that the reactor kept getting hotter and hotter. And acceleration used up thruster power. You COULD on each screen go to a station to dump a heep of coolent into the reactor to take it back down. Or dock at a fuel station to recharge your thruster power. If you ran out of thruster power, your ability to accelerate was WAY down and you would bounce all over the place...

So the game was a trick of being able to easily move down each level with a minimum of correction as fat as possible, alternating one level to use the thruster recharge and input coolent on the next. If you had to go to both on one level, you would use up way too much time...

God DAMN that was a cool game though!

EDIT

Ahh this is the guy.
http://www.eps.ufsc.br/~gio/cmuseum/rainbow.htm

Unfortunantly while it did use a Dos interface, it wasn't bassed on the 8086 and you couldn't run IBM bassed programs on it.

Then we got a VAXmate and it WAS able to and I was thus happy

[Sarevok]

The oldest computer I used is a 486. Many years ago I used it to surf the internet with a 14.4 modem.

The oldest computer my family has is an Epson PC from the 80s. From I what I am told it was built before I was even born !

[The Yosemite Bear]

The first computer I had at home didn't even HAVE such luxuries as 5.25" floppy drives no this sucker jacked into anolog tape players through the earphone and microphone plugs. funny we used the old reel to reel tapes at first just to keep the old fashied look.

[Slartibartfast]

The first computer I had at home didn't even HAVE such luxuries as 5.25" floppy drives no this sucker jacked into anolog tape players through the earphone and microphone plugs. funny we used the old reel to reel tapes at first just to keep the old fashied look.

That sounds like the Sinclair Timex I have lying around. Rubber keys n stuff, "one-key" BASIC entry. Weird thing.

I still have a C-64 (in fact I have several, put an ad in the newspaper offering to buy, cheap, so every time it breaks down I throw it out the window)

Used to have a Vic-20 when I was young.

[General Zod]

i remember the school's apple IIEs, with their ASCII based games. i also recall the first computer i ever owned was an IBM Compatible 386 system. i managed to trash it in about 6 months due to curiosity getting the better of me.

[Uraniun235]

Used a C-64 at a very early age. (My parents have a photo of me at it when I was around 3) We had some ancient IBM PC then that took about five minutes to warm up before it would start booting. Monochrome display and all! Then there was a 286 at one point. My dad then found a PGA card and tried to get it to work, but couldn't.

Then he got a 386 and went from there.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Ah, the great, grand old days. Playing on my Amiga 500 and later 1200, the 500 model being the movie pack which was bundled with the likes of Days of Thunder and Nightbreed while the 1200 model was a Comic Relief pack with Sleepwalker.

Playing at a mate's with his ZX-81 Spectrum (by far the greatest computer based thing ever with that great kung-fu game I bested), Megadrive and NES.

Then there was school with the old Acorns and BBCs which could display all 16-colours and had a true floppy disk drive with those huge 5" diskettes.

I feel all nostalgic now and need to play Elite somehow.

[RogueIce]

Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail on the Apple ][e...those were the days.

I remember some kind of summer program/after school(?) computer thingy, back in ol' Ft Myers... All I did was play Oregon Trail, until was dark out and I went home. In a red brick type building, too.