Hardware Happy 30th Birthday, PC

I miss mine, especially the keyboard. Damn rock solid and comfortable one, with mecanical keys. Was looking for one on ebay and the keyboard alone retail at 50€ !!

 

My first computer memory was dragging the whole of the desktop into the trash bin on a mac at school in year 4.

And playing duke nuke at my neighbours as a child.

Beat that!

 

I remember the MFD hard disk on my old XT - you had to tap it ever so slightly with a screwdriver when you pressed the power button, otherwise it would not spin up - i kid you not, and it lasted like that for over a year without any other problems! It obviously wasn't like this from new, but my cousin who had donated it had been doing it for quite some time!

 

Midtown Madness! I loved the 2/3s of that game that I could actually unlock! Even the annoying announcer that yelled 'hell, now go for the finish!' all the time was great.

 

Only 4 months older than me.

1st PC (and last bought, built my own ever since) was a Time. 128MB Ram, Massive 10gig harddisk and a cyrix 333...DOH! I only released the day after ordering how pitiful they were for gaming the next day when reading up it in a magazine. Alas it was too late to change the order

Voodoo card sorted that out, and thus began my now 12 year(ish) love affair with the PC. Here's to another 30 years!

 

Wow! great article, its nice to see how far todays modern PC's have come

 

yeah started on the atari 800xl, later 130xe (128k).. nothing like having 128k of memory and 16 bit addressing.. you had to bank memory- so if you had code or data loaded above 32k, you'd have 4 32k banks you could switch to- but you could only access one at a time xD

a lot of really good programmers came from the atari 8 bit.. we tended to hate commodore because of the slow load times of the floppy.. I've actually seen bucktooth bodyslams over this- a atari guy is like wtf is taking it so long to load.. commodore guy- atari sucks! (because that's all they could say) que spock and kirk fight music

 

First PC? A 486. Horrible computer, couldn't run Windows 95 for the life of it. But boy was it pretty awesome.

Second computer managed to barely run Age Of Empires. Pentium of course.

 

They were ahead of their time.

 

My first PC and I can recall it pretty well was some bloke in my house setting up some boxes that looked weird to me. My mom and dad told me that this was a computer and they were getting it for them and for me and my brother. It was a Peacock branded pc with a 286 cpu, can't recall how much memory but I guess the hdd was 300mb or something less. The monitor was black and the only colour available was yellow (already in that time I had true blacks) with its horizontal case and matching keyboard, mouse, joystick and even the printer, ribbon type with the proper paper fed through the side holes that were detachable. I don't know how much it cost but sure had to be a lot (my parent's even got a purpose built solid wood cabinet).

It had the 3.5 and the 5.1/2 disk drivers and remember playing Leisure Suit Laryy, Arkanoid, Operation Wolf, Digger, Xonix, Cat, Monkey Island (was afraid of the faces then), Rick Dangerous, the all mighty Pre-Historik and so on.

I was below 9 and learnt how to work with DOS properly.
Good old times, games were fun and simple! I didn't have proper ESA monitor but mine did the job pretty well. I've still got everything and I think, maybe, just maybe, up and running

 

Probably more like 30MB

 

I second, my IBM 486 was a high end (at its time) one and had 200MB and 16MB of RAM.

 

Started out with a ZX81 and Speccy then a C64, the first PC I used was my dads Sanyo MBC550 running MS-DOS v1.25, this was followed by an Amstrad PC1640 (god I hated GEM!) then an RM 386sx laptop, RM 486dx2 66 which I upgraded with the Pentium Overdrive chip 83Mhz!.

 

Right then, in this order (from, er...1979 );

Sinclair ZX81
ZX Spectrum 48k
ZX Spectrum 2+
Atari 520STFM
Amiga 500 (x2)
Amiga 1200
Amiga 1500 (pretty much a B2000)
Amiga 4000/30

My first PC (swapped my 4000/30 for it!) a Pentium 90, 64 megs of RAM

My first upgrade? A K6-166 CPU!

 

The first PC that I owned personally was a Mitac something, 286 12Mhz with a whopping 4Mb of RAM and a 10Mb HDD. It even had two (count'em: TWO) floppy drives; a 5.25" and a 3.5"!

Now that I think about it, weren't there some odd 3" and 2.5" floppies floating around at some point, never quite making it into the mainstream? And now that I'm thinking about this, what happened to the promised minidisc data drives? *off to google*

First computer I owned was an Amstrad something or other (it was a CPC464). It had a dedicated green/white monitor and an integrated tape drive. I have also owned a Commodore 128 for which I got a floppy drive!

Edit: turns out they did try to market several various formats of floppies throughout the eighties; 2", 2.5", 2.8" and 3" drives where in production at different times. Amstrads CPC642 and upwards came with an integrated 3" floppy drive for instance.

 

My first pc was the Tandy TRS 80 Color Computer, the one that looked like a BBC micro, I think it had a whopping 32k of memory. Still got it and it still works

 

Excellent article which brought back memories from 1988 when I was an eager 16 yo studying a BTEC National diploma in Computing. Gone were the BBC Micros of secondary school, the college had "proper" computers - IBM XT workstations networked to a 286 server!

My first computer was a Commodore 64 in the early 1980's although the first computer I bought myself was a Amiga A500, in the late 80's. My first "PC" was a Cyrix P166 with 16MB RAM which I bought around 1997/98.

 

My first PC
Micron
PIII 550 MHz
128 MB SDRAM
8 GB HDD
Windows 98

First family PC (that I used)
AST
???? ???? MHz
??? MB (EDO?)
??? MB HDD
Windows 3.1

First family PC:
Stock IBM 8088 (used)

 

Great review guys and really glad that the keyboard did it's job (regardless of it being German!). My memories? Selling Zenith 8086/8088 PC's in a computer shop in Luton along with the extremely expensive Visicalc software, then the arrival of Amstrad's PC1512 and PC1640 to blow everything else out of the water by price and features (even though they weren't that good). Mind you, we sold anything from the Spectrums, C64's, C128, Plus4, BBC B's, Acorn Atom, Amstrad CPC464 & 128, PCW8256 & PCW8512 word processors, Ataris of various forms including ST/STE, Amigas from the A1500 to the very first A500's in the country and beyond (main Commodore Dealer) and even obscure machines like the MSX series, Oric and the Sinclair QL......my god, I don't half feel old now.....First computer? ZX81. In order:

ZX 81
Atari 800 (with tape deck - then with Disk Drive)
Atari 800XL
Atari 520ST
Atari 520STE
Atari 8088 processor PC Clone
Amiga A500
Pentium P75
IBM Aptiva Pentium 2-233
Quantex P3-550
Self Build PC's - 2 different motherboards with 2 different AMD processors, same chassis & peripherals
Sony Vaio All-in-One (current machine)
Dell Laptop
Samsung Netbook

Phew!

Memories - having to buy matching twin memory at a time for the P75 machine (very expensive), buying an upgrade chip to fit on the existing Intel one supplied to make it faster....and it not working. My dad's PC's needing countless upgrades of sound-cards and CD rom drives to make them worthwhile in using at all. And the oldest memory? Having a discussion with a PC manufacturer in Reigate about Hercules graphics chips....WooHoo...we knew how to live then eh??

Keep it up chaps!

 

The photo in this article showing an IBM and AMD 8088 should be corrected the IBM Chip is a Math Coprocessor not the CPU.