Hardware Happy 30th Birthday, PC

IBM spawned the personal computing revolution 30 years ago when it released the very first PC

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/08/12/happy-30th-birthday-pc/1

 

Computing is older than me by about 5 months.... I know why I was born 5 months later now...

Ironically there is a tshirt floating around at my parents house that has me printed on it, picture taken with one of the 'first' digital cameras (I was a baby). Apparently at some fair or something (a booth type thing). Geek on IBM...

 

It'll be interesting to see what the next 30 years entails, that'll make for an interesting article ay?

 

*sigh* floppy disk's those where the days ^_____^'

 

Yeah,and I remember CP/M

 

Absolutely great article guys, really loved it!

Just to contribute: My first PC - A Pentium 75, 8mb of RAM and 545mb HD drive - and wait for it -a 4x CD-ROM.

 

i miss beige.

 

My first PC was 386SX 40MHz. Only one of my friends had PC too, 286, 1MB of RAM. I had 2MB, then after a year upgraded to 4MB of RAM! I remember I had 5.25 and 3.5 FDDs and HUGE 80MB HDD!
Good times...

 

My first PC was Tesla PP-06. =D

 

first pc:

100MHz Pentium
8 MB RAM
1GB Hard Drive
4x CD-ROM
and [the newly launched] Windows 95

EDIT: it wasn't beige... it was grey... [the monitor was beige... and the size of a postage stamp]

first upgrade:

an extra 32MB RAM [taking it up to a whopping 40], a 4GB Hard drive and Windows 98


i did have a couple of older PCs that i acquired [an old 386 with windows 3.1, and some amstrad pile of junk with windows 2], ZX Spectrum and a ZX81 [i still have those]... but the pentium was my first PC

 

My first PCA Commodore PC1...a 8086 clone, 4.something Hz, floppy, no harddrive, but the special Comodore "AGA" graphics card that did Hercules monochrome...more or less EGA black-and-white.
I still have it, it still runs, even reads it's MS-DOS-Floppy (well, it did last year)
My first MOD:
built a speaker for it (didn't come with one)
My first Overclock:
Swapped the 8086 for a clone, a V20 (or was it a V30) NEC chip, woohoo!

And we're going back to it...no, not cloud computing. A company serious about it's data doesn't store in the cloud (yet?). The cloud is for Joe Average putting his snapshots to facebook

Mainframe and Terminal, now called Server and Thin Client.
Now the thin client could run on it's own, but usually runs some virtualisation like citrix. Saves you the maintainance of local PC's which have become a serious cost driver.

 

My first PC was an Amiga 2000 in 1989 (I was 9). Awesome machine, I ketp it from 1989 to 1996.

Motorola 68000 @ 7.19MHz
1MB onboard RAM (expended it to 3MB, costed an arm )
2 double density floppy drives (880KB)
no HDD





Bought a IBM 486 DX50 - 16MB of RAM in 1994 for my school homework (Autocad for the Mecanics courses and DMT for Electronics course)

486DX50 @ 50MHz
16MB EDO RAM (8x 2MB sticks)
200MB HDD
TsengLabs ET4000 1MB GPU (love these card)
SoundBlaster AWE32





I can remember setting the IRQs directed on each card via jumpers, FSB and multi was also set via jumpers on the Mobo ... overclocking by shortcutting some tracks with a carbon pencil .... unsoldering the dead battery (the blue capacitor on the bottom right corner) and soldering a new one (no removable battery for bios back on those time).

 

Like Clive, my first PC was an AMD K6-2/450 from Novatech. Unlike Clive, I only shelled out £99 for a Voodoo 3 gfx card that made Midtown Madness look like the end of a rainbow.

The only reason I shelled out the £400-odd for my first PC was because the hard drive on my A1200 had died. As well as 3.5" hdd, it had a Blizzard 1230-IV card with a 68030@50Mhz on it, together with an 8MB simm. Workbench loaded in about 30 seconds with all the startup-sequence stuff running, like Antivirus, pretty gui etc. It's still in my loft.

After the graphics card, I then upgraded to an Intel 440bx motherboard bought from a computer fair (an Asus I think) and plonked a P3-450 in there, which promptly got overclocked to 519mhz iirc. It was on this PC that I played Half Life into the small hours. Damn that was such a good game.

I also have (somewhere) one of those Intel/AMD 8086 cpus from a PC5150.

 

First proper PC
Manufacturer - TINY
Operating System - Windows 98
Processor - Intel Pentium II 266
Motherboard - Micro Star International MS6132
Graphics - ATI 3D Rage Pro (intergrated)
Memory - 32 MB SDRAM
Hard Drive - Fujitsu 4 GB
Floppy Drive
32x CD-ROM
56k modem

Later added 256MB RAM and 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 PCI

Still have it!





Commodore 64 before that

 

Nice! It shares my birthday too!!

 

First computer was an old Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the old cassette tape one with the rubber keys, We then moved up to the next version which had the hard plastic keys (don't know any specs -I were 8 or 9 at the time). We had an Atari ST for games, still have fond memories of BattleTank, centipide, Space invaders etc

 

happy birthday！！

 

ZX81, without the 16k memory pack - you have to learn elegant programming when you've only 1k of memory. Yes, 1k!

 

My first PC was a IBM 5160 XT with a 8088 CPU. Can't remember how much memory, but I recall it being counted in KB.

On a side note: also the first pc I took apart, put back together, broke and binned

 

It was 1994, my dad got a new pc and he wanted to get rid of the old one. It was a Xerox PC with 8086 8MHz processor, 512kb of RAM, 30MB IDE HDD, 2 5,25" floppy drives, CGA monitor and a keyboard. I think the best thing is that it had a serial port connected Xerox Star optical mouse with a special mouse mat.

If no-one believes that optical mouse story, here's a link about that mouse: http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/xerox/star8010.shtml.

So, happy birthday, PC.