Had an Acorn Atom, Spectrum 128K and Atari ST. First Actual PC was an Olivetti Envision. Crap build quality, poor infra-red keyboard and buggy as hell... Pentium P75, can't remember the rest of the spec, but Windows 95 and a bunch of useless bundled software.
First home computer (in 1981) was a BBC Micro B (32K RAM), cassette tape and a 14" TV; those were the days. First home PC (in 1983) was an IBM 5150 PC :- 4.7Mhz 8080, 64K ram, 2 x 360K diskette drives, 5151 monochrome display 1st lot of additions/mods were :- 5153 CGA display + adpater, home made CPU board with 6Mhz NEC V20 which also added a "Reset switch" and a "Turbo switch" (4.7Mhz or 6Mhz) 2nd lot of additions :- 640K RAM with real time clock, 10Mb MFM Hard disk + controller Followed by various others (too many to remember) :- 386,486,486DX2 Pentium,AMD-K6,Pentium-2,Pentium-3,Pentium-4,AMD-K7(slot-A) Athon64,Athlon64X2
Zenith Z-120 Intel 8085 (8 bits) @ 5 MHz & Intel 8088 (16 bits) @ 5 MHz - dual processors baby! 128 KB, up to 768 KB through 64 KB or 256 KB modules 640 x 500 (semi-graphic mode with 33 special characters available) - in lovely amber! 2 x 5''1/4 disk-drives (320 KB each) - for storing things
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX80: It was bought it for my 12th birthday in Jan 1981. This had an incredible 1k of ram. This was followed 12 months later with a ZX81 plus 16k ram pack! Those were the days when you got your games from a magazine (as a program) and had to type them in before playing them. Not that they were much of a game; mostly a few of sprites with collision detection algorithms. Had to be careful with the ZX81, if you sneezed when typing or typed too hard, the ram pack would move, re-starting your machine and losing all of your work. As it was all tape storage then, you didn't do a save that often. I think this is when I learnt to swear like a trooper. After that it was a BBC micro, before moving onto the machines we know now.
Man, that takes me back. A Friend of mine had a ZX81 with expansion pack. He also had a tiny dot-matrix printer that was not much bigger than the expansion pack used for book keeping and program listings. Sir Clive Sinclair sure had the right visions, just not fast enough to keep pace with the personal computer revolution and sometimes just plain bad timing(Sinclair C5 anyone).
I remember that printer well, it was a thermal printer. The paper came as rolls, much like supermarket till rolls, only grey. I forgot to mention the quirk of the ZX80. Because the processor was so slow, when you typed, the screen (your tv) turned off whilst the computer thought about it. Once you stopped typing the display would appear again. Gaming, as such, was a complete waste of time on this.
P200 MMX 32MB Ram 3.2GB HDD CD Rom (cant remember the speed) Windows 95 33.6kbps modem It eventually got upgraded with a 16MB PCI Voodoo Banshee. Funny thing is it only died about a year ago due to PSU failure. Darn AT
