My First Hard Drive...........

[BRL]

.............was an amazing 4gig!!!

Just talking with a mate about my first home PC from Time Computers called The Time Machine.

I can't remember what processor it had in it but it had a 4gig hard drive, 64 meg graphic card, and a free half meg digital camera that was the most basic thing you have ever seen!

It was nice thinking back about pc's and how they have come on so much and I wonder about what is around the next corner regarding home pc's....

Can you remember your first PC/Laptop?

[Tocsin]

My first computer was an Acorn Atom (precursor of the BBC Micro).

Memory upgrades were £11.50 per 512 bytes - my last USB flash drive would have cost over £80,000,000 at those prices :eek:

[LPS500]

I remember my first PC, I splashed out for a Pentium 75 as this was the new rage, chosen over a 486. It had 800 odd meg hard drive, I'm sure 32 meg of ram, a lovely 14 inch crt monitor, and an external 28,800 modem. Somehow I still managed to play Quake online with a friend of mine! My mother still has it although upgraded to a mighty P100. My first computer though was a C64............

[exeng]

Bought it in HKG and it had a 20mb hard drive. I asked seller if he thought that was big enough for my future needs - he said why do you think you will need anything larger than that?!!!!

Pre windows of course - and funnily enough it achieved about 80% of what I manage now on non-internet related tasks but in a non-pretty DOS kind of way.


Regards
Exeng

[batninth]

First computer at batninth towers was also a Time machine, but much earlier than yours BRL.

It had 1MB RAM, and a 270MB Hard Disc. I upgraded it to 4MB RAM so it would run Windows 3.1 properly.

I now carry more than 270MB in a memory stick on a lanyard with my security pass, and my phone runs a more advanced version of Windows.

[SOTV]

I'm sure it was a Commodore 64 after laughing at a mates ZX81. Cant remember the cost but it was probably not that cheap.

Compare that with a system I picked up for the youngest the other week.

HP Compaq. 160 Gb HD, 3 GHz processor, 1 Gb memory, 19" flat screen, Vista, Pentium etc... No other software but have that anyway. Got the sales chap to throw in an external Wi-Fi wotsit and gave him a shade under £290. OK, special offer but it does the business for her Facebook and music downloads.

:)

[dontpressthat]

Blimey.. this takes me back. I also had a ZX81 and upgraded to a spectrum-48k. All my mates then had spectrum 128k's so gave up and asked santa for a BMX the following year. On reflection that may have affected the development of my PC skills but dinnarf have some fun on my rayleigh burner.

Also I can remember being given some early art software with this new fangled 'mouse' thingy... haha that'll never catch on I thought. :ooh:

DPT

[Saab Dastard]

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, 48K RAM, AFAIR. Rubber keyboard and tape recorder storage, hitched up to the TV. Hard disk? What hard disk?!

First proper PC in the house was my father's - a Philips 8088 with a massive 20MB hard drive and 1 MB RAM. DOS 2.X, I think

My first was a relatively recent 486SX 25 with 4 MB RAM and 100 MB disk. DOS 5 and Windows 3.1

We've all passed as lot of water since then, as Jack Warner would have said!

SD

[frostbite]

Very first computer was a bits-in-a-bag, take it home and solder it together.

Can't remember the processor but I do remember the 2K RAM (4K upgrade £75), hex display, tin box 'case' (£10.50 extra) and Tiny Basic when you upgraded the memory cost £19.95 on a C15 tape.

Program/data storage? Forget it!

[eticket]

Like a number of posters my first computer was a ZX Spectrum with rubber keys that got heavily modified and upgraded over the years. With all the hours spent typing out and checking programs from the pages of the magazines I now wonder if I shouldn't have gone into supplying Audio Cassettes to go on the front of the magazines. But that idea would never have caught on.

First PC was an XT Amstrad 1640 DD/ECD with two 5 1/4" drives.

I still have both of them. In cupboards. Though the audio cassette recorder for the Spectrum is still on active service.

[Senior Pilot]

I've still got my first: an Apple IIe, in its original box :)

Hard drive: what hard drive?

[rickity]

First computer I played with was Siemans R330 64k core memory, 1.5M 18inch disk drives, and on bad days loaded from paper tape. Operating system was in German, and the PSU produced 60 amps at 5 volts. CPU electonics over 9 boards - not exactly a home computer but my thanks to the RAF for the introduction. Next up was the DEC PDP 11 series 2M Memory, CPU on one card (but a big one ) allowed fault finding to a bit in a regisiter. Still looking at a later model PDP 11/84 18MHz clock still providing a service with a well known ATC service provider. they were the days when you could replace a chip. never did understand how windows worked. now feeling a bit old.

Rickity

[reynoldsno1]

Had an Amstrad that had TWO of those 5 1/4 in floppy drives - eat your hearts out suckers .... wotsa hard drive..:confused:

[terrain safe]

First computer I ever used was a dual processor computer. You had to manaually switch between them if you were processing or printing. 5Mb HDD, 8 inch floppies, green screen and a daisywheel printer. First pc I used was a Tandy TRS 80. My dad bought a ZX80 for us to play with. Then I had a Commodore 64. Loved that one. My first PC was an IBM XT with a 20Mb MFM hard disk drive. Autoroute fitted in a 1Mb space and took half an hour to work out Lands End to John O'Groats! Since then spent an absolute fortune on Pcs but I am loving my Dell Vostro 1700 laptop with 8600Gt video card. games run loverly.....

[bnt]

I played with a few friends' home computers - Spectrum, BBC, C64 - but the first machine I owned was the PC-XT clone I bought myself in '88. A couple of years later I paid a lot to upgrade it to a whopping 286-20 with 2MB RAM... but kept the 20MB hard drive. Those were the days... :hmm:

[Parapunter]

Speccy 48k for me - used to write games in basic for it. Jesus that took forever! Heat sensitive paper on the printer!

[Foodbomber]

Im definitely feeling old! First computer got to grips with was a Sharp MZ3500, twin floppies (360K) green screen and ran CPM with Wordstar. Brilliant keyboard though, much better than ones get these days.

Still got my Speccy 48k in original box and tapes of games. Shame dont have tape player these days!

After much use of Speccy first proper PC was a homebuilt 286/16 with 10mb and 640 K ram. Still got the MSdos 3.2 and harvard graphics, and wordstar disks somewhere!

Dont make em like that anymore! :)

[gibbo568]

My first computer was a Vic20, can't remember how much RAM, cassette for storage!
First PC was an Amstrad MegaPC, 386 CPU running at 25Mhz, 1Mb RAM, 40Mb hard drive!
Memory upgrade to 2Mb cost £104!!!
Now running
a) AMD 64x2 4200, 2Mb Ram, 320+250Gb Dual monitors and PCLinuxOS
b)Biostar XP3000, 1Mb, 320Gb, 19" widescreenTFT, PCLinuxOS
plus an Acer lappy, and an EeePC
Things have changed.

[The Nr Fairy]

First cpmputer I played with at home was a TRS-80, with expansion pack and two 5.25" floppies in an external case.

Next came an IBM PC Portable - sewing machine size, 30Mb internal Winchester (!) disk, internal amber screen, external colour screen.

Then a succession of IBM PC/AT clones. Work buys my computers nowadays !

[MacBoero]

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 bought for me by my Grandfather. I still have it, and I suspect it probably would still work too.

At university in 1988 I bought my first PC...

12MHz 286 processor
1MB RAM
5.25" floppy drive
3.5" floppy drive
And for the time a very good graphics card, that could do up 800x600 pixels in 16 colours!

All the above was brand new.
Attached to it was a second hand colour monitor I bought at an auction for about £140. It was 12", and colour monitors were quite rare. This one turned out to be multi-sync, which was even rarer, and the price had I bought a new one would have been £1000!!!:eek:

In 1991 I upgraded it by installing a hard drive. It was an RLL drive. the whole thing is 5.25" wide and fills TWO standard drive bays familiar on most PCs nowadays. It had a dedicated ISA card that connected it to the computer.

The monitor I got rid of years ago, even at 12" it was just too bulky. The computer still sits under my bed.

Guess what? It still works, and boots to MS-DOS 5 in about 15 seconds. Windows? What's that!?:}

[hellsbrink]

First computer was a C64 (hard disk? No, but eventually got a floppy drive for it!) which was followed by an Amiga 500 with a whole 1Mb of Ram and eventually a MASSIVE 20Mb hard disk. Upgraded to an A4000 with a bigger hard disk and eventually bought first PC (Pentium 133, can't remember much more about it apart from it being an Olivetti)

[Mac the Knife]

Goodness! My first HDD was a 40Mb drive in a no-name clone PC-XT a good while ago. Nice little machine too, that I spent hours tuning to perfection. I actually used that drive for years, booting FreeSCO on a router/firewall until it died a few years ago.

Started with a ZX81 though and wrote my first database program. Then it was a Spectrum and Microdrives - funnily enough I never had any trouble with them and last time I resurrected the system about a year ago, the drives still read without problems.

I was a Microsoft thrall for years until I discovered Linux.

:ok:

[WALSue]

My first computer was an Atari 8bit, no disk at all. Had to wait 20 minutes for a game to load from tape. Most of which you had to program yourself by copying the code from a magazine.

[hellsbrink]

Had to wait 20 minutes for a game to load from tape. Most of which you had to program yourself by copying the code from a magazine.


Ahh, them were the days. (where's the zimmer frame smiley?)

Now you spend three hours figuring out why a game doesn't work properly when you install it and update it. Isn't progress wonderful....

[cats_five]

You had it cushy. I think 'my' first one (e.g. my employer's disk) was measured in kilobytes. However there was room left for data given it was running Windows 3.

[frostbite]

Just remembered the name of that first one - it was an RCA Cosmac Elf.

(sure you were all holding your breath waiting for that)

[Tosh McCaber]

1989- second hand Mac SE/20, with 1 MB of RAM, and a 20 MB hard drive, (£750), which the wife used for graphics- amazing what she was able to do with it, even compared with her Imac now!

[unclenelli]

I had a Vic20 (http://oldcomputers.net/vic20.html)
3.5kb RAM
Cassette deck (proper Commodore one with no speaker, so silent loading unlike Spectrums)
Took Atari-style joysticks

I also had a "Super Expander" cartridge which added 3k to the ram as well as enhanced graphics

Cost a shade under £400 back in early 1980's!!! - Sold it in 1993 for £25

(I also previously owned a 1970's Commodore Video-Game machine with slider controllers, which played 3 Pong-style games (tennis, squash, football), and also came with a hand-gun/removable rifle butt gun attachment for the 4th game - a shooter game.
Had a Commodore Calculator (Red LED display) too.)

Even my first PalmPilot (m100) beat the Vic for processing and my current PalmPilot T5 has a 466MHz processor!!!

I've also got a BBC B Micro in the loft
Cost me £25 second-hand in 1994, but at least it has a 5.25" Floppy Drive and dedicated monitor.

1st laptop was a Compac Armada E700, which I gave to my brother. 500Mhz CPU and 30GB HDD.

---------------------------------------------------------

Currently running a "Trigger's Brush" desktop
Intel 2.8Ghz 2TB HDD

Laptop
Toshiba 1.73GHZ DualCore 120GB HDD with 1.1TB external HDDs

---------------------------------------------------------

So - Can anyone beat a 1970's Commodore Video Game unit for nostalgic computing????????

[WALSue]

BBC Micros, I remember playing Grannys Garden back in the day at school.
One computer between the entire class.

[P.Pilcher]

What modern machines! The first one I got to grips with was an Eliot 903 which I was helped to program(me) using Eliot Algol to process my experimental results. No hard drives, no floppies, no attached keyboard and yes - no CRT monitor either! Type your program(me) on a teleprinter which produces a strip of paper tape. Feed this into the tape reader of the computer. In a flash with a screaming noise the tape punch ejects miles and miles of tape containing the machine code. Now flip a couple of switches, feed this into the tape reader, then move another switch and feed in another length of tape with which you have recorded the results of your experiment. In a flash another lenght of tape is punched which, when read and printed out by the teleprinter gives you the required results. It machines like this that the Colossal Cave and other similar text adventure games were written for. Of course the difficult bit was writimg the program(me) which had to be letter, space and punctuation perfect!

XYZZY!

P.P.

[exeng]

Beds - we used to dream about beds.



Regards
Exeng

[Keef]

My Commodore PET 3032 is still in the cupboard in the back bedroom, together with the "tractor printer". The dual drive floppy disk went to the RAF for some obscure purpose. I remember paying £695 for the PET, £695 for the dual floppy, and £295 for the printer. I became quite adept at writing 6502 machine code to get it to do things.

Then I got a BBC B, and it all went downhill from there. Sideways RAM, and then those scary newfangled hard drives. After that it all became a blur.

[Bushfiva]

When we upgraded our (only) computer hard drive from 20MB to 30MB, it was cheaper to fly to Singapore, buy the drive and fly back, than to buy the drive locally.

[frostbite]

"My Commodore PET 3032 is still in the cupboard"


Well, I've got a CBM 4032 in my cupboard, and an 8032, so there!

any offers?

[BRL]

^^^^^^^^^ Pictures?

[Bushfiva]

Taken in 1998, when I thought they were old even then. Name 'em and weep. The newest of the bunch was the Toshiba with a red plasma display. I'd upgraded the hard drive from a 3.5" full height 30MB unit to 100MB. It involved huge amounts of drilling and Cuba Libres. Serial number of the Beeb was 13. I installed a Solidisk floppy drive system in it, which didn't work initially, and as was quite typical in those days Solidisk spent the next few days on the phone to me as I looped ludicrous amounts of wire between pins until the the subsystem burst into life.

The Apricot was the one I really wanted to use, and was also the one least likely to actually work. So many ideas, such piss-poor implementation. Proprietary floppies, FFS.

http://www.bushcat.com/crop0002.jpg

[hellsbrink]

OMG!! An Acoustic Coupler!! :eek:

Now I do feel very, very old since I remember them....

[Binoculars]

Great thread!

I was a late comer to computers. First was an Amstrad 286 with a 20Mb hard drive. I put every piece of software I owned on it and wondered how I would ever fill up the rest. Eventually I used disk compression or whatever it was called then, so that my 20Mb HDD was compressed to about 35Mb of which 10Mb was used with the software!

Then I took the giant leap to a 486 DX2-66 with a 420Mb HDD. Not only that but instead of the standard 4Mb of RAM I paid to increase it to 8Mb. How much? I still have the original receipt; $300 for the extra 4Mb. I'm saving that one for my grandkids!

[hellsbrink]

Since it had a keyboard AND you could get a cartridge for it where you could type in BASIC, does this count as a computer? If so, then I got my first computer 28-30 years ago....

http://linewid.free.fr/ordis/g7000.jpg



Gawd, I AM old!!

[Pontius Navigator]

Mine was an Elonex with IIRC a 40Mb HDD but it could only handle a 32Mb partition. It therefore had 2 partitions. It then got loads of bad sectors and the available space started to shrink.

Step in Steve Gibson of GRC.COM and Spinrite. Of course in those days there was no internet to order it and I got Spinrite by mail. It repaired the hard drive and saved me having to buy a new one.

Then to get more space I used disk compression software. Not Mr Gate's offering of Doubpace but a superior (difficult?) competitor.

With a 360 and a 1.44 floppy it was the bees knees.

I then got Patrice Belard (IIRC) with his LZEXE which could crunch an EXE file to fit onto one floppy.

Then we got Registry and Dynamic Link Libraries :(

[Saab Dastard]

OMG!! An Acoustic Coupler!!

Mmmm - I knew a chap in uni who gave a bloody good impression of 300 baud! It certainly sounded right! We never hitched him up to a computer though! :p:D

SD

[frostbite]

There was a Starling on TV a while ago that used to do a fair imitation of a modem.

Remember 300/300 and 1200/75, and of course, Prestel?

[hellsbrink]

frostbite, you are making me feel even older now

[green granite]

Acorn Atom, which I soldered together myself, Atari ST (my son poo pooed that and brought an Amiga) 66meg PC 1meg of ram, 6meg hard drive dos 5 and windoze 3,11. (now running a Quad processor 4gigs ram 500gig HD which cost a lot less than the 66meg pc.)

[BRL]

This has turned out to be a little gem of a thread!

Those pictures are brilliant, those of you with old stuff under the stairs, in the attic/loft etc go and take pics of them and put them up here!!!!!

I remember my mates dad had a ZX81 with which he took off the old keypad and replaced it with one of his own! My mate still has it now somewhere, I will get him to dig it out and will post a pic.

My first computer was a C16 then an Amiga with about 500 discs for it and some amazing games. I wrote a programme in basic on that C16, still have it up at my mums somewhere, would love to find it and see what it is like!!

I got a job in computers back in '85 inputing data and printing it out for a clothes factory in Birkenhead. I remember our 'IT' guy from a company called 'Xetal' in Manchester called Rob, he came over once with a monitor for me, it was a colour Tascan and it was the bees-knees! People used to come over from all over the place to have a look at it!

[hellsbrink]

I would get pics, BRL, but since I ain't where my old stuff was ya can guess it's gone.

Nowadays I just have to "suffer" this old Athlon XP2600, a quad-core, a PS2 and a Wii

Come to think about it, the quad-core system cost about as much as my first PC, the P1-133 system....

[innuendo]

1986, a generic XT with a 20MB hard drive that I had to be talked into. The supplier said that loading from 5" floppies was becoming passe.
I had DBase,Lotus and Wordperfect on it. The monitor character colour was orange, green being the other option. Cost me about $Cdn 2600.
The printer was a nine pin IBM dot matrix.
Good grief, this should be in the History and Nostalgia section.

[NeoDude]

My first computer was a Commodore VIC20. My first PC was a 486-SX25 with a whopping 80MB HDD.

[batninth]

Looking at the old games - anyone else remember the old DEC graphics terminal (circa 1980). We had one at the educational establishment I frequented in those days, hooked to a PDP-11 running Unix 7, and it had the "Moon Lander" game which amazed us as it was graphical. You used the light pen to control the moon lander's decent & if you got on the moon without mishap the astronaught came out & popped into the Macdonalds next door for a burger. One of the profs was so good he could loop the loop in the moon lander on the way down.

In 1981 we upgraded to a VAX with BSD Unix (pre V4 I think) and it came with a game called "Space Invaders" that you could play on a standard ascii terminal, wonder what happened to that?

[ohitsmonday]

Ahhhhhhhhhh some comments make me feel very old...

My family started with a ZX81 - with the highly reliable 64k(?) memory pack (ended up mounting on a piece of plywood with the memory pack wedged in to stop the crashing)
Then became very jealous of those with the splendid vic20, but my
Dad then decided a BBC model B was the future. Oh the joy, and the hours spent playing defender, scramble and (possibly) the still unsurpassed ELITE!
Following that I lost interest (probably typing in programs from magazines that never worked), until I went to uni where a PC to type up assignments etc was very useful. Parents kindly bought an Amstrad PPC640 (as pictured in a previous post) for me. No hard drive - boot to DOS from floppy (3.5 inch and 2 of them!!), what a machine. After uni again lost interest.
Years later I bought a packaged machine from Tiny - can't remember the specs but it had had a whopping 4.3Gb hardrive - the rest is unfortunately is history, have become a geek, building systems for myself and friends....and my wife hates me.

[hellsbrink]

Ohitsmonday

With you there, why hasn't there been a decent "modern" version of Elite or Frontier?

Come to think of it, thinking about "older games", why has nobody updated Boulderdash (or isn't it violent enough?)

[Avtrician]

First puter was VIC 20 n tape drive, sold it for A$100.00 (sucker) Next was C128, with single side disk drive, (later upgraded to double sided) Monitor and printer ( MPS1000:- rebadge Epson LX 80/800) still in the shed, and working . Also aquired a C64, still in shed and works, has a tape drive as well, and I think an acceleration mod of some sort. First PC was a 486 DX32 wif 40 meg HD and 16 Meg ram (A real power house), has been upgraded many times. currently using a Dell laptop, and have a Desktop of some description at home. Still have a sh!t load of Commodore games in the shed, pacMan, boulderdash, galaxiansn so on.

[Bushfiva]

Re Elite, there was a falling out between Ian Bell and David Braben. You can read one perspective at http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/archive/b5081501.htm.

[Saab Dastard]

why hasn't there been a decent "modern" version of Elite

I know what you mean, but I think it would simply be spoilt. I bought Elite+ for Dos which was a good "update" of the original (though I don't think I ever did manage to get Archangel status), and then I got Frontier: Elite 2 (I think that's what it was called) way back whenever, and I was hugely, vastly and enormously disappointed! :{ :sad: It was awful!

Perhaps with more modern hardware and software it would be possible to produce a game that was true to the original while also more challenging and involving.

But I doubt it! ;)

SD

[Keef]

Now, if you are really sad, you can download a programme called Beebem which will emulate the BBC B (and some of its variants) on your PC.

You can also download Elite for it, and sit and relive your past experiences trading out of Lave, Commander Jameson!

[hellsbrink]

SD

Which version of Frontier? You had the original Frontier, which I didn't think was too bad, and then it's follow-up which was truly awful.

Mind you, I was a mere slip of a lad when I got my paws on Frontier, so I wouldn't be surprised if my rose-tinted memory has been switched on.....

[S'land]

My first computer was something that a couple of schoolfriends and me put together for the maths depatment at school in the sixties (1960's NOT 1860's as my nieces tell everyone). It used valves, wires and a series of on/of switches. Today I have a scientific pocket calculator that can do more a lot quicker.

First "PC" was an Amstrad with one 128kb 3" (not 3,5") floppy disk and no hard drive. You loaded the programme with one disk, took it out and then used another for the data you were working on. It had a green screen and a dot matrix printer as part of standard kit. I also bought a mouse for it. The wordprocessor was Locoscript and it had a cad programme called Dr something or other. Total cost was about 400 pounds.

Gave it to my nieces when I bought a new machine. They used to use it to write up homework, etc. It finally died when their house was flooded in the early nineties.

[frostbite]

I used to be rather good with 'Chucky Egg'.

Anyone remember that?

[Groundgripper]

First "PC" was an Amstrad with one 128kb 3" (not 3,5") floppy disk and no hard drive. You loaded the programme with one disk, took it out and then used another for the data you were working on.

Still got one and it still works. In fact I was just editing a program for it! When I got it in the late 1980s I wrote a suite of programs to print out the results of rifle leagues I used to participate in with my rifle club which were sent to me in a particularly incomprehensible form. I still do those leagues (and more) and I've somehow never quite got round to writing equivalent programs on my PC (why bother when the thing works OK anyway:bored:)

About four or five years ago the rubber band that drives the floppy gave out and I even managed to find a replacement. Actually the seller sent me two as they were the last ones he had - my reply to his comment that "when they go I don't know where you'll find a replacement" was "if they last as long as the original I'll be well into my nineties and will probably have other things to worry about!"

I'd put a picture up but the batteries on my digital camera are flat (again!!):hmm:

Okay, fifteen hours later, batteries recharged - here goes:

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g18/chrismaxbrown/Amstrad.jpg

Complete with tuner and home-brewed switching. Now, where's that spare digibox!

[frostbite]

Rooting around this afternoon I found a large quantity of M2DDs.

(for those that remember)

[unclenelli]

For those who like to get their hands dirty, check out mini-itx.com (http://www.mini-itx.com)
Have a look at the projects down the RHS
My personal favourite is the PSU (http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/psu-pc/)
Imagine taking that into PC World to get it fixed and watch the look on their faces when they open the empty case!!!