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

[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.

[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'm with Gibbo

I had a Vic20
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

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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]

Eh. When I were a lad

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.

[hellsbrink]

OMG!! An Acoustic Coupler!!

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....





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