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

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?

frostbite, you are making me feel even older now

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.)

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!

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....

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.

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

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?

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.

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?)

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.

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...e/b5081501.htm.

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

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!

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.....

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.

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

Anyone remember that?

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/g1...wn/Amstrad.jpg

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

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

(for those that remember)

Soldering
 

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