It ran on a 386 SX 16, with 4MB of external RAM and first and an EGA screen. Just for reference I remember the 4MB of RAM set my dad back almost ~$500 back then.
I was born and grew up in a world without computers. When I was in college (UW/Madison) computers were very rare and filled entire rooms. Somehow I managed to survive.
Me. My first home computer was in 1988, was an Epson & there were 2 5 1/2" floppy disks and no hard drive. The computer guy at work recommended no hard drive needed🤔
And now think about the things that were designed with multicore cpus: facebook, instagram, .. :p
more seriously I find amazing that a simple piece of wood with the right choice of marks allows one to rise abstraction level up to logarithms. It's quite poetic.
The IBM Model-M keyboards were the best keyboards ever made, but they switched to plastic membrane crap when they realized most customers didn't care. I had to track down one made by Unicomp which was built to Model-M specs.
Oh, right, the turn off thing. As a kid I was terrified to do it early.
I grew up with the ZX spectrum, SVI-728, Amiga 500/1200 and then moving on to PC. Though my dad had PCs during this time as well starting with 286 I believe. Me and my sister kinda inherited them as he upgraded his PC.
I had a Gateway 2000 that did exactly that. Windows 95. Hovercraft game. Good times bad times song. Its what I mostly remember about this PC. Oh, and Chernobyl virus.
I am. I started with a TRS-80 in '77, more than a decade before IBM's first PCs came out. I first used a cassette player to load programs, not even a floppy disk. And my first machine had 16K of RAM.
Same here. I lived in a house with well water, and every time the well pump came on, the power drain caused the cassette player to slow down enough to corrupt the operation.
I had to wait for the pump to shut off and pray that the operation would finish before the next cycle.
Learned to type on a smith corona. I had a book, that typewriter, and a roll of the old white medical tape. As I finished each lesson, I taped the keys. Shoutout to Mavis Beacon!
I used to sell and install the things and their clones along with software packages, repair services, along w/ other stuff to insurance companies, car dealerships, and the like. It was a license to print money in those days. People were scared to death of them and we were experts from afar.
They added that message after discovering that millions of people feared turning off their computer, thinking they were going to lose everything they did. Every app, every program, everything they wrote, every email. Everything.
I would've killed for a card punch. We had to color in bubbles on the cards and feed stacks of cards to the mainframe to see if our fortran programs met spec.
My first computer experience was on Allstate's IBM 360 in '66. My dad, an Allstate exec, bought it from Ross Perot, but that's another story.
The guys in the ginormous computer room showed me how to make ASCII drawings. Saved to punch cards. Loved the clackety sound. Pretty cool for an 8-year-old.
Looking for a safe place to put my coffee on my desk this morning and I remembered the IT repairman talking about people breaking that slide-out drawer for the 5" disks because they thought it was a cup holder. But yeah.
My partner used one for her dissertation in the mid 90's. After that we shelved it. During the pandemic I got it out and on the third try it actually booted and I was able to run MS Word from the old disks.
🙋 I had in my hands the first IBM PC-AT in Western Australia. It was selling for $20,000AU and it was sold to Atwood Oceanics in Manning Bridge, WA.It held a 1Mb HDD, 2 FDD, 640kb of RAM and an IBM 5151 monochrome monitor sat atop it.
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more seriously I find amazing that a simple piece of wood with the right choice of marks allows one to rise abstraction level up to logarithms. It's quite poetic.
Think Atari 800, and before that, the Sinclair 'Computer'.
Oh, right, the turn off thing. As a kid I was terrified to do it early.
I had to wait for the pump to shut off and pray that the operation would finish before the next cycle.
The guys in the ginormous computer room showed me how to make ASCII drawings. Saved to punch cards. Loved the clackety sound. Pretty cool for an 8-year-old.
This was my first game computer.
I remember one that was black and white.
From the late 1980s.
1983 ish
Am not that old-
Like woah.