Remember back in the day....

[krott5333]

I remember back in 94, when we got our first computer. It was a top of the line, compaq presario with Pentium 100 Mhz Processor, 8 MB Ram, 1 Gb Hard Drive, a 4x CD-ROM, and 1 MB of "Video Memory".. oh, and it had this really cool feature, it played this new format called MPEG-2. Wowsers.. And it cost a little over $3,000 with the monitor.

Mom: "Is it going to be like my computer at work?"
Me: "No mom, its coming with the new Windows 95! It has this little start button you press, and everything is right there!"

....

And today, I was talking to this guy at work about this, and how the video card I ordered last week for $75 is now $60. Anyways, he was saying how 5.25" Floppy drives used to cost $200, and he has a 386, with a 40 mb hard drive that cost about $3000. I thought I was bad.. damn.

Its amazing how fast prices go down, as technology, and the new standard, goes up.

[Spec_Ops2087]

Yeha I know...now is the best time for great deals on PCs...

Plus I've always loved it...it being how the prices go down and the standard goes up...remember....the consumer always wins...(in the computer race atleast :rolleyes:)

BTW: I also had that same computer but it was a HP....lol....I remember me saying WOW!! 1mb video!!! :D



Spec

[pRS317]

i remember when i upgraded my 386 to a 486 dx-4 100. i even went all out and spent $200 on a whopping 4 meg of ram! that and it had a wd caviar 38.5 meg hd. i still have that drive in the spare parts bin...and yes, it's quite a large bin =)

[JimmyG]

Do you remember when (in 1980) the Radioshack TRS-80 Model III was the best there was? It had two (count 'em, two) 48K floppy drives.

And...it even had a word processor that would allow you to edit words on the built in screen and print out a completed document to your 48 cps dot matrix printer (print one way only).

And...you even had a Visicalc spreadsheet that could add up columns or rows of numbers and automatically update when you changed a number!

..........do you remember?

[yanks111]

My first pc was a Packard-Bell (:beer: ) pI 133mhz computer---and it still remains the most expensive pc in my house! It didn't even have a heatsink on the cpu (of course back then heat wasn't even a thought in a big companie's products) I can remember surfing the internet, thinking my modem (can't remember speed, less than 14.4k?) couldn't get any faster...and now I have cable modem! Yup, those were the days I continually signed up for the "72 hours AOL trial", and then when it wore out, I'd get one from like Prodigy or somethin'

[JDXNC]

My first real pc was a 386/33 with 4MB of ram and a 40MB hard drive... I bought it off my aunt for like $200 with monitor... I thought it wa quite something, then I made a new friend who had this awsom pc called a 486! so I ditched the 386 and bought a brand new system (no monitor) --> 486 AMD 120! It even had these funky new slots called PCI! with a whole 16MB of edo ram and a 500MB HD! I belive it has a Speedbit 2MB Video card. I was king then :beer:

[ThePunkGeek]

i seen many many of these post in the past, i was like 2 years old with my commador64 :P

[engjohn]

I had an Apple IIe clone.... :D
Then upgraded to a Gateway2k 386/33 (which later got the Cyrix 386/486 upgrade chip)

[pommie]

Sinclare spectrum. a wopping 4K ## yes 4 Kilobytes of ram !!!! ## :eek:

OOOh I'm showing my age as I was married when I got that latest thing in technoligy ;) :D

:beer:

[Diggrr]

I remember standing spell bound in front of the first color (more than one color) monitor I saw. That was an Apple.
My computer at the time didn't have a harddrive, everything was loaded at startup with either 5.25 floppy or audio tape drive.

But one thing all the computer maker's now could learn from...no noise. It had no fans. It relied on convection through the back of the built in 9" monitor (Commadore PET).

September is my 10th anniversary on the 'net.

[pRS317]

colour monitor....hmm, makes me wonder what that colour it was that monitors first had. as i remember it, it was some oddly muted orange/brown colour. ugly, it was.

[Breadfan]

Originally posted by Diggrr

September is my 10th anniversary on the 'net.

I wish I rememberd when mine is...I remember back in the day before www when I'd hover around BBs and FTP. Heh, remember gopher?

I think we got our 486 in '93, and I had already been on the 'net via our 286/2400baud external modem for awhile, so I'd have to say soemtime in '92 or early '93...

Mike

[Steelforge]

Originally posted by JimmyG
Do you remember when (in 1980) the Radioshack TRS-80 Model III was the best there was? It had two (count 'em, two) 48K floppy drives.

And...it even had a word processor that would allow you to edit words on the built in screen and print out a completed document to your 48 cps dot matrix printer (print one way only).

And...you even had a Visicalc spreadsheet that could add up columns or rows of numbers and automatically update when you changed a number!

..........do you remember?

I remember. Had one at the school in 5th grade. That's where I learned the most defining and painful lesson in my adult life.

I suck at shooters.

It's haunted me ever since.:D

[Wa11y]

All these dang kids and their newfangled x86 processors and hard drives! Why, back in my day, we learned BASIC on a Commodore 64, and we LIKED IT! Man, my first computer was the C64. But my dad also had a Vic 20, PET, and Timex Sinclair. At one time, we even had a Tandy. Those were some good times. Running games off tape, or off 6.25" floppies.

run "frogger" ,8,1

How's that for nostalgia?

[Diggrr]

Hey, pRS317. My PET had a black background with green text/characters. All pictures had to be done with ascii, bacause there was no control over individual pixels like is done now (that, I believe began with apple).

And Darned straight, Wa11y. If I wanted a video game, I had to program it in basic myself (which I did). It took up to 35 minutes for my games to load from the tape drive. Cry me a river over harddrive benchmarks...consider yourself lucky they were invented. Sometimes I forget about the marvels on my desk!

[repo man11]

I remember in 1981, a good friend got a TRS-80 model 1. His parents bought it for him for Christmas, so he wouldn't be spending every night at the Radio Shack wearing out their display model. Whopping 4K! I was never much interested, and I didn't get my first computer until October 2000, an old 486 that a friend threw together for me. I had a lot of catching up to do. I'm not done yet.

[arhines]

Funniest episode I remember was seeing a "video accelerator" in action for the first time. This was playing original tribes, and coming from using an ati rage IIC 4mb to a riva tnt 128 with 16 whopping megs of vram...hoo boy. I walked out of the red base on snowblind, and literally exclaimed "I CAN SEE". Heh heh heh. I was also terribly impressed when i first ran q2 at 800*600...talk about amazing ;) 8 fps, 16 bit color, that is the life...

Then there was the move from monchrome (orange...loved the contrast at least) display toshiba laptop to my first real home computer, a mac quadra 650. I thought it was amazing that I could watch video clips in grolier encyclopedia, on a computer! Gee, I just spent $4,000 to watch 30 crappy seconds of low quality tv! Thought it was pretty neat at the time, of course :)

[Wa11y]

Oh yeah, forgot to mention the 8088 that was my gaming rig for quite some time. Monochrome green screen. BBSed on the main rig for games, copied them to floppy (5 1/4" floppy mind you. Those were the days when floppies really were!), and moved them over to the gaming rig and played them. [sniff]Aw, now you've gone and made me all weepy and nostalgic.

[Lance Thornton]

Somewhere, in the bowells of my parents' house, is my old Apple II E with the optional duodisk and the 80 character wide video adapter. I don't remember hom many K of memory it has. By the way, it still boots up from the 5 1/4 floppys! Oh how I loved that mono-green screen!!!