A look at operating systems that time forgot

ponder said:
No, say it ain't so, a QL? :D
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Not only a QL, my friend. In the early and mid-80s the British micro industry was very creative, with lots of cheapy clunky micro's with lekka chips ... remember the Grundy NewBrain? I had one, too. With a floppy drive and CP/M. And the SuperBrain all-in-one? I had one. Amstrad. Sinclair ZX-80 and ZX-81, and Spectrum. Atari 800. Commodore VIC-20 and 64. The Americans also consumed my budget: a second-hand Tandy TRS-80, a second-hand Apple IIe. Osborne 1 portable. All my IBM's were new - my first was a dual-320kb floppy 64KB RAM IBM PC, to which I added a massive 3rd party 5MB Mountain external 5.25" full height HDD, bought with dot matrix 5152 printer on staff purchase for just on R5000 in then's money. In June 1984 I upgraded to the awesomely powerful PC AT with incredible 80286 (and 80287 co-pro), 128KB RAM, 20MB HDD, and 320x240 CGA! I spent two years paying it off.

Sorry Jannie - all my old stuff was dumped just two months ago. Gone are old SLDC cards, a Hercules Graphics Card, my original (and illegal) World MX 1200 full duplex modem (with 1200/75 for Beltel/Prestel - remember that? I even had a Beltel site - InfoTel). Also dumped is the first OS/1 1.0 diskette set in SA. Plus about 300 diskettes with betas or pre-release builds of OS/2 1.1 (first with Presentation Manager), OS/2 2.0, Windows NT Beta, Win/386, Star Office (for OS/2, forerunner of today's OpenOffice), Xenix, Framework, MultiPlan, VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, dBase, FoxBase, TopView, etc, etc, etc ... most hardware went ages ago, but it took me 20+ years to migrate the software to the Big Bit Bucket in the Sky, via the local rubbish dump.

My treasured momento is an original mini IBM PC desk caddy given out to the VIP guests at the launch of the original IBM PC.

Sniff.
 
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Arthur said:
Not only a QL, my friend. In the early and mid-80s the British micro industry was very creative, with lots of cheapy clunky micro's with lekka chips ... remember the Grundy NewBrain? I had one, too. With a floppy drive and CP/M. And the SuperBrain all-in-one? I had one. Amstrad. Sinclair ZX-80 and ZX-81, and Spectrum. Atari 800. Commodore VIC-20 and 64. The Americans also consumed my budget: a second-hand Tandy TRS-80, a second-hand Apple IIe. Osborne 1 portable. All my IBM's were new - my first was a dual-320kb floppy 64KB RAM IBM PC, to which I added a massive 3rd party 5MB Mountain external 5.25" full height HDD, bought with dot matrix 5152 printer on staff purchase for just on R5000 in then's money. In June 1984 I upgraded to the awesomely powerful PC AT with incredible 80286 (and 80287 co-pro), 128KB RAM, 20MB HDD, and 320x240 CGA! I spent two years paying it off.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you burned a lot of money on your hobby! You obviously enjoyed it though.

During that time I was still in school and only got my first computer in Std.6 which was a Apple IIe clone my uncle brought over from Taiwain but it had a colour monitor, two disk drives and a Z80 card with CP/M software that I never used. Ideally I would have preferred a C64 but you take what you get and later I got a Amiga 500 with lots of accesories which made me the happiest kid around :D
 
ponder said:
Sounds like you burned a lot of money on your hobby! You obviously enjoyed it though.
Click to expand...
Hobby? It was a life-passion. And profession.

Life, we said, is a terminal experience. (For those who don't know, there was a time when the computer monitor+keyboard was called a terminal.)
 
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