Your first computer

[gregmcc]

ZX Spectrum and then the Commodore.

Remember back in the day if you wanted to play games, bought the magazine (which generally had 30+ pages of code for a single game in every edition), which took hours to type and then you could play. Once the system was shut down, you needed to type the code again to play again.... Learnt a lot about coding for games back in the day....

Lol. Yes, I remember doing that.

All those peeks and pokes

 

[Fulcrum29]

Unauthorised copying, hiring, lending prohibited. See cover.
This program has been recorded on both sided of this cassette.

- CBM 64

 

[herbertk]

ZX Spectrum and then the Commodore.

Remember back in the day if you wanted to play games, bought the magazine (which generally had 30+ pages of code for a single game in every edition), which took hours to type and then you could play. Once the system was shut down, you needed to type the code again to play again.... Learnt a lot about coding for games back in the day....

Ah many a weekend coding on my zx, I would then stuff around to try and change the game a little... the I would save it on a cassette (writing down the counter numbers haha) only for my sister to record some music over it... hahaha

Many fond memories!

 

[House]

Lol. Yes, I remember doing that.

All those peeks and pokes

Ah many a weekend coding on my zx, I would then stuff around to try and change the game a little... the I would save it on a cassette (writing down the counter numbers haha) only for my sister to record some music over it... hahaha

Many fond memories!

Lol, Yeah

.... and after 5-6 hours of typing the game would not run.... typing error somewhere in the code.... yes, and those cassettes.....

 

[Kosmik]

sigh ... Commodore 64, many many fond memories floppies and tape drive :}

Fond? Tape Drives? Pain in the butt.

 

[gregmcc]

Fond? Tape Drives? Pain in the butt.

It was fun to copy though. Tape to tape audio recordings

 

[Luke7777]

Apple II clone, late 70's , like this



followed by an Olivetti M24 in '83 screaming away at 8 Mhz as opposed to the paltry 4.77 of the IBM PC at the time

 

[gregmcc]

The craziest thing about the early PC's is the turbo switch. Who wants to run in slow mode??!

 

[OMB]

First computer if my own was an HP-85 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_series_80

whilst I never owned one personally, I worked on one for a number of year and did my first coding in Basic on one

 

[biometrics]

The craziest thing about the early PC's is the turbo switch. Who wants to run in slow mode??!

You had to for games or it ran to fast.

 

[BigAl-sa]

Then I bought a 286 clone with 20MB drive and I think it had 16MB RAM

No, it would have had 640kB, it could go up to 1MB, but you had to have serious memory extenders to use it - more often than not, you'd use that extra 360kB as a RAM disk.

 

[DominionZA]

No, it would have had 640kB, it could go up to 1MB, but you had to have serious memory extenders to use it - more often than not, you'd use that extra 360kB as a RAM disk.

Ah, the good only days of tweaking the autoexec.bat and config.sys (if I recall correctly) files. Every K counted.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

No, it would have had 640kB, it could go up to 1MB, but you had to have serious memory extenders to use it - more often than not, you'd use that extra 360kB as a RAM disk.

One of these bad boys:

 

[Mortymoose]

Vic 20. ......

 

[Fulcrum29]

You had to for games or it ran to fast.

Sopwith

 

[copacetic]

A commodore 64.

Floppy disk drive was the size of a submarine.

 

[Mortymoose]

Back in the day, you could buy a book with programming in BASIC to write games to your Vic, how often we would spend hours on end typing code, only to have a power dip waste it all...

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

ZX Spectrum 48K

 

[howardb]

Fond? Tape Drives? Pain in the butt.

Loved "speeding up" the tape drives by the slightest increments using a small screwdriver on the motor speed adjuster, so the Speccy could load the games a bit quicker.
Ended up with a finely tuned tape deck that could load the average game in 2 minutes instead of 2.5 minutes!

 

[Other Pineapple Smurf]

The craziest thing about the early PC's is the turbo switch. Who wants to run in slow mode??!

Best of all was my ignorance as to the use of the Turbo switch. We thought it would wear out the hardware faster so only used it sparingly as we wanted our 20MB harddrive to last at least a decade

Never even filled it up in the 5 years I had that XT