We have come a long way

[bakron1]

After reading a post about someone finding an old Apple 2e got me thinking about my early days in the personal computer revolution being I am a relic compared to some of the younger folks out there.

I remember buying my first machine which was an Osborne CPM portable machine which relied on keyboard input and had the old 7 1/2” floppy disk for storage.

I also had a early Kaypro CPM Machine which if I remember had a 10MB hard drive and dBase installed on it and back then to have a 10MB hard drive was the bomb.

I then migrated into the MS DOS and TRS80 machines when they became popular. I bought a Kaypro 16 portable machine which was my first MS DOS machine back in the day.

Then came Apple computer and the series 2 which I bought a used one and that was the one everyone wanted back then. Apple was much much expensive compared to the other machines of the day.

I remember going to a local computer show and seeing the first Apple Macintosh computer with a GUI interface and used a mouse to navigate and that was the machine anyone who had the financial resources wanted.

The company I worked for at the time had bought a couple of Apple Macintosh units and the boss even had a Lisa which was ahead of its time compared to other PCs back in the day. I bought a couple of used Apple Lisa’s way back when they became affordable for me to buy used.

I do remember building many of my own PC’s back then and it was fun because you had to have a good basic knowledge of both hardware and software to configure the systems back then and it was fun putting it all together and seeing the end result.

Now you go into a store and buy a unit and all you do is turn it on and start using it. It’s seems like a lot of the configuration fun is gone from the early days of the PC revolution, but it’s called progress and I can honestly say I was in on the ground floor and had a lot of fun from then to now. Just thought I would share my experience.

 

[Just_Me_D]

My first computer was a Commodore 64, but a part of me is telling me I had something before it. Oh well. Anyway, from there I gravitated to Windows and MS-DOS. 25 MHz machine with both a 5 ¼ and a 3 ½ floppy disk drive. The modem was 300 baud external. There was no World Wide Web back then. It was raw. BBS boards were king at the time. Compuserve, Prodigy, Genie were major services then AOL came along and changed everything. Netscape and Eudora became household names. In the early 90’s, playing the original Doom, Duke Nukem and Rainbow Six on my computer was a blast. I miss those days....(Laughing)

 

[bakron1]

My first computer was a Commodore 64, but a part of me is telling me I had something before it. Oh well. Anyway, from there I gravitated to Windows and MS-DOS. 25 MHz machine with both a 5 ¼ and a 3 ½ floppy disk drive. The modem was 300 baud external. There was no World Wide Web back then. It was raw. BBS boards were king at the time. Compuserve, Prodigy, Genie were major services then AOL came along and changed everything. Netscape and Eudora became household names. In the early 90’s, playing the original Doom, Duke Nukem and Rainbow Six on my computer was a blast. I miss those days....(Laughing)

I also remember the early BBS boards and had a 300 baud modem I used to get access to them. I also used some of those services you mentioned, god those where the days. I also remember how big some of the computer shows where back then.

 

[anon(50597)]

My first computer was a Commodore 64, but a part of me is telling me I had something before it. Oh well. Anyway, from there I gravitated to Windows and MS-DOS. 25 MHz machine with both a 5 ¼ and a 3 ½ floppy disk drive. The modem was 300 baud external. There was no World Wide Web back then. It was raw. BBS boards were king at the time. Compuserve, Prodigy, Genie were major services then AOL came along and changed everything. Netscape and Eudora became household names. In the early 90’s, playing the original Doom, Duke Nukem and Rainbow Six on my computer was a blast. I miss those days....(Laughing)

My first geek friend had the 64. I bought the 128 and we would dial in to BBS boards like we were contacting Mars. Those were the days!

 

[Just_Me_D]

.... we would dial in to BBS boards like we were contacting Mars. Those were the days!

(Laughing)....I know, right? Back then, getting online was an adventure. It was new uncharted territory. Now, however, the internet is a noisy ad-filled mess.

 

[metllicamilitia]

Well I’m young enough to have to deal with dial-up, AOL discs, MS-DOS, and the original Doom. I don’t even know what computer it was that we had. I agree though, computers have advanced rapidly even since the 90’s.

 

[kataran]

Lol memories

Played around with a few of Healthcliff systems but my first computer was a Packard Bell 486 that I overclocked to a 100 MHz with a 14.4 Baud Modem I was the neighborhood king.

The Computer Shows were the place to be and I use to sell 3.5 inch disks loaded with porn pics to the newbies that I would meet at the shows

 

[bakron1]

Lol memories

Played around with a few of Healthcliff systems but my first computer was a Packard Bell 486 that I overclocked to a 100 MHz with a 14.4 Baud Modem I was the neighborhood king.

The Computer Shows were the place to be and I use to sell 3.5 inch disks loaded with porn pics to the newbies that I would meet at the shows

A 14.4 modem back in the day, you where the king. I also had a lot of the early laptops because I was a field service tech for a machine tool manufacturer and had many Compaq, IBM Thinkpads and my pride and joy was my Grid Systems laptop which was magnesium with a gas plasma display and built like a panzer tank.

 

[gnirkatto]

Started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, then thought MSX was the future (wrong, C64 won), then built my first PC, was proud to install a Nec V20 processor instead of an Intel 8088 (or 86?) which was said to be a tiny little bit faster, and even more proud of my RLL Disk controller, which made 32MB out of a 20MB HDD.....I remember this was quite difficult to get up and running properly, but eventually it worked somehow. Then playing with .dbase and IBM PCText where drivers for my Epson 9-needle-printer had to be self-defined, which was a true nightmare! Fun times though.

 

[Golfdriver97]

I remember working with an Apple 2e in grade school. My first computer though was about 10 years later; a Compaq Presario, I think. I can't remember all the specs....Pretty sure it had RAM in the MB, and probably 1 GB of storage. Since then I had a range of cheap Windows laptops (never again....ugh), until I started building my own PCs. Compared to my old Presario....I have 6,000 times the storage, probably the same amount more in memory.

Gone are the days of floppy drives, even CDs.

Been trying to find the specs while I've been typing this up. Just guessing, we have gone from memory in the MB to GB, storage in the very low GB to TB, from single core CPUs to 4, 8 and even 32 cores, integrated graphics....the list can go on.

We can even list things that really can't be seen. For example, specification standards, connection standards, and even improving those connections (who wants to use a VGA cable anymore...lol)

 

[Ken Magel]

I started with an APple II+, then moved after a couple of years to a "Fat" Macintosh. The APple II+ had 64 KB of main memory and an external hard drive with 5 megabytes of storage. The floopy disk was 5 and 1/4 inches and held a whopping 143 KBytes. The Fat Macintosh had 512 KB of main memory and a ten megabyte drive.

 

[bakron1]

I started with an APple II+, then moved after a couple of years to a "Fat" Macintosh. The APple II+ had 64 KB of main memory and an external hard drive with 5 megabytes of storage. The floopy disk was 5 and 1/4 inches and held a whopping 143 KBytes. The Fat Macintosh had 512 KB of main memory and a ten megabyte drive.

As I said, those where the days when computers where fun.