Members misterhinkydink Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 I had no idea how many of you have been geekin' out for so long. I prefer to be called a nerd, thank you very much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members jmb374 Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 Yet another Commodore 64 guy here. My mom probably got it in 85(?). It was for the whole family, but at age 7, I was the only one who was interested in it, so I'll call it mine. I guess I got online in '93 or '94. Local BBS's on a 2400 baud modem. One of best friends hosted the Blue Buddah BBS from his bedroom. I think 7 people could be on his BBS at once! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CMS Author Craig Vecchione Posted February 23, 2007 CMS Author Share Posted February 23, 2007 Commodore 64 - 1983 Same with me, sometime around 1984. A few months later I got the 5.25" floppy drive. Those were some serious money back then....$400 for the C-64, and $450 for the drive. {censored}ing drive failed a month after the 90-day warranty expired. I took it to some hack that lived nearby and paid him $150 to fix it. It still didn't work. I gave up on computing in frustration. In 1988 I gave it another shot, getting a Packard Bell 286. Paid about $2000 for PC, monitor and Panasonic dot-matrix printer. It was of course obsolete before I even bought it, but didn't know that until later when I couldn't get anything remotely useful to run on it. It wasn't until 1997 that I got my first AOL membership and got online, but by then I was using someone else's PC's as I had, amazingly enough considering my personal computer experiences, shifted careers to programming. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members niomosy Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 I mostly borrowed time on other computers (school, friends) until 1992 when we bought a 486-33 with a whopping 4mb RAM. I also threw in a 14.4 modem. For getting online, I hit several local bbs'es a while before we got out own computer. My friend let me use his old 8086 PC with a 2400 baud modem in it so I'd typically use that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members K7Baixo Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 Yep...early 80's for me also with a Commodore although as an electrical engineering student, we used 8088's in labs and various mainframes. I still remember computer punch cards that we used for programming. What a PITA.My first laptop was a Kaypro like this one:I used it in the Netherlands for starting up a steel mill and I used it for email access.I went through a masters program with some kind of inexpensive computer than was more designed for gaming. It had 512k of memory on board and I wanted to add another 128k. I had to solder the memory socket on the motherboard for that one! Later, when I wanted to add a HDD, I called a company called Harddrives International in Tempe AZ. Man, imagine my surprise when they were able to tell me exactly what I needed! Anyone care to guess what Harddrives International grew up to become? Yep..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Mytola Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 '93 with a 486, went online with a Pentium 133 a couple of years later. I kept that one for quite a while, got a 800mhz packard bell laptop, then a self-built 2GHz AMD machine three years ago. This fall I got myself a MacBook Pro which I am really satisfied with and will be keeping for a looong time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Kindness Posted February 23, 2007 Moderators Share Posted February 23, 2007 First computer: 1985 Mac PlusOnline in 1993 as freshman in college. My family's first computer was something that ran off what looked like audio tapes back in about 1979. I remember learning to play blackjack on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members oldivor Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 My family made one of the IBM home PCs. I always remember having a computer around. Internet though.... hhhmmmm I'm guessing 1994ish? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members HackedByChinese! Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 Oh, man. We (being 82Daion, me, and parents) had (and still have) a pair of NCR DM-5s, an NCR PC-4, and about eight NCR 386/486 machines. The first machine I remember using regularly (around age 4/5) was probably a 486 or an original Pentium. I think we got Internet access around that time as well, so 1992-1994ish. I'm currently using a homebuilt machine with an Intel Core 2 setup. This is one of the NCR machines: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Super Bass Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 we had a commodore amiga 64 for years. i remember my brother mail-ordered 1mb of extra ram. it cost him lots! but the amiga then had 2mb and we had worms on it....the worms could then talk i thought that was great! our first pc with web access was in 1998 and it was a Gateway G-350 with 4gb hard drive, 64mb ram, and 4mb graphics. i think we had it for about 6 or 7 years. internet access was thru dial-up with a isp here called oceanfree. my OWN first computer is a Toshiba Satellite L20-173 laptop, i bought it in feb '06. still have it and i'm using it now i love it, its great. i have 1gb ram, 128mb graphics, 60gb hard drive and DVD-RW drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rippin' Robin Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 First computer somewhere in 1989, a C64. First PC - a 286 with a hardware switch that switched from 6 to 8 MHz. Man, I was green with envy when a friend's father bought a 486/DX4 running 33MHz. It was kinda cool to have games run 5x too fast First online? Hm. 1996 or so? Celeron 366. I kept that until... 2003 or something. Actually it's now my mother's computer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Smokinfiddler Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 Radio shack TRS 80 featured state of the art TRS DOS back before there was any such thing as windows or the internet Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members GMOGreg Posted February 23, 2007 Members Share Posted February 23, 2007 I know my parents had a computer back when they had those huge floppy disks, I always played some dinosaur game and my brother liked one of those text adventure ones. I think we got the internet around the time cd-roms came out. Is there anyway to check when you set up a hotmail account? I know I set it up around the same time we got the internet... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Deep Bass Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 we had a commodore amiga 64 for years. ... Weren't Commodore and Amiga two different computers? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members King Kashue Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 First comp was in 1996 (I grew up poor, so no computers). A Gateway 2000 (back when it was called that), 133mhz Pentium. I bought it primarily to play Warcraft 2 and Daggerfall. Bought one more Gateway after that (2 years later) and I've built my last 4 Comps. Got AOL at the same time in 1996. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Deep Bass Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 The first family computer was a Commodore Vic 20 with 5k of RAM and an external 5.25" floppy drive (sometime in the early 80s?) I learned BASIC on that. I remember I made a program of a stick figure doing jumping jacks when I was in 4th or 5th grade. It had some good games also. We used the TV as a monitor. Commodore Vic 20 Then my Dad bought an Apple IIe with dual floppy drive, a monochrome monitor, and dot matrix printer (mid 80s?). No mouse or internet yet. Thanks to the IIe, I never had to use a typewriter. My Dad still uses Appleworks on the IIe for the budget. I guess because he has the spreadsheet fine-tuned, so why change? They have an iMac for everything else. First internet use was just email on the Vax terminals in college (early 90s). I could dial into the Vax with my Mac IIsi and 14400 baud modem. Never saw a website until sometime around the mid-90s. I used the Mac IIsi for about 9 years (it was painfully slow when web pages became popular), then got a Rev C iMac, and now have an Intel Duo Core MacBook Pro. Being an engineer, I use PCs, Unix, and Macs, but want a Mac for home use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Shuma Gorath Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 1988 or 1989 Tandy 1000 A whopping 16 colors Actually had some good games though. Might & Magic II was great. Don't remember when I first got online. Sometime in the mid 90's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members phaeton Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 Lessee.... In 1987 I picked up a second hand Commodore 16. I learned to program it in BASIC from a friend that had an Atari 800XL. Probably around 1988 I picked up a used Commodore Plus/4. Remember those? It was the "business model" that C= was trying so hard to pawn off. Round that same time I also had a friend who owned a TI-99/4a that's been referenced many times in this thread (he had the speech emulator, too! -and-, he's also a bassist these days), plus scads and throngs of people who had VIC-20s, C=64s and C=128s. Remember all those 1980s pre-teen computer geek movies? We lived that {censored}. I even saw the Internet once or twice during that time (The Atari + an acoustic coupling). Not much to do in those days. I discovered guitar around 1989, and the computers all went under the bed. I always wanted to get back into them, but I could never afford an IBM-compatible computer. Shacked up with a roommate that had a 66mhz 486DX2. Got to experience the Intarweb for the first time in 1997. Heh. Anyone ever hang out a Hotelchat.com? By 1998 I was building my own computer out of parts. Put together a 300mhz AMD K6-II w/ 128mb RAM, 6.4GB HDD and a 16MB RIVA TNT video card. It also had a Yamaha OPLSAX (or something similar) soundcard. I dual booted Win95 and Solaris 7 for awhile, then pitched Win95 and Solaris for Caldera Linux 2.2.. Went through an assortment of Linux incarnations, acquired a metric fsck ton of computer gear, had a massive LAN of old but working boxen lying around for awhile. Wrote programs in PERL and C. Got tired of it all and recycled everything but the K6-II (Running NetBSD) and my newest (but not very new) AMD Athlon (currently running FreeBSD 6.1)... I was waiting for the computing world to get all the SATA/PATA and 64-Bit bull{censored} squared away before I built another computer, but now that Vista is coming out, I'll wait until it finishes driving the hardware upgrade cycle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members badmotor Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 I started off with a Commodore 128, back in 1989. I was 13.Then one day, on my paper-run, I went past a music shop. There was a burnt-orange coloured Charvel-Jackson electric guitar in the window. I promptly went home and said to mum "I'm gonna buy a guitar". She said "How you gonna pay for that?" I said "Sell my computer"... she said "You'll regret it!...I never did.30 -40 odd guitars/basses later, in 2000, I flatted with a programmer dude, got a PC and online (napster was the dangerous thing), never looked back. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Super Bass Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 Weren't Commodore and Amiga two different computers? i dunno, but that was the name on this thing it had a built in floppy drive. i must check to see if we still have it lying around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rippin' Robin Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 i dunno, but that was the name on this thing it had a built in floppy drive. i must check to see if we still have it lying around. In that case, it's a Commodore Amiga 500.The other computer is a Commodore 64, which doesn't have a built-in disk drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Perfessor Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 2004 after I made two goals, paying off my house and saving 50 Grand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Super Bass Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 In that case, it's a Commodore Amiga 500. The other computer is a Commodore 64, which doesn't have a built-in disk drive. it was smaller than the amiga 500 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rippin' Robin Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 it was smaller than the amiga 500 Amiga 600 then?I still have one of those. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members nicebigstrings Posted February 24, 2007 Members Share Posted February 24, 2007 Got a Motorola Starmax 3000 Mac clone in 1996 and got online the same year. 2.5 gig hard drive, 48 megs of RAM. Wooo hooooo!! THought I wanted to be a digital designer ....... yeesh!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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