"Computers" from the 80's.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

I was wasting some time yesterday and typed Amiga 1000 as a search criteria, has anyone else had/got an A500/A1000/A1200/A2000 etc??? If you've hung onto to it, check out the going resale rates of these machines!!

I've still got my A1000, no idea if it will work, but these machines were years ahead of their time, OS was the first Windows before Windows came on the market, written for CBM by Microsoft.

They still have stuff on them a modern PC doesn't have, albeit, they are as slow as a snail at the side of modern PC's.

There's some good videos on the A1000 on youtube with demo videos from the 1980's.

[mick2me 3,033]

The First PC I saw was the Commodore VIC-20.

My first computer was a Sinclair Spectrum with Microdrives, which I still have.

This is why it takes me so long to reply to topics!

See

Timeline of computing 1980–89

[Limey 242]

I had used CP/M machines at work as well as an Apple II and we had, but I didn't use, an early IBM PC. The pre-PC device I used the most was an HP-85!

The first PC clone I owned was a Sanyo MBC555 - it was not truly PC compatible, but it was MS-DOS compatible. I used it a lot for both fun and work and learned a lot about computers from it - including how to write directly to the parallel port, and so control other devices with my own programs. I moved on to a Gateway 80286 and had several gateway variants until I gave up buying complete machines and started building my own (not as hard as it sounds) about 12 years ago! Now I just update the machine as I need - but I do a lot of stuff on a laptop these days!

[loppylugs 8,429]

Still have my Atari Mega 4 Ste sitting out in the garage with it's mono monitor. 4 Meg of RAM 100 Meg HD. Thought it was the bees knees when I bought it in 1990. Wonder what it might be worth these days. Always been meaning to list it on E-Bay but you know how it is never got a round-tuit. GUI drag and drop and all that while MS was still doing DOS.

[mgread1200 141]

I had the Commodore 64! lots of fun trying to copy games on Cassette to Cassette recorders, sometimes it worked sometimes it didnt.

Remember one game in particular "Elite" This boy is dangerous! played that for hours and hours.

[banjo48 928]

My first was a Sinclair Z something or other, very very basic thing, had a BBC one and a Commodore 64.

Built my first PC in probably late 90's then moved to laptops, now on my first IPad. Technology certainly improved beyond recognition.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

I still assemble my own PC's, mid towers, you can then get what you need personally in them and not have unwanted odds and sods.

My wife's first PC was a Packard Bell, a 286, with printer and monitor I think we paid about $2500 back then in 1989, and it only had a 40mb HD and 256k of ram!!

I picked an old Texas Instruments 286 tower a year or so later to use in Morse Code practice..

There seemed to be a "lull" from when the 286 chipset went on the market to when the 386 came out, and then it seemed like twice a year there was a chipset upgrade, now we are on quad processors!!

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

Remember back in the 80's we had 5.25 floppy drives!! Then 3.5 floppies, now we hardly ever see a computer with anything but a CD/DVD drive...

[Limey 242]

5.25 floppies???? The first Apple II I used had two 8" external floppy drives! I did a LOT of work on a DEC machine back in the early 80's, a PDP-11 - it had two hard drive platters, and (I think) 64K of memory! Storage was either 8" floppy or punch tape and I believe it had reel-to-reel too, but I didn't use it!

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

The wife used to do the books for a friend of ours who had a plywood factory and a farm in the mid 80's, he supplied her with an Apple II e, I don't recall it having an 8 inch floppy drive, but been a long time back now!! I think she just provided print outs for his company. I'll ask her when she gets home.

There are still boxes of 5.25 floppies in a cabinet at the back of my shop.

There was a company the wife worked for in Bathurst NSW, he hired time on a remote hard drive set up, as his work computer just didn't have enough disk space to accomodate his two works accounts. Later on he bought the remote disk drive/s and installed them in the office, I recall the cabinet was about three feet high by about 2.5 ft square!!! I'll bet I have many times the disk space on my PC than that cabinet held..

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

I asked the Missus what size floppies she used with the Apple II E Eric, she said it was a 3.5" as far as she recalls, I asked her could it have been a large floppy, she said no..

[Limey 242]

That must have been one of the very last ones. I think the 3.5" floppy came out with the original "Mac" in 1984 and the Apple II was on the short list by then - overwhelmed by the PC and the early PC clones (Compaq) which were much more powerful and adaptable - although there was a LOT of third party stuff for the Apple II.

I often (and still) think Apple shot themselves in the foot by going to the closed architecture of the Mac. The II was incredibly successful due to the third party vendors making add-in hardware and cheap software for it - and they basically handed all that market to the PC business.

Had to laugh the other day - saw a video of Apple's test bench for the iPhone - it was doing durability tests - and the test and measurement process was controlled by a PC! As an engineer, we could actually never use Macs - there has never been any data acquisition hardware or processing software that could run on/with a Mac - that wasn't true of the Apple II - in fact we used one to control an HP data acquisition and analysis system through an IEEE bus! Hard to believe that was 30 years ago!

[mercurydancer 1,104]

My first computer was a ZX80. I still have it somewhere.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

Bit like IBM, Eric, they lost their market to the clones, they had the PC market totally sewn up and blew it.

I think the ZX's were a fabrication of Clive Sinclair's, Md, he pioneered a lot of electronic devices, I still have an audio chip his company manufactured, aka, designed and had a chip maker fabricate them for his company. He developed the metal oxide transistor..Ironically he never went out and mass marketed it and lost his chance and got left behind.

[mercurydancer 1,104]

ayupmeducks

The ZX was certainly a Sinclair production. It introduced many of my generation into computing. I never could write code, but I knew from that machine what code was, and its basic frameworks. It came in handy later in life.

Essentially, with the ZX, all that was needed was a modem and you would actually have the main component of the internet there and then.

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

But back then, modems were bought or supplied for sending and receiving faxes. My wife's first PC, a 286 came with a modem, That was 1989.

When I first got into ham radio around 1991, I bought a TNC, (Terminal Node Controller) for sending digital signals like packet and rtty, via ham radio, it was a sophisticated modem that was hooked up to an old 286 computer I threw together myself for the purpose.