You dont know how lucky you have it nowadays, this is a brief look at the computers that got me where I am today...


First up, & probably the first sight of a computer for people my age & older is the Commodore Pet.
A dire machine, which inhabited pretty much every school in the country.



CPU Speed: 1mhz
Ram: 16k
Rom: 20k
Price: £775


Thankfully this was replaced in schools by the BBCB, which at the time rocked because it had colour output not black & green. It didnt use cassettes either, we used the fantastically dire floppy disks. These were the original 5" floppys, that actually flopped, not the hard plastic things you have now. If you gave one a hard enough stare it would lose all its data & die.



CPU Speed: 1.8mhz
Ram: 32k
Rom: 32k
Price: £399


It was around this sort of time I got my first home computer, the legendary ZX81. Rubbish doesnt even come close. I had the beefed up version, which boosted its 1k Ram with a 16k rampack that plugged in the back. It was a silly idea that didnt work.



CPU Speed: 3.5mhz
Ram: 1k
Rom: 8k
Price: £70


My brother, being older, had a Spectrum 48k. These things were the bad boys of home computing. They had the best games & all the popular kids had them. If you think PS2 now they were the same back then.



CPU Speed: 3.5mhz
Ram: 48k
Rom: 16k
Price: £125


Computers were starting to move along a bit now, my next was the Oric 1. It had a weird keyboard, & was French, but apart from that was a pretty good little computer. It was with this I first started programming.

10 print 'my name is matt'
20 goto 10

The first code I ever did, & it just filled the screen with 'my name is matt'. Top stuff.



CPU Speed: 3.5mhz
Ram: 48k
Rom: 16k
Price: £129.99


Unfortunately, a burglar stole my beloved Oric 1, but the insurance payout replaced it with its new improved version the Oric Atmos. Same as the Oric 1 really, but with a proper keyboard.



CPU Speed: 3.5mhz
Ram: 48k
Rom: 16k
Price: £179.99


My brother thought he would be clever around this sort of time. He got a Dragon 32. It was rubbish. I lol'd. A lot.



CPU Speed: 0.9mhz
Ram: 32k
Rom: 8k
Price: £139.99


While I had the Atmos, I 'won' a lynx of a kid at school. I didnt keep it long though as he was the smelly kid & to be honest the keyboard stank. I swapped it for a BMX. Shame really, as it was a good computer.



CPU Speed: 4mhz
Ram: 64k
Rom: 32k
Price: £199.99


My last of the old school computers was the Atari 800XL. A top machine in every way. It had great graphics & sound for the time, & you could stick Atari console cartriges in a slot at the top. I still have it somewhere.



CPU Speed: 3.6mhz
Ram: 64k
Rom: 64k
Price: £260


Then came my first 'proper' computer (it had a mouse), a second hand AppleMac SE. This was the thing that got me on the road to a design career. I nostalgically look back on this computer, & wish I hadnt bought it. I could have been a doctor or something dammit.



CPU Speed: 7.83mhz
Ram: 1Mb
Rom: 256k
Price: £1600


There you go. The next time you complain about your pc running slowly, or a game isnt working, come & look at what I had to put up with.


All images from old-computers.com

XD i grew up with DOS too jajaajajaja the price of percia for ever

This was the first computer I had


I played some of the best games on that thing: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galexy, Warriors of the Wasteland (which got me into RPG's). I love computers.

Now...I've grown up with the more recent computers, so I'm not to sure about this.

These computers use monitors? Right? I'm..stunned, they look so different!

At school whe had an other model (Tandy Trs-80)
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/comput...?st=1&c=244

An old model with a single side 5 1/4" floppy drive.
It was only programmable in Basic.

At home I had a Commodore 64 with a tape drive as storage device.
You had to connect the computer to a TV-set.

This was in the days before monitors, apart from the Commodore Pet (which had a hideous green & black built in display) & the mac you had to plug all the above computers into a television.


This post has been edited by Mjay06: Sep 19 2006, 11:20 AM

Nice computers there.. reminds me of my time.. i started out with a BBC Micro.. and then moved onto a 8086 with a green monitor 240 kilobytes of memory and two big floppy drives! was sweet to play digger and prince of persia like others!

The BBCs were excellent computers in their day, nice & reliable & easy to use. Nowadays though the look partically prehistoric. Its amazing how far things have moved on in such a relatively short time.

My uncle gave me the Spectrum computer and if I remember correctly, games were loaded using the casettes and then you connected them