How far??

[aardvark]

Back in the 80's my Dad brought home our first computer. I can't remember what it was called, but there was no software for it (Dad had to write all the software, including Chocolate Chip Invaders) and he even had to fabricate the case out of fibreglass. I remember being amazed at the graphics!

Then we hit the late 80's and early 90's and games like Leisure Suit Larry, Wing Commander and Doom really started to push the wow factor for computer graphics... how could it get any better?

Last night I watched Beowulf. WOW!!

If you need any reminder about how far computer graphics have come, then this is a must see. Every now and then I found I was reminding myself that all of the characters are computer generated, only to slip back into totally forgetting about all of that.

I may be an old school nerd, but I can't wait to see what computers will be doing in another 10 or 20 years!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9qpqyO_dmU

[red_dave]

Looks like a big step up from that Final Fantasy movie from a few years back...

Do you get to see Angelina's virtual boobies?

[Valheru70]

True aardvark , I remember in 82 when the ZX-82 came out you had to write in basic

eg:
1 I am the King
2 goto 1

computer screens around school were like early graffitti.

V

[photomike666]

True aardvark , I remember in 82 when the ZX-82 came out you had to write in basic

eg:
1 I am the King
2 goto 1

computer screens around school were like early graffitti.

V

That would do bugger all unless you told it to do something with 1, and they were 10 , 20, 30 etc

10 printscreen "I am king"
20 goto 10

[Smitty]

having learnt Assembler machine language at uni
which then let us compile stuff in Fortran...and do things (like add up invoices entered on paper tape)
we thought compuders were fantastic when COBOL and Pascal made things easy (umm..maybe easier )
but we were still playing with things ½ the size of a house

then I went back and did a postgrad degree in IT (like 1978) which had a subject..the architecture of small computers
and yep we designed and made our own...about the size of a sewing machine..very Apple IIish
but they still needed Assembler to run and we had to 'mount' 8" floppies to get it to do anything

The PC came not much later...and we gave thanks to IBM







and Bill Gates


cheers
Smitty

[Valheru70]

good memory photomike, mine is shot.

[ttc]

My very first computer was a Tandy TRS-80

In 1977, Radio Shack issued a press release introducing
TRS-80 computer, 25 existed, within weeks thousands were
ordered. The TRS-80, which was developed by Tandy Corp. for
less than $150,000, was unveiled at New York's Warwick
Hotel. It is widely recognized as the first completely
assembled computer and the first affordable computer
available at retail. Sold through Radio Shack stores, the
$599.95 system featured a black-and-white-monitor, cassette
tape storage, 4KB of
RAM (expandable to 52K) and a Z80 8-bit 1.77MHz processor...

... Try getting Windows to load on THAT thing...

[Smitty]

.....
... Try getting Windows to load on THAT thing...[/i]

CPM did.....

[Slow and wobbly]

Theres one on display at the Melbourne Museum - the CSIRAC. Was there a couple of months ago and I was fascinated by it!
People used to write letters to the operators requesting a solution to a mathematical problem and they would spend a couple of days asking the computer the question, to which it would take a couple of days to come up with an answer and then they would mail you back the answer!
Nerds go here and read all about it. Is quite informative and will definitely stun anyone from the current generation who may not have even heard of a comodore 64 or a mac IIe.
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/dept/about/csirac/

[photomike666]

My first PC was an 8086, duel 5 &1/2 floppy drive, 20Mb hard drive, maths co processor and a coal chute Everything was DOS based back then, even Window required DOS to be loaded first. I call it Window (no S), as aside from it being theoretically possible to open more than 1 window, the computer hung every time you tried. We had a chess game, and every move was like waiting for a grand master to play.

I eventually replaced it with a 486 Dx 100, the predecessor to the first Pentium. I skipped the 286 & 386 as the 8086 did everything I needed to do at the time, and they were far more expensive back then. The DX100 was quickly taken off the market, as although it was a lower grade chip than the P1, the P1 ran at 66MHz and was slower than the 486. The only advantage of the pentium was the ability to run more than 1 processor on a Motherboard - something I have never yet done. We ran Windows 3.11 for ages, even after Win95 came out us die hards ran 3.11. I think I still have a copy of that and DOS 6 somewhere, unfortunately they are on 3 & 1/4 inch floppys and and I no longer have such antiquated technology

And here I am, two decades later, and I'm now running old technology again. Not only have I refused to upgrade to Vista,
this P4 is about 4 years old now. It's probably about time for a new generation, 64 bit or 128 bit running at 20TerraHertz. A terrabyte of ram, hard drives should consist of banks of memory sticks with no moving parts and ultra fast bit rates, wireless everything, fingerprint scanner built into the keyboard and voice software that has moved on since early releases in the mid 90s. I had a voice control on the 486, which was supposed to open programs and minimise windows on voice cammands - it was shit and that hasn't changed.

[red_dave]

Dad had an Osborne "laptop" thingy with a 5 1/4inch floppy drive on either side of a 4 inch screen. The keyboard used to fold down from the main box section and it wieghed about the same as a ZZR600...

Commodore 64 was my first real foray into the computer age, but my first real computer was a 386, 8mb ram and 40mb hard drive... Windows 3.11 and the best game in the word - Death track

These days, as long as my PC runs Photoshop, KSRC and porn, i'm happy

[Ratmick]

Mine was a Amstrad PC1512, 512k RAM, twin 360k 5.25" low-density floppies, no HDD and mono CGA screen. Amstrad DOS (MSDOS v2.1-clone) booted off one floppy, GEM Desktop ran off the other. There was a bit of floppy-swapping to save files.

Next PC was a Taiwanese-clone 12MHz 80286 AT-Compatible (16MHz in Turbo mode) and 1Mb of RAM. It had a 42Mb Connor voice-coil HDD that cost $650 (in 1990 that was a LOT of money). I ran Windows v3.11 on this one, it was a remarkedly stable OS for Microsoft... Next was a 100MHz Tawanese-clone Pentium with 64Mb of RAM/440Mb HDD running Windows 98 SE. I think this was the amount of RAM, it was too long ago. This was followed by an Athlon 1GHz Thunderbird PC with 256Mb of RAM, which died a horrible death (catastrophic motherboard failure). That was replaced by a 3GHz Dell P4 (1Gb RAM/125Gb SATA HDD) that went the same way during a thunderstorm. I rebuilt it myself with higher spec everything, though it's still in the Dell case.

Mick

[mike-s]

When i was a lad our first computer was an xt with a monochrome screen, that didn't last too long as that thing cost as much as a new car. Next we went to a microbee 16k, not quite the top of the line 32k which had a memory expansion board installed, but still a very capable computer. It had a heap of games which my folks bought from catalogue's from microbee.

I went on to a 386sx 16Mhz made by IBM with their revolutionary MCA bus, which is a shame as it was as popular as a lead balloon, i suspect due to the whole licensing issue they had on the architecture.

I then went to a dx2/66, that lasted a hell of a long time, i then got a p75 when the newest thing was the 133. I then had a punt with the stove hot cyrix 120+ and then went on to whore myself some more with intel once again and their celeron 300A. Then i went to a Amd Duron 1200 (i had this for a LONG time, something like 3 or so years) before the motherboard totally shat itself. Next was my current pc, celeron 2.6 or so. Add onto that memory, hard drives a couple of monitors, and a couple fistfulls of video cards, however i still cannot justify spending over a hundred on ANY video card . Then building spare pc's out of various bits left over and looking back, yeah, i wasted a lotta money on this kinda stuff.

[Strika]

My first puter had about 8 MB of ram and fuck all of anything else. As a matter of fact....my current mobile phone has more power, memory and operates 1000 times faster than my first puter did!!!

[MickLC]

Well while we're at the recollections of our prehistoric computing pasts.....the first computer game I ever played was on a friend of my dad's home made "computer" that had a block of led's with a 'snake' moving back and forth on it and you had to hit a button every time it got to either end to get it to go back. As you went it got faster and faster until you missed it. The "computer" was around the size of a briefcase and it would've been the very late 70's or early 80's.

The same friend of my dad also had the first digital watch I ever saw which was one of those ones with the red led numbers and gold bands...very cool