A Chronology of personal computers - What have you purchased?

I was browsing for the first computer that I "purchased" and came across this introduction timeline.

When did you start computing work or play / Which of these have you purchased along the way?

A Brief Timeline of Personal Computers


Short version: A Brief Timeline of Personal Computers

detailed version: Chronology of Personal Computers

80286
80386
80486

Those were the days:

2 Meg Ram - 40Meg hard drive, 5.25'' floppy discs - oh memories.

I am now using an ASUS laptop with Duo P8700/500GB hard drive/4GB memory/8 second boot up/cold as ice/

Purchased 18 months ago - Should be out of date by now!

 

I started off with a Sinclair Spectrum 48K in around 1984.

Then I bought a second-hand IBM-XT clone built by Zenith. 640Kb of memory, no hard drive, two 5.25" floppy drives running on DR-DOS 7, GEM desktop or Windows 2. I did later upgrade it with two 20MB hard drives.

Next was a home built 386DX (16MHz I think it was) with 8Mb of RAM and 1Mb SVGA graphics card in a Mini-tower case.

A home built 486 came after that but don't remember the specs.

This was followed by dual Pentium II processors running NT with 64Mb of RAM.
Also had a Mac PowerPC at the same time and a 486 laptop. The dual Pentium was much better though.

Since then I have given up building my own desktop PCs and have used various notebooks.

Currently using a Dell Inspiron with 1.6 GHz Centrino Duo with 2Gb RAM, dual boots with either Windows 7 or Fedora. Due for a new one.

Lee

 

The first computer I had was in 1979; it was a Commodore Pet. When switched on it had 7167 bytes free! That's not even enough memory to store my current avatar! Having said that it was programmable and I wrote my first software in both Basic and Binary.

My first military database was in 1986 when I built a database of Sussex men killed in WW1 on, I think, a BBC computer that the Uni had.

More than 30 years after my first PC currently typing this on an iPad!

 

I had a Sinclair ZX81, then a Commodore Vic 20, then a Spectrum+...

Came back to computers with my 1st PC, an Olivetti with a Pentium II processor running Windows 95 with 8GB hard drive.

After that came a PC built for me that had a mighty 32GB of disk space and ran on Windows 98 before upgrading to XP.

When this machine became slow and kept freezing I got what I use today..
An Apple iMac 20" screen , 2 GHz, 2 GB memory, 250 GB hardrive using the Snow Leopard version of the OS. It's 3 years old and is just great, as quick as the day I got it.

I'll never go back to Windows.

 

I project managed a relocation of 1200 Banking Personnel to a new state of the art building in 1982 and there were only 8 IBM terminals in the entire building with the most basic of accounts information. When I started work as a cashier in 1973, there were no calculators in use and we added up the till books in our head. I can still beat people today using this method.

 

I am now using an ASUS laptop with Duo P8700/500GB hard drive/4GB memory/8 second boot up/cold as ice/

Purchased 18 months ago - Should be out of date by now!

My laptop above cost me $1,200. When I had my 386 it cost $200 for two extra Meg of RAM.

 

A Dragon 32! I'd forgotten about them. There was also the Acorn which I think was made by the same people as the BBC micro but not as good. Jet Set Willy was great but did you ever play Daley Thompson's Decathlon for the Spectrum? A definite keyboard wrecker!

 

wow now let me think.....

Started off with a kit Sinclair ZX80, then a shop bought ZX81
Then....

VIC20
Commodore 64
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48
BBC Micro
Atari ST

and then a long string of PC's after that

 

Started of with a Pet - Two 5" floppy drives and 64kb ram (£5K back in the mid 1980s)
Then on to a 386, followed by an Olivetti Laptop
upgraded every couple of years since
PC cheap - software - expensive

 

My laptop above cost me $1,200. When I had my 386 it cost $200 for two extra Meg of RAM.

I remember spending £2,000 of my employer's money on 64Mb of RAM in the mid-1990's. I was a little jittery installing that pair of DIMMs I can tell yer!

 

Ramcal - sounds like the move to BBI in Poole around that time....

1975 I had an Amstrad 512- forgotten the details of it then a whole series of PC's- with floppies etc until now with HP pro - and feeling it as it is now seven years old and looking at an Imac 21'

Started off in the 1967's with the boss coming into my office and announcing that the company was going on computers - and I was in charge - GULP ! Nine months later we sent the first transmission of our punched cards into the ether at 4:30 p.m. to Columbus Ohio - my hair was turning grey but by 8.a.m.- it was all back with less than 0.01 % error - that bonus was very well received ! Staff was happy as well !

Still don't know how it all works ....maybe just as well !!!
Cheers

 

A mighty Vic20... with less than 4K, then (a few years later) an upgrade the size of the original computer, which took it to a magnificent 6/7K. Then we got a casset deck, which frequently didnt load and seem to take hours with psychodelic lines zagging across the screen... then a commodore 64 (I must have been the only person in the world to have an 8" floppy disk drive for this, it was the size of a shoe box)... then an Amiga 500 (initialy purely to play eye of the beholder) then sideways to an Acorn (purely to play "retro" emulated BBC Master games like Repton, citadel, Strykers run and Exile), before finally giving in to the enemy and the evil world of hard drives, mice and PCs.

 

My Mum and Dad got me a second hand ZX81 for Christmas a few years ago. Before that we had the usual TV Box cames console with the white dots if they count?

I have a Packard Bell Easy Note laptop now.

 

A mighty Vic20... with less than 4K, then (a few years later) an upgrade the size of the original computer, which took it to a magnificent 6/7K. Then we got a casset deck, which frequently didnt load and seem to take hours with psychodelic lines zagging across the screen... then a commodore 64 (I must have been the only person in the world to have an 8" floppy disk drive for this, it was the size of a shoe box)... then an Amiga 500 (initialy purely to play eye of the beholder) then sideways to an Acorn (purely to play "retro" emulated BBC Master games like Repton, citadel, Strykers run and Exile), before finally giving in to the enemy and the evil world of hard drives, mice and PCs.

Don't forget the 22 character per line display on the vic 20!

 

Some well heeled folks here, buying their own PCs! My computing introduction was the very early 70's and a Hewlett Packard 'Desktop Computer'. It cost about half an average semi-detached house and was the first time I'd ever seen a LED display. I was supposed to write a program to solve a math problem (HND Engineering course). I hated it. Today you could get an equivalent scientific programmable calculator for a few quid. Fast forward a few years, I was an electronics engineer and had to maintain some gear that included a DEC PDP11 - one of the manufacturer's engineers showed me how to 'punch in' a binary test program on the key switches. I was hooked. Built a 6800 system with 256 bytes of memory (!!), but did not get a real computer until a ZX80. Later Worked on PETs, BBCs, Research Machines 380Z (Anyone remember them?). Remember 40MB drives were 500 quid. Eventually got a series of 386, 486, PII, whatever. My computer pioneer heroes must be Tom Kilburn and Dennis Ritchie....

 

Don't forget the 22 character per line display on the vic 20!

I remember I wrote a simple BASIC text adventure game for it and ran out of memory at line 100.

 

In my family it's not so much a question of keeping up with the Jones's as keeping up with the Grandkids at Uni

So, after having succumbed and mastered the Ipod Touch and got myself involved in Facebook so that I could see all their photographs, I am now coming to terms with the formidable Apple Ipad.

Are any other enjoyers/sufferers of this device out there who wish to pass on any helpful tips ?

Ron