I remember buying this

[andyman]

we had a 100mhz compaq in 98, that 14.4kbps modem was as good as it got for me for 5 years....

[tnf]

Lots of you got into computers fairly late.

I expected more commodore 64s, amigas, etc.

[Therac-25]

Lots of you got into computers fairly late.

I expected more commodore 64s, amigas, etc.

Ataris and Commodores weren't in the same price class, so they're not going to show up as "expensive shit you got rid of for cheaper later". The Atari 400 was like $500 on release, i think. PCs were ~$2K in that timeframe.

Also, you started with a picture of a PC. I interpreted that as "starting at IBM® Compatible", not "your first computer".

[Fender]

Lots of you got into computers fairly late.

I expected more commodore 64s, amigas, etc.

I got my TI-99/4A for xmas in '81. I've been programming computers since the next spring. Think I could put 26 years of programming experience on my resume?

[tnf]

Lots of you got into computers fairly late.

I expected more commodore 64s, amigas, etc.

Ataris and Commodores weren't in the same price class, so they're not going to show up as "expensive shit you got rid of for cheaper later". The Atari 400 was like $500 on release, i think. PCs were ~$2K in that timeframe.

Also, you started with a picture of a PC. I interpreted that as "starting at IBM® Compatible", not "your first computer".

Oh, sorry.

[tnf]

Lots of you got into computers fairly late.

I expected more commodore 64s, amigas, etc.

I got my TI-99/4A for xmas in '81. I've been programming computers since the next spring. Think I could put 26 years of programming experience on my resume?

I made a lottery number picker in basic back in 87. If I can count that as one complete app under my belt you can have your 26 years.

[Shmee]

Windows? Please. MS-DOS is where it's at.

Exactly. Windows came on our 3rd machine.
THose DOS days taught me a lot about memory management, writing autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get my games to play, using EMM386.EXE and HIMEM.SYS, all that hassle to get games to load.

Good stuff.

The horror...

Alone In the Dark was a BITCH to get to run on my old 486. Tweak, fail. Tweak, fail. Sim City 2000 was another bastard. VESA? Get fucked!

This is why people become republicans. "Ah, the good old days!"

Yup - they sucked

[seremtan]

i think the first actual computer i ever used was my first job out of school: an ICL2900 mainframe in 1984, complete with mag tapes, humungous dot matrix printers, giant exchangeable disk drives the size of washing machines and a punched card reader that still got used from time to time

the disk drives:



rofl...

[Therac-25]

The horror...

Alone In the Dark was a BITCH to get to run on my old 486. Tweak, fail. Tweak, fail. Sim City 2000 was another bastard. VESA? Get fucked!

This is why people become republicans. "Ah, the good old days!"

Yup - they sucked

Ultima VII

[Fender]

Christ... you're fucking old seremtan.

[seremtan]

i bet i'm younger than you

and you did catch the bit about "straight out of school" right?

[MKJ]

right. getting SC2000 to work properly. it would refuse to recognize the gpu. then it would bitch about the sound.

i said fuckit and got it for Mac. cause not only did that instantly work, it also used actual Fonts for the newspapers

[AmIdYfReAk]

Lots of you got into computers fairly late.

I expected more commodore 64s, amigas, etc.

i had both of those, didn't really use them that much, if at all... the 486 was the jump in period.

[Κracus]

My first pc cost roughly 4,600$cdn. It was an Acer 233mhz with 32mb's of RAM and 6gb industrial hd (the thing was loud as hell) This was back in 1996.

[Dr_Watson]

well... the first computer was a TRS80 but that was cheap and my dad still has it.

expensive would be when he dropped $4k on our first *PC* which was ~1990-1 when the 486 was bleeding edge
was a smoking hot 25mhz with 4meg of ram and a fat 213MB hard drive.
shit was hot... even had the brand new sb pro sound card so i could play duke nukem with all it's ad-lib FM synth chip-tune goodness. The high end cardinal 2400bps modem for BBS access also drove the price up a bit.

after 6 years or so it was donated to a church IIRC.

[Fender]

i bet i'm younger than you

and you did catch the bit about "straight out of school" right?

I was 12 in 1984.

[LawL]

i bet i'm younger than you

and you did catch the bit about "straight out of school" right?

Looks like a nerve was hit.

[Fender]

i bet i'm younger than you

and you did catch the bit about "straight out of school" right?

Looks like a nerve was hit.

Note the lack of response.