A Trip Down Memory Lane with Microsoft

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
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For all of us who grew up with Microsoft and marveled at the technology of the time can now look back at the ads and get a chuckle at what was cutting edge technology back in the day. It was new and exciting experiences that can only happen once in a lifetime. Check out the click-through and relive some old memories.
 
Thanks for the post; it's always splendid to revisit legacy ads for electronic relics that at the time were cutting edge. And get a load of those 70's hairdos!
 
"...the power of a 80186...." Wow, just wow. Our first family computer had a 286 and was a Tandy.
 
I read awhile back that everyone in that stock picture of all of the Microsoft employees were multi-millionaires, even down to the maintenance staff. Talk about starting at the bottom :D
 
In color bros.... Fucking color!:D

I actually had a Coleco Vision ADAM. It had 16 colors.;)
 
Really scary thing is that my first machine was an Osborne (the original tan one with 160 KB floppies!
 
I spent many hours lusting after the Tandy's, and annoying the salespeople at the local Radio Shack when I was a kid. Those guys probably still hate us! :D
 
I remember the Tandy 2000. In it's time, it really was one hell of a computer.

The most expensive computer I ever owned was my first one. A TRS-80 Model 1.

32k Expansion Interface - $500.
Four Floppy Drives - $1200.

Lower-Case Mod - $10, self installed hack, resulted in all Lower case letter a's being super scripted LOL

15MB (yep, MB) hard drive. External. Damned thing was the size of a typical desktop computer case. - $2800.

All of this was later moved over to a Model IV.

Switched to Mac's in late 1983, and stayed there until 2000 when I moved to PC's for corporate/work reasons.
 
Oh, and lets not forget the massive CompuServe Bills ! It's amazing how much money you could spend over a 300b acoustic-coupler modem.

For you youngin's, that's the thing with rubber ear cups you would put your phone handset in :)
 
my first computer was a ibm 286 i remember when my dad brought it home. He knew nothing about computers he said "learn how to use this its important for your future"
 
If I remember rightly, the '186 was similar to the '286. It had more peripheral support built into it, but less memory address space. The PC industry never really adopted the '186 though it allowed more compact designs.
 
I had the TRS-80/Tandy Color Computer 1 with 4K memory ... that was my first computer. I ended getting the 16K upgrade and then trading it for a Fiat 124 Sports coup with a bad CV-Joint. Fixed the CV-joint as an Auto-Shop project. I had a lot of fun with the computer, but a lot more fun with the Fiat :D
 
My first machine was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I think it had 8k of memory and was a pain in the ass to program. Took forever. Stored programs on a cassette tape. And god forbid you types one thing wrong in the 1000's of lines of code you had to start over.

Fun times those were.
 
everyone is remembering the good old days huh?
I paid $2500 for my first PC; a humble 486DX 33Mhz with nothing but DOS.
This replaced an Atari 400 I bought in '82 with lawn mowing capital.
They didn't have any computer related courses in high school when I attended. The closest thing was "typing" which was taught on old manual type writers. So I took that to learn to type. An essential computer skill! LOL!
 
Tandy 2500SX/20 that came with DOS and DESKMATE from Tandy. First experience with a computer for me.
 
Thanks for the post. Funny enough I've been on a Microsoft kick lately, reading up on the old products, commericals, culture. I'm sure i'm in the minority, but I really enjoy their products - even laugh at things like BOB or WinME.

However, I will agree that those were exciting times back then as newer ideas began to flourish and everything seemed "new" and limitless. Not really like today is it?....
 
Awesome walk sown memory lane.

When I yas a yungin', our first computer was a Commodore 128 (not the D :( ) that was purchased in '87 or '88. That thing was used for mostly games, then I got into programming on it, but hated that I couldn't save any of my work through the standard interface. Still fun to program a game that would make a little animated helicopter fly around the screen using a joystick.

Then in mid '89 we got a Packard-Bell 4.77 MHz (8 MHz turbo!) 8088 with 640K RAM and both a 360K 5.25" and a 720K 3.5" FDD. Had to pay a pretty penny for an EGA video card and monitor upgrade. Whole thing shipped was around $1,100 iirc.

After that, I got into building my own systems, so an Am386SX-40 with 1MB total across 4 SIMMS was assembled in '92. About 6 months later, I ended up buying a Cirrus Logic 1MB SVGA board at Wal-Mart and perfectly fine floor demo 14" SVGA monitor from Best Buy for about 1/2 of what they went for new and retired the carry-over EGA card and monitor from the Packard Bell.

Then came the "real power" in around '95: I bought all the parts to assemble a system with a huge leap in performance!
-Biostar motherboard and Cyrix 6x86 PR 133+
-40MB (2x8MB + 2x2MB) EDO RAM
-Trident 9440 PCI Video Card
-8x CD-ROM (non-recordable)
-255MB Samsung PATA HDD
-Windows 95 FDD version

Oh yeah, gaming awesomeness! :rolleyes:

After the 6x86 showed it's age (which was rather quickly), I upgraded with a budget friendly AMD K6-2 350 processor. Later on I dropped in a K6-2 450. I yearned for the PII-450, but the CPU alone was well over $1000, so no thanks. First ran the beta of Win98, then the release version, then SE.

When the Thunderbird generation arrived, I started with a Duron 750, then transitioned to a true T-bird 1.2GHz and had 64MB DDR1 RAM. Thing was faaaast. Produced a hell of a lot of heat, too. Even with a full copper HSF with high-speed 80mm fan.

Then came the Venice 3000+, pre-ordered, waited patiently, then went ape-shit crazy when it finally arrived and I got it running. Amazing performance. Was able to obtain a 600MHz 24/7 stable overclock out of it with very minimal Vcore bump using an X2 OEM heatpipe HSF. Windows XP Professional (dual booted both 32 and 64 bit versions)

Ran that until the X2 6400+ came along (thank you Kyle and the rest of [H] for the drawing!). Win XP, Win Vista, and now Win 7.

Been running it since. Can't wait for tax return so I can finally transition to SB/IB. I'm kind of looking forward to Win8, too!
 
My first was a Compaq 66Mhz, my dad's a blistering 75Mhz Packard-Bell....back when both brands made good products - haha. I always thought it neat to learn how to configure things in DOS. You worked so hard to get games going, the reward was playing the darn thing!
 
My first computer was the Atari 800XL, still have it in the closet at my parents. I used it all through college until the floppy drive died on it an I could no longer save my term papers. The great thing back then was programs on cartridge, which allowed you to have the programs running and still have your floppy drive free. My roommate had a Tandy 1000 and you had to make a copy of the word processor program every time you filled a floppy because you couldn't swap out the floppy to save your work while you were running the program. He really needed two floppy drives on that one.

One friend learned Assembly programming on the Atari and could make some really great programs for it, I only learned BASIC but still managed to make a few database programs that were nice. Neat thing about the Atari 800XL series was they were the first to actually have a separate chip for graphics, where all the others used the CPU to handle the graphics. They were also trying to come out with a 32 bit version just as the company went out of business, which would have put them ahead of the IBM clones at the time. Trammel should have never retired and left his sons in charge of the company :(
 
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