Reminiscing about Old computers.

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Killian1701

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Feb 21, 2006
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I was just sitting here, looking on Ebay. I dont know why but i was suddenly struck by a wave of Nostalgia. I did a search for a Tandy HX 1000, my first computer. I remmeber sitting around on christmas, listening to the songs it could play with its little 3 voice integrated sound system.. or hooking a vcr up to the composite out, and recording little horribly animated movies with the paintbrush program that came in deskmate. I remember feeling a sense of wonder. A feeling thats hard to describe, but one that you could feel in your heart, an almost nervous excitement of learning new things. Then i remmeber playing in 5th grade, on our schools commodore 64's and apple IIe's, writing dumb little programs in basic , or playing frogger on the c64.. once again, i get a funny feeling in my heart when i think back. Our computers nowdays are so rediculously superior to the other computers i mentioned, My desktop, dual 21" sceptre lcd's, a pair of geforce 7900 gtx's, Athlon 64 4800x2 oc'd to 2.8ghz.. 4 gb ram and 3 300 gb hard drives.. but.. it still doesnt make me feel the way those old, and by current standards, Crummy computers did. I almost bought those old machines i saw on ebay.. but then i thought, what would i do with them, if i got them? I cant recapture that lost magic. It doesnt seem like anything can make me feel like those things did. I know this might sound odd. Im happily married now, almost 30, but, when i think back to the times of my childhood that felt the most magical, it was using those old computers, or getting that nintendo when i was 9 for christmas.. anyone else have similar memories? if so, please reply. i'd like to hear it. so i know im not t he only one that has felt like that.
 
My family had a C64 that I sort of grew up on. We had all sorts of games for that tank. Zaxxon was my favorite, but I was also pretty good with Wheel of Fortune. I actually still have it.

Experts are saying that we're going to see the same kind of renaissance with the biotech industry over the next 10-15 years that we saw with the computer industry over the last 10-15 years. Being in the biotech industry, this is an extremely exciting prognostication. If we can come as far in biotech as we have in computer science, then the world is going to be looking much different in about a decade.

What's funny is that one led to another. The advances that I've witnessed in biotech over the last 8 years or so have been directly because of the incredible increase in computational power and storage.
 
yup - I had a commodore 64 too - got it when I was 5. Disk drive as big as a shoebox. Printshop and Jumpman. Good times. Sold mine in a yard sale a few years back. I thought about keeping it, but as you say, Killian1701 - what would be the point? sigh. thanks for the nostalgia and gnawing sense of loss.
 
Killian1701 said:
I was just sitting here, looking on Ebay. I dont know why but i was suddenly struck by a wave of Nostalgia. I did a search for a Tandy HX 1000, my first computer. I remmeber sitting around on christmas, listening to the songs it could play with its little 3 voice integrated sound system.. or hooking a vcr up to the composite out, and recording little horribly animated movies with the paintbrush program that came in deskmate. I remember feeling a sense of wonder. A feeling thats hard to describe, but one that you could feel in your heart, an almost nervous excitement of learning new things. Then i remmeber playing in 5th grade, on our schools commodore 64's and apple IIe's, writing dumb little programs in basic , or playing frogger on the c64.. once again, i get a funny feeling in my heart when i think back. Our computers nowdays are so rediculously superior to the other computers i mentioned, My desktop, dual 21" sceptre lcd's, a pair of geforce 7900 gtx's, Athlon 64 4800x2 oc'd to 2.8ghz.. 4 gb ram and 3 300 gb hard drives.. but.. it still doesnt make me feel the way those old, and by current standards, Crummy computers did. I almost bought those old machines i saw on ebay.. but then i thought, what would i do with them, if i got them? I cant recapture that lost magic. It doesnt seem like anything can make me feel like those things did. I know this might sound odd. Im happily married now, almost 30, but, when i think back to the times of my childhood that felt the most magical, it was using those old computers, or getting that nintendo when i was 9 for christmas.. anyone else have similar memories? if so, please reply. i'd like to hear it. so i know im not t he only one that has felt like that.
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absolutely, my first machine was a c128 I did it all, got a 300 baud modem, downloaded gfx demos & warez (which sometimes took DAYS for one game ;) ), then got an amiga 500 and later an amiga 1200 which were so much goddamn fun with all the games and BBS'ing I did, I telnetted into MUD's and had such a fun time.. the reason we dont get that cool feeling anymore is because of our age, back then when we were kids and had this new technology that very few other people had & it really was a unique & exciting experience.. it was something we've never seen before.. now-a-days we've pretty much seen it all, played it all, yea a new OS comes out that lets you right click .01 nano-seconds faster, a new vidcard that has 8 more pipelines, new games that are very cool but don't give you that same feeling because quake 4 is pretty much like quake 3, bf2 is like bf1942, civ4 is like civ3, it's all the same regurgitated shit... there's no new ground that's being broken and now your grandma has a water-cooled modded case so that cool underground experience is completely gone.. hey at least we have the memories :p
 
Techx said:
absolutely, my first machine was a c128 I did it all, got a 300 baud modem, downloaded gfx demos & warez (which sometimes took DAYS for one game ;) ),
Click to expand...
Sneakernet > BBS ;) Remember whan one drive copies took several swaps?

I still have my first C64 and a bunch of disks. Surprisingly every disk i tried still works. Not bad for 20 year old media.
 
pxc said:
Sneakernet > BBS ;) Remember whan one drive copies took several swaps?

I still have my first C64 and a bunch of disks. Surprisingly every disk i tried still works. Not bad for 20 year old media.
Click to expand...

Nowadays your doing good for a floppy to last 20 days.
 
My first computer was a Comodore Vic20. It was my older brothers computer, but it became mine very quickly, along with the collection of cartridge games. Thinking of it kinda makes me want to hook it up and play Gorf.
 
8088-

I get the same cool vibes when I write my own Macro or VB stuff- now it's actually productive stuff. Sort thru 20,000,000 values and make sense of it in an hour or two- with my own Macro; that's cool to me.
 
I recently powered up my Zenith supersport 286 laptop. The feeling and sound of the clickey-clack keyboard, sound of its 21MB hard drive whirring, and CGA graphics... Oh yes, it brings back memories. Opposite of the floppy drive, a 2400 baud modem :p.

I got rid of my commodore-64 stuff years ago, I regret it now. Emulators just dont cut it, I miss the sound of that 1541 drive rattling away like a machine gun/impact printer at night while I loaded maps for Seven cities of gold.
 
Started out on the C64 as well. Got into BASIC and assembly. Fried my first 1541 in the first 24 hours by running Jim Butterfield's floppy checking proggy. Worked up a good number of phone bills calling BBSs. Modified a few peep's BBS proggies to fix bugs and add features. Also played around on the TRS80s. Jumped in the Amiga scene. Got a Video Toaster and slapped it in a 'modded' A3000. Had that Video Toaster go nuclear on me after getting it back from RMA. :) Joined the PC world as soon as Lightwave3D hit the PC. Been in the PC world ever since building my own systems. Still gaming and programming to this day and enjoy anything tech!
 
im there with ya.

My dad was a pastor, so the church was next door. I used to have to walk over at night (kinda scary alone) and go play with the base xt 8086. I use to draw with gwbasic where i had to type the color in with a numeric digit to draw. I was happy. I had crappy computers growing up because i wasnt rich, thats probably why I overcompensate now with un-needed hardware and build my dad systems in thanks for showing me computers. I think I owe him atleast 6 more to call it even.
 
My dad had an Apple IIe which was around as long as i could remember, i finally got to play with it when i was like 6, he got a Commodore 64 to start learning to programming and i messed with that but i had more games for the Apple so i used that till i got into K6. I still have it somewhere in the garage.
 
My first was the Commodore VIC20, with those shitty cassette tapes to hold programs & data. It didn't last long till the cable shorted out and burned up, got a used C64 and my first modem, the old 300 baud, would download messages from the local BBS's just about as fast as you could read. Still have all my C64 and C128 stuff all boxed up, someday I'll pull them out and fire them up to enjoy that old 8-bit goodness again.
 
haha i had a tandy... ohhh man i remeber using some paint program... where you could blow up the stuff you paint.... and also the game Mad Max... horible game... it was really hard and of course there was no save... would get 20 minutes in and die... have to start over... hahahah ahhh those were the days that started me on my computer...

next computer after that was a 66mhz computer... wow that thing flew i thought....
 
bob said:
I recently powered up my Zenith supersport 286 laptop. The feeling and sound of the clickey-clack keyboard, sound of its 21MB hard drive whirring, and CGA graphics... Oh yes, it brings back memories. Opposite of the floppy drive, a 2400 baud modem :p.
Click to expand...

I used to have on of those, someone got it for me at an auction for $50 (and I paid him back), I used it off and one until I got me a Dell PIII 800 laptop (HD just died on it too :( ) I then gave it to a friend who has since got a second one at an auction for practically nothing.
 
Heh.. check this out

old_laptop1.jpg


old_laptop2.jpg


old_laptop3.jpg


EDIT: Yes, it should still work.. but all the batteries for it are completely dead, and the power adapter needs a battery that can hold some kind of charge to work..
 
Take apart the dead battery, hook up a regular 12V 1.7Amp adapter to the insides of the battery contacts and just clip the contact panel in place. It'd be kinda like those old videocamera adapters that attached where the batteries normally did.
 
hehe.. I think I filled up the 20mb HDD with text pr0n..

ahh.. those were the days
 
C64 then Amiga 500 was were I started. The Amiga was so way ahead of the PC world back in 88'. Icons, Run boxes, Disk Directory, GUI Desktop and Drag n' Drop made them look like stone tablets. I also had an emulator to a windows 3.1 partition....I spent at least 3 grand on that system, extra memory and software. I was surfing the net' way before the WWW came along....anyone ever hear of Delphi?

But the biggest thing was video. I'd say it was at least 5 years ahead of any PC video cards of that era. A lot of the graphics could not be done in the PC world until we saw 3dFX come on the market years later.

You kids today are spoiled rotton worrying about that next upgrade of a 200 or 300 hardware whatever.....I've spent at least 15 grand since 88' cause I had to be the baddest...no more.

Since I'm now older and wiser I also miss the old days and think a lot about my humble beginnings. My thinking has changed quite a bit, if the dang thing works and ain't broke why fix it or replace it....

I may be an old man but I'm still kickin' your kiddy butts in lots of games....and I'm not about to stop!
 
I remember my first experience with QBASIC:

I typed in the following:

Do
Print "Test"
Loop

And thought it was the greatest thing in the world when the word "test" went all the way down the screen. :p It was the only command I knew, but I thought it was cool. I think I tired it like twenty more times with different phrases in the "print" command. :p

I also liked the NES. To this day I don't think any game has ever given the same magical experience as Super Mario, and I still play it on the emulators.

Also, I remember an old 386 machine I had. I must have ran the Norton diagnostic tests hundereds of times. I also remember two really, really weird solutions that I came up with to some problems I had with it:

1. The floppy drive door broke. It wouldn't click into the closed position. So, whenever I needed the system to access the floppy drive, I would put massive amounts of pressure on the drive door with both hands to force it into the closed postion. I had to keep doing that the entire time it was being accessed, and my thumb was very sore after formating a disk. :p

2. Some of my floppies stopped working for some reason, giving me a "run-time error" every time I tried to start the programs on the disks. So, not knowing much about computers, I figured that maybe if I kept pressing the "s" key ("s" for "solve my problem" I think is why I chose that letter lol) while the system was accessing the disk, it would work. Sounds very stupid, right? Well, much to my suprise now but not then, it worked! Apparently, pressing the key while the disk was being accessed until the system started beeping would do something to cause the system to "skip over" the part of the program that was causing the problem (I still have no idea how it did that, all I can think of is that filling up the memory by pressing the key caused the error message to be dropped out of the memory, making the system forget about it and keep executing the program anyway). Of course, it would have worked with any key, not just "s", but I didn't know that. I really thought that I could tell the computer to solve my problem by pressing the "s" key. Eventually, however, I got to a floppy disk that had a different error message. I was very frusturated by the fact that it wouldn't load, even though I pressed the "s" key about 150 times. :p

Oh, yeah, and I would also run memmaker five times over to try to get the "80K of conventional memory" that one game required. I can't believe that there was once a time when just getting 80K of memory was tough.
 
msny said:
C64 then Amiga 500 was were I started. The Amiga was so way ahead of the PC world back in 88'. Icons, Run boxes, Disk Directory, GUI Desktop and Drag n' Drop made them look like stone tablets. I also had an emulator to a windows 3.1 partition....I spent at least 3 grand on that system, extra memory and software. I was surfing the net' way before the WWW came along....anyone ever hear of Delphi?

But the biggest thing was video. I'd say it was at least 5 years ahead of any PC video cards of that era. A lot of the graphics could not be done in the PC world until we saw 3dFX come on the market years later.

You kids today are spoiled rotton worrying about that next upgrade of a 200 or 300 hardware whatever.....I've spent at least 15 grand since 88' cause I had to be the baddest...no more.

Since I'm now older and wiser I also miss the old days and think a lot about my humble beginnings. My thinking has changed quite a bit, if the dang thing works and ain't broke why fix it or replace it....

I may be an old man but I'm still kickin' your kiddy butts in lots of games....and I'm not about to stop!
Click to expand...


Yup I agree Amigas were FAR, FAR ahead of thier time. Its a shame that Commodore couldn't hold on its a name that ranks right up there as IBM and HP in the computer world for a lot of people.
 
MFM hard drives for the win. Im trying to set up a PPP server right now, but the Zenith doesnt like to talk to my windows PC with my ghetto mouse cable converted to null modem cable. I tried dialing into my ISP with my 8088 toshiba T1100 plus. (Died in the line of duty) a year or so ago, it soiled itself and coulnt talk fast enough to the ISPs server, and the connection would drop before it ever had a chance to process what was going on, poor little bugger only had 3Mhz.

The zenith is a real powerhouse, 16Mhz I beleive. I still use it from time to time, because It has that feel to it...

I may use it as a dummy terminal for my LAN servers, though I dont know if its got enough horsepower, I Think its serial-ports are only 9600bps (if that). Sigh... They dont make em like they used to.
 
dayumm I miss the C= A500. Had all the wares, dual floppies, fast/chip ram switch mod(3.5MB?). Seeing HAM4096 mode on my dad's 27" Trinitron for the first time will never be topped! Miss Lotus turbo Challenge 2 - I still remember one of the track passwords (peasoup). Anyone ever played North and South, goofy/comedy military game that actually used the meat-grinder sounding floppy drive for in some game sounds!? at least it was on the intro/loader scenes.

Went from a 64k? Atari > Amiga > PC 486DX66(for a couple months > Pentium 75 upgraded to 100 OC'd to 120 > been OC'ing since then.

:( need to uhh close eyes and cry now ... L O L
 
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99 4A.

It was my cousin's and I ended up with it somehow.

I know it's not as old as some of the other stuff in this thread but I was like 4 at the time.
 
my 286 was AWSOME.

16 colors! and a math co processor! got it when most people were still buying 8086s.

I remember commander keen was cool... and breakout... lemmings... though it was mostly for autocad. (release 9!)

oh, and Dr. Halo and Dpaint.

I also remember being addicted to this game called just "vette" as in corvette, the car... it fit on a 5 1/4" floppy and was a full 3d polygonal driving simulator that was actually pretty open ended.

I also dabbled with an early version of Flight Simulator... and I had Jet Fighter 2 which was awsome (building dodging in a yf23 fighter hehehe)

and golf... lets see... there was Mean 18... there were a million courses that you could get.

it was the most awsome thing until my friend got a 386... then I was always over at his place.
 
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