These ones are labelled 180 watt but yeah sound fantastic and they get impressively loud. 🤣

386SX wrote:

Eheh my evolution was a circle even with configurations. I am trying to go back as much as possible even for browsing and multimedia; next goal a pure Dos Arachne web machine.

Thats not terribly hard at all. A 40meg hdd, nic with packet driver and a 286 is all you need :p

First family computer: Texas Instruments TI-99/4A with Speech Synthesizer, joysticks and audio cassette tape drive. Lacking: floppy drives, etc.
Enjoy this stock photo:

We had the follow-up cost-cutting beige plastic version. I recently learned that it has been in storage for over twenty years, I may soon rescue it. In between now and then I've picked up a brushed-metal one from a garage sale but I need a new PSU, video cable, the works.

Second family computer: ultra-rare Franklin CX-1 (or possibly CX-2) luggable Apple II/CPM clone (ours was configured for Apple). Based on the Franklin ACE 1000. Long story but local computer store built this for my father from parts purchased from Franklin as they were closing. IIRC this one died but my buddy and I played around at "fixing" it. Supposedly less than 30 were actually made. Someone else's:

Third family computer: VTech Laser 128 EX/2, yet another Apple II clone. (Somerne else's photo):

Fourth family computer: generic 386 clone of some kind IIRC. Dad had a Toshiba T1000 prior to this but as I recall the kids weren't allowed to use it.

Going back to my story. I've got flashback, remembered when like 5yr old. I've played with my brother kind of ping pong TV game. On black screen television.( two 80s style) small joysticks. This is something like this Tele-Set GTV-881 but really that was so looong ago, and can't remember properly

Caluser2000 wrote:

386SX wrote:

Eheh my evolution was a circle even with configurations. I am trying to go back as much as possible even for browsing and multimedia; next goal a pure Dos Arachne web machine.

Thats not terribly hard at all. A 40meg hdd, nic with packet driver and a 286 is all you need :p

Nice!

I think 286 is probably a bit too much for Arachne. 😁

But if we talk about a pure text-lowres image version of the web maybe it's usable. What configuration did you tried with it?

Great to see some people still have pictures of their old systems!

First computer we had at home was an Amstrad CPC 464 with mono monitor. I still have this, although sadly it doesn't power on.
At school we had the old BBC Model B's and later Acorn A3000, these were a big step up.
Then off to the PC world, everything from a IBM PC Portable up to Athlon 64 3000+.

I was thinking about those games that were sold original low cost at newspaper shop. Some GREAT titles like Prince of persia, Test Drive 1/2/3, Indianapolis 500.... 3.5 diskettes... always low end requirements... I played Wolf3D in a small window cause framerate dropped badly at full screen something like 5-10 fps.

It's really hard to remember, but it would have been one of two machines. Either my Father's IBM PS/2 (which was at my Grandmother's house at the time) or his then current computer (which is still in his office and astonishingly is still used now and then).

The first time I would have used one or both of them would have been sometime in 1993 or 1994. The PS/2 had some games on it, but because I was a little kid that could barely read and couldn't type worth a damn I needed my Dad to start games up. The games weren't anything mainstream because the computer was primarily meant for work. It had a Lode Runner clone called "Freddy's Rescue Roundup" in which you rescued zebra striped chickens...which actually sounds cooler than pieces of gold in retrospect. Their were also versions of monopoly, hangman, jeopardy, and "Castle" (which was my favorite because it involved using commands and guiding your character through a castle looking for artifacts while avoiding enemies.) We eventually got the PS/2 when Grandma got a Laptop, unfortunately I wasn't much a computer nut at the time, as I was only 10. We "gave" it away. No idea what happened to it, it was too old to be of any use to anyone at the time, I mean what would anyone do with a computer from 1987 in 2000? So it was gone, awesome keyboard and all.

The other computer as I said earlier is still in Dad's office. When I was much younger there were some Commander Keen Demos, and some other game involving a guy with a wand who could make blocks disappear for a certain space of time. PacPC and a Doom Demo were also on it at one time. Last time I checked it was 100MHz. According to Dad he got it heavily upgraded with a "Pentium" and 3 hard drives (in addition to both floppy drives, CD drive, and an archival Tape drive that can carry a whopping 2 GB per tape...). But since I'm not allowed to open it I can't tell exactly what's in it.

386SX wrote:

Nice! […]
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Caluser2000 wrote:

386SX wrote:

Eheh my evolution was a circle even with configurations. I am trying to go back as much as possible even for browsing and multimedia; next goal a pure Dos Arachne web machine.

Thats not terribly hard at all. A 40meg hdd, nic with packet driver and a 286 is all you need :p

Nice!

I think 286 is probably a bit too much for Arachne. 😁

But if we talk about a pure text-lowres image version of the web maybe it's usable. What configuration did you tried with it?

Whatever was the default for the 8086-286 specific version- http://www.glennmcc.org/arachne/197-8086/ Only thing I had to do was set it up with a static ip address as Arachnes dhcp function didn't work for some reason. Obviously it's not going to be my primary interthingy box but for giggles it does the job. Not bad really for a brain dead processor 😉

I've documented what I've done to that system over at VCF http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showt … odel-ZCV-251-EC

386SX wrote:

I was thinking about those games that were sold original low cost at newspaper shop. Some GREAT titles like Prince of persia, Test Drive 1/2/3, Indianapolis 500.... 3.5 diskettes... always low end requirements... I played Wolf3D in a small window cause framerate dropped badly at full screen something like 5-10 fps.

At the time you just didn't care. You just set to a smaller screen size and played the damn things on whatever system you could. I keep reading here that Wolf3D is unplayable full screen on a 286. That is total bullshit.

Also some of those titles were sold a few years earlier as Big Box titles. A number of older titles were also resold bundled like Activisions Power Hits.

One good thing about them was they never under specced their system requirements.
There were other useful, now probably forgotten, software titles besides games available as well. I recall drafting up the our property layout with one of the drafting packages that came on a 360k floppy disk and printing the resulting file to a 9 pin dot matrix printer.

Well form my experience Wolf3D just like Stunts would need just a bit more (not that much) power to play at their full glory with the 386SX. But considering the 286 at 16Mhz I think the experience would be not that different. By the way like you say, at that time the important thing was just play it even with half screen of a 320x200 resolution.

First electronic game was a Binatone system on a B&W TV in the UK. The system was actually colour capable but we were behind the times! Very early 80's that was. It burned out many years later.

Moved to Indonesia and met the BBC micro at school at age 7. Loved Granny's Garden most of all. That was my first PC experience. At home it would take another year until we got an Apple II clone, with dual Epson floppy drives and 9 pin printer. This computer was chosen even after we'd had a play with the then mind-blowing Mac 128k at a presentation at my school. I also remember playing Gato at my friend's house on his XT and thinking the PC was so far ahead - CGA was a big leap above my green mono BMC. Spent many hours programming in basic, and trying in vain to get cassettes to load.

Coming to Australia we didn't upgrade the Apple for some years. I used to go to Kmart on weekends and drool over the C64 home packs (they had flashy packaging and colour games), then the Sega Master System and NES, and eventually Amiga 500 promo packs. I certainly wasn't 'keeping up with the Commodore' as the jingle used to go 🙁 Every Christmas I hoped something better than the Apple would appear under the tree, but it wasn't to be. Dad had an IBM PC Convertible from work, which I used from time to time for school work, but that was hardly exciting. High school computer labs had Mac SE and LC machines, and the music class had a couple of Atari STs. Eventually he bought me a 386SX-20 in 1992. I upgraded it later with a Mediavision Pro 3d and a Toshiba XM3501B at a cost of $1100. I saved up for the sound card by mowing lawns for a few months! Finally I was free of the PC speaker for music and sound. I still have the soundcard and box.

After that we skipped to a Gateway 2000 Pentium (not sure of speed, but it may have been a 200 MMX as it was a TX chipset that was fussy about RAM - recall it required 2k refresh EDO). Been a blur of hardware ever since.

386SX wrote:

Well form my experience Wolf3D just like Stunts would need just a bit more (not that much) power to play at their full glory with the 386SX. But considering the 286 at 16Mhz I think the experience would be not that different. By the way like you say, at that time the important thing was just play it even with half screen of a 320x200 resolution.

Maybe my expectations weren't that great 😉 IIRC a few earlier vga games used that screen size for best quality grahpics. I remember playing one particular interesting one, damned if I can recall the name of it though, that involved a lot of problem solving before moving to the next scene.

my very first computer I used was an Apple IIe (i think) back in my elementary school days. The very first computer I ever owned (and also first computer I ever took apart) was a Zenith Data Systems 386dx66mhz with 4mb of ram and a massive 320mb HDD!

Would love to find another one of the beasts sometime but shipping on that will make it not worth it.

James

My first computer was like many people a C64, it was the revised model with the newer design (c64c I think it was called).
After that my mum got a 286-16 for work purposes with Dos 3.3, a trident 512kb vga card and 1mb of ram, I discovered that while it had a 40mb hard drive dos 3.3 only supported partitions as large as 30mb, so I created a partition in the remaining space and copied all the games to to that drive. Being young my file management skills were... somewhat lacking, so all the games were copied into the root directory of the drive and not in individual folders.
That machine was upgraded to a 486 DX33 with 4mb of ram but still had the trident video card in it, this was around the time where I started tinkering, first thing I did was change the video card for a Tseng Labs ET4000/w32 VLBus card with 2mb of video ram, then I added another 4mb of ram. The next thing I added was a Cyrix DX2-80 CPU (I still miss that green heatsink) and a 160mb hard drive. The final thing added to that machine was a sound card, an ess audiodrive 1868.
That machine was once more upgraded and got a Cyrix PR166 (133MHz) with a PCI Tseng ET4000/w32, 16MB of RAM and the same 160mb hard drive. This machine went through several updates with CPU going to a Cyrix M2 running at 233MHz (cant remember the pr rating), 32MB RAM, 1GB hard drive, and an S3 Virge.
Finally that same machine was given to me as my personal machine rather than the family machine and I upgraded it to a K6-2+ 500MHz with 256MB Ram, an 8.4GB hard drive and a 16MB Voodoo Banshee.

My first introduction in the computer world was when I entered primary school (1983). At the beginning there was some kind of Computer show. I was amazed 😁 All those computers and games and ooooooh 😊 Good three years later my father bought new Atari 800XL with cassette deck. It was "smuggled" in to the country as computers and other western stuff were banned at the time - but everyone was doing it 😉 Yeah, 800XL was the start - games, programming, hacking... I stepped in to the PC world much later when I went to the secondary technical school in 1991. It was funny running Atari commands on a PC DOS 🤣 We used AutoCAD there, so me and my brother bought a first PC, a used 286/16 with 1MB, 40MB Conner HDD, 5.25" floppy, 256kb VGA card, small VGA color monitor and a nice desktop case. Later I purchased 287 math coprocessor. I soon mastered DOS and Win 3.1 optimizations - they were needed on a such a slow system - and a Stacker/Doublespace on top of that 🤣

Hopefully one day soon I'll get the needed parts to complete the setup of my first PC computer and then the 2nd and so on 😎

My first time sitting down and using a computer was in 1984 or so. I was in 4th grade and the library had a small room where there was about 8 or so Apple II computers. It was here I was first exposed to the wonders of software such as the Oregon Trail and Print Shop. I spent many hours sitting in that room toying and learning my way around those big clunky keyboards. They truly were magical beige boxes of wonder. I would be another 5 years until I could get my very own computer at home. By that time PCs have become the dominant platform in my life.

I will always look back fondly at those Apple wonder years.

laxdragon wrote:

My first time sitting down and using a computer was in 1984 or so. I was in 4th grade and the library had a small room where there was about 8 or so Apple II computers. It was here I was first exposed to the wonders of software such as the Oregon Trail and Print Shop. I spent many hours sitting in that room toying and learning my way around those big clunky keyboards. They truly were magical beige boxes of wonder. I would be another 5 years until I could get my very own computer at home. By that time PCs have become the dominant platform in my life.

I will always look back fondly at those Apple wonder years.

Feel the exact same thing, just with C64's instead. Otherwise much the same story.
It must have been in 1985, and not 1984 that I got to know computers for the first time.
I was 8 or 9 years old at that time.

Hmmm.... Come to think about it.
My mother worked were they had mainframes to keep records of the powerstations they drew.
I might have seen and pushed a button for the fun of it years before the C64, when i think about it.
And perhaps, only just perhaps, they have let me start up one of those platter-drives that
are sometimes orange, and have these big chunky platters inside a transparent caddy.
Those machines and that C64 is all what sparked the magic of computing inside me.

-

First computer I ever used was an Apple II Plus in the late 80s. Upgraded to 64K memory with a language and integer card (Seems kinda redundant that it had both thinking back now). Beyond that it was a minimally-configured system with only a single floppy drive and no other accessories. I primarily used it to play games, although I did attempt once to do some homework on it using FrEdWriter...an adventure since it didn't have a lower-case chip or shift-key mod. 🤣 I couldn't read what I was typing, but I was still able to finish the paper, and just used one of the school's IIe systems to clean up any errors.

Beyond the Apple computers at home and school, my first encounter with a PC was...well, also at school. :p In fourth grade, the school library installed a computer with a CD-ROM encyclopedia. All I remember about it is that it was running DOS, I don't believe it had Windows installed on it.

As for at home, the first PC we had there was in late summer 1995, the Dream 486 that I am currently in the process of recreating (All I need is the sound card!). 486DX4-100, 16MB RAM, 810MB hard drive, Windows 95. Ah, nostalgia...