I always remember how much better my Tandy 1000 played games than my friend's IBM XT. Not just from a speed standpoint (that didn't matter to me back then), but the 16-color graphics and the audio were so much better It was a huge edge for gaming. I remember Space Quest III, Marble Madness, King's Quest, Lightspeed and others on both machines and yeah....wow. And I'm sure the Tandy was cheaper than that IBM XT had been.

Apparently Tandy 1000TX was actually an XT architecture though, just with a 286 used instead of 8088. But the peripheral hardware was the next generation. Kinda like the jump from Tandy 16 color to VGA and then from 2D VGA to 3D. I've been spoiled by jumps like those.

I used that Tandy for like 6 years or something. It was perfectly fine until I got Star Trek 25th Anniversary and found that it needed a upgrade to memory. That Tandy shares its RAM for video memory so needed the "768KB upgrade" to be more compatible. Picked up a 486DX2 50 in 1992.

Actually a few machines at this point in time but here was my main computer I was using:

Amiga 500 w/GVP 68030 Turbo Card
8MB
CDC 120MB SCSI-1 HDD
Seagate 48MB SCSI-1 HDD

I had the audio tied into my old Marantz Receiver and a cheap pair of Radio Shack, Optimus Speakers.

Why was everyone using a PC/PC Compatible ???

> Why was everyone using a PC/PC Compatible ???

I guess this forum is not so interesting for the others 😀

Well I also had an old Heathkit H89 that my dad built that we retired around 1990, and a Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (CoCo2/Dragon) that we fooled around with from time to time (but it sucked compared to the PC - it made me wish I had a Commodore 64 or even a Nintendo NES or even an Atari computer because they were all better for playing games on a TV).

I did manage to pick up a $99 300-baud CoCo modem on sale for $9 (since everyone was using PCs with 2400-9600 baud modems by then) and Dungeons of Daggorath (a sort of rudimentary Wizardry clone) among other things.

The only others I knew about back then were Apple. They were all over the schools here. If you want to reminisce over Apple II sure go ahead. I thought the IIgs was really cool. The first CDROM that I used was on one of those. And the GUI finally made it seem as good as PC to me.

Those funny little Mac Plus machines never did anything for me. 😉

BigBodZod wrote:

Actually a few machines at this point in time but here was my main computer I was using: […]
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Actually a few machines at this point in time but here was my main computer I was using:

Amiga 500 w/GVP 68030 Turbo Card
8MB
CDC 120MB SCSI-1 HDD
Seagate 48MB SCSI-1 HDD

I had the audio tied into my old Marantz Receiver and a cheap pair of Radio Shack, Optimus Speakers.

Why was everyone using a PC/PC Compatible ???

I think it depends on where you were located back then...Commodore's products weren't heavily marketed everywhere back then...here in Sweden it was heavily marketed

Me and my friends used Amiga's and game consoles mainly because the pc games sucked back then....and they were expensive.
Had two friends who used PC's because it was their parents which had got them thru their jobs...we used to laugh at them when they were forced to play old crappy EGA/CGA games with music/sfx coming thru the pc speaker 😁

Texas Instruments TI-30 III.

But later that year I bought my first PC/AT, a Siemens PCD-2L. Here is what happens with him:

286 Total Conversion

late 90's i think with custom machine my dad's computer tech friend made we paid him for the job it was a pII system we later had him upgrade but, the mobo wouldn't fully support the new pII so it was under clocked. i used it till it died then transferred the files from the hdd to the one i used today on an hp system wich i slowly replaced all the parts till it is the phenom940 it is today.

1990 - Had an intel 8088 running at 10MHz, with "Turbo(!!!:happyhappy:)" on, and 6MHz without. 640K RAM with a Seagate 20MB HDD, 2 x 5.25" HDFDD and a CGA card with a CGA Monitor. MS-DOS 3.3. Coupled with a dot matrix printer. No Soundcard. No Mouse. (<--- scary stuff. 🤣)
Mostly using it for Wordstar. Also remember playing Karateka, Test Drive II -The Duel and Lode Runner, Dig-Dug using this.

1991 - Got myself a 286 @ 20MHz, with 2MB RAM, 40MBHDD, 2 x 5.25" HDFDD, a VGA card and VGA monitor, Sound Blaster 1.5, 3-Button Serial Mouse. MS-DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0. I remember playing Wing Commander, Prince of Persia, and The Secret of Monkey Island, like there's no tomorrow in this machine! Should have waited for the 386 which was just available at that time, but I guess I just couldn't wait! 😁

1990 - Believe it was a regular 7 Mhz XT that by that time I had placed a paradise EGA card in and paired that with the IBM 5154 EGA monitor and an Adlib sound card, 2400 baud modem and a 20MEG Hard Card. Man I loved this computer. Had spent the last 2 or 3 years previous with the same CPU but monochrome card and monitor using simcga to play cga games of course. I still get happy feelings when I look at pictures of that model IBM monitor.

http://www.yesterpc.com/Hardware/IBM%205154/item.htm

This computer was in the living room as my mom used it for writing fiction on as well. She used to wake me up in the early, early morning to figure out what button she hit on the computer that caused it to insert, num lock, or caps lock, and I'd stumble out there hit the key to fix it and go back to bed to sleep before school. I was in the 10th grade at this time.

I had a friend who had a 12Mhz AT with a VGA card and a Soundblaster. I remember being so impressed with his machine. Then again I had a different friend who only had a packard bell 8088 with CGA card and monitor and PC speaker for sound so I was content.

Just around a year later however I managed to cobble together my first computer built completely by me, a 386/sx-16 with a VGA board 2 MEG of ram and a 120MB HD.

Later I remember I traded a rare magic the gathering card "Time Walk" to a friend to get a VLB video board for my next motherboard (Think it was a 386DX33). Funny thing is that "Time Walk" is still equal to the value of a new video board today, only difference being then it was 100 for a new card and now its 499.

Loved all these old machines...just like I'm sure all of you did, its why were here.

keropi wrote:

In 1991 I was using an ultra-expensive IBM 386sx/20mhz , with the onboard 2MB ram, the onboard 512kb VGA, 80MB HD and..... speaker!!!! later I added an ESS card and when it came out a Yamaha SW-20PC ...

Almost the same here, though it was late 1990; without any sound, but with 4mb RAM and a 512kb ISA ATI VGA Wonder card (which I still have and which still works!). That wrapped up with CTX 14" SVGA monitor (1024x768). That was the most expensive computer I've ever had...

Afterwards, Opti Mad 16 Pro was added; but it sucked sooooo much... Hateful card. Worked properly only on IRQ 10, which almost none of the older games supported. 16-bit 44.1 Khz was only supported "on the paper", so the quality in windows sucked too. Worse piece of PC garbage ever produced.

Hey, I had a 14" SVGA CTX monitor too. Did you know that CTX is an abbreviation for Chuntex? Sounds chunky. 😉

Amigaz wrote:

I think it depends on where you were located back then...Commodore's products weren't heavily marketed everywhere back then...here in Sweden it was heavily marketed

Me and my friends used Amiga's and game consoles mainly because the pc games sucked back then....and they were expensive.
Had two friends who used PC's because it was their parents which had got them thru their jobs...we used to laugh at them when they were forced to play old crappy EGA/CGA games with music/sfx coming thru the pc speaker 😁

I do know some of us on this board also belong to a well know Amiga forum now don't we 😉

It is fun to talk retro regardless if one got introduced to PC/PC Compatible architecture first or something like the Apple ][ Series/Macintosh computers...

The first computer my mother bought to her, my sister and I was an Olivetti 486 25 MHz 4MB of ram 250 MB harddrive no sound, no CD drive just VGA and a diskette drive.

swaaye wrote:

Hey, I had a 14" SVGA CTX monitor too. Did you know that CTX is an abbreviation for Chuntex? Sounds chunky. 😉

Yeah, I did 😀 Chuntex electronics. I think my model was 1416 or something. It supported 1024x768, but at 56Hz only; 800x600 was at 60Hz and 640x480 at 75Hz. These resolutions worked only in Win98 and only with the right driver. This CRT still works btw 😀

My main system back then was my trusty old Amiga 500 😀 and Sega Megadrive (i still have them 😁 ) I was a kid back then and was not really into PC's until they became better than the once mighty Amiga 😎 ( I always preferred amiga games back then as a kid... especially the music!)

1990 was a transition year in my family. We had a Unisys PW2/300, which was a 286/10 slimline desktop with 20MB MFM HDD and 1MB of RAM. It only had three ISA slots. It had a VGA (can't remember the chipset) card in one, a Sound Blaster in another, and a extra serial port card (mobo only had one built in) for my modem. I ran a BBS in the Los Angeles area using WWiV software on that 2400.

Later that year, my parents bought me a clone 486/33. It had a 120MB Western Digital Cavier IDE HDD, 8MB of RAM, a Sound Blaster Pro, a generic multi-I/O card, and a Paradise WD90C30 VGA Card w/ 1MB of Video RAM. A couple of years later in 1992, I remember making a big deal about OS/2 2.0. I no longer had to sacrifice my BBS to do school work on the computer. I could now reliably run the BBS in the background in OS/2 while doing whatever else I wanted on the system. At that time, it was a revolution. Today we think nothing of it.

Around this same time in the early 1990's, I remember hanging out with a buddy who had a Mac IIsi. Thanks to him, I got decent exposure to Mac's early.

You had a 486/33 with 8mb in 1990? You must have paid a bloody fortune for it.

The first time I moved past a single MB, all the way to 5 MBs, the RAM was still in single DIP chips, and there was an entire full-length 32-bit memory slot card that was covered with those. All by itself, that card (and all of the many chips it was covered with) cost $600 in about 1991, or 1992.

( I think that the added RAM was related to Windows 3.0, but I just don't know for certain any more why I wanted it. It was for my first or second 386DX 25. )

Anonymous Coward wrote:

You had a 486/33 with 8mb in 1990? You must have paid a bloody fortune for it.

It wasn't cheap. My parents are immigrants and they sacrificed a lot for us.

If I recall correctly, that 486/33 cost more than $3000 new at the time and was purchased from TC ("Treasure Chest") Computers in Louisiana. We found them through Computer Shopper magazine which used to be nearly as fat as the phone book back then. I think TC was eventually bought up by Insight computers.