What's your first computer and OS???

[oj88]

During the early 80's, my uncle had a TRS-80 (similar to the pic below) where we played Snake. Among other things, they also use it to play chess. Would you believe that at level 10, the TRS-80 takes 8-12 hours to think up a move? lol It takes several days to finish a single game. I remembered this like it was yesterday because my uncle who is a chess freak, would bully us young kids not to touch the computer while it's thinking... or else.

[tidus1203]

Kami Compaq Presario 486, the OS was Windows 3.1

[Jun aka Pekto]

During the early 80's, my uncle had a TRS-80 (similar to the pic below) where we played Snake. Among other things, they also use it to play chess. Would you believe that at level 10, the TRS-80 takes 8-12 hours to think up a move? lol It takes several days to finish a single game. I remembered this like it was yesterday because my uncle who is a chess freak, would bully us young kids not to touch the computer while it's thinking... or else.

Oooh. We had that at work long ago. But, the TRS-80 we had were already taking on that classic beige look. I think they had 8" floppy drives instead of the 5 1/4" ones.

[ghosthunter]

^^^

My friend had a TSR-80 but was equipped with tape drive to load the programs.

[ssaloon]

The first computer our family owned was an IBM compatible PC, cant recall if it was a 186 or 286, running on MS-DOS (may boot disk pa).

The first computer that I really owned was a Macbook running on Tiger.

[woohoo]

4 years before our first family PC, my father bought an IBM PC clone running on an Intel 8088 for use in his LTO office. I made a dBase ]I[+ program on it that recorded all the vehicle registrations in his office back then. My brother and I had to input them one by one, field by field! His branch was the first to use a PC for recording vehicle registrations. He even guested on TV and was interviewed about this PC.

That office PC had no hard drive! The records were held on 360KB 5.25" floppy disks!

One had to switch the Turbo on so that it ran at 10Mhz, from the default 4.77Mhz!

My first ever personally-owned PC was an IBM PC-XT compatible rig with an 8086 processor, MFM HDD, the capacity of which I cannot remember. It also had 2 5.25" FDD's, and it came with an 80-column Star NX-something dot-matrix printer (24-pins FTW!). Together with its computer table, and all the licensed software on floppies, I bought it second hand for 20,000 pesos! The Greenhills folks marvelled at what a bargain it was (circa 1991)!

Both of those XT's had monochrome green monitors.

My first mouse was an optical one which cost me a whopping Php1,800!!! Back then optical mice were still a new technology to Filipinos, and each one had to have its own mouse pad especially made for optical mice (dotted surface).

About 2 years after this, I replaced it with a 386SX-25Mhz machine with an 11" color VGA monitor, to which i attached an HP Deskjet 500 (Php 12,500) and a Sound Blaster Pro sound card (Php4,500) with a 1x CD-ROM drive (Php 11,000) that used a caddy for discs and came with LOOM, that Luftwaffe game, Where in the world is Carmen San Diego, etc.

How time flies when you're having fun... :sigh:

[roberto_minosa]

...it came with an 80-column Star NX-something dot-matrix printer (24-pins FTW!).

In the mid-90's, Lolo also owned a Star NX (10?) printer on his IBM-compatible at home! Its buttons were oh-so-cool back in the day. It printed so loudly that I wasn't allowed to print anything during siesta hours. Oh well, I was just about 5-years old back then, and everything that I printed were just for kicks. Lolo manually refilled the ribbon on the Star NX with Epson refills. Guess what, that printer's still alive! It just needs a refill, a parallel cable, and virtually non-existent drivers...hehehe.

It looked kinda like this:



I can't forget how I played with its buttons (when it was off hehehe).

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>

Our first PC never had a decent monitor when we got it. It had an almost-dead Mitac 14-inch monitor. Its display was so dark that I had to turn all the lights around the PC off whenever I had to use it. When we turned over our beloved 386DX to my lolo, he bought a 110v IBM color monitor immediately. It looked exactly like this:



It was a 13-incher, and displayed a maximum resolution of 640x480. It was the first decent monitor that the 386DX PC was attached to.

Eventually, the PC got infected by viri, but there was always the trusty McAfee on a 3-inch floppy to fix everything. At some time, the infection was so bad that my uncle had to reformat the PC. Like some of you guys remember, it was a stack of floppies that was required to install Windows 3.1.

[Jun aka Pekto]

Like some of you guys remember, it was a stack of floppies that was required to install Windows 3.1.

It wasn't too bad.......just 7 floppies. I made disk images of my Win 3.11 before they went bad.

But, you also needed MS-DOS 6.22 before you can install Win 3.11 on a real pc. That took an additional 2 floppies. I think the the third MS-DOS floppy is GW-BASIC only. Or maybe not.

[ghosthunter]

I remember my first PC with a hard disk... it was a "huge" Seagate 10 mb HDD.

Later it was upgraded to one of those modern 20mb half-height HDDs.

[ghosthunter]

My first optical mouse (Genius) even had a reflective pad underneath it. Lasted almost 3 years.

[Jun aka Pekto]

Amiga OS Workbench 3.1

[ghosthunter]

Before Windows 3.1 ... there was DESQview. Anyone else experienced using this early multitasking and task-switching software? ... Back when DOS was king, it could already open multiple windows for different programs to be running at the same time on the same PC.

In my case, I would have it running a modem dialer, Bluewave OMR, a terminal software and a BBS based online game helper or a DOS screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

[Jun aka Pekto]

Before Windows 3.1 ... there was DESQview. Anyone else experienced using this early multitasking and task-switching software? ... Back when DOS was king, it could already open multiple windows for different programs to be running at the same time on the same PC.

In my case, I would have it running a modem dialer, Bluewave OMR, a terminal software and a BBS based online game helper or a DOS screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

We didn't have that. But, we did have Desqview/X running on a pc that managed (weather equipment) Wind Profilers.

[Jun aka Pekto]

This was the version of Workbench I was most familiar with for a long time. Version 1.x

[woohoo]

Before Windows 3.1 ... there was DESQview. Anyone else experienced using this early multitasking and task-switching software? ... Back when DOS was king, it could already open multiple windows for different programs to be running at the same time on the same PC.

In my case, I would have it running a modem dialer, Bluewave OMR, a terminal software and a BBS based online game helper or a DOS screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

Desqview was fine, but OS/2 was the best! :sigh:

Miss Bluewave...

[Jun aka Pekto]

Desqview was fine, but OS/2 was the best! :sigh:

Miss Bluewave...

OS/2 Warp trashed the boot sector of my hard drive back in 1994 when I tried to uninstall it and revert back to MS-DOS 6.22/Win 3.11. I was able to rescue the drive with Norton though. OS/2 Warp had a problem with a number of MS-DOS games. It didn't help when M$ yanked Windows/OS2 compatibility.

It was ok though when I was using it. It and Win 95 felt very similar.

[Jun aka Pekto]

Anyone here had an Atari ST computer? It was overshadowed by both the Amiga and Mac which was a shame because it was quite a capable machine back then. It was the one platform I didn't get acquainted with very well because it was so rare wherever I went.

[woohoo]

OS/2 Warp trashed the boot sector of my hard drive back in 1994 when I tried to uninstall it and revert back to MS-DOS 6.22/Win 3.11. I was able to rescue the drive with Norton though. OS/2 Warp had a problem with a number of MS-DOS games. It didn't help when M$ yanked Windows/OS2 compatibility.

It was ok though when I was using it. It and Win 95 felt very similar.

Minor glitch... Perhaps it didn't want you to uninstall it.

It wasn't just ok, for me. Win95 couldn't quite catch up to its performance. That's why it was my OS of choice, especially when I still had my BBS running... Everything ran smoothly, and some of the apps were DOS-based, even (well, I used all DOS-based BBS software at the start and I had nothing to complain about, but I wanted to try out the OS/2 native versions, and I did, eventually).

[Jun aka Pekto]

Minor glitch... Perhaps it didn't want you to uninstall it.

It wasn't just ok, for me. Win95 couldn't quite catch up to its performance. That's why it was my OS of choice, especially when I still had my BBS running... Everything ran smoothly, and some of the apps were DOS-based, even (well, I used all DOS-based BBS software at the start and I had nothing to complain about, but I wanted to try out the OS/2 native versions, and I did, eventually).

Actually, there was a complicated uninstall which I didn't follow because of my impatience. But, Warp was pretty good, much better than the preceding versions of OS/2.

The OS/2 Warp cd wasn't mine to begin with. So, I was back to MS-DOS/Win3.11 for about a year until I upgraded to Win 95 ( in 1995).

That was about the same time frame I got my feet wet with Slackware 3.4. I managed to get X-windows going (after numerous hardware swaps). But, that's about it. I was at South Korea at the time and many students were psyched up about Linux. Me? I was scratching my head and wondered what was the big deal. . I couldn't run anything with the darn thing. Well, Linux finally got much better 3-4 years later.

[yaj]

We used to have an Apple ][ similar to GH's. It had an Epson LX-800 printer. We used it for typing (i think wordstar was the software) and also games (could not remember the titles though)

Then we had an IBM compatible XT. The games i used to play on the PC was karateka and some flight simulator (F-117 na ata yun).