[artrafael]

Those damn audio tape drives haunt me in my dreams - they would corrupt about 5% of your files! I spent hours re-editing all my BASIC code

For that reason, I bought a thermal printer for my PET so I could print out hardcopies of all my BASIC program listings. Unfortunately, thermal printouts fade over time.

[KraziJoe]

C-64 with 5.25 Floppy and a color Monitor.

[GortWillSaveUs]

C-64 with 5.25 Floppy and a color Monitor.

See I used my color TV as a monitor.
I thought that was the coolest thing at the time to use a TV as a monitor.

[User 77203]

ZX Spectrum+ -> amiga 500 -> Amstrad 1640 (0x86) with 10mb hard card -> 386 sx -> 486 -> etc etc

[jammyb]

Pentium II, 233mhz, 32mb ram and 4gb HDD. Windows 95

"never going to fill that drive up!" ha!

Age of empires was the game of choice along with monkey island lol.

Was a Gateway machine. Their 0800 tech support was fantastic when I used to break it lol.

[Mallet21]

5mhz Intel processor (Franklin PC8000) circa 1985

[FlashPan]

First computer I had was an Acorn Electron 32k with a black and white portable TV. My dad said the BBC Micro was too expensive at the time. I was really jealous of my friends who had the BBC as they could play Elite years before it came to the Electron and they had a 5.25 floppy for super fast game loading, unlike my 5 mintue waiting for a cassette tape. When I managed to get a colour portable tv it rocked my world.

First PC I bought with my own cash at college was a 286 16mhz with a 1mb ram and 30Mb HD, upgraded to a 386 66mhz with 4mb ram and a whopping 100mb hd. I can remember the day I spent over £100 for a 1Gb HD upgrade, placing named stickers on the all the cables/connectors so I could swap out the drive and not frying anything

I also remember getting exited upgrading from Dos 5.0 to 6.1

[GortWillSaveUs]

Pentium II, 233mhz, 32mb ram and 4gb HDD. Windows 95

"never going to fill that drive up!" ha!

Age of empires was the game of choice along with monkey island lol.

Was a Gateway machine. Their 0800 tech support was fantastic when I used to break it lol.

I still have one of Gateway's magazines they would mail out that basically touted their current technology as being timeless.
If I remember correctly,..they were saying that you'd never need a HDD bigger than their 10GB drive.
I'll have to find that mag,....since I can't even make up the crazy things they were saying.

I agree, their Tech Support was Top Notch! At that moment in time though!
Once they realized they needed to make more money and support more customers,.....all bets were off.
As for today, Gateway customers probably can't reach tech support since the 800+ million in that country were without power.
So much for off-shoring our jobs to save money.

---

I also remember getting exited upgrading from Dos 5.0 to 6.1

I still have the Dos 5.0 Manual,.....somewhere in the house.

[twelvebore]

ZX81 (Z80) was my first closely followed by a BBC B (6502). Made some money writing games for the Beeb with which I bought an Archimedes. Then when Acorn panned I built my first PC based around a Cyrix CPU, can't remember the codename. That was my first x86.

I look back on my days with the ZX81/BBC/Arc with much fondness, I had great fun learning the insides and outsides of them. Particularly 6502 and ARM assembler, and disassembling the BBC
ROM and Acornsoft games to figure out how they really worked. Given it's the ~30yr anniversary of the computers I grew up with I find myself getting misty-eyed reading retro articles on The Reg and such. Plus I found copies of some of my old Beeb games on the net and replayed them on a BBC emulator.

PC stuff on the otherhand, I just find tedious. Partly because it's so inelegant compared to 6502/Acorn/ARM stuff, partly because DOS/Windows3 weren't the best, but more likely because I grew up and got a day-job.

At least I managed to get a tune out of the 1MHz bus

[artrafael]

Then when Acorn panned I built my first PC based around a Cyrix CPU, can't remember the codename. That was my first x86.

Ah, yes, Cyrix... forgot about them until you mentioned it. My first home-built x86 system also was based on a Cyrix, mainly because it was cheaper than Intel or AMD. I believe I used a Tyan motherboard with it.