Your computer history

I ran a 286 box with Windows 2.11, a pair of Apple IIes, an IBM 386 w. Win 3.0, a Dell w. Win 95, a coupla laptops running early Linux Distros, a Pent II box w. Win2k / mandrake partition, a handmade box running 4 OSes, constantly in flux (this one), another craptop porn-box Toshiba Tecra running Windows Something, and now my cheapo ibook.

Since then I've only upgraded when absoloutely necessary, I don't play games much on PC. I'm still living on 128mb and Win 98 (as well as Linux). But I like the nitty gritty of computing and how they work.
Currently mixing it up with the C++ language after having a brief time learning Assembly, Java, and other various Web code.

ihttp://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/Compaq_PortableII_System_1.jpg

That must have been the early 80s, before I persuaded my folks to get us a Commodore 64. I never had a disk drive - they were dead exotic - but I did manage to master at least one game, Raid Over Moscow. I loved that game (and will totally try and find the ROM online when I get home).

After three years of playing football manager games on friends' PCs (and making do with a sweet, functional Canon word processor at university), I once again used my powers of persuasion to make my parents buy a 166MHz PC for the home. It was on this computer that I learned most of what I know today about how the things work; infortunately, I learned this by mucking about with it to such an extent it became completely crippled. My parents still have it, thanks to a much-needed disk wipe and reinstall, but they barely ever use it.

In 1998 I paid Vicky's dad £700 to build me a lovely sexy new PC with 450MHz of processing powah and 128 sexy Mb of RAM. It was great! Until it too got so fucked over (this time, I suspect, with viruses and spyware more than because I deleted system files) and I bought my current PC from a company in Stoke. This was July 2003, and they built me a shit-hot system for very little money. It's worked near-perfectly ever since. Unlike the company who sold it to me - they ended up taking hundreds of "bargain" orders via eBay then doing a runner with £250,000 and no forwarding address.

Things seem to have moved on a bit in the intervening years.

Got my first computer second hand from my uncle, a Commodore 64 when I was about 9 or 10 in the mid-80s, and I seemed to spend most of my spare time on it, until about 5 years later when I finally managed to get an Amiga 500 in about 1990. Again, spent most of my spare time with it! Got involved in the Amiga demo scene, originally making graphics using Deluxe Paint, but then started tinkering with making music on trackers.

After going to university in , I stopped using my computer for anything other than making music or writing essays. I used the university computers for t'internet and email but stayed with my Amiga, until 1999. I decided I need to get a more powerful comp for music, so with the help of my brother I built a PC. I used a Pentium III 450mhz processor, a 128 meg memory stick, an 8 Gig hardrive, a Terratec soundcard, and a Matrox dual head video card. I gradually upgraded: extra memory, new hardrives, better power supply; and 2 or 3 years ago I changed the motherboard and got a Pentium IV 1.6 Ghz which I overclocked to 2.1 Ghz, and I still have this today.

I'd love to upgrade, but I don't have the cash, and I don't reallyt need to, as this does everything pretty well - it would just be handy to have some extra processing power when making music!

1989: Amstrad CPC, second-hand off a neighbour. I learned Basic, and tried to understand Z80 machine code.

1996: University - a mixture of BW and colour System 7 Macs in the university library.

1997: my first PC: a 200MHz K6., running Win95. Later installed SuSE 6.0 on it.

2003: after said PC died, I got an Emergency Replacement from work - a 266MHz K6 running Gentoo. Officially a long-term loan, at least originally; when I left the company, they told me not to bother brining it back. It's still my main home machine.

The day before yesterday: my new PC arrived! An Athlon 64 3500+, 512Mb, 200Gb disk. Still can't get over how much faster it is than the previous one - at least 10x at a rough guess. My AMD-love was previously just coincidence, but this time I did deliberately go for an Athlon 64 machine. Currently in the middle of installing Gentoo on it (grub is giving me a headache).

Spectrum. was a 16K but that failed within a month and upgraded when we got it fixed.

Atari ST. was never the same after i did my own RAM upgrade.

Amiga. was never the same after i added that accelerator card. first hard drive. first cdrom.

Win 3.1 25MHz 486 laptop that job #1 was getting rid off / didn't know i had. still has a copy of Netscape 3 on it.

Celeron 433 from Evesham bought with redundancy money with "Windows 98 pre-installed for your convenience". also dual boots into Mandrake 9.1. still use it for emailing / browsing from home as the only modem i have is the winmodem in this. cost over £1000 in '99.

Mandrake 10.0 / Win98 P3 1GHz built from various bits. unfortunately it was obsolete before it was finished which is what happens if you spend 6 months accumulating all the pieces. Main development machine for the various bits of crap i do to pass the time in lieu of having a Life.

P3 733. Currently running FC1(?) bought in liquidation sale from job #2 when they dot bombed. Really only needed the monitor so this is largely unused.

Loads of others at college, uni & work.

Next up is an Athlon 64 of some sort with a PCI express mb and GFX card. If I can raise the cash.

1986? - The TI99/4A. Used mainly for games (I was 10) - 'Facemaker' is the only one I remember, sort of a computerized version of Mr. Potato Head. Took cartridges but also ran programs off of cassette tapes, with a player that hooked into the back.

1989 - IBM XT, salvaged by my mother from her office junkpile. Used to program endless Zork-stylee adventure games. Also a word processor . After a memory upgrade to 640k, I was able to run Space Quest 3, Hero's Quest, and the Colonel's Bequest -- geeking it up, yeah! Trashed in 1993.

1996 - In college I borrowed a friend's old Mac Classic to write my thesis on.

1997 - HP Desktop P2 etc. B

I switched to straight-up wordprocessors btwn '89 and '97 - a Br0ther glorified typewriter and then a Br0ther "laptop" wordprocessor with awesome tiny green screen and, gasp, floppy drive. I was teh poor. They worked well for what I needed, though it was never love. Also, I cheated on them a lot by using the university's mac lab. A lot.

University graduation present from grandparents was a '98 Compaq Presario laptop, which I'll admit was great at first but never quite up to speed, yet it worked well enough (despite obviously lacking so much) until this past November, when it began to deny me access. The frustration was too much, so I (and my visa card) broke down and bought a T0shiba A50 laptop. So beautiful, so understanding. It's been love ever since.

The problem with the TI was the connector to the TV always seemed to be the first thing to go. While I never had the voice synthizer unit, I did have MASH, Miner 49, Tunnels of Doom (best RPG at the time), Dig Dug and used to program what was basically Snake in their version of BASIC.

1981 - Some kind of computer that ran C/PM (remember that?). Had no graphics mode, b&w text only. Used floppy disks that were 8 inches wide and long. I had a games collection for this - one was called "Goat & Bomb", where you sat and watched a goat and a bomb blink on and off in random parts of the screen. If they appeared on the same location, the goat got blown up. Like many of the computers we owned, this came from my Dad's place of work (Rank Xerox) on loan and eventually stayed with us permamently when the progress of technology rendered it obsolete.

1985 - A Xerox-badged 8086 PC, that ran MS-DOS and had CGA graphics. Was in use for the next five years, had loads of (mainly shareware) games on it.

1988 - I finally got a computer for my own personal use - a Spectrum +3! Used those weird, thin disks that Amstrad word processors also used. I still have this computer, but I haven't used it in years. Emulators are a bit easier to handle. I love this machine, anyways.

1990 - Inherited an Amiga 2000 with Workbench 3.0 from Dad's work. Had a hard drive, but it never worked so I had to run everything from floppies. Another machine I am very fond of, and have an emulator for on my current PC.

1992/3 (?) - a 386 PC to replace the now ancient 8086. Windows 3.1. Followed soon after by...

1994 - A 486 PC, originally using Windows 3.1, later upgraded to Win 95 when that came out. This was the first computer since the Speccy that we bought ourselves. Also the first computer we used for Internet access a year later.

1997 (?) - A Pentium II, with Win 95. Upgraded various times, more memory, bigger hard drive, Windows 98.

1999 - AMD Athlon PC with Windows 98. Still using it today.

As well as the above I should mention that for a weekend in 1986 my Dad brought home an early laptop, which was more like a massive plastic brick, and ran Windows 2.0 on a screen that had two colours - red and black. Also, as a sidenote, we owned some huge, very very early versions of portable disks that were sitting in a cupboard in my room until about 1995. They apparently contained programs to be used on a computer running the very first GUI operating system, Bravo X, which I think Apple based their OS on, or so I am told.

But I used Macs all through high school and college. I only got my first *new* Mac, an ibook, last year. But I've been working on PCs through my whole post-college career.

Assorted less powerful server/test machines running OpenBSD, Debian, Slackware, DOS, etc.

apple IIc - mostly used to play joust on.
apple mac
dell optiplex gx1 - used at work and still do
compaq presario
emachine

Nintendo Gameboy
Gameboy Color
Cameboy Advance
Win95 PC, 100Mhz Pentium 1
Tin98 PC 666Mhz AMD processor.

(+lots of different work PCs, but never a Mac)

Today I've been craving an old Mac, because of the Ma chate thread and cos Douglas Adams useed one. Boo.

IBM "PC XT" ("eXtreme technology"??? it wasn't as good as the "AT" (advanced technology))

Quadra 610

PowerMac 7200/75

G3 PB

G4 PB

One nightmarish day me and my friend Josh had hooked the tape recorder up to the computer. But we used the wrong cable, somehow. The tape recorder accepted a four-pin plug, but all we had was a two-pin plug. The two pins seemed to fit alright, though. We turned everything on and the computer started emitting BLUE SPARKS and SMOKE from the back!@ We jumped up like it was WW III and ran for the door and stood there, trembling, looking at this catastrophe from afar. My dad came running in, shaking his head, like he knew something like this would happen. Everything worked fine afterwards, but there was a big smoky stain on the back of the computer.

P 90

P 200

PII600/Blue and White G3

Athlon 3200+ (just arrived today!)

Also, a 486 with a CDROM to play old cdrom games in proper setting

To celebrate my impending graduation from grade school and going on to high school, my parents splurged for a new PC -- one with an actual Pentium processor! And with about 2GB of HD! And a CD-ROM drive! And speakers! And a built-in modem! I could actually listen to music AND go online on this computer, which I immediately proceeded to do. And, for a short while, it was glorious. Then I started experiencing problems with it. Lots and lots of problems. I had no idea of the poor quality of NEC brand computers and, combined with the fact that Win95 seemed destined to give me a hard time via the Blue Screen of Death once a week or so, I had a hard time with the computer up until I ended up having to replace the HD (to a 30GB one -- mind boggling!) and upgrading the OS to Win98. And then things were peachy until things started getting buggy for me. Finally, the big shutdown of last year occurred and I had to retire the already well-past-outdated PC.

Now, there's the one I'm currently using, i.e. my beautiful gray Compaq baby. It came with an AMD Athlon processor (2.13 GHz, which is impossibly fast to me), 512 MB of RAM, an 80GB HD, a combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, actual name brand speakers, and an OS, WinXP, that I've found has not failed me in the manner that Win95 or Win98 have. I'm still in the swoony honeymoon-ey period with this computer, though it's dying off slowly but surely.

Work computer: A Hewlett-Packard computer from approximately 1998. Uses Windows NT. Speakers, which we in the office are allowed to use to play CDs so long as we plug in earphones. Online access, but strictly guarded, which is why I only use it for academic-related purposes. Don't know the specifics of the computer, because those features have been disabled by the admin.

School computers have ranged from older computers that ran Windows 3.1 to upgraded computers that ran Win95 to new computers that ran Win95 to new computers that ran Win98 to older computers that ran Win98 to new computers that look as though they're running WinXP but are in reality running a snazzy version of WinNT.

And that's my history with computers. Not a single Apple-manufatured computer in the bunch.

I purchased my first and only computer to date in 2003; an HP laptop PC with an AMD processor. The hard drive died just last week and I replaced it with the only one immediately available - 40 gig - and for the record I burned my first music CD today. Kinks Kontroversy borrowed from the local library.

I am such a luddite it isn't even funny.

"Cloud Computing" is sold as a bold step forward, but it's actually 50 years backwards, to the days of mainframes and terminals. Also, isn't 'cloud computing' really just the internet?

Sorry for the rant, using a cloud product that's about as fast as 1991 dialup. Grrr.

As someone who first used a tractor-feed teletype terminal connected to a timeshare mainframe 50 years ago, in 1971, I can assure you that however much of a backward step cloud computing might be, it is not a 50-year backward step.

Okay, maybe I'm characteristically exaggerating. But isn't the concept largely the same? My laptop becomes a terminal to access their incredibly slow servers?

Unless your laptop is just pathetically under-powered and lacking in memory and local storage, it can and should be doing the great majority of the computing that's necessary to whatever task you are doing. That's what your CPU, memory and storage device are there for.

The cloud is great for backup and offsite storage. Pushing applications software and computation up to the cloud has nothing to do with computational efficiency and everything to do with centralized control of the software. It makes life easier for IT managers and worse for end-users. Guess who wins that battle.

Okay, I see what you're saying. I thought I was actually logging onto their AWS servers or whatever and it was all taking place remotely. That's what it feels like anyway.

The chromebook model of computing was a step in the direction of turning laptops into limited-ability terminals, with most computation happening remotely. I don't know how your system is interacting with the remote servers, but it could be mostly like a terminal, depending where each action is taking place.

I think the big advantage of cloud computing isn't so much on the personal end, but in SAAS stuff for businesses, which no longer have to host data on site and deal with server maintenance, backup, DR/BC issues, etc. At least at my (small) company, getting as much stuff on the cloud makes everything a lot easier. NB I am a lawyer not in IT.