12 Megabytes RAM

[G-Man]

In 1995 an episode of Friends began with Chandler showing off his new state-of-the-art laptop: with 12 megabytes RAM, a 500 megabytes harddrive, and a built-in modem communicating at 0.028 megabytes per second. And it had built-in spreadsheet capability!

In 1995 my computer at work was an Apple of some sort, with a fairly big screen. It had a huuuuuge harddrive: 1 gigabyte. Nobody I knew had a 1GB harddrive. Downside was: all files were stored on my computer, so if somebody on the network accessed a file, my computer would slow down to near standstill.

At home I had a PC from the stone-age (probably around 1991), still running on DOS. The type and images of Larry the Lounge Lizard on the monitor was grey. I upgraded to Windows 95 about two years later.

[hobbes]

The first work computer I had after leaving the wine trade to go into IT had a 5" floppy drive.

[Stumpy Pepys]

The first proper computer I really used was a Macintosh SE30, which had 1 MB RAM according to Wikipedia.

The first PC I bought had 8 GB MB RAM and a 1 GB hard drive, which was a good spec at the time. With a 56K modem of course.

[Giggler]

Christmas 1995. ICL Fujitsu PCTV. 8Mb RAM, 330Mb hard drive. Dual speed CD-ROM drive which ran Encarta 95 like a dream. We later got a 28.8k modem for it and paid by-the-minute for access to AOL.

There was also meant to be capability to rip songs off CDs but I never got beyond the result being a scratchy mess.

[Patrick Thistle]

The first proper computer I really used was a Macintosh SE30, which had 1 MB RAM according to Wikipedia.

The first PC I bought had 8 GB RAM and a 1 GB hard drive, which was a good spec at the time. With a 56K modem of course.

8GB of RAM would be an amazing spec.

In 1998 when Mrs Thistle and I bought a computer for our business we paid just under £2K for a 6GB hard drive, 32MB RAM, Zip drive, CD-ROM drive (remember when we called them CD-ROMs??). Ran Quark Xpress 4.0 as a design programme. We also bought a huge Epson printer and an A3 Artec scanner.

All of that stuff went to the tip a few years ago.

[Snake Plissken]

First work computer was at a company that did motor insurance quotation software for brokers. Developed on an Amstrad PC1512, so 512Kb and a 10Mb hard card (not a disk). It had a 5 1/4" floppy drive, to which was added a 3 1/2" drive which required a different boot disk in order to extract the maximum 1.44Mb out of it. IIRC, It was DOS 3.3. In the office was a Amstrad 1640, a PCW8256 and a Tatung Einstein. The database was built (and the code done in Turbo Pascal) on the PC1640. Then the disks were sent to a company called Grey Matter in Devon (I think) who would transfer them to 3" discs for the PCW and Einstein, which were copied by hand and sent to the customers.

Building the database took 4 hours each month. Eventually we got a Compaq 386 which could do the build in 10 minutes. This was like hitting Ludicrous Speed, and we began to send updates every two weeks to PC customers if they asked for it. Occasionally they could register a database error (it was all done by hand and to this day, I can still read 5000 lines of a table and spot errors) and if we liked them, we would build and send the update the next day which was practically unheard of.

[hobbes]

I'm about to get a laptop that has 16Gb RAM, a 1Tb PCI drive, an 8th gen quad core processor a discrete graphics card and a 4K screen.
It weighs about half as much as my current laptop which has none of the above.

[Eggchaser]

286 processor. Prince of Persia, The Secret of Monkey Island I and II, Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis. SWOTL wouldn't run properly, the processor wasn't up to it.

Two others I can't remember the names of, one cruising the Pacific in a US sub sinking Japanese shipping, the other piloting fighter jet missions.

[pebblethefish]

Currently I can understand one of the eight posts (Hobbes's first). I so love the techy threads.

[Ginger Yellow]

My first hard drive had a 120MB capacity. It was bigger than the computer it attached to (with 1MB RAM).

[Snake Plissken]

Two others I can't remember the names of, one cruising the Pacific in a US sub sinking Japanese shipping, the other piloting fighter jet missions.

Silent Service would be the first of those.

[San Bernardhinault]

My first work computers were an SGI Indigo and a Sun Sparkstation - usually the Sun, but I used it to access the SGI box for the heavy processing. Everyone was in awe of how powerful the Indigo was for about two years before other hardware superceded it. We kept using it for probably another 5 years after that.

[caja-dglh]

We had a 286 at home. I remember spending way too much time spec-ing out my own build from PC Magazines. I couldn't stretch to a 486 but was adamant that I needed the math co-processor on the 386 otherwise it made no sense even bothering. I remember drilling holes in 3 1/2 inch single format discs to get them up to 1.4mb (which alarmingly worked with great regularity).

[Giggler]

My first hard drive had a 120MB capacity. It was bigger than the computer it attached to (with 1MB RAM).

My first iPod was a 40GB-er. My then-computer's hard drive was 30GB.

[anton pulisov]

I had no idea that you could take non-1.4 MB disk, drill a hole and it would turn into a 1.4 MB disk. Bastard corporations.

[Patrick Thistle]

I still have a drawer of misc cables, connectors and gizmos. Can't throw away those! My zip drive, extracted from that first PC, is in there.

I reckon anyone who used a computer pre 2000 is the same. Keep this stuff just in case. Today's younger generation probably chuck that stuff away without thinking.

[anton pulisov]

The 3.5 inch diskette lasted a long time, didn't it. I reckon about 15 years of mainstream use, from the mid-80s up until about 2002, when USB sticks came along (although, even then, you still had to carry a 3.5 inch diskette around with the effing drivers for the USB stick). When I went to college at the turn of the millennium we were still putting a 2.5 guilder coin in a vending machine at the university to get our 3.5 inch diskette. Projects were spread over multiple disks and backed up to a hotmail account (2 MB storage limit, took a good 10 minutes to upload if it didn't crash). I was also in the last year of students ever at the college I went to who learned how to make technical drawings on a drafting table using rotring pens. I'm not sure if my college was hopelessly behind the times, or if some guy coming up to retirement just needed a class to teach. I'm thinking the latter.

[ursus arctos]

It also has had a major second life as the model for the "Save" icon

[anton pulisov]

It also has had a major second life as the model for the "Save" icon

Yep, there was some thing doing the rounds on twitter recently. A father showed a 3.5 inch floppy to his son and the son said, "wow, you've 3D printed the save icon!"

[Gerontophile]

My first computer was a Commodore 64. I ruined at least 10 joysticks playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon (which also had the best tape loading music ever).

[Amor de Cosmos]

Mac Plus with one megabyte of RAM. I had it upgraded to four megs when the first version of Photoshop was released (late 80s?) The guy I shared studio space said I was nuts. I'd never need that much speed.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Atari 800XL, Atari's version of the commodore 64, but with 48K. Bizarrely enough Garcia was one of the very few other people in the country to buy one.

First real computer was a Mac LCII with 4 mb ram and 40 mb hard drive. The Mac was so far ahead of windows at this point it was laughable. I can't help feeling that Apple fucked up something rotten in the 80's.

[Sam]

Ours was an Amiga 500 Plus. 1 MB of RAM, 6-bit stereo sound at 28kHz, 640x256 graphics resolution, and no hard drive storage at all. Think it cost my parents about £800, in a pack which included the monitor, mouse, keyboard and a printer, and some games which included Crystal Kingdom Dizzy.

Two years ago my parents spent about 500 quid more than that to buy my 30th birthday present, which has 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB solid state drive, a 4K monitor, a sound chip which will play 5.1 sound, and a keyboard with a backlight among other bits and pieces. It didn't come with a Dizzy game, though. On the plus side it still runs almost as well as it did when I first got it. Whichever OTFer it was who told me at the time that the SSD would be worthwhile for the speed and the fact it makes the computer go easier on the cooling system due to fewer moving parts, thank you.

[Bored Of Education]

The first computer I used didn't have a screen and just printed out life insurance and pensions quotes onto that wide continuous form paper. It only had an option for putting in someone's age, age of retirement and contributions and it would work out how much they would get as a monthly pension or lump sum. If I wanted to work it backwards from the lump sum or pension to work out how much contributions they would have to pay, I would have to pro-rata it. I once punched the keyboard in rage and broke some of the keys due to this process. It did have a modem though. Having said that, it was probably connected to the Banker from "Deal Or No Deal". I saw one in my university's "Computers through the decades" exhibition.

The second computer I had any dealings with took up half the "computer room", had all the sorts of flashing lights and whirring tape wheels that you saw in 60s villains' headquarters and produced payroll information which was inputted by three "computer girls" who operated VDUs. My job was to check the data inputted against the worksheets. We also had to take the back-up discs down to the safe each week. These were very fragile plastic discs about 15 inches wide and the depth of a vinyl record and protected . They were contained in disk cartridges and contained a massive 1mb of storage each. There were 12 of them for the week.

[Snake Plissken]

The 3.5 inch diskette lasted a long time, didn't it. I reckon about 15 years of mainstream use, from the mid-80s up until about 2002, when USB sticks came along (although, even then, you still had to carry a 3.5 inch diskette around with the effing drivers for the USB stick). When I went to college at the turn of the millennium we were still putting a 2.5 guilder coin in a vending machine at the university to get our 3.5 inch diskette. Projects were spread over multiple disks and backed up to a hotmail account (2 MB storage limit, took a good 10 minutes to upload if it didn't crash). I was also in the last year of students ever at the college I went to who learned how to make technical drawings on a drafting table using rotring pens. I'm not sure if my college was hopelessly behind the times, or if some guy coming up to retirement just needed a class to teach. I'm thinking the latter.

Mrs P came up with a use for them.



5 1/4"