12 Megabytes RAM

[Sam]

That's some nice repurposing!

[caja-dglh]

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.

It kind of did though. You just need to get MAME on it.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Skimming this thread makes me feel like the Mel Smith character in that hi-fi shop sketch, being asked "how many watts?".

[Various Artist]

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.

Snap! Start of 1993 that was, in my family. Got Prince of Persia for that Christmas in anticipation of it, the graphics of which knocked the IBM-PC version's so far into a cocked hat it was ridiculous.

I still remember the time I first ever came across the notion of a 'gigabyte', when visiting PC World in about, oh, 1996 and seeing some of the newest PowerMacs or similar with this unworldly 1GB hard disk. Since at the time we were still on the LCII, where as I recall the usable hard disk space was c. 36.4 MB, it was like a glimpse of something from a different planet. Ours was so thoroughly maxed out after a handful of years it reached the stage where you had to delete something literally every time you wanted to save a new WordPerfect document of like 19KB. Mercifully, for the latter portion of the period we were using it (up to the millennium!) we'd added an external hard drive of a whopping 500MB.
Aside from PoP (where I got my speed-run down to a level of perfection where I could finish with, I think, 37:19 of the 60-minute time limit still left), I also spent months and years playing SimEarth and SimCity 2000 – the latter of which I've been rediscovering the joys of in only the last few weeks, via a DOS emulator on an iMac.

[Sam]

I can't remember the make or model, but I do remember one or two computers after the Amiga coming with a DVD drive, and when I told my schoolfriends this one of them scoffed, 'a DVD? What's that?'

It kind of did though. You just need to get MAME on it.

Yeah, I saw a couple of those emulator sites when checking Wikipedia last night to remind myself exactly which Dizzy title we had. Fortunately I have no idea how to 'get MAME on it', or I fear I'd be about to waste quite a lot of time in the name of nostalgia.

[steveeeeeeeee]

a discrete graphics card

Does it let you watch at porn in the office?

[anton pulisov]

First computer we had at home was an Amstrad PC1512 my father was allowed to inherit from the office. It had no hard drive. It had two five inch floppy drives. You'd pop in MS-DOS into the first one to boot up the system, and then another floppy into the other one with your programs. Such as Digger, for example.

To the right of the keyboard was an egg shaped thing with two buttons that was also connected to the computer with a wire. I had no idea what that was supposed to do. I remember pointing it at the screen as a kid, but nothing happened.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Snap! Start of 1993 that was, in my family. Got Prince of Persia for that Christmas in anticipation of it, the graphics of which knocked the IBM-PC version's so far into a cocked hat it was ridiculous.

I still remember the time I first ever came across the notion of a 'gigabyte', when visiting PC World in about, oh, 1996 and seeing some of the newest PowerMacs or similar with this unworldly 1GB hard disk. Since at the time we were still on the LCII, where as I recall the usable hard disk space was c. 36.4 MB, it was like a glimpse of something from a different planet. Ours was so thoroughly maxed out after a handful of years it reached the stage where you had to delete something literally every time you wanted to save a new WordPerfect document of like 19KB. Mercifully, for the latter portion of the period we were using it (up to the millennium!) we'd added an external hard drive of a whopping 500MB.
Aside from PoP (where I got my speed-run down to a level of perfection where I could finish with, I think, 37:19 of the 60-minute time limit still left), I also spent months and years playing SimEarth and SimCity 2000 – the latter of which I've been rediscovering the joys of in only the last few weeks, via a DOS emulator on an iMac.

The thing was that the processor in the LCII was broadly speaking comparable with a 286 processor, but it was miles ahead of a 486 processor + windows. My mam was doing a masters and I was the one typing it and well, it took a very long time to print out a thirty or forty page document on a stylewriter.

My GP uses a dot matrix printer to print out prescriptions. I didn't realise they still existed.

[Patrick Thistle]

I printed my uni dissertation on a dot matrix printer. The computer I used had a yellow and black screen output. No idea what computer it was as it belonged to my future sister-in-law

[Chopper]

I was only thinking about ‘my’ 1st computer the other day, not quite in the same vein as the rest of the thread, but I hoped someone might find it slightly interesting – This beast had 128k (96k available for ‘Apps’) memory, 8 disk drives holding a total of 230 meg, and tapes holding 45 meg each (The Motor Master File consisted of 24 reels, so just over 1Gb in total, loaded 2 at a time, processed sequentially on every ‘daily’ run, which we only had time to run 3 times a week, overnight).

OK, not my computer, but Zurich Insurance’s, on which I cut my IT (DP in those days) teeth as an operator in 1974, mounting (leave it) those disks, loading those tapes, toteing that barge – staggering to compare the processing power and storage I have under my desk now.

[andrew7610]

I was transfixed by this little lot on display at one of my former clients' offices (a publishers, not an IT company) - there is also with a chap there who has a shelf with every Blackberry he'd ever had (back to 1999) on display.

[Lurgee]

Are people not counting the noble ZX Spectrum as real computer?

World leading, idiosyncratic and British. A sort of forerunner of Brexit.

[San Bernardhinault]

Well, yes, my first computer of all was a ZX81, with its 16k ram pack that always came loose at the key moments in a game so you lost everything as the machine reverted to its 1k state.

[Lurgee]

I printed my uni dissertation on a dot matrix printer. The computer I used had a yellow and black screen output. No idea what computer it was as it belonged to my future sister-in-law

I typed mine up (Bakhtinian Readings of Graham Greene, no less) on one of Alan Sugar's Amstrad PCW atrocities. Crappy keyboard and printer, bulky green screen monitor and used funny rectangular discs that no-one else in the universe used.

The printer needed a special ribbon and mine ran out half way through printing my dissertation, necessitating a desperate search through every shop that might conceivably stock 'Information technology' type stuff. I found one in the end, in case you're wondering. I bought up the entire stock of two ribbons. The shop owner commented that he hadn't sold one for years.

In the mid 90s, it was still quite happening to have a word processor - even one such as that - of your own. At least, it was at Stirling University.

[Eggchaser]

My mother had one of them. She wrote her first radio play on it.

[Lurgee]

My mother had one of them. She wrote her first radio play on it.

I also wrote a short novel on it, in which my friend N arrives in Edinburgh only to find I am dead, having been buried alive on the lower slopes of Arthur's Seat in drunken prank. N then proceeds to steal my not-exactly-grieving girlfriend and, well, that was it. There was also an unresolved serial killer plot.

It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, unpublished. Prbably due to the incompatibility of the discs and lack of the interweb thingy.

I think a solitary paper copy may still exist in the possession of N.

[Stumpy Pepys]

George RR Martin (he of Game of Thrones) still uses Wordstar 4.0.

[hobbes]

Are people not counting the noble ZX Spectrum as real computer?

Oh I had a spectrum. I even had a Kempston interface you could plug in to use quickshot joystics and a ram slot for RAM games (which were like 10 times the price.)
In fact ultimately I had a modem for it as my sister's company borrowed the speccy for a few weeks to test their new kit and gave me the modem they bought when they gave it back.
Useless though it was of course. We had old fashioned phone sockets so I couldn't plug it in and there wasn't anything to dial up to that I knew of either.