Everyone on this site has 2 things in common. 1 They have an interest in Skoda cars. 2. they use a computer. Been threads in which people describe the cars they have had, so here goes one for computers. My history would be:

1. 1982/83ish 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum I had great fun with this. Got many extra add ons, a ZX Printer, joystick, light pen, a real key board etc and best of all a ZX Microdrive (fast tape drive).

2. 1986/87 Amstrad PCW 8256 running CP/M and Lococript word processor. This computer came with a printer and everything you needed for about the price of a printer alone for other serious computers at the time. Had 256k memory, 3 inch disk drive and a dot matrix printer. Used this final year at school and all 3 years of my undergraduate days. Upgraded to 512K and added 3.5inch disk drive. Great little machine.

3. 1991 Amstrad PC with a 8086 8Mhz processor and 640K ram and 20Mb HDD and 14 inch VGA display! MS DOS 3. Had this for a month or so then the HDD failed. Shop replaced it with another one. HDD failed again replaced it (and had to pay difference) with my next machine:-

4. 1991/2 386SX 20Mhz PC. Came with MS-DOS 5 and 2Mb ram. Immediately upgraded at great cost to 4Mb Ram and got a free copy of Windows 3.1. Later on added a 8bit Soundblaster card and a 1X CD-Rom drive. Had 14 inch VGA colour display. Also replaced MS Dos with DR Dos 6, which was much better and compressed the 100Mb HDD to about 200MB.

5. 1995 486DX2 66Mhz PC. Came with 4Mb Ram upgraded immediately to 8Mb and a 400Mb drive. Came with Windows 3.11 and MS DOS 6, Again changed Dos to Novell Dos 7 (replacement for DR Dos 6. Upgraded with Soundblaster 16 and a 8X CD-Rom. Had 14 inch SVGA display. Upgraded to 16MB Ram and Windows 95 on the 24th August 1995. VESA display card failed in 1997 - bin job as you could no longer get anything but PCI cards (also HDD faulty).

6. 1997 Pentium MMX - 166Mhz, built this myself using keyboard, Mouse and FDD from last PC, had 32Mb Ram, 20X CD-rom, Sound Blaster 16 (from last PC), 3.2 Gb HDD, 17 inch monitor and Windows 95. Upgraded to Windows 98 on the day it came out. In 1999 upgraded Ram to 64Mb as the price had finally dropped.

7. 2000-1 Pentium II 400 Mhz, 128Mb Ram, 10Gb HDD, 17 inch Monitor Windows 98SE then ME - crap. This wa shop bought because I was too lazy to rebuild my old PC. Regretted it. Despite the higher CPU my own system built with choice componenets was bbloddy faster (166 Pentium MMX v 400 Pentium II !). Windows 98SE almost unusable, Windows ME even worse!

8 2000-present Celeron 400 MHz, 64Mb ram, 4Gb HDD, 13.5inch TFT display Notebook, Windows 98SE - now XP Pro. Slow with XP, but I only use it for PowerPoint presentations when teaching now. Used to freeze with Win 98SE, does not with XP.

9 2003-present Celeron 2.2GHz, 256Mb Ram, 15 inch TFT, DVD-R drive Windows XP HE. This machine is great for all office, digital photography and video editing uses despite being as cheap as chips (e-machine). Also having opened it to add a firewire card, I have to say that despite the cheap brand it is beter laid out and put together than PCs from loftier brands that I have tinkered with. Am about to add 512MB Ram and possibly add a loftier graphics card if a mate in work decides to yet again aupgrade his card to thelatest thing (about every 6 months as he is a serious game head).

Probably the 2 I was happiest with at the time was the PCW and the 386SX PC.

I learned on an IBM 370 :P

Programming in Fortran 4 on punched cards - hundreds of the blooming things :thumbdwn:

Tell kids that today and they just don't believe you

I'll believe you mate.

I started same as you - prior to that university computing which consisted of teletypes with paper tape readers/punches. Also spent many happy years surrounded by paper tape in a machine shop programming NC lathes and machining centres.

Also used to be reasonably proficient in 370 assembler - all our NC postprocessors used assembler output subroutines (Fortran IV main program). I could even write useable JCL at one time (and lots of TSO CLISTs).

When I first started work my job every day was to carry sets of cards over to Scientific Computing to be processed, and fetch the printouts (usually ending with the word ABEND :P ) from the previous day.

OH - and to keep on topic:

286 with 20MB hard disk and 1MB of memory (on an expansion card)

386-SX/25 in same case with 2MB

486-DX2/66 still in same case - various HDDs later (think this one had 16MB)

AMD K6-2/300 in new case (self-built) with 4GB disk and 64MB was my last and still current desktop. Now do nearly everything on notebooks (I have about 4 of them all Toshibas), so the desktop sits unused most of the time. There are various relics lying about the house as used by the kids - mainly Pentium 1s - very low spec machines, running W95 (don't laugh, it's a better platform for very poorly specced machines than 98 or anything newer).

Yea!!

Well that's my history explained!

Dragon 32 in about 1981 - still got that in my loft.

Commodore 64 in about 84 - not got the original one , but have half a dozen or so of the things up in the loft.

Amiga 500 in about 88 - still got my original plus a couple of others.

Used my Dad's 486 SX25 for a while (had to upgrade to 8mb RAM for Doom2).

I then had an original playstation as my main machine for a couple of years.

My first PC was a homebuilt AMD K6-166mmx with 32mb RAM which as been continually evolving ever since. I never replaced the whole thing at any one time , just upgraded it bit by bit to end up with my current XP1800+ with 1GB RAM. This is due for a change around christmas and will probably end up as an XP64 3200+ machine.

I also have an X-Box for games.

In the mean time I've also had a couple of arcade machines , several other PCs I used while studying for my MCSE and have a whole loft full of old computers including a Spectrum , Amstrad , Philips VideoPac , Tandy TRS 80 , A NES , SNES and N64 , a few megadrives , a gamegear , an Electron , An Archimedes A3000 and a few more I can't remember off the top of my head.

ZX spectrum 48k, ZX spectrum 128k, 386 with 80MB HD 4MB RAM, Amiga 600 with 20MB hd then upgraded to 120mb donated from a laptop, Amiga CD32, P100 Intel with 2.5GB HD 32MB RAM, P133 with the same HD and RAM, P266 with again the same HD and RAM(and thats still going!!!) with orchid 3d expansion card, Athlon 500 with 10GB HD and Matrox G450 128MB RAM(still alive today), Athlon 1300 with 512MB ram, 80GB disk, Athlon 2000XP with 40GB disc and Ati Radeon 9200SE, Athlon 2500XP with 2x40GB 1x20GB disc DVD+-RW Radeon 9600 512MB DDR. Gameboy, Playstation 2, Gamecube, Gameboy Advanced, Gameboy Advanced SP

All PC's except the Athlon 500 were built and up until the Athlon 2000XP they were family PC's and the latter 2 were my own.

1980 ish some hardboard thing my dad built.

1981 ish Texas Instruments TI 64

1982 ish Sinclair at friends.

erm....amstrad thing, dunno was used for tickets in the shop and some commando game by me.

...manged secondary school on not alot, although surrounded by pc's as dad was writing all sorts of epos stuff from 83/4 onwards. Real32 anybody?

Tell a lie forgot about our 486DX25 100Mb HD machine....god that was a joy...windows 3.11 uninstalling corel after you had used it...

'96 some 8086 goliath green screen + ribbon printer to write my dissertation on Genetic Algortihms. Figured it would not get nicked and I'd actually do some work on it...made a a good erm pot stand aswell

'97 Paid employment, you can tell whats coming...

PII350

PII450Dual on Gigabyte, left the locked processors of intel to...

Amd's and the start of the performance enhancment period with Durons to TBirds and onto XP2500 "barton" and a stupid amount of disk drives, almost 800Gb of storage before disassembley and the last transistion back to ....

Intel and presently abit IC7-G 2.4C PIV 1Gb XMS 3200 memory and a 9800 Oc'd slighlty and I know this because I just opened it up so I can upgrade it with two raptor drives all houses in a yeong Yang Cube as I was going to play with water and didn't feel like hacking my CM201 case up...

Car pc and a phone now that can surf the web; so pretty mind blowing the leaps in the last 20 years I'd say from hardboard creations to watching bongo beach on a beach in the remotest part of Scotlands islands...

my wife still has her dragon 32 in the loft!

i had a BBC model b -fantastic games etc.(rocket raid and planetoids) - think it was 32K!! audio cassette data transfer , what joy!

remember the coloured lines around a black screen on me mates zx spectrum when loading stuff.

Only good game on the Beeb was Elite.

Ok , so maybe Frak! should get a mention too.

zx spectrum in about 83 (was 3 at the time)

128kafter that

then a spectrum +3

8086 2mhz (iirc) in about 91 ish

8088 2mhz (iirc)

286 16mhz

386 sx and dx's 33mhz

486 dx/sx 33's dx2 66 dx4 100's and cyrix m series ones and amd k5's etc

pentium 2 300

dual pentium 2 xenon 333

amd k7 2100 current machine cant be arsed with pc's these days working with them removes the fun

most prob forgotten a few 2

Only good game on the Beeb was Elite.

Ok ' date=' so maybe Frak! should get a mention too.[/quote']

Elite was great - I had it on the Commodore 64. I cheated, of course

The first computer I owned was a VIC20 and I've had lots since. Mostly home built in recent years. Current beast is an Athlon 2200XP with an 80Gb Seagate Barracuda, 512Mb of Crucial ram and a cheapo 64Mb graphics card. It runs Win 2k - I can't abide XP! :thumbdwn:

I started with a Sinclair ZX81.....

1 k RAM, about 850 useable bytes after the system variables.

Black and white display, upper case only. No sound and graphics resolution was about 36 x 20. It's still about the place somewhere.

Since then the usual PC stuff.

AndyC

Had lots of computers over the years but cant remember when, but here they are in order

Tandy TRS80 Color Computer

BBC Model B

ZX Spectrum +2

ZX Spectrum 128K

ZX Spectrum +3

CBM Amiga A500 along with Sinclair PC200

CBM Amiga A500+

CBM Amiga A1200

Compaq Presario P90

Homebuilt P150 MMX

Various other homebuilt PC's up till now

Laptop : PIII 1000 with 512MB ram , 20GB HD

Desktop1 (main PC): AMD 2700XP with 1GB ram and 240GB HD

Desktop2 (PVR PC) : AMD 2800 Sempron with 512MB ram and 200GB HD

Spectrum 48k

Spectrum 128k

BBC Master

386 SX25 4MB RAM / 512KB video / 105MB HDD

Pentium 60MHz (overclocked to 66MHz) 32MB RAM / 1MB video / 2GB HDD

Pentium 150MHz (overcloced to 187MHz) 64MB RAM / Matrox and Voodoo 1 / 6GB HDD

Celeron 300A (overclocked to 464MHz) 512MB RAM / TNT1 then GeForce MX / 20GB HDD

AMD TBird 1GHz AXIA (overclocked to 1.4GHz) 512MB RAM / GeForce Ti4400 / 60GB

Pentium 4 2.8GHz (overclocked to 3.2GHz) 1GB RAM / ATi 9800PRO / 360GB

As for dates... can't really remember, about 6-8 months after the CPU's became available I expect!

Yea!!

Well that's my history explained!

Very similar to mine CJ ...............what are they talking about .......

Thought this thing had caught a virus when I saw all this stuff!

Baffles me...bloody electric shed.

I had a Spectrum 128k +2a

IIRC it was a +2 in the black casing of the +3 (stil had the built in audio tape though) and apparently a few other mods over the +2. Half hour to load any game then...

"syntax error"

Then the old man got a BBC model B (also what we had at school at the time), Elite was good but a touch confusing (I was about 7 or 8 years old then mind you)

First machine was a BBC B. Yes, it did have 32K of RAM. And I still think that in those days, people knew how to program. Elite. What an awesome game. Not just the "game" but the fact they managed to squeeze it in 32k Nowadays.....

Oh yeah, remember my dad getting a loan to pay for the

my wife still has her dragon 32 in the loft!

Mines gone to bed and is now snoring!

For those wanting to have a look at those old computers (without dragging them down from the loft ) have a look at this book - quite good IMHO

http://www.digitalretro.co.uk/

1974: ICL 1906A. 256k words (that's 24-bit words; with four 6-bit "bytes") of core memory (real ferrite cores). Huge thing - filled the computer hall and needed chilled water for cooling. Started off as a COBOL programmer, but moved on to system support. Got to be quite good at programming in PLAN (ICL's 1900 assembler language). GEORGE 3 made IBM's operating systems look positively stone-age.

:coder: Happy days...

Did a stint in "comms" (would be called networking these days); worked on replacing the office's Strowger telephone exchange with a digital one, and helped with the implementation of the office's first LAN.

Supported ICL 2900 and 3900 systems, then moved on to "open systems" (Sequent Symmetry running Sequent's version of Unix).

Currently looking after some Sequent/IBM NUMA servers, but that's about to change...

Oh, my first PC (not counting the office ones) - a 25MHz 486DX, with 4MB RAM, in 1993. I'm still using it, but it's had umpteen new motherboards, a few new cases, new disks, new keyboards, monitors & mice. You'd hardly recognise it now

and the P.E.T. computer springs to mind -cant remember any detail but it had an inbuilt monitor, looked like summat from 'blakes seven' and came with one 'game' -minesweeper type thing. was it a commodore machine or an early apple??

and the P.E.T. computer springs to mind -cant remember any detail but it had an inbuilt monitor, looked like summat from 'blakes seven' and came with one 'game' -minesweeper type thing. was it a commodore machine or an early apple??

It was a commodore.

When I was working for BNFL in the early 90's they were still using PETs for decontamination records and BBC Bs to control a decontamination robot :eek:

frightening !!

frightening !!

You lot are frightening me! :eek: What you all on about? :confused: Am I from another time dimension?