What Computers Have You Owned?

Shouldn't it read "what computers have you pwned" ?

The second PC was an Apple II. This time the computer had as much as 64k RAM.

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this must have been an Apple IIe. The II+ was an upgrade to 48k of RAM if I remember. The //c had its 128k built in which put it in the category of their brand new Macintosh computers which replaced the Lisa.

Incidently, did you know the TI-99/4 and 4a computers were 16bit? Everything else was an 8bit machine.

The TI-99/8 would have been a 10mhz machine had TI not dropped their home computer line before release. The fastest machine at the time was IBM's PC at a whopping 1.7mhz in order to compensate for their brilliant choice of using Intel processors.

A tad Mac-centric, and severely lacking in historical options..

I've had a C-64, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, 486 DX2-66, Pentium 90, Pentium 2-233, Athlon XP 2400+, which together with my P4 still is in service. I still have the C-64 in my TV periphernalia drawer, but havent played anyting on it for a few years (I used Buggy Boy to convince my gf that gameplay trumps graphics).

My milestones were the switch to PC around xmas -94. The P2 had the longest continuous service life as I used it for more than seven years, and kept it after getting the Athlon (playing low spec multiplayer games with my gf). It feels reasonable to upgrade every two years and keep the second latest machine for network gaming and office work. Provided I stick to my "always go for 4 times Dells recommended RAM" rule of thumb and avoid graphics heavy games a PC easily remains usable for 3-4 years...

Zaleukos said:

A tad Mac-centric, and severely lacking in historical options..

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Of course, if you are a PC user, having Apple history there is relevant, as the recently released Vista "innovations" remind us

Amiga - greatest computer ever made

I remember upgrading my memory to 1 MB from 512K - OMG I PWNED!

Seriously some of my favourite gaming memories come from the Amiga. I experienced games like Populous, Syndicate, Flashback and the SSI Goldbox RPG's for the first time and I loved them. Thats the problem with emulation - they always seem to be lacking something now (except Rainbow Islands that will always be a classic)

Who remembers the biggest selling Amiga 500 pack with Batman the Movie, New Zealand Story, F-18 Interceptor and Deluxe Paint 2. Classic pack. God I missed the good old days!

http://www.homecomputer.de/

In the far most upper left side there are two tiny flags acting as buttons for switching the language.

I owned a Commodore Vic-20 in 1983.

Does - load 'name of the game'
then press play on tape - mean anything to any of you?
Then, after 15 minutes of loading, you'd see a message saying :
Error in 220!

When that happened, I'd throw the tape in the garbage because I didn't have the script to correct the error.

Then, in 1994 I bought myself an 486 DX-4 100 Mhz pre-pentium rig.

Now I have an P4 2.5 Ghz 1 G RAM with an 120 G HD and a G-Force 5500.

It's just enough to play Gothic 3 (it lags a lot).

In order, I owned:

ZX81
VIC-20
Commodore 64
Amiga 500
and then jumped straight up to a 400Mhz Celeron PC
(yep, I was using that Amiga way past its use-by date!!)

Our first was a videogame capable of playing four versions of PONG. I do not remember the name of the system though.

After that:
Apple II (monochrome)
IBM PC (do not remember name, just that it had color screen, 10mb harddrive and a whupping +512kB ram)
Commodore 64
Macintosh LCII
Amiga 500
Amiga 1200
Amiga 4000
Pentium 90mhz
Pentium II 350mhz
AMD Athlon 1000, and then upgraded several times, now I have a 4800+

Also:
iPAQ 5550
Dell Axim x51v (my current Pocket PC)
Dell Inspiron 5100 (my current laptop)
GameCube
Playstation 2
A 2ghz win xp "server" on the floor, running apache, serv-u and eMule.
Finally my girlfriend inherit my hardware for her computer every time I upgrade.

Can only say PC & Linux on this one.

I had a few others like speccy, c64, Atari ST, Amiga.

I was lucky to be decked out with an Atari 800 with a 5 1/4 inch drive the size of a concrete block, and I was most certainly 'styling' with my cassette tape drive as well. And don't get me started on my sweet dot matrix printer.

My first two computer games I got that Christmas were Frogger and Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail from the Atari Program Exchange. The first true CRPG I ever played was on that system, Ultima 3. I also enjoyed the heck out of the Infocom games and Sierra adventures (Wizard and Princess, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, etc.) The Shamus games were nice as well.

Next was the Amiga 500. At this point adventure games were huge, especially Lucasarts Maniac Mansion, Monkey island, etc so I played those mainly. The one CRPG for the Amiga that was extremely good was a game called Black Crypt, I think Raven Software's first game. Populous was another Amiga title. The Gold Box games, Betrayal at Krondor, Psygnosis games, and another one named 'Empire' wasted a lot of my time.

Next came the 486 DX. I remember RAM was ridiculously expensive back then for some reason, and then came the 3d video cards you had to buy. My first was a Voodoo something or other.

Then came a Celeron, and since I've had 2 or three Pentium computers since. It's pretty astounding to think that a game used to come out on 4 or 5 floppy disks, now they come out on DVD's. The whole technology side of computer gaming has changed so much in the last 20 years it's almost freaky. Oh well just sounding off.

Next came the 486 DX.

I remember Populous and Empire. Good games that burned a lot of time back in college.

Owned only three computers - all PCs.

A 486, a 400 mHz Pentium II (my golden age gaming system *cough*) , and now a 2.4 gHz Pentium IV.

On a side note, Pentium II lasted from 200 mHz to 700, Pentium III to 1.1 gHz, and Pentium IV has been going for 2-3 gHz (well, all of numbers are approximations). Have they renounced the naming scheme or is there some component/function that delimites them, and has been on the IV ever since 1.1 gHz? I've heard Pentium V was going to be launched, but that was like, a year ago.

Khass said:

Have they renounced the naming scheme or is there some component/function that delimites them, and has been on the IV ever since 1.1 gHz? I've heard Pentium V was going to be launched, but that was like, a year ago.

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The relation between current microprocessors and the original P4's is not too close at this point ...

The naming scheme has changed indeed. There is not going to be a Pentium V. The "Pentium V" is the "Core" dual core processor (the current desktop models are called "Core 2 Duo") based on an all new architecture that is derived from Intel's mobile CPUs. The Pentium IV is now considered as the budget/entry/value segment. All new future CPUs -until the next naming scheme change that is- will be referred to as "Core" processors. The code name of the current generation is Conroe and the next generation that is based on a 45nm process will be code-named Penryn. Penryn should be available in Q3/Q4 of 2007. It remains to be seen whether the Penryn will be called "Core 3 Duo" or still "Core 2 Duo" or something else. I believe they wanted to stick with "Core 2 Duo" though since Penryn is "only" a die-shrink from a 65nm manufacturing process to a 45nm process plus some minor tuning changes (e.g. a higher FSB support of 1333MHz vs 1066MHz, optimized cache/prefetch etc).

Well, and then there's quad core CPUs but those are still a bit pricey and they are not really overly interesting for the consumer market yet due to a lack of apps that support multiple cores. At least the price issue should be resolved when the quad core versions of Penryn are released and, of course, when AMD's Barcelona/Agena/Kuma dual/quad core CPUs (these are the code names... they will retail on the desktop as "Phenom" which is the successor of the "Athlon") comes out later this year.

C64
Amiga 2000
Pentium P60
Pentium P133
Pentium P200
AMD 900
...

I got experience using a few different platforms at work, including mainframes and time-share services, but I didn't own my own till I got a x386 with an 80 meg HD and a whopping 2 megs of RAM in 1989 or thereabouts.

My favorite comp was my next one. I had a kid build me a "dream system" with a bleeding-edge new Pentium 90, 16 megs of RAM (everyone assurred me I would never use all that memory!) and an unbelieveably-huge hard drive -- 1 whole gig (again, I was told I'd never fill it up in a million years!).

@ Moriendor - thanks a lot for all the information! I seriously lost track of pretty much everything regarding new hardware when I cancelled my subscriptions to computer magazines. Can't say I knew much back then, either, but eh ...

Squeek said:

My favorite comp was my next one. I had a kid build me a "dream system" with a bleeding-edge new Pentium 90, 16 megs of RAM (everyone assurred me I would never use all that memory!) and an unbelieveably-huge hard drive -- 1 whole gig (again, I was told I'd never fill it up in a million years!).

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I lol'd.

Damn, I need to change my vote now. I'm working with debian, gentoo, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Mandrake and HPUNIX. But I don't really own them, just bare some responsability for them.

My first computer was old Intel 486. Couple pf years later I've bought Pentium 1, then Celeron 133MHz, then Athlon 1700+, then Athlon 2400+, then Athlon 3000+, and I've finally bought Intel again - E4300.
So, that means I've had Windows 95, 98 and XP (I don't own Vista, yet).
Actually I've still own all of this computers, except 2400+ and Pentium 1.
Oh, and I've also had PS1 and Sega Mega Drive.