***Vintage PC Technology Mega Discussion Thread***

[USAFRet]

i had a 9600 all-in-wonder and agree it's the best card i ever bought. am putting together a parts list for a small htpc to replace cable completely and wish there was such an option now. gonna take multiple parts to get all the options this one card had.

I had one too. It was awesome.

 

[galeener]

Lol computer shopper man that was the best and it was huge. Ive worked on 8088,8086 80186 80286 then turbos then 386 sx and dx so on so forth. jeesus ive spent a fortune on hardware.

 

[MabF]

I owned an original IBM PC I think it was about 1982 It had 64K memory and two 64K floppy disk. I still have Floppy disk for DOS 1.1 and floppy disk for the original spreadsheet program VisaCalc ver 1.0. These were the days before 1.44 floppy disk and Hard disk. If i'm not mistake it was a 186. I also have the original 5250 Display Station Emulation Adapter Programs Users guide and the Installation and Problem Determination Procedures Manuel.

 

[Ed Chombeau]

Hello and welcome to the nostalgia tech mega thread!

Have you ever been the owner of a 486? Or a Macintosh running System 7? Or know what the various cages that hold CD-ROM discs are for? Have you ever used a 1.44MB floppy drive? Or a punchcard? Or a 3DFX Voodoo 2? Well this is the place to discuss all things vintage PC technology! Reminder - keep things civil and avoid the GRAPES. As usual, all Tom's Hardware rules apply. This thread will be moderated.

Bought an off-brand 486 in 1996 for my home use; had Windows 95 and dial-up.
.

 

[edman545]

I still fire up this old girl every now and then. https://pcpartpicker.com/b/yrpgXL

 

[synphul]

I still have a pile of 3.5" floppies laying around. An external zip drive in the desk drawer. Used to use 1.44 floppies in grade school with their mac's. I'm not sure if I still have my first pc, a tandy coco3. Think I gave it to a cousin during one of the times my family moved when I was younger. Pretty sure I have a couple 5.25" hdd's roaming around somewhere.

My parents had a tatung pc clone in the late 80's running dos and I loved it. I could write reports for school and print them off while enjoying the serenade of the dot matrix printer. It sure beat typing on a typewriter and having to fix typo's. There was no sneaking onto the pc to finish up homework on that thing, once you turned it on and the 80mm fans started whizzing, the dot matrix realigned itself it was like something from "lost in space" whirring to life lol.

I'm definitely grateful for optical mice these days. Especially with the higher resolutions, I remember having to scroll the old mouse on my compaq several times across the pad. That and digging the ball out, wiping it off, using the eraser on a #2 pencil to clean the gunk and lint off the rollers inside when the ball stopped spinning free.

It's been awhile, I should dig through storage one of these days and sort out some of the older systems I have kicking around. Most of them older business systems the owners didn't want anymore and were just going to throw away. A couple of them the case alone was intriguing, one a full tower (much taller than my enthoo pro) and another an older yeon yang b0221 cube server case.

What's funny about the yeon yang, it's got to be a 13-14yo case by now at least and yet it looks a lot like a mirror of the corsair air 540. Obviously the air 540 is much more modern, nice side panel window etc but the layout is pretty much the same. Motherboard/gpu on one side, the psu and drives on the other side of the split case.

 

[rathar3]

I have a copy of win 95 and plus on floppy somewhere. I think it was 99 floppy's for win 95.
first computer I had was a old TI with a cassette player for a hard drive

 

[g-unit1111]

This thread makes me miss my Super Nintendo!

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nintendo-famicon-unboxing-nes-classic,32868.html

 

[turkey3_scratch]

This thread makes me miss my Super Nintendo!

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nintendo-famicon-unboxing-nes-classic,32868.html

That new NES is definitely something I will purchase. For $60 it's really a great thing.

 

[Math Geek]

especially once folks figure out how to flash more games to it. won't take long i'm sure. all the roms are already out there. someone will take the time to add more games to the box

 

[Justiceinacan]

First PC I built had a Pentium III or IV and a GeForce 2... good times.

 

[Math Geek]

i still see P4 systems come to me regularly for maintenance. amazing how many of these are still in use with some updated to win 7.

sounds crazy but some folks don't need anything more for email and occasional web browsing if that's all they do.

 

[g-unit1111]

That new NES is definitely something I will purchase. For $60 it's really a great thing.

Yup! I'm buying one of those ASAP. I hope they do a Super Nintendo and N64 version.

 

[DSzymborski]

Not only do I have all my old PCs, starting with the TRS-80 and including odd stuff like this weird PC-compatible Commodore, I also have most of my old files, including save games.

Which leads to some weird situations like me finally finishing King's Quest III in 2012 on a file that I started in 1989. I had lost that stupid page with all the spells written on them and finding them didn't become easy until the internet age.

 

[g-unit1111]

Which leads to some weird situations like me finally finishing King's Quest III in 2012 on a file that I started in 1989. I had lost that stupid page with all the spells written on them and finding them didn't become easy until the internet age.

Wow, that is a long time to go between starting a game and finishing it! :lol:

I have a buddy of mine who is a video game collector and he has literally every system going back to the Atari 2600 through the current PS4 and XBox. He even has his parents' old rear projection TV. When it works its' great! :lol:

 

[Reynod]

My first "computer job" we had a ZIP drive with the 100mb disks we had a lot of our group licensed software for our clients on it, so I would schlep that thing to their offices to install stuff. Or I would bring blank disks to back up data on a machine I was re-installing Windows on. It was faster than burning a CD, but running it through the computers parallel port was still slow as heck. I carried a PalmPilot back then for work notes and stuff it was funny, people looked at me and how that thing worked and you would think they saw a space alien.

I copied anything useful off all my old 1.44mb floppies onto 1 CD years ago probably a bit before the time I moved out of my parents house (2006?) and tossed them all.

My first computer-related job was to install a server and token ring-based network for the DoD Army ... 10based2. It was horrible ... slow ... painful ... but it worked. Mid 80's. From memory it was called a token ring.

 

[synphul]

Sounds about right Reynod, token rings were more or less the predecessor to ethernet and came out in the mid 80's. From what I understand more complex and likely more expensive than ethernet but the type of networking we have today wasn't around then. A whopping 10mbps for 10base2 😛

 

[robbcravens13]

He said "The 25MHz 286 was more computer than most people will ever need"

The first PC my family ever owned was a 386 SX 25 with a 340mb hard drive, at a time that 100mb was normal. I can't tell you how many times I heard "340 megabytes?!?!?! You will NEVER fill that up! It will last FOREVER!"

I had a 386sx 25 and a 42 mb Seagate hard drive with first 2 mb and then 8 mb ram. As you well know 8 mb was the limit. 1992-1998
I ran Dos 6.20 and Win 3.11 WG. I started with Dos 5. I still have all this and plan to run Dos 6.2 and Win 3.11 WG Again. I'm going to move all my floppy stuff to CD and run a multiboot retro including Win98SE. The reason for doing this is I have a program called Command Post and Wilson Window-ware. This allowed me to use a custom text window interface that was like Windows but used menu items instead of icons. Gonna take another shot at Linux!? ""It will last FOREVER" and "You'll never need that much". Well, it still works.

 

[Justiceinacan]

Dug up an old PC in the design communications lab at a school I went to. 0.3 GHz processor. Didn't recognize any names, but it boots. Boot drive was scrapped.

 

[Pimpom]

After nearly 6 dozen posts, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Amigas. But more about that later.

My first introduction to computers was an IBM 1620. It had a whopping 40 kilobytes of memory, used punched cards and occupied a whole floor. I was 17, attending special classes for selected college students back in the summer of 1969. It was shortly before Armstrong & Co. left for the moon and we plotted their course, taking more than 2 days and using up stacks of punched cards.

My first personal computer was an Amiga A500 of 1985 vintage but bought second-hand a few years later. Powered by a 7MHz Motorola 68000 CPU and 0.5MB RAM, it came integrated with 4-channel audio, 16-bit processing and a 12-bit palette display with full GUI.

I inherited an 8088 and a 286 from some folks but they didn't really interest me much.

Then came the Amiga A1200, released 1992 but again bought somewhat later. 14MHz 68020 CPU, later accelerated with a 68040 running at 28MHz. 24-bit color OS that could run from a single 880KB floppy disk on 2MB built-in RAM, including graphics memory and no virtual memory. Multiple windows open with different resolutions at the same time!

I added 4MBs of EDO RAM later for a total of 6MB and also bought a huge 630MB Seagate HDD for the then equivalent of US$250. My OS partition was 10MB and the OS "Workbench 3" took up all of 4.4MB when fully installed.

When it became painfully clear that there was no hope of revival for the Amiga after the company went bankrupt due to incompetent management, I was forced to switch to a Windows PC around 2000.

 

[spdragoo]

Well, it's kind of like how there's little mention of Atari's home PCs. The local library branch, back when I was a kid in the early/mid 80s, had an Atari 400 that you could use. Most people used it for the couple of games that they had, as opposed to doing anything else with it...

 

[Math Geek]

that long ago there was little else to do with them in school. we still wrote everything on actual physical paper by hand. still took typing on a typewriter in high school and had never imagined a computer lab full of these wonder machines to work on as a class.

we had apple 2e's in elementary school in every classroom but not like there was a projector for power point presentations or smart boards or any of the cool tech we have in classrooms today. was no internet so not like there was online gradebooks and attendance and such like they have now.

so really what else was there to do with a pc in the classroom? other than some "educational" games. was there even an office suite for things like these first gen pc's from apple, atari, commador and so on?? i know lotus 123 was the first one i ever used but that was well into high school for me and long past the apple 2e days. we were on 286 systems by then if i recall right

 

[Pimpom]

I'd worked on IBM clone PCs from the early 1990s, troubleshooting and occasionally assembling them for others, but never really wanted one for myself until the end of the decade when it no longer made sense to keep hanging on to the orphaned Amiga as my main computer.

I put my own first Windows machine together around 2000, entirely from scraps accumulated by working on other people's computers. It didn't have a cabinet and the motherboard stood on its edge on my table, leaning against the wall. It was a Pentium 200 overclocked to 266MHz, the highest the mobo's jumpers could manage. The PSU was a 150W unit I'd repaired. The 2GB HDD was a merger of two identical units - one with fried electronics and the other with a platter full of bad sectors. The CD-ROM drive was similarly born out of three discarded drives.

The graphics card was a discarded SiS 6215 with 0.5MB RAM soldered onto the board plus an empty RAM socket. I got an extra 0.5MB chip by desoldering it from another card and inserted that into the empty socket, thus getting a whole 1MB gfx memory.

The PSU lay on my table near the motherboard. The CD-ROM drive sat on the PSU and the HDD was on top of the optical drive. When I put a CD into the drive, it vibrated so much that it sometimes caused the computer to crash. A piece of foam between the two drives cured that problem. Then came a Pentium II, an early slot type Pentium III and a K-5.

My first all-new PC was an Athlon XP 1800+ with 128MB SDRAM, a 40GB HDD and a TNT2 graphics card.

 

[spdragoo]

that long ago there was little else to do with them in school. we still wrote everything on actual physical paper by hand. still took typing on a typewriter in high school and had never imagined a computer lab full of these wonder machines to work on as a class.

we had apple 2e's in elementary school in every classroom but not like there was a projector for power point presentations or smart boards or any of the cool tech we have in classrooms today. was no internet so not like there was online gradebooks and attendance and such like they have now.

so really what else was there to do with a pc in the classroom? other than some "educational" games. was there even an office suite for things like these first gen pc's from apple, atari, commador and so on?? i know lotus 123 was the first one i ever used but that was well into high school for me and long past the apple 2e days. we were on 286 systems by then if i recall right

Well, of course we needed those Apple II+/IIe machines! How else could we vicariously experience the joys of dying from dysentery on the Oregon Trail? LOL

 

[Rogue Leader]

In elementary school we had Apple IIe machines and a few IIgs machines, "computer class"consisted mostly of playing oregon trail, carmen sandiego, and 1 or 2 learning games. Similar IIgs machines in jr high.

In high school Programming 1 and 2 (BASIC) was also done on Apple IIe computers (and this was in like 1995!), and we all had our own 5.25 floppies to save our projects and we had to turn in at the end of class they weren't allowed to leave the room. But there were 3 PCs in the room as well, an 8086, a 286 and a 386 all with black and white monitors. I put Doom on the 386 and would play that during class because I would finish the projects in about 5 minutes. Then a guy a couple years older than me in class who wasn't too bright asked me for help, I helped him out a bit and then he started asking me to just do it for him. Sure with enough payment. Then he decided he didn't want to pay me anymore and said if I didn't do it he would beat me up. Ok.... don't mess with the smart kid. I made my disk "disappear" for a day and reported it to the teacher. The next project I gave the guy who threatened me had my name commented in the code, which I had done on my own program as well. I knew he was too dumb to catch this because he turned around and handed it in like that. Next day teacher takes me outside and tells me of this "egregious violation". "Oh my gosh I can't believe someone did that! I'm shocked" He got kicked out of class. Never beat me up either. Don't mess with the smart kid.

By senior year for AP Computer Science they had built a new computer lab with current PCs that even had internet access, and we coded in Pascal or C++ I think, I don't remember.