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i got 4 running on my personal system right now. win 7, 10 plus Mac OS and Remix OS as well. been enjoying Remix OS as it's a pretty good adaptation of Android on PC. could see that easily being a daily driver for a simple machine with limited needs. maybe a streaming box or net surfing machine. and with the play store available, there is a whole world of casual gaming you could do on it.
 


Ha! These days we laugh at people who want to spend $9,000 on a computer. :lol:
 
I was thinking about it and what we used to pay back then, and I had to look that Tandy up, because that price, I just never remember them being that expensive. It turns out the part where it says it had the IBM Microchannel 32 bit architecture is why the price was so nuts. ISA was 8 or 16 bit depending on the card which was what most cards at the time used. Microchannel cards obviously doubled that. This really was for professional applications.

Meanwhile for us mere mortals $2500-3000 could have gotten you a decent 386 PC around that time. Still excessive don't get me wrong especially if you take inflation into account and today's prices. But in that respect whats funny is we are flabbergasted by $8500, but take inflation into account, its over $16,000. Heck $3000 in 2017 dollars is almost $6000!
 
I remember an editorial in PC Magazine, just as the 386's were coming out.
I believe it was John Dvorak: "No one needs a 386 CPU unless you are in a server room" (or words to that effect)

For that Tandy....16MB max RAM.
Today, 1,000 times that amount is ~$100.
 


Yes I remember upgrading from 4mb to 8mb in a system I had, I think it cost me like $200 to do at the time.

My 340mb hard drive was also so big I could "never fill it"
 
my first laptop i bought probably back in 92/93 or so had an option to upgrade to 8 mb of ram from 2 mb i think it was. was a $2500 upgrade at the time. was an ibm thinkpad from back in the day. you remember those with the little red nipple sticking out of the keyboard that was the "mouse"

man i hated that thing but after what i paid i had to use it for a number of years. thank goodness stuff was changing so fast i could justify an upgrade in only a short time. well short for such an expensive purchase anyway.
 


Thinkpads (now Lenovo) still have that, as do HP, Dell, and others, except its not red anymore. I liked it at the time but these days I find its too imprecise. Worked fine when resolutions were low though.
 
not seen a laptop with one of those nipples on it in a long time. what type of systems have them as i don't see them when looking around local stores like best buy and others who have a bunch on display. ??

or maybe i do see them and quickly push the memory away as it's just too painful.......
 


My company issued Dell Ultrabook has it, its about a year old, my last one did as well. I would guess more office oriented machines have them.

 
I had a few old motherboards stored away but only two worked. However, I need a gfx card for one of them. The other was an old 98 board that had celeron and I had a few old HDDs laying around. Tried to get the sucker running last week only to have it smoke up on me when 98 started installing all the drivers on the board. I believe the voltage regulator chip short circuited. Why? I have no damn clue.

Was disappointed though, wanted to run the old thing.
 
I have one of the original Apple/Macs (Mac 2 maybe?), Atari 2600, Super NES and a few other older systems. Think I have an older Compaq from around 1996 too.
 
i did not keep any of my old pc's. as i upgraded i handed off the old ones to someone who needed it. all my old stuff found a home where it could be of use. since i upgrade more often than needed, what i gave away was still very much modern and quality systems.

i only hold on to enough stuff to be useful to me in fixing pc's. some old parts for testing and cheap upgrades for some older systems, but after a while i purge the un-needed. finally started thinking about getting rid of the box of ddr 1/2 ram i have since i rarely come across systems needing it anymore that are worth doing anything with. finally got rid of my last AGP gpu as well. dropped it into an old system my sister used in her store as a cash register and inventory control. onboard video died so she got the last AGP card i had.

hopefully i'll never need one again. everything i see now is pcie, even if it is pcie 1.0 slots.
 
Where do I begin... I have SEVERAL used systems, many are pre-PCIe age, and a large stack of HP Z640 workstations and another older workstation model with CORE 2 Quad Q9500s in all of them instead of 6core Xeons

Right now I have a Pentium II, 2 Pentium III's, and I think 8 Pentium 4's with varying clock speeds. The only pre-dual core age CPU from AMD I have is the 3800+

Quite the pack rat here. I only use two systems ever at once (one Pentium 4 was in use up till not too long before, but the storage drive in there fried itself and the replacements I salveged from my late grandfather's house didn't work, so I gotta get something else up there soon) but I just can't bring myself to get rid of all this stuff lol
 
Here is a blast from the past:
I was looking though Origin to find a new game to play and found something called "Ultima I" It was fee with my account and thought to give it a try, so I set it up to download.
It was over a week later when I got back to the system and thought I would give it a shot. I hit the play button and was surprised to see it opening in an MS-DOS emulator! I then see a very pixalated picture of a castle and the option to press "a" or"b"! DOS? Really? I paid how much for a gaming system to play DOS games? I just thought it was funny and uninstalled it as I couldn't even figure out how to open it!
 


:lol: that was like the top PC RPG in its day...which was 1980. Its literally the game that started the Origin game company (well eventually by Ultima III), which eventually got bought up by EA and the name repurposed for its game service.
 


I think the first PC I ever owned was a Pentium II. It was manufactured by a company that doesn't exist anymore (Quantex) and I think I still have the mouse pad that came with it somewhere.
 


My first calculator was a GE Genius 70 ... I was one of the first kids in primary school to have a calculator ... 1975.


 
now you're going way back :)

i was born in 1974. first calc i needed was in HS for trig. never really used a graphing one for actual graphing. we learned by hand and got very good at it that way. same with arithmetic. did not have calcs, so we got real quick and basic computations.
 
Do you remember the ISA slot? 16 bits? That was the bee's knees in 1980. My first pc was a Pentium 2 with mmx technology. I think 500 mhz. It had an ancient Nvidia card, 256 mb hdd, and all of 20 something mb ram. It ran TIE Fighter ok! I cleaned out hardware closets where I did IT work at and found all kinds of gems! They had a P3 with slick ASUS board, customized to the moon... nic and 56k modem expansion cards on pci, ATI graphics with 16 mb of sdram, 1 GB (all ram slots used up) ram. Windows XP. They bought it that way I think it cost around $2100 back in 2000 and were still using it as a shipping machine in the warehouse 12 years later. Pc tech has come a long way since then.
 


330px-Vlb.jpg


16-bit ISA slot... cut off the "back half" and you had the original 8-bit ISA slot as it was on the original IBM PC. Add another connector behind that, and you had the VL-Bus.
 
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