Question Which CPU was your very first one?

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TravisPNW said:
Yep... Amiga was a state of the art media and gaming machine... outclassed PC by a lot in those days. The Video Toaster was amazing too. The Amiga should have done a lot better than it did... but it's my understanding they screwed it up from a business standpoint.
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At begin of 1990s in SOHO market Amiga in some tasks outclassed even Apple. Indeed it was brilliant in analog PAL and NTSC video editing and was used by TV companies and in graphic design. Our national TV channels used Amiga's for short time and some other commercial TV channels used them till 1997. From words of guys who worked with them, it was dead easy to mix video streams and process green screen videos on Amigas.

BogdanH said:
Yes, at that point I was very disappointed on PC.. I mean, 6 year older comp was faster and had more features in every aspect.
The thing is, 68000 was pure 32bit CPU.. no x86 burdens, no EMM386 crap, etc. I believe, by "adopting" (Intel) PC idea, we lost at least 10 years in computing technology...
Just my 2c
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Yes, 16-bit legacy caused a decade long lag in PC software development. Too much money spent in old commercial software development. Till Microsoft neutered 16-bit support in Windows NT. They was large enough to force 3rd party software developers to do a shift. In reality we got really free from 16-bit legacy only from Windows 2000 and upcoming (at that time) Linux.
 
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BogdanH said:
Yes, at that point I was very disappointed on PC.. I mean, 6 year older comp was faster and had more features in every aspect.
The thing is, 68000 was pure 32bit CPU.. no x86 burdens, no EMM386 crap, etc. I believe, by "adopting" (Intel) PC idea, we lost at least 10 years in computing technology...
Just my 2c
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I can't really blame Intel nor Microsoft. I'd still argue the late 80s, early 90s was still within the wild west of everyone trying to do their own thing and finding what sticks. Unfortunately for the PC ecosystem, "what sticks" is "my old xxx program that I refuse to update runs as is" and the developer of said program goes "we can't afford to fix that hack we did because I want to wipe my ass with $100 bills"

If anything, 9 times out of 10, the reason why some OS or some system has some weird behavior was because some company that's probably no longer relevant was a big enough player to push everyone else around into keeping the old behavior because they couldn't program their software correctly.

I still find it absurd that basically every x86 CPU, likely even the recent Ryzen 5000 ones, still boots up in real mode because that's a requirement to be "PC compatible."
 
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Many don't even know about CISC vs. RISC. They also don't know about the various OSes that many of us were using over the years. This thread has been insightful in regards to the varied backgrounds of our members. Our younger members missed what was before the internet and how we used to share ideas. BBSes were once king.
 
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COLGeek said:
Many don't even know about CISC vs. RISC. They also don't know about the various OSes that many of us were using over the years. This thread has been insightful in regards to the varied backgrounds of our members. Our younger members missed what was before the internet and how we used to share ideas. BBSes were once king.
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I'm not very surprised that someone there still remember what BBS was. Probably someone still know what FidoNet was (lived under 2:5100 for few years before public Internet access matured enough). Fun fact here: with humanity expansion around Solar system we must prepare to communications with ping time in tens of minutes and even hours and data exchange by burst transmission packets. It look like interplanetary BBS may have a renaissance.
 
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First computer was a RadioShack Model I with a Zilog Z80 processor and 4KB RAM. I built an expansion board for it to get it up to 64KB RAM. Later moved to a Model III with double sided floppies that some guys at NASA put in for me. By that time I was into the software so let the NASA guys do the hardware for me. First Intel was a 8086. 4MHz maybe?
 
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thx1138v2 said:
First computer was a RadioShack Model I with a Zilog Z80 processor and 4KB RAM. I built an expansion board for it to get it up to 64KB RAM. Later moved to a Model III with double sided floppies that some guys at NASA put in for me. By that time I was into the software so let the NASA guys do the hardware for me. First Intel was a 8086. 4MHz maybe?
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This is history!
 
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COLGeek said:
Many don't even know about CISC vs. RISC. They also don't know about the various OSes that many of us were using over the years. This thread has been insightful in regards to the varied backgrounds of our members. Our younger members missed what was before the internet and how we used to share ideas. BBSes were once king.
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Don't mention the dark ages before the internet, you will give me nightmares.
What is the difference between World Wide Web and the Internet cause Unless those BBS were peer to peer they were on some sort of internet.
I remember before any of this. No mobile phones, no personal computers. Monopoly and Risk were games that you played when there was nothing to do, now kids have so much choice and they choose to play Monopoly and Risk online. We have come so far?
I don't know what my first CPU in a non computer was, I can't go back and open box to see. Something in the 1970s
 
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The first computer I ever used was my mums old ZX Spectrum (Zilog Z80) that I found in the roof as a child, although I only ever used it to play manic miner (the only cassette that would still load)

The first computer I had from new was a Toshiba laptop running an intel celeron M410 at 1.466 Ghz, and my first desktop build was a 1.5Ghz Pentium 4
 
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Krotow said:
Other - original IBM PC Model M keyboard. Used at home till 1997, until next computer motherboard was not compatible with it anymore. Honestly I would like to have my Model M back, but with USB connection
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Yey!!! IBM Model M - the king of all keyboards (I'm typing on one right now) 👍

you can get an active PS2 to USB adaptor but these are sometimes hard to make work, the alternative is a company called unicomp that own the rights to the model M design and make new ones with USB

https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/Classic
 
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