Favourite old computers?

motorguy

esuhl wrote: »

"Amstrad Action"

Sounds a bit seedy.... :eek:

U've_been_framed

Amstrad cpc 6128. It had a disk drive built in. A 3" one 178kb on each side. Adding a 3.5" drive was like adding a hard drive.
My first machine was a Dragon 32. Something rattled around inside it and it would crash randomly, usually after you had spent 2 hours typing in code from a magazine.
After the Amstrad I had an Amiga 1200 which was pretty amazing once you had added more memory and a hard drive. But it broke (under guarantee fortunately) and Commodore had gone bust by then. The next machine was a pc.

Lorian

I have a Research Machines Limited 380Z




And "one or two" other interesting machines :rolleyes:

A the other end of the spectrum (!) I have a brand new Spectrum 128 that has never been used, mine since launch day, haven't got around to plugging it in yet, some 21 years later.

LadyMorticia

I loved my Amiga 500.

My dad managed to get it for me. I can't remember where from but I was ecstatic.
Then I went into foster care and I'm not sure what happened to it.

I miss it in a way. I know that computer technology has advanced a lot but it was still nice to have an old computer to mess about with.

My dad owned an Amiga 1200 and a Spectrum. He loves old computers.

xx

System

totalsolutions wrote: »

My first home built kit was the UK101, anyone....

Snap! Back in the late 70s/very early 80s

BillScarab

Since nobody else has mentioned them I'll have to mention my first machine which was an Acorn Electron> I bought it because I wanted to play Elite and couldn't afford a BBC B, Of course they went and proted Elite to everything else after. Mind you it was a decent enough mahcine and good for learning programming in BBC Basic and even a bit of assembler. I even bought a floppy disc drive for it.

After that I had an Atari ST 520FM, much better than those nasty Amigas!
I remember spending a small fortune on upgrading the RAM to 1MB for it as well.

After that it was all PC's, although I did have a IBM PS/2 running OS/2 for a while.

superscaper

BillScarab wrote: »

Since nobody else has mentioned them I'll have to mention my first machine which was an Acorn Electron> I bought it because I wanted to play Elite and couldn't afford a BBC B, Of course they went and proted Elite to everything else after. Mind you it was a decent enough mahcine and good for learning programming in BBC Basic and even a bit of assembler. I even bought a floppy disc drive for it.

One of my friends at uni told me he became so obsessed playing elite that his mum found him wandering the study sleepwalking saying "I can't land, I can't land". :rotfl:

Quaint1

Oh, memories, memories! I started off with a ZX81, then got a Spectrum 48k (plus microdrives!) and moved to an Atari STFM, which was probably (To answer the original poster's question) my favourite computer - I could do SOOOO much more on it (I even dabbled with the MIDI ports and a cheap keyboard, and produced a few bits of shareware using STOS; I'm another one who paid big to upgrade the memory - in my case to 2.5mb)
Then it was downhill into Microsoft-land (with a brief diversion, courtesy of a
colleague in work who was clearing out the old kit from the IT department we both worked in, of an Apple IIe). Now I have more computers than ever - includign two PC's and an Apple Mac G4, and ALL the computers mentioned above still lurking in the house somewhere, and all (except the Atari) still working...
Au Res.,
Paul (coincidentally working on a blog on the subject of maintaining not-quite-cutting edge computers!)

isofa

In rough date order mine were:

1. 1980s - BBC B around £400 I think, TV screen as a monitor, Taxan dot matrix printer, teletext box and tape recorder! Fantastic machine, wish I'd never sold it. Spent hours typing in listings for programs and games.
2. 1980s - Amstrad CPC 6128 with colour monitor and 3" disc drive with a stonking 128K of RAM - £400. Plus a Star LC10 colour dot matrix printer, Brunword WP on ROM, all sorts of gadgets and accessories - also added an external 3.5" disc drive as U've been framed mentioned earlier! An avid reader of "Computing with the Amstrad". Absolutely loved it.
3. Late 1980s to 1992 used Mac SEs, LCs etc, but never owned them, until...
4. Early 1990s my first Mac - a Mac IIsi (heaven!), 14" colour monitor, 9Mb RAM, 80Gb HD - £2000 plus a HP DJ 550C colour 300dpi inkjet printer which was over £700.
5. 1994 Mac Quadra 840av (16Mb RAM, 1Gb HD, CD with video editing ports and software) - £2500 - sublime wiped the floor with PCs at the time, I still have it, it's an incredible piece of kit with separate DSP and main processors and it works fine obviously! HP DJ 850C. Produced all my Uni coursework on this and ran a small publishing business too.
6. 1994 Dan 486 DX2 66 (8Mb RAM, 340Mb HD) - used for my Uni course and systems development, cost about £1600.
7. 1997 Dell Inspiron P3 laptop, with a 15" colour screen.
8. Everything else much more modern, Power Mac 8600, PowerBook G3, PowerMacs, and Pentium PCs, colour lasers and inkjets...

:cool2:

Operating systems everything from the BBC and Amstrad native systems through to CP/M, DOS, Unix, VMS, Mac Systems 5 to 9, Windows, OS/2, Linux, and OS X

BillScarab

superscaper wrote: »

One of my friends at uni told me he became so obsessed playing elite that his mum found him wandering the study sleepwalking saying "I can't land, I can't land". :rotfl:

Docking with the space stations was an aboslute !!!!!! in Elite until you could upgrade to a docking computer. It's the one game I really remember from the 8 bit days, it was so far ahead of it's time.

Then when I had my ST my major time sink was Dungeon master, which again was very advanced for the time.