The good old days

[datan]

Though, in computing class we studied the history of computers, and I remember one day when we went into a room at the back of the Computer Science wing of the school. In the room was loads of old computers. With one of them, you had to physically boot the drive to make it work. Heh. I thought it was funny

big deal.
there's a room in my school with the first digital computer ever built.

 

[onionring]

big deal.
there's a room in my school with the first digital computer ever built.

What a conscience! There's a room in my house where my first child was built. Now there's something to brag about...because I did it (not someone else)!

But hey, cool for you.

 

[Ormo]

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
128KB RAM,
TV for monitor,
Tape drive for storage..
We'd get up on a saturday, set it up and start it loading Manic Miner (what a game!).
Then we'd go do the shopping/garden/whatever and come back after lunch and it was just about done!

Then dad got an Amstrad PC for work, 8086 CPU, 512KB RAM (awesome!), a 20MB HDD and a 5 1/2" floppy drive! WOW!!! No really good games for it though, not like manic miner...

Then my dad triped on the power lead for the speccie and tried to resolder it and, being an accountant, that didn't go so well for him and smoke started coming from little speccie...
So we got a Commodore Amiga 500 as a replacement! We were astonished that the disks were so small and loaded in mere minutes! And we upgraded it to 1 MB of RAM so we could play F15 Strike Eagle by Microprose.. The graphics!! Outstanding!!!

Then we got a pentium 75 and since then life has been much easier as we rafted through various x86 platforms running WIN 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, XP, RedHat 5, 8 and 9, Suse (can't remember the version), BeOS. But y'know, nothing comes close to the feeling of awe that Commodore Workbench brought home...

 

[MsDe]

To give you some idea of how many "good old days" I've been through...as a senior in high school (in 1971) I learned Fortran on an IBM 1620 ... <snip>

Oh my, I was in second grade in 1971.

We never had computers at my high school, and the biggest thrill of the week was being assigned to one of the electric IBM typewriters instead of one of the Olympia, I think they were called, manual typewriters.

The first computer I encountered was in 1986, when I worked as a secretary/bookkeeper for a school. They had Apple cII's, if I remember correctly, and purchased a Mac SE for the office. That SE was fun, but the software they paid an arm and a leg for never worked properly. I'd get error codes and bombs (the bomb graphic was cute, yet frustrating to see) that the programmers insisted I couldn't get. "You can't have an Error 74; it doesn't exist." "Oh yeah? Tell that to the computer; I'm looking at the error window right now!" I finally had to take the computer and myself to them to show the various error msgs and problems. Never did get the problems resolved and the software working while I was working there, though.

About four years later I started working for a tax preparation franchise and learned Windows and a smattering of DOS on a Tandy computer. I spent more time on the phone with the tax preparation software's tech support! It got to the point where I'd have the autoexec.bat and config.sys ready to edit before they even got on the phone.

Ahhh, the good ol' days.