@vwbusguy

My first family computer was an Osborne One. Now, let me hear about yours.

It was a—heyyy this is a sneaky way to learn our ages, isn't it?

@vwbusguy a 486 DX2. What a time 😅

@vwbusguy First one the family owned was an IBM PC XT, with 640KB of RAM, a DSDD 5¼" floppy drive, a 10MB hard drive, and a CGA card and matching monitor.

@vwbusguy One of these lovely beasts:
Man I loved that computer. I still have the gutted case around, because I like it so much :P

@vwbusguy my first was the TI99/4A.

This one wasn't the original, but the one I recently got running with the PEB underneath it - something I would have loved to have back in the day.

@vwbusguy an IBM PCjr. Wikipedia tells me it was a market failure, but they sold at least one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr

@vwbusguy TRS-80 Color Computer 2

@vwbusguy Apple ][e

@vwbusguy
First family computer was a DEC Rainbow that my dad brought home from work … after it was surplused in 1990 or thereabouts. Early adopters my parents were not.

@vwbusguy we had a Compaq Presario 5000. I'm pretty sure it was the AMD duron model with 64mb of ram. I just remember thinking that color on it was cool because the only computers I had seen before that were completely beige lol

@vwbusguy
A micron desktop computer, running Windows '95.

@mos_8502 I'm guessing that was back when you had to "park" the hard drive before moving the machine?

@mos_8502 @vwbusguy same here. I had a number of machines with both MFM & RLL drives. 8088 FTW. I remember upgrading to a 486 eventually and my Mom was upset because the pacman game that was on the 8088 ran too fast. 😝 Was able to get it to run in lower speed mode that fixed it for her.

@peter My uncle just told me last week that he first learned on a TI99.

@jdd I don't think I've ever seen one of those, but now I'm curious about the dual Z80 and 8088 CPU setup.

@Mirppc The distinct sound of those ][e floppy drives will forever be etched in my memory.

@the_skotts We had one of those for our 3rd family computer. Came with Windows 95 and we eventually upgraded it to 98SE. I remember playing Final Fantasy 7 on it. Ours had either a Pentium 2 or Pentium MMX, I can't remember which.

@vwbusguy You did. MFM drive, full height.

@vwbusguy The issue with the TI was that it was so slow due to it's architecture.

Processor was actually 16 bits but for some reason only 256 bytes of ram on the base machine - the 16K was in the video chip so the cpu couldn't access it directly & it was 8 bit.

Then the expansion memory was on a 3rd 8 bit bus, but at least the cpu could access it directly.

A shame as it could have been better

@vwbusguy
Dual CPUs didn’t mean anything to me at the time, so I couldn’t tell you anything about that feature … or pretty much anything else. I vaguely remember playing Zork on it but that’s about all

@mos_8502 Ah, yes, the good old days

@jdd Dual CPUs with Zork just means you're twice as likely to be eaten by a grue.

@vwbusguy Sinclair ZX81 with the 16kb expansion pack!

@cy The person who replied with a pic of an emachines box certainly made me feel old.

Well anyway, my father purchased a Commodor 64. He even programmed it to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the PC speakers, with a terrible star animation. No computers at all before that, except a pocket calculator. Wow...

@vathpela @vwbusguy commodore power!

@vwbusguy yeah, exactly. the keyboard was so bad that even the spectrum's rubber keys were an improvement

@jarkko @vathpela I'm going to take a wild guess that this is Finnish language and therefore a slightly underclocked PAL version.

@vwbusguy @vathpela correct :-)

@vwbusguy @vathpela commodore was huge in 80s and early 90s. there is still active community in finland writing old school demos and stuff like that for c64 and amiga 500/1200.

game and graphics industry in finland inherits directly from 90s demoscene. e.g. max payne and alan wake series of games and also RTX technology in nvidia cards derive from that (RTX was engineered in finnish offices of nvidia).

@sanityinc @vwbusguy same, except the US version Timex Sinclair 1000. No 16kb expansion pack. The keyboard was such a pain to type on! And saving to cassette wouldn't always restore properly.

@vwbusguy @jarkko @vathpela My brother loaned vic-20 from his friend for a couple of weeks. No tape recorder, so I had to rewrite all the basic examples from book at each boot. Learned basic that way Then we got our own commodore 64. Played games like crazy with it.

@ikkeT @vwbusguy @vathpela vic 20 has a faster cpu than c64 :-) it is clocked 1.10 MHz while c64 cpu is 0.985 MHz

@ikkeT @vathpela @vwbusguy same actually applies to atari st and amiga. ST had a slightly faster clocked CPU and memory access speed. Thus, some 3D games run faster on ST.

@jarkko

@vathpela @vwbusguy @ikkeT

Let's also not forget how the #zxspectrum Z80A at 3.5MHz ran circles around C64 when it came to vector graphics :)

(now who could ever guess what was my first computer...)

@timojyrinki @vathpela @vwbusguy @ikkeT MOS6502 vs Z80 was sort of the first Intel vs Motorola battle. Z80 is Intel 8080 derivative and 6502 is Motorola 6800 derivative :-)

@jarkko @vathpela @ikkeT IIRC, the different clock speeds are between PAL and NTSC.

@jarkko @vathpela @timojyrinki @ikkeT Yup. Clock speed isn't the full story since 8080 was much less efficient than the 6502 instruction based stuff. It was a roughly 4:1 ratio.

@vwbusguy @vathpela @timojyrinki @ikkeT yeah and over time people did learn to take advantage of ocs chipset better so that cpu advantage of atari st melted down :-)

@vwbusguy @ikkeT @timojyrinki @vathpela i remember seeing some demos that take advantage of VIC-20 differences to C64. it is not only the CPU speed but also that CPU is not interrupted by the video chip so you can predict clock cycles used almost exactly. there was a great article about these differences in finnish skrolli magazine 2016.3 :-) that's where i learned these differences (just to denote where credit is due). after that i watched a bunch of vic-20 demos because i had always thought that it is just "worse version of c64".

@ikkeT @timojyrinki @vathpela @vwbusguy other than demos, vic-20 would be more feasible system write hard real-time system of some kind because of predictability in the used clock cycles :-)

@ikkeT @timojyrinki @vathpela @vwbusguy if i recall correctly @viznut was the author of that article. do not have the mag at hand to check :-) very nice and inspiring write up have to say

@ikkeT @timojyrinki @vathpela @viznut @vwbusguy There's this non-profit organization funded mag in Finland that has had really nice insights about older hardware over the years that is published four times a year: https://skrolli.fi/en/

@ikkeT @timojyrinki @vathpela @viznut @vwbusguy

Most of the issues have been in Finnish but there's been couple of internal editions over the years too...