I'm not that old??

[ving (David)]

i remember the abacus being invented

[iceman (Mike)]

I loved the commodore 64, my friends and I used to write games and demos in machine code on it.

I used the name "Iceman" way back then, as well.

You can get c64 emulators for the PC, nowadays. My friends (who are way more nostalgic than me) got a cable to interface the tape drive with their PC, and loaded our old demos onto the PC to convert them into the format that the emulator used.

Was great fun going down memory lane looking at what we used to code, and the messages/greetz we used to write

Me and our group on CSDb

ah the memories. What a great way to spend year 10-12

[Ric]

I started out with a 486 DX100 with 256mb HD and 8mb of Ram.
It's still running in the garage with Windows 3.1. I use it for my bike /car service records and my vege garden plotting plan, can't put much else on it though.

Cheers

[okiscopey (Mike)]

I could never be bothered with ‘computers’ when they did such mundane things from a cassette tape. First experience of halfway-decent machines was at work (medical photography/graphics) when, in 1986, we bought 2 ‘fat Macs’ (512k, far better than the 128’s) and the first Apple 300dpi laser printer. The printer cost about $12,000, weighed half-a-ton and took ten minutes to spit out a simple black-and-white graph. We had the operating system, MacWrite, MacPaint and one or two other things on a 3.5-in floppy … until we spent up big to get a Rodime 20 megabyte external hard disk. As the Apple stuff had Postscript right from the start and more and more graphics programs came on the market, they were and still are the ideal choice for most of our work. Now we work on 21-in colour-calibrated monitors with Epson pro-printers and software that does everything, we can hardly believe we once worked on 9-in b/w screens.

But times move on and technology improves. I noticed this again the other day when I was taken to the cinema after many years’ absence. I was amazed to find the picture was in colour and there was even sound and music! What more wonders lie in the future?

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

The July issue of APC, (Australian Personal Computer as if you didn't know)
has on the cover disk a .pdf copy of the very first APC magazine which was ublished in May 1980.
You guys would love it.

[acropolite (Phil)]

Like Bert & others I cut my teeth on a DEC PDP(11), my first personal computer was a Dick Smith System 80, with a massive 16K of ram and the aformentioned audio cassette drive. I upped the ram to massive 48K by soldering 2 additional layers of ram chips on to the existing chips with the exception of a couple of pins (RAS and CAS for electron heads) saving several hundred dollars on an expansion interface. Sadly I threw the beast on the tip some years ago, I doubt there would be many left in captivity.

[RB (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by acropolite

my first personal computer was a Dick Smith System 80, with a massive 16K of ram and the aformentioned audio cassette drive. Sadly I threw the beast on the tip some years ago, I doubt there would be many left in captivity.

Ah yes Phil, the legendary System 80.
Still got mine, complete with the optional upgraded kit Ivory Keyboard.

[acropolite (Phil)]

Bugger.... I suspect that they'll be worth serious money one day if they're not already. On the subject of old APC's if you have some around 81-82 you may find some articles I wrote on modifications for the beast, one of which gave hi-tech graphics characters with tails that descended below the line and the ability for the user to design custom character sets.