Boyhood 1st computer back to life.

[1042686]

Moar pics!

There you go. Games ranging in release date from 83 to 88 & I busted out my pro stick II which is my go to 2800 stick.

I went ahead and rerouted all my consoles through the 1702 which is a real trip down memory lane although playing wii Mario Kart through a 14" monitor with a production date of December 1984 is pretty darn humorous to me.

 

[Project Alice]

@Project Alice: I somehow get a kick out of those stickers that proudly show off what today are all but laughable specs. Windows 95 on 8MB RAM? Ugh.

I know right lol. Right now it has 64MB in it, and Windows 2000. It's still pretty slow. I had 98 on it but after like the 4th blue screen of death I was like, okay; you're getting Windows 2000 😂 I'm gonna source 128MB for it eventually. I wanna set it up as a Retro PC gaming box. I've got enough Macs setup for that.

@Project Alice It's really cool that you kept the original spec stickers on them. In 1996 when the 4610 was made, I was 18 & enrolled in my first semester of Culinary school. I imagine the computer lab at the school was full of similarly spec'd machines. "Legend" that's some amusing marketing in 2020

Even in 2020 OEMs have some weird marketing tactics. I have a gateway that came with Windows 7 that has a similar sticker on the side of it. Not many people buy OEM PCs unless it's an office setting I'd imagine. Everyone has a laptop unless they're trying to be a "gamer".

 

[weckart]

@Project Alice: I somehow get a kick out of those stickers that proudly show off what today are all but laughable specs. Windows 95 on 8MB RAM? Ugh.

Windows 95 on 8MB RAM was quite usable. My Escom came with only 4MB RAM, which was fine for Win 3.x but woefully inadequate for OS/2, which was closer to NT 4.0 in RAM requirements and capabilities. Even opening a window was like watching a slide show in slow motion as every single call to the CPU was paged out on the hard drive. OS/2 3.0 needed a minimum of 8MB to navigate Presentation Manager and really required 20MB to be comfortable, which was way above what was regarded as affordable then. Probably why it never really took off.

 

[Amethyst1]

I know right lol. Right now it has 64MB in it, and Windows 2000. It's still pretty slow. I had 98 on it but after like the 4th blue screen of death I was like, okay; you're getting Windows 2000 😂 I'm gonna source 128MB for it eventually.

Yeah, Windows 2000 needs room to breathe. 128MB is the minimum to have some headroom, along with a fast hard drive. When it was first released, I ran it on 96MB which was decent but upgrading to 160MB was a very noticeable improvement.

You should check if the chipset can cache more than 64MB first though.
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Windows 95 on 8MB RAM was quite usable. My Escom came with only 4MB RAM, which was fine for Win 3.x but woefully inadequate for OS/2, which was closer to NT 4.0 in RAM requirements and capabilities. Even opening a window was like watching a slide show in slow motion as every single call to the CPU was paged out on the hard drive. OS/2 3.0 needed a minimum of 8MB to navigate Presentation Manager and really required 20MB to be comfortable, which was way above what was regarded as affordable then. Probably why it never really took off.

Usable maybe, comfortable... well, not so much. As for OS/2, I still love that one and am running ArcaOS (the current distribution) on one of my boxes. IIRC OS/2 3.0 was supposed to run better on 4MB machines than 2.x, but that's probably relative.

In any case, I have run Win3.11 on 2MB RAM. Talk about painful.

 

[Hughmac]

My brother-in-law gave us his self built Dell 386 in 1995 - 12MHz with 6mb RAM and running Windows 3.11 - he bought it as a kit and soldered everything together himself.
I used it for educational stuff for my kids who were just starting school at the time, but that was the beginning of my computing experience.

Up in the loft I have a Toshiba 286 laptop. I think the 10mb hard drive has gone but I had Windows 3.11 working on it with the mono display.
I will get it out some time and show it off on here.

Cheers

Hugh

 

[tranceking26]

That's awesome OP. My first PC was shared between family. It was a HP on windows XP.

For those who like older machines such as the C64 etc The 8-Bit Guy on youtube has loads of interesting videos.

The 8-Bit Guy

A computer video series focusing mainly on retro technology from the 80's, 90's and 2000's. However, once or twice a year I'll create something totally "out ...

www.youtube.com

 

[Project Alice]

You should check if the chipset can cache more than 64MB first though.

It says right on the front of the case it supports up to 128MB

 

[cmaier]

Nice. I still have my earliest two machines. And yes they both work.

Texas Instruments TI99/4A
Sharp MZ-700

I had a ti99/4a with the expansion unit and the speech synthesizer. Wasted a lot of days writing code for that thing. Good times.

 

[Amethyst1]

playing wii Mario Kart through a 14" monitor with a production date of December 1984 is pretty darn humorous to me.

Can I get a picture of that?

 

[1042686]

😅

 

[velocityg4]

My families first computer was an AST Premium 286 Model 140. The coolest feature to me was the official lock for changing the clock rate. I spent many hours on that learning about computers. My first personal computer was a Renau 486 33Mhz shortly followed by a Macintosh IIvx. I probably have a picture somewhere. Unfortunately, I can't find any examples of it online. Heck I can't find anything about the company.

View attachment 893393
There you go. Games ranging in release date from 83 to 88 & I busted out my pro stick II which is my go to 2800 stick.

I went ahead and rerouted all my consoles through the 1702 which is a real trip down memory lane although playing wii Mario Kart through a 14" monitor with a production date of December 1984 is pretty darn humorous to me.

I remember I figured out how to wire my friends NES to his Apple IIe color display and audio to his stereo. We spent many hours playing Spy Hunter.

 

[retta283]

I wish I still had my first computer. It was an Atari 800, I spent a good amount for it. I had it until 2006 when I moved and sold it to a friend. It's possible he kept it, but I have not been to his house in years.

My oldest computers date to the early 1990s from when I did some repairs for a local company, I kept a few of their computers in the shop. I was able to get my hands on the machine I wrote logs on, the shop in Bullhead closed so my friend purchased it off of them and sold it to me.

 

[1042686]

Here’s something odd I noticed when connecting the consoles to the monitor. If you use the I/o on the back of the monitor that is specific to the c64, you get audio but it downgrades video to b&w. Connect up the C64 to that I/o & you get a color screen. If you use the front I/o for the console, you get full color. Don’t know what’s going on there but was interesting. At first I thought my monitor was crapping out.