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What is the slowest computer you've ever owned?
- Thread starter SkyBell
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DakotaGuy
macrumors 601
YES! Oh wow the old PET. We had those in lower grade elementary school. You had to use a cassette tape to load the program. It took like 10 minutes of tape play to load a program. When the teacher would give us a few minutes of computer time if you wanted to be mean you would shut down the computer before the next group of kids used it.
In 4th grade our school finally got enough money to replace all the computers (the PETs were hand-me-downs from the high school) and we got new Apple IIe's. They were SO AWESOME and so fast we could not believe it. I loved Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? I still remember the day I caught Carmen!
Foxglove9
macrumors 68000
Heh, yeah I remember the cassettes. Wow, are we spoiled now or what?
When my school ditched the PETs in the library, they bought 1 commodore 64 for every classroom as a learning tool. But what happened was everyone fought over it and the boys ended up just bringing games from home and eventually the computers were off-limits permanently. So that was the end of computers in the school. This was in mid-80's catholic school... looking back I'm surprised they even embraced technology with their ancient beliefs.
When my school ditched the PETs in the library, they bought 1 commodore 64 for every classroom as a learning tool. But what happened was everyone fought over it and the boys ended up just bringing games from home and eventually the computers were off-limits permanently. So that was the end of computers in the school. This was in mid-80's catholic school... looking back I'm surprised they even embraced technology with their ancient beliefs.
Relative to what i expected from performance the slowest computer i have ever owned was an Atari ST. Even though i had many physically slower computers i always felt it was slower than i wanted. My commodore 64 however was like greased lightning.
Awesome. I still have my 800 hooked up to play games every now and then.
In practice, game play was not all that slow. I believe the 8-bit Atari home computers had superior graphics capabilities at the time.
siurpeeman
macrumors 603
Foxglove9
macrumors 68000
It was powerful. Donkey Kong on the 800 is still 100x better than the NES version. I loved gaming on the 800. I sold mine a few years ago.
DJMastaWes
macrumors 65816
Well, I'm only 15. The first computer I'VE ever owned, was my iMac G4 @700MHz. Still alive and well, but going up for sale soon 🙁.
My families first computer - I have NO idea. We go through a lot of them.
My families first computer - I have NO idea. We go through a lot of them.
Ah yes, the Mac Plus. 8 MHz of neckbreaking speed with upgraded ram to 4mb. Who needs a hard drive when you can save to a floppy!
Well, my Atari 800 runs at 1.79 mhz IIRC, with 48 kilobytes RAM. That may sound slow, but gaming was often silky smooth. And yes, mine still runs perfectly. No floppy disk failures yet, even though some of my disks are more than 25 years old. I dread the day one of my favorite games decides to stop working. Some of the originals have some sort of copy protection, so it's impossible to make backups AFAIK.
After that, my 512k and Plus run at 8 mhz. I also have a Plus with a Brainstorm 16 mhz accelerator.
Also, I've an Atari 1040 ST with the same 8 mhz 68000 processor in the original Mac. In some ways it was a technically superior machine to the Mac. But despite the Mac-like GUI, it had some shortcomings, one of which was a painfully slow interface.
slowest computer ive ever owned
Custom build i got at a garage sale.
200MHz Pentium 3gb HDD 128mb RAM currently struggling with Windows XP Pro
Custom build i got at a garage sale.
200MHz Pentium 3gb HDD 128mb RAM currently struggling with Windows XP Pro
Jason Beck
macrumors 68000
Packard Hell Pentium 75 with 8 or 16 megs of ram. I ran my Iniquity Software based BBS on it 24/7 with a dedicated line in San Diego for a few years in the 90's.
If I recall correctly: 286 DX 25Mhz with 2 MBs of ram and a 20 MB hard drive. At that point, I don't believe Intel was the only player on the field. I think it was an AMD CPU (not 100%).
1. Texas Instruments TI99/4A
2. Packard Bell 75MHZ Pentium 1. I think it had 4MB ram in 1993. I couldn't afford any more ram for the machine because it was so expensive. I think the 50MB drive I bought for it was over $200.
By the way, a few posts up and the last post was from 2007....
2. Packard Bell 75MHZ Pentium 1. I think it had 4MB ram in 1993. I couldn't afford any more ram for the machine because it was so expensive. I think the 50MB drive I bought for it was over $200.
By the way, a few posts up and the last post was from 2007....
clientsiman
macrumors 6502
I don't know the name of it. I took it out of an old piece of instrumentation. It was built around 1970. It used core memory. The whole thing was made of 7400 logic chips. It consisted of about ten boards. They supplied a book with the schematics of each board. I wrote a small interpreter for it that had to be loaded off of paper tape. I also built a keypad for it to toggle in data one address at a time. Fun project for a kid.
