When I was young used to experiment with my Dad's computer

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it was an old 386 with an 80MB HD and 4MB RAM . You youngins' may not even know what I am talking about. this was just too little space so I used to tinker with things. then I'd mess it up my Dad would get mad and call an engineering colleague to fix it.

Wow, you're flying with that hardware!

>29 years old
>calling others youngsters
>wtfamireading.jpg

Trolling aside, it's funny how different technology is nowadays. Back then they said 'yup those 80mb's will be all you need'.
20 years later were talking about terabytes (and soon petabytes).

"No one will need more than 637kb of memory for a personal computer." -Bill Gates

Haha! I gotta laugh about this. I have a 3 y.o. on the spectrum who has, since 20 months, has been going on my laptop, activating the webcam to snap pics of herself, been turning down the screen brightness through different boxes, has disabled my password lock so she could play with it at her leisure while I'm at work and her dad's watching her, has reformatted my hard drive on my netbook (she did this when she was 2.5), makes shortcuts on the desktop to her favorite sites, renames the icons for the shortcuts to things she can understand...I definitely have a soft spot for kids who really like computers that much...

It's 640KB, and he never said that. The limitation is entirely in the hardware. The Intel 8086/8088 CPU had a 20-bit memory address bus, which allowed it to address a maximum of 1048576 bytes of memory, or 1024 KB or 1 MB. The IBM reserved the upper 384 KB of memory to ROM BASIC, shadow ROM, video memory, and some other important system memory requirements, leaving the lower 640KB free for use.

Anyway, my very first computer was ZX Spectrum. It had a 1 MHz CPU (one megahertz, not giga!), 48KB of RAM, and a tape drive for external storage. My first PC had a 4.77 MHz CPU, 512 KB of RAM (1/2 MB) and a 20 MB hard drive.

My computer today has two quad core CPUs running at 3.33 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, a 128 GB solid state disk for the OS, and a 10,000 RPM disk for my data. The video card has 1 GB of video memory, or about 50 times more fricken video memory than my first PC had hard drive space. Crazy.

My first computer was an IBM Selectric. It replaced an old Underwood portable hand-me-down from my Dad.

Here is an emulator:

http://www.jorin.com/shed/zx-spectrum-4 ... ?sna=basic

That one was running at a whooping 3.5 MHz! Software was loaded from plain old audio cassettes. The process was about 40% successful so oftentimes we had to rewind the cassette, reset the computer, press play on the cassette player again, and start over. There was no monitor. Instead the computer connected to a television screen. Graphic resolution was 256×192, or about the size of the Wrong Planet logo up above, albeit at a different ratio. There were only 15 shades of colors; compared to 16 million colors on your computer today. The sound was just beep-beep. There was no mouse or printer.

AND THE MOST SHOCKING thing of all for you youngsters: there was no Internet, or in fact no way to connect these early computers together. Whatever we personally had on the computer was all we could play with. Sure the more serious computer like the early PCs could dial-up to a local text-based BBS, but we didn't have that.

I've killed coutless computers via expirments on what they could do. My mum always is complaing that I am hard on computers but she also used to say I should be a computer programer; she dosen't anymore because she knows how bad I want to be a vet.

The first computer I spent a lot of time with as an Amstrad PC1512. It was powered by an 8mhz 8086 CPU and had 512k of RAM. In addition, it was the high end model with the 20MB hard drive. It played a fair number of games, including the classic Sierra adventure games (e.g. King's Quest, Space Quest). We gave it away in 1993 (being displaced by a lightning fast 486-50)