sudden hit of nostalgia.. Sanyo MBC-555

[Meditate!]

If you are a millennial this may not be of any interest...

 

I was looking fro something else and up popped this reminder of past PCs. In the late 70's early 80's I had been interested in computers having used home computers, consoles  really.

 

Then my brother phoned me up and asked me if i'd be interested in a pc and printer. £80 with lotus 123, Wordstar and Access. All of these heavyweight programs were pie in the sky prices let alone a pc to run them on.. AND a printer?

8088 cpu and a Hercules generated green screen monitor, twin 160kb 5.25" floppy drives.. There were some upgrades that made it more useful/faster. A Ramdisk  which did actually do the job. The maths co-processor 8087 was only useful with programs that used it.

 

I remember seeing in magazines, the Osborne portable.. ( Tube monitor .... looked like someone's luggage by laptop standards

 

You will have your own nostalgic experiences but this took me back nearly 40 years! What are your start out, tech stories?

 

 

As someone said in the regular forums. .we have everything on a phone now.

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

I sold a couple of those. Sanyo were very price competitive. In Australia we might have had the MBC 550. And they were green.

 

Just Older

 

 

 

 

[Friends just call me Ross]

First computer I owned was an old Apple...a REALLY REALLY old Apple.

Picked it up in a thrift store for about a hundred and fifty bucks.  

Would probably be a museum piece, if I hadn't passed it on to my nephews and nieces.  

 

It came with everything, including instructions on how to write computer programming.  

 

Took me all day to program a simple box shape.  I was so proud.  

[pnutts]

My 1st was an Adam - mainly a word processor with printer. You had a tape to load basic.

 

My sister had a 5 1/4" dual floppy 8086.

 

My 1st real computer was a Cyrix 486 DX100 8 Mb Ram 850 Mb HDD- about as fast as original Pentium.

Ran MS Basic & Windows 3.1.  Updated it to 16 Mb Ram for $100. 😎

 

 

[On the huh]

I built my first computer.   An AMD K5, only 200mb hard drive.  Windows 3.1.  I had Ms Office 4, although (confession time) it wasn't legit.  Remember upgrading to 1GB hard drive, and Windows 95.  So much storage space, that would never get full!

I also remember figuring out how to the Windows 95 Upgrade disc as though it was the full version.  Now that I think about, much of my software wasn't completely legal.  Trials versions cracked to full versions.  I'm pleased to say scriptural principles kicked in, and I now use my computer skills for the good.

 

[jwhess]

My first computer was a 1982 Commodore Vic-20 with 4 Kb of RAM memory.  All files and programs were stored on cassette magnetic tape and loaded or recorded through a cassette tape player.  I used a joystick (no mouse) or the keyboard to move the cursor.  I programmed in Commodore Basic.  The monitor was any old television you could find.

 

I later upgraded to a Commodore-64.  In 1984 I started building IBM-PC type computers from used parts and selling them.

 

 

[Sylv]

Our first computer came with my husband 😁. An Atari 800 that used our only TV as a monitor. His best friend came by just about every single Friday, Saturday, and many Sunday evening and they would be totally engrossed. Did I mention that it used our only TV as a monitor? And we were newlyweds?

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

I didn't own a pc, but I worked on them. The Sinclair ZX-80, ZX-81 followed by the BBC Atom were my first taste. These used a cassette player as storage, and a TV for a monitor.
We were agents for the UK stream of microprocessors, well before IBM entered the PC world in Oz.
Then came the Acorn, Sirius and Apricot.
I then switched over to the IBM PC market. The clones first, with Columbia Data Products.
Portables like Osborne and Kaypro were in the mix. Commodore had their Business Machine (CBM), a little upmarket from the Commodore 64.
Ah, the good old days.
Never want to fix any of them ever again! They were quite unfriendly. Everything needed its own interface installed, from graphics card, printer and even keyboard.
No 'plug-and-play' then!

Just Older

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

ZX-81

Just Older

[Thesauron]

ZX-81

Just Older

The Sinclair ZX81 was my first one as well. We kids got it as a gift, I would learn basic programming on that one. Sometime later, a friend of mine got a computer with which you could make music, and I was hooked. I went to his place as often as I could. Preteen me shamelessly used that friendship to be able to explore the possibilities of digital music making.

[Meditate!]

7 hours ago, jwhess said:

My first computer was a 1982 Commodore Vic-20 with 4 Kb of RAM memory.  All files and programs were stored on cassette magnetic tape and loaded or recorded through a cassette tape player.  I used a joystick (no mouse) or the keyboard to move the cursor.  I programmed in Commodore Basic.  The monitor was any old television you could find.

 

I later upgraded to a Commodore-64.  In 1984 I started building IBM-PC type computers from used parts and selling them.

This sounds very similar.. I learned about them around the same time. No one I knew from my brother's business network could afford an IBM pc and not know how to use one if they did...So it started to put together my own from new parts and offered support services too. That was a time when you could actually make good money. There was a good margin in the hardware, then. Now there is no margin for entry to mid level. Only if a customer wanted a specific high end pc/bespoke and a list of specs does it make it worthwhile. 

 

Now there are M.2 sockets directly on the newer motherboards to slot your SSD into and now U.2 SSDs! these make my first full height Tandon MFM 15Mb (yes Mb) seem infinitesimally small!

 

I bought that HD and had to buy the ISA controller board too and you had to set that up first. Now you just fit a SATA and the bios sees it and the OS knows how to use it! 

 

Remember RLL Hardcards John?

7 hours ago, jwhess said:

 

 

 

[On the huh]

I should clarify my earlier comment.  I built my first PC, not computer.  My first computer was an Amstrad CPC.  64k of memory.  Although unlike the C64 or ZX81 it came with it a dedicated monitor.  And the cassette desk was built in.  Ah yes, I remember waiting for wait seem ages for game or program to load, and then at the last moment an error in reading and you had to start all over again.

The next model had 128k and a disk drive.  But it had an unusual size - 3 inch (not 3.5 or 5.25).

 

Even though these early computers had very little memory and what would be considered very basic cpus and graphics nowadays, you could pack a lot into them.  The games kept me entertained for hours.  And though I very rarely play games now, I would rather play the games I had back then than today's games with their modern graphics.

[jwhess]

9 hours ago, Alan said:

Remember RLL Hardcards John?

Alan, I liked the "Run Length Limited format.  You could get almost 50% more data stored on the same size disk platter.  I like Seagate at the time.  If you were pretty good a "low-level" hard drive formatting and you had a good quality MFM drive you could reformat to RLL and get a 20 MB drive to be a 30 MB.  Which was all you needed sin the old MS-Dos 2.0 could not read anything larger than 32 MB.  It took 2 cables to run an MFM or RLL drive.  You had to reformat them every couple of moths when the tracking got off. They were about 4 nches tall and took up one of the two floppy spots on the front of the computer.  I have included an advertisement.

[pnutts]

I erased a lot of old x86 and 283 computer hard drives still in computers- one very large HDD only 20 Mb weighed about 10 pounds by itself.

Boat anchors is what we called them.

 

When wife & I got married and I moved her into my house 2 months later ( she was in Vegas -I was in cottage country Ontario )

had 1/2 of a room stacked to ceiling of old computers & monitors- mainly from those I had erased the HDDs.

 

Even got win 95A ( diskettes ) to run with only 5 Mb ram and 30 Mb HDD. ( Got diskettes from company I erased HDDs for -

they had several sets - upgraded to 95 B or C on cd )

 

Had original MS office on diskettes too - the very ones from Georgian College that I used in 6 week training course - they upgraded to cd's - I got the 3.5" diskettes.

Edited July 6, 2019 by pnutts

[➕👇 ꓤꓱꓷꓠꓵ🎵Tone]

One game that was popular when the IBM PC hit Australia (early 80's), was MS Decathlon.
10 games (with graphics!) on 1× single sided 5.25 floppy (160kb).
Programmers had to have tight code back then.

Just Older

[jwhess]

I wrote (transcribed) a game program for the Commodore VIC-20.  It was called "snake escape" and ran a lot like the Atari "Centipede" game.  It had  direct pixel selection in full color (8 colors), with 3 levels of difficulty, joystick support, sound, timer and moving graphics, multiple players, scoring and history.  It was done in machine language and ran in 4 Kb of Ram.  Loaded by cassette magnetic tape.  That is 4096 bytes only.  As Br. Tony says, "Tight Coding".

 

It looked something like this....

 

 

Edited July 9, 2019 by jwhess

[Cheeks]

19 minutes ago, TonyWenz said:

One game that was popular when the IBM PC hit Australia (early 80's), was MS Decathlon.
10 games (with graphics!) on 1× single sided 5.25 floppy (160kb).
Programmers had to have tight code back then.

Just Older
 

 Wow!  that takes me back!  I think I spent about a trillion hours as a kid playing that game.

[Cheeks]

Not as old as some have posted but this was our first computer: the Tandy 1000 SX.  We thought it was the greatest!  Then when we changed and got one with both a 5 1/4 AND a 3.5 inch disk drive, well that was just the greatest!  

 

[Meditate!]

20 minutes ago, Cheeks said:

Not as old as some have posted but this was our first computer: the Tandy 1000 SX.  We thought it was the greatest!  Then when we changed and got one with both a 5 1/4 AND a 3.5 inch disk drive, well that was just the greatest!  

 

Bro Cheeks... This is like another life.. seeing these things brings so many things back to life.

 

Remember the MS-Dos competitor suddenly turning up DR-DOS  (Doctor Dos some used to think it was .. Then it was HD disk compressed which gave more space but risk of losing everything if corrupted

 

Twin 5/14 floppies.. I remember someone saying that all 5/14 disks were manufactured the same, just that single sided only had one notch ; I tried cutting my own notch on the other edge and guess what.. The single sided became double sided. ... and cheaper to buy.

 

Windows 3.1 off floppies.. then buying a mouse for the first time to use one

 

Vesa Graphics Cards.. First EGA card and monitor to go with it.. boy was that expensive! So was memory 1Mb RAM = £30 per Mb ..Now? . 4Gb DDR4 = £30 

 

AMD version of the 8086.. most put off by 'so called' compatibility issues...

 

Back to reality:  As someone said though.. even nostalgia isn't as good as it used to be 

[Cheeks]

3 minutes ago, Alan said:

Bro Cheeks... This is like another life.. seeing these things brings so many things back to life.

 

Remember the MS-Dos competitor suddenly turning up DR-DOS  (Doctor Dos some used to think it was .. Then it was HD disk compressed which gave more space but risk of losing everything if corrupted

 

Twin 5/14 floppies.. I remember someone saying that all 5/14 disks were manufactured the same, just that single sided only had one notch ; I tried cutting my own notch on the other edge and guess what.. The single sided became double sided. ... and cheaper to buy.

 

Windows 3.1 off floppies.. then buying a mouse for the first time to use one

 

Vesa Graphics Cards.. First EGA card and monitor to go with it.. boy was that expensive! So was memory 1Mb RAM = £30 per Mb ..Now? . 4Gb DDR4 = £30 

 

AMD version of the 8086.. most put off by 'so called' compatibility issues...

 

Back to reality:  As someone said though.. even nostalgia isn't as good as it used to be 

It is funny to look back and see what we used to use but for the times this stuff was cutting edge!  

 

I would go back to those days in a heartbeat.

 

 

[pnutts]

My 486Dx 100 8 Mb ram 850 Mb HDD was $2 grand back  Jan 1996

[On the huh]

I remember that to get more disk space, Microsoft came up with DriveSpace.  It compressed the files to get more space.  It did work, but it also slowed things down.  And with cpu speeds so slow anyway, you didn't really want your computer to get slower.  Ironically, when cpu's became fast enough to use the software comfortably, hard drives also became bigger and affordable, and you didn't need to use compression software.

 

43 minutes ago, Alan said:

Remember the MS-Dos competitor suddenly turning up DR-DOS

Anyone use CP/M ?

 

[On the huh]

I remember a game that was played at school called Fletchers Castle.  It was an educational game designed to teach you logic and planning, although at the time I probably didn't realise that, just having fun.  The task was to build a mound and castle.  You started with about 200 men, and had assign them tasks, like building the mound, cutting trees, building the fort, and building the castle, as well as some for guards.  You had 10 "days" to complete it.  The logic and planning came into play when you realised you cannot just assign men to all tasks.  You cannot build the castle until the mound is complete.  You cannot build until enough wood is supplied.  And once the mound is done, or enough wood is ready, then you don't need to assign these tasks anymore.  It probably tested your IQ and thinking skills.

 

 

 

 

[Meditate!]

23 minutes ago, Jonathan77 said:

Anyone use CP/M ?

 

Wow.. The old all in one Amstrads used CP/M (3" disk inside the monitor casing, didn't they. 

 

do you remember the black art of Modem protocols/BB's (you don't have to configure anything nowadays; ) and then internal Fax cards became popular?  LIM (Lotus/Intel/Microsoft,) memory expansion cards?

 

I still have an Atari 800 just for Pac Man! not used that in years. There are still some SIGs out there for these machines. 

[jwhess]

Floppy drives have been mentioned.  Do you remember  the movie "War Games"?  That Imsai 8080 computer was hooked up to a dual*" floppy drive..  I still have an 8" drive in the garage (and disks).  We had 8" 160 KB disks single sided.  Later 5" disks with several sizes squeezed in.  The the not so "floppy" 3 1/2" hard shelled disks of 1.44 MB.  The Watchtower Society eventually made the NWT Bible available on the "Folio" set of 3 1/2" diskettes (it took about a dozen of them). Here are the memory visuals, first is an actual shot of the Imsai used in the movie, then the disk size comparison and finally a standard 8" drive and disk with a 3 1/2" in the foreground for size comparison...