[OFB Cafe] Introductions?

[Rick Bowers]

At Saturday 7/12/2008 16:51, you wrote:
>On July 12, 2008 05:03:08 saki wrote:
>
> > I started (as many of us, no doubt) with an 8 bit ZX81 "home" computer,
>
>Hands up both of you who _didn't_ have a ZX81 (it doesn't count if you
>actually had something even more primitive and skipped that step).

I skipped that step. I held out quite a while before buying my Coleco 
Adam. I still have it.

My first "real" computer was an Amiga. I started with a single 3.5" 
floppy, then added a second. The first hard drive I put on it was 
10MB. I don't have the first Amiga I bought, but I still have two of 
them; an A500 and an A2000. I'll have to admit, though, that they 
haven't been turned on since I moved in 2005. I also had/have a card 
that plugged in that was a complete 8086 on a card with a hard drive 
attached. It used the Amiga's monitor and keyboard (no PC mouse 
support yet, though the Amiga had one). So I ran DOS as well as AmigaOS.

> > The break through: a Western Digital "Hard Card" drive of 20 mb. This
> > had to be formatted as two partitions as M$-DOS wouldn't read over 10 mb...
>
>I remember that step.  I had an original IBM PC-XT - for which I remember
                                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Well, being the anal person I am, I'll have to call this one out ;-) 
The ORIGINAL was simply an IBM PC. The XT was the next generation.

>spending $2300 _used_!  I've never paid so much for a computer (even laptops)
>since.  When the harddrive eventuall failed, it was replaced with a 20MB
>monster, and I remember having to use it as two logical disks, but I had a
>program called something like BigDrive which remapped it as a single C:
>drive.
>
> > I'm just sorry my children will not experience the same excitement that
> > I've enjoyed. They will have their own, though, that's certain.
>
>They do things with phones that just leave me scratching my head and feeling
>like that "old geezer" Don thinks I am...

Remember when we had to get up and cross the room to change the TV 
channel? I still think my kids will be telling their kids "I remember 
when we had to use a remote control device to operate the TV". that 
is, of course, if "TV" is still in the vocabulary ;-)

>--
>derek

~Rick

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