peek and poke baby. Commodore 64 with the tape drive and 1200 baud modem. I spent two days typing in a program to play Tanks!

 

Oh yes. I also had a Roland MT-32 that made those sound superb.

Who can forget the Ultima series? I played Ultima I-III on the Apple II, IV, V, VI and VII on the PC.

 

Yeah I played a few and there were kicked ass. Never finished them though.

I had King Quest V and got stuck in the with the magic machine thing, in the castle, on that creepy island. You had to provide the machine with a wand, some rotting cheese, and I third item, which I was never able to figure out. Anybody know what that was? I think I still have the CD.

Then there was the other one with Prince Alexander. I think it was KQ IV. I got stuck in the castle. I didn't know how to stay out of sight. How did you guys do it?

I wanted the finish those game so bad, and left like a dumbass for not completing them. Those games rocked. I was so inwrapped with those games that I can now play the game out, in my head, to the point where I got stuck. I'm a nerd.

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by ICEMAN666
1st computer was a Texas Instruments 99/4A. . .

 

I don't remember my first computer, but I know we had one in the house as far back as like 85 or 86 or somewhere aroudn there. We played games like Ancient Art of War, Spy Hunter, Thexter (some transforming robot game), among others and the only colors were magenta, cyan, white, and green. And whenever people asked about it, it was more than enough to say, "yeah, we got a computer at home...". Kind of like saying these days, "...yeah, i got a plasma screen TV at home"

 

I may be showing my age by posting to this thread. My first computer was an IBM 360/44, it was a "scientific" model of the IBM 360 family that is not widely known -- even most IBM mainframe experts tend not to know about this model. I don't remember how much memory it had, but it had the usual tape and cartridge disk drives along with the card reader/punch and printer. Then my next computer was an IBM 360/40 with 64KB (later upgraded to 128KB) of memory, a couple of 2311 disk drives (later upgraded to 2314) and tape drives. It had the super-fast 1143 printer that can shoot fan-fold paper straight out the back side if someone forgot to put the paper guide in place. Those were the days. We didn't have any games, so we wrote our own chess and checkers programs that we play via the console (a modified IBM Selectric typewriter). It just so happened that the IBM 360 architecture celebrated its 40th birthday this past April.

And then I moved on to the CDC 6400 and CDC Cyber 80, with some work done on the NCR Century series and the NCR Criterion series (which we loving called the "critter") in between. These were all considered "mainframes" in their days. Played with the DEC PDP-8 and PDP-11, DG Nova, and other minis along the way.

Then the age of the micro hit and the whole world changed.

 

My dad picked up a green screen Apple ][ one day with an external 8" floppy drive! I learned BASIC on that thing til we got a PS/2 with those modern-looking 3.5" disks! Games included Striker, Hard Hat Mack, Bushido, Karateka...

I finally got my own machine (286/16) with the 5.25" floppy I always wanted as I could only buy games in that format. The 20MB drive didn't last long, but at least I could play Leisure Suit Larry (Ken sent me!) in 16 colours, buy shoddy used spacecraft in Space Quest, fall to my death too many times in KQ3, and play poker in Police Quest!

I eventually got a 386/33 with 4MB of RAM, which was good for Links, Test Drive 2: the Duel (between the F40 and Porsche 959), the early point and click Sierra games, and endless nights of Ultima V.

I broke down and bought a Sound Blaster Pro so I could get some sound for Ultima VII. That game was a pig, 21MB hard drive footprint!!

Later on came a 486 with 8MB RAM. This was the time where games needed you to play around with EMM386 and get more out of the anemic 640K that Bill Gates said was enough for everybody.... Wing Commander II, Ultima VIII, System Shock, SWOTL, Indy and the Fate of Atlantis!

Finally got a Pentium 90 which rocked for Wing Commander III but all that speed eventually got slowed down by Win95 I thought that the CD playing Autoplay feature was the coolest thing in the world

///Robin

 

TRS-80 with a cassettee "drive" and the Sinclair ZX81.

Man, those were the days........

10 PRINT "Those were the Days"
20 GOTO 10

 

Oh man my first computer was a commodore 64 with the DiskDrive. Everybody had the cassete driver and I was only one around my friends who had the diskdrive.
Then I bought an AMIGA, I am not sure if too many people know this computer or not, it was a beefed up commodre actually using 3.5 floppy disks. They were low density though only held like 750 kb's I think. I used that comp for a long time while people were getting 286,386 and 486 cpu powered Pc's. Then I got a Pentium 90. It had a 90 mghz cpu, I was laready traiend on dos by that time on other computers os it wans hard for me to use dos 6.22 and windows 3.11. Then I remember installing windows 95 and hated it because it took so long to load DOOM II, a gama I used play a lot. I deleted it and put dos back on. Then moved to a pentium 166 to P2 266 to P2 450 to P3 667 to my current P4 2.8.

 

The Amiga is a famous computer, I'm pretty sure many people know about it. One of the greatest inventions that platform brought to computing was Newtek's Video Toaster. Quite an impressive machine and a great hacker's platform.