I saw a news report about the COCO on the TV show,
Computer Chronicles. The report interviewed a user-group that still uses it. But I think I saw that show 8 years ago, lol. Atari 800/1600, Commodore 64, Apple, Amiga, DEC--man those were the days. Now everyone has a PC or Mac and there isn't much romance in it. Everything's user friendly with a graphical user interface--kinda takes the geekiness out of it. Sad to say, I don't program for fun anymore
My PC history. This is fun.
I remember playing Lemonade and Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe computer in Junior High.
Then I bought my very own computer in the summer of 1990. It was a PC-XT running at 4.77 MHz--until my sister showed me there was a turbo switch that could be connected. Then it ran at 8.54 MHz, woot! I got it for $300. It had a 5 1/4" floppy and 1 MB of RAM. I think that price included the 12" TTL Hercules amber monochrome monitor. I bought a 20 HD for it for another $100 or so. My sister was a partner in a computer business and sold it to me. I later worked for that business in '92 putting computers together in the back. At that time the 486 was king. A typical server would be a 486-33 with 16 MB of RAM.
My next PC was a 386DX-20 MHz. I dont remember how much RAM it had. It was either 1, 2 or 4MB. I was so excited when I bought a color VGA monitor for it (I think the video card was a Trident something or other). I bought it so that I could play King's Quest V-- a very cool full color adventure game.
Also about this time I got my first sound card. BIG difference over the PC speaker. It was a Thunderboard from Sierra On-line, a SoundBlaster compatible that didn't cost as much.
PC generation #3 was a 486 DX2/66 with 16 MB RAM. I remember buying 16 MB of RAM for around $650. And I bought a 57MB HD for $250. Amazing how prices have changed. Too bad it isn't like that for automobiles. It was an this PC that I switched from DOS (I think I was running DR DOS 6.0 at the time) to Windows 95 in Aug '95. I remember loading the beta version-- it took something like 30 1.44 floppy disks. Around this time I got my first CD-ROM drive. The video card was a Genoa Phantom Visa Local Bus.
#4 was a Pentium 120 MHz with 32MB RAM. I bought a Samsung 17GLsi monitor for $800 in '96. Still use it to this day. Got my first 1GB hard drive around this time. Then later a 4GB. Diamond Stealth 3D-2000 video card.
#5 was a Celeron 466MHz, 128MB RAM, ATI Xpert '98 video card, bought in '99.
#6 was an Athlon 1.6 GHz, 256MB RAM, 20GB HD, Nvidia GeForce 2, purchased in '01.
#7 is my current PC, an Athlon XP 2400+, 256MB RAM, 40 GB HD, GeForce 4, includes DVD-ROM and CD-RW. But these stats fluxuate as I periodically swap parts for work.
Arthur
