Nice video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF7Ep...3IQoNmjhGGlE9K

Kids comments are word for word matching sentences. Matching some members comments on this forum. Just goes to show. No matter how old you are. The kid in you remains the same.

We had a few of those apple 2's in my highschool in the early 80's

I am not sure what had the better specs the apple or my "HP 41c "
i know that the calculator was VERY useful

My 10 year old nephew loves the command prompt...

When they say "old" they mean "OLD", really old and obscure to use, probably because it is an Apple.

I feel sorry for you if you came on the scene too late to have witnessed the birth of the technologies that we now take so much for granted. You just missed it, that's all. Everyone was pushing the envelope so very hard, and in so many ways. And that envelope was moving, certainly faster than I ever thought it could.

More than anything else, the environments that we have today are the direct result of advances in semiconductor fabrication, and disk-drive manufacture, which allowed incredibly "tiny, therefore fast" devices to be constructed reliably. We also did not have flat-screen LED displays yet. We didn't have CAT-5 cable or wireless. When you look at the "old" computers of merely ... twenty to thirty years ago, you must remember that the chips we use today simply couldn't be made "back then." But these machines were constantly expanding the limits of what could be done at that time, and setting the ground for everything that would follow.

And let's remember also that, when we fast-forward another twenty years or so, the same thing will have happened again. The laptops, phones, tablets and so-on of today will seem childishly primitive and slow. The wheel never stops turning.

But it's never again going to be that magical time ... the KIM-1, the Apple-1, the IMSAI and the Altair, the SwTPC, the DEC VAX, the HP-2100, and yes, even the early mainframes. When it was all just so damned new, and therefore, so wonderful to have been a part of first-hand. I'm not waxing nostalgic here. Just feeling very lucky to have actually been there, done that.

I was "born at a right time," have always been fascinated by computers so as to make them my hobby, and gosh, manage to make my living at it also. Is that cool, or what?

[QUOTE=sundialsvcs;5177816]I feel sorry for you if you came on the scene too late to have witnessed the birth of the technologies that we now take so much for granted. You just missed it, that's all. Everyone was pushing the envelope so very hard, and in so many ways. And that envelope was moving, certainly faster than I ever thought it could.
.../QUOTE]

I think I'm one of those...I'm only in high school now. My first OS was Windows ME. (and I fail to see why everyone hates it, it worked perfectly for this 9-year-old) Next up was the XP machine that my parents use today.

I definitely feel like I missed out on a lot. However, I found my uncle's old i486 machine, and he let me have it...there was a lit of interesting stuff (moldy MS office, college projects, funny emails...I took images of the HDDs, they're so old I was surprised they worked at all)...I might try to install something in it this summer...I would go with Arch, but AFAIK it's i686 only. Maybe I'll try Debian, or maybe Slack. I wonder how it will like KDE?

the first computer in the house was an IBM with two 5.25 drives and a external 8 in drive
and a HUGE 1 meg ram

remember the com64 with the 128K expansion board
128k ram was A LOT

then the green and white paper you had to remove the sprocket holes from
man was that a LOUD printer and printed out 50 FEET of paper

I was born in 1977 and the first computer I've played with was an MSX-1 back in 1984. Came with 32 kb memory. Didn't have a hard disk. Hooked it up on television and you had to load programs and games from a cassette (tape) drive. Took several minutes just to load a simple game. And if it failed, oh well. Rewind the tape and try again. Ah, those were the days.

I bought my first PC in 1995. It was an 80 MHz 486 DX-2. It came with a 14 inch screen, 4 mb RAM and a 520 mb hard disk. No soundcard or CD-ROM drive. Two months after buying it Windows 95 was released. Friend of mine temporarily build in his CD-ROM drive so I could install it (bye bye DOS/Windows 3.11) and I've upgraded the PC's RAM to 8 mb. Those extra 4 mb set me back 250 Gulden (today, around 100 euro's). Half a year later when I earned enough money again, I bought the PC a CD-ROM drive and a soundcard. I've used the PC a lot. For nearly 4 years before replacing it with a Pentium.

Now several years and PC's later. I'm typing this on my 2 year old laptop. Which is happily running the RC of Mint 17. It's 8 gb RAM is plenty enough to do everything I ask of it. Ridiculous amount if you compare it to my first PC with it's 8 mb. Or the MSX's 32 kb. 2 GHz i7 quad core CPU, which is also in a very different league compared to my old trusty 486. And yet... The stuff I do nowadays ain't that much different compared to what I did back on my old 486.
Only big difference is that I now have access to the Internet. While back then the 14k4 modem was too expensive to use all the time. So through a friend I'd learned of an amateur BBS system called Packet Radio. Which you could also use to connect to other people in range of your 27MC equipment. Fun times for sure

As is commonplace with "new and improved" some good things get lost and left behind. Example - todays cars use less gas and are far more convenient, comfortable, and safe that those of the past. They are also harder to work on and a lot less fun to drive in many cases... thus the continuing popularity of Classic Mustangs, 57 Chevys etc. In PCs if you want to see just how advanced they were (aside from pretty graphics) and some good functional ideas that got lost, check out this video on the Xerox Star.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q

"When that system was announced in 1981 the cost was about $75,000" [1] ?

Old computers and old technologies brings back nostalgia to my heart :'(

I saw this video the other day and had to laugh at how stressed it seemed to some of those kids got that it wasn't easy to use.

My first computer was an Atari XE, with 64K of RAM, I had it slightly better than SandsOfArrakis as it had the optional XF551 (I remember the model number... damn) SDD 5.25" floppy drive. I spent so much time in Atari BASIC (and a lot of time wasted playing The Goonies).

My first PC was a 286 8MHZ (had a "turbo" button brought it up to 12MHZ) with 1MB of RAM... it used GeoWorks Ensemble, which if any of you are familiar with, used a version of the MOTIF toolkit. Very nice for it's time, compared to Microsoft's GUI offering at the time (Win 2 and 3.0).

We used Apple IIGSes in Junior High. One classroom had an original Mac... that was a "privilege" to use... although still a PITA.

I saw that. It was slightly amusing but kind of made me facepalm when
they didn't know what a floppy is. Actually at the time a floppy was a luxury

Posting from my 486. I use a CF to IDE adapter so I can easily swap OSes
I installed Win2000 on this one and it works better then I thought it would.

I can even go to LQ.ORG without getting a stupid 403 error (why does LQ do that when
the useragent says Windows98??)

I'm surprised there wasn't a commodore and a datasette drive ( i.e cassette drive storage ) in the video.