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My first family computer was an Osborne One. Now, let me hear about yours.
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

First one the family owned was an IBM PC XT, with 640KB of RAM, a DSDD 5ΒΌ" floppy drive, a 10MB hard drive, and a CGA card and matching monitor.
in reply to mos_8502 :verified:

@mos_8502 :verified: We had a very similar machine back in the day. It started out with two floppy drives, but eventually my dad swapped one out for a hard drive. I don't remember the capacity. It also didn't originally have a colour monitor.
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

One of these lovely beasts:
Man I loved that computer. I still have the gutted case around, because I like it so much πŸ˜›
in reply to Jarkko Sakkinen

I'm going to take a wild guess that this is Finnish language and therefore a slightly underclocked PAL version.
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Jarkko Sakkinen

commodore was huge in 80s and early 90s. there is still active community in finland writing old school demos and stuff like that for c64 and amiga 500/1200.

game and graphics industry in finland inherits directly from 90s demoscene. e.g. max payne and alan wake series of games and also RTX technology in nvidia cards derive from that (RTX was engineered in finnish offices of nvidia).

in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

my first was the TI99/4A.

This one wasn't the original, but the one I recently got running with the PEB underneath it - something I would have loved to have back in the day.

Scott Williams 🐧 reshared this.

in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

The issue with the TI was that it was so slow due to it's architecture.

Processor was actually 16 bits but for some reason only 256 bytes of ram on the base machine - the 16K was in the video chip so the cpu couldn't access it directly & it was 8 bit.

Then the expansion memory was on a 3rd 8 bit bus, but at least the cpu could access it directly.

A shame as it could have been better

in reply to Peter Mount

Oh weird - it was a different instruction set than the 6502 and 8080 based stuff everyone else was using. I imagine it probably had a very limited software library comparative to Atari, Commodore, Apple, Osborne, TRS-80, etc. as a result.
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to mos_8502 :verified:

Reading through the history on Wikipedia, it looks like it suffered a similar development fate to OS/2 where it became a one size fits all and they were so concerned about cannabalizing their own product lines that it got nerf'd in committee to something highly proprietary and impractical. An earlier rejected iteration used an 8080. 🀦
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

@mos_8502 @peter I don’t claim to be an expert, but what I recall contemporaneously (circa 1982) was I didn’t become aware of the existence of the Texas Instruments computer until several years after Apple, TRS-80, Commodore, and Atari all had established strong footholds in home computing. By then, people were becoming aware that buying one system meant you could only use software and accessories for that system.
in reply to Scott Miller πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ

@mos_8502 @peter Wikipedia says β€œBy late 1982, TI was dominating the U.S. home computer market, shipping 5,000 computers a day from their factory in Lubbock, Texas.”

That all may be true, but I didn’t know anyone with a TI nor seen one at a school or library, but I had seen systems from the other 4 (Commodore, TRS, Apple, and Atari).

in reply to Scott Miller πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ

The same article mentions that it sold poorly 🀷

Computers shipped != computers sold

This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

@mos_8502 @peter Ha! Good catch! I hadn’t noticed that distinction. From what I recall of the video game crash articles I’ve read, many big retailers likely had contracts to return unsold machines.
in reply to Scott Miller πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ

@scottmiller42 @mos_8502 @peter I did some looking last night in ebay and there are a whole bunch of TI99 units on ebay for $20-30. Almost every other machine from that era has skyrocketed in price in ebay but that one.
in reply to mos_8502 :verified:

@mos_8502 @scottmiller42 @peter Yeah, the (rather boring) software bundles for it were going for more than the system itself. That's a pretty clear sign.
in reply to Mirppc

@Mirppc The distinct sound of those ][e floppy drives will forever be etched in my memory.
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

for me i spent more time listing to the sound of a Macintosh floppy drive πŸ˜€ found an mp3 of one here and it brought back memories. videvo.net/royalty-free-sound-…
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

First family computer was a DEC Rainbow that my dad brought home from work … after it was surplused in 1990 or thereabouts. Early adopters my parents were not.
in reply to jdd

@jdd I don't think I've ever seen one of those, but now I'm curious about the dual Z80 and 8088 CPU setup.
@jdd
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

Dual CPUs didn’t mean anything to me at the time, so I couldn’t tell you anything about that feature … or pretty much anything else. I vaguely remember playing Zork on it but that’s about all
in reply to jdd

@jdd Dual CPUs with Zork just means you're twice as likely to be eaten by a grue.
@jdd
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

we had a Compaq Presario 5000. I'm pretty sure it was the AMD duron model with 64mb of ram. I just remember thinking that color on it was cool because the only computers I had seen before that were completely beige lol
in reply to skoot

We had one of those for our 3rd family computer. Came with Windows 95 and we eventually upgraded it to 98SE. I remember playing Final Fantasy 7 on it. Ours had either a Pentium 2 or Pentium MMX, I can't remember which.
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to cy

@cy The person who replied with a pic of an emachines box certainly made me feel old.
@cy
in reply to Steve Purcell

@sanityinc That's the small one with a membrane keyboard that was difficult to type on, right?
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

@sanityinc Ah, yes. I found one a couple of years ago:

pixelfed.social/i/web/post/426…

in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

yeah, exactly. the keyboard was so bad that even the spectrum's rubber keys were an improvement
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

at&t 6300. we had it for the better half of a decade. at some point we upgraded it with a bernoulli box (the original version, with the giant rectangular cartridges). it was enormously loud
Unknown parent

Unknown parent

Scott Williams 🐧
@jarkko @vathpela @ikkeT IIRC, the different clock speeds are between PAL and NTSC.
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Jarkko Sakkinen
vic 20 has a faster cpu than c64 πŸ˜€ it is clocked 1.10 MHz while c64 cpu is 0.985 MHz
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Scott Williams 🐧
@jarkko @vathpela @timojyrinki @ikkeT Yup. Clock speed isn't he full story since 8080 was much less efficient than the 6502 instruction based stuff. It was a roughly 4:1 ratio.
Unknown parent

Timo Jyrinki

@jarkko

@vathpela @vwbusguy @ikkeT

Let's also not forget how the #zxspectrum Z80A at 3.5MHz ran circles around C64 when it came to vector graphics πŸ˜€

(now who could ever guess what was my first computer...)

in reply to Timo Jyrinki

MOS6502 vs Z80 was sort of the first Intel vs Motorola battle. Z80 is Intel 8080 derivative and 6502 is Motorola 6800 derivative πŸ˜€
in reply to Jarkko Sakkinen

same actually applies to atari st and amiga. ST had a slightly faster clocked CPU and memory access speed. Thus, some 3D games run faster on ST.
Unknown parent

Scott Williams 🐧
@jarkko @vathpela @timojyrinki @ikkeT @viznut The two things I remember are loading related. The C64 had to blank the screen to read from the tape drive where the VIC-20 didn't need to share the same cpu cycles for video and marketing pushed that the 1541 would have to be backwards compatible with the VIC-20, so they infamously did bit banging making the floppy read times atrocious where it didn't otherwise need to be.
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

yeah and over time people did learn to take advantage of ocs chipset better so that cpu advantage of atari st melted down πŸ˜€
in reply to Jarkko Sakkinen

i remember seeing some demos that take advantage of VIC-20 differences to C64. it is not only the CPU speed but also that CPU is not interrupted by the video chip so you can predict clock cycles used almost exactly. there was a great article about these differences in finnish skrolli magazine 2016.3 πŸ˜€ that's where i learned these differences (just to denote where credit is due). after that i watched a bunch of vic-20 demos because i had always thought that it is just "worse version of c64".
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
in reply to Jarkko Sakkinen

other than demos, vic-20 would be more feasible system write hard real-time system of some kind because of predictability in the used clock cycles πŸ˜€
in reply to Jarkko Sakkinen

if i recall correctly @viznut was the author of that article. do not have the mag at hand to check πŸ˜€ very nice and inspiring write up have to say
in reply to Scott Williams 🐧

Tandy Color Computer 2 for me. It’s weird that we had one, because we never had a lot of money growing up but yet we were one of the only kids in the neighborhood that had a computer. Lucky, too because my brother and I learned how to program on that computer and ultimately shaped our careers.

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