The hottest, beigest room
I used to like the IT centre. All those computers, so beige, so hot. I bought my first PC in the autumn of 1997. £1499.00. P166 MMX, 16MB of RAM, 15 inch monitor which was extremely luxurious. 3.2GB hard drive – insane storage headroom. No more IT centre. Innocence lost.
My first pc was an Acorn Electron (little brother to the famous BBC pc, which I bought later on) in the 1980s
Started with 32k RAM I think and a tape deck to store programmes/programs, all in BASIC of course, although I ran out of memory when coding myself a word processor so I ended up doing some of it in 6502 assembler – fun times…
If you used the higher res graphics and wrote programs that were too big, some of the programs would overwrite the graphics RAM and you’d see pixels appearing on the bottom right of your screen. That was ok until you caused some graphics to write in the same patch of screen and then – BAM! Hung…
I used my parents’ TV until I got myself a green-screen CRT
I knew that whenever I finally got a computer I would become a hopeless computer nerd so I waited until there was a computer worth becoming a hopeless computer nerd for: the original Amiga 1000. Couple grand after printer and extra external floppy drive. Didn’t get a hard drive until a few years later — 50 MB!
Still have it! Still works; at least it did last time we fired it up to play Lemmings on the big living room TV.
For me it was the Amiga 500, which stuck with me for a few years until I broke down, joined the herd and got a 386 with a 10 MB hard drive running Windows 3.1.
The Amiga was a member of the family. The 386 was just a computer.
Surely I can’t be the oldest geek in this list, being as my first PC had a whopping 1K RAM, and no drive of any kind… Heck, think nowadays even a 1px gif is bigger than 1K!
I read a few days about other folks who got to live the horrible experience of mainframes and punch cards…
The experience of mainframes and punchcards built character.
That’s what Calvin’s dad would say!
My first “PC” was a KIM-1, got it in 1976, it too had 1K RAM. Hundreds of machines later, I built my newest daily driver with an AMD 7950X and 64G RAM, runs Fedora.
The best thing about punch cards was those IBM punch machines. Every keystroke invoked a satisfying KERCHONK, if felt like you were driving a battleship, so much power…
That’s the thing about hardware back then, wasn’t it? Everything was so PRO-quality. Tape machines as big as a refrigerator spinning 14″ reels full of 1/2″ magnetic tape, hard-drive units as big as a clothes dryer, card readers and sorters, all built with so much precision. You didn’t get to use stuff like that every day.
Mine was the infamous Radio Shack TRS-80.
Wait, does that count as a PC?
In 1993, a high school friend told some of us that their new computer had an 0.8 GB hard drive. There may have been an awed hush. What would you even use that much memory for?
My first hard drive was 20 MB (in other words, 2% of one GB), which was fabulous luxury at the time in the late 1980’s. It took me about three years to fill it up.
Ha! Lucky guy. I inherited a 12MB hard drive from my Mom when they upgraded her computer at work. This was in the days when you’d be lucky to have a second floppy drive. So many floppy disks!
All my kit was Macintosh back in the day. Never bought any of it, just got to use the outdated stuff my Mom brought home. Her boss bought a new computer every year, and she got his old one and brought her old one home. It was gravy.
Lucky! The Mac I bought in 1997 for Way Too Much Money was 100Mhz & 1GB with soldered-in components that were NOT upgradeable (thanks to Steve Jobs) but were soon eclipsed by the new generation G3’s that were so expensive but beautifully designed for the Apple Brand of “All Things Really Cool You Wish You Could Have.” ( I immediately started building my own PC’s!)
Easier to save space when the largest image you can display is 240×320 in sixteen colors and you can’t play actual wave files or videos.
The old disks had to be reformatted periodically, making the big floppies our permanent storage for most stuff.
I love how these discussions of old computer technology inevitably wind up sounding more and more like the Four Yorkshiremen sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k
And, to be clear, I’m 100% here for that.
The IT centre at my uni had a major problem with brand new Pentiums going missing despite state of the art security (a few cameras and a card lock on the door).
The mystery was solved when the cleaners came in in the morning to find a large pool of blood beneath a shattered ceiling panel.
damn you tom cruise
RIP Eustace
I hope Jack isn’t speaking too soon and that the ominous figure badly in need of a manicure behind him isn’t plotting evil.
Not only that but the 2 guys coming towards them on the sidewalk: Is this a Hit-Squad from the FUTURE there to prevent him from Changing History?
Tortus Dortuldang will be touring in Aotearoa New Zealand any time now.
One of the best Flying Nun signings
Happy to see Jack and Paolo become such good friends. But last panel is creepy! Who is the stalker?
A fellow time traveler bent on stopping Jack from contaminating the timeline?
Hey, hey, 16 megs. What does that get you today? I was regularly in the computer rooms at university in the mid-90s despite having my family’s old 386sx in my room, just for the internet access.
In (West) Germany in 1983 I worked at a personnel data-center with the US Army, and they brought in these Wang work-stations. All in one units, glorified word-processors with gigantic floppy discs and 16″ monochrome screens (Green) that had (Red) for special operations, like delete or edit. In the other room was a ONE GIGABYTE Hard Drive in a huge case that SHOOK the whole 2-story building when it started-up and shut-down. The Computer-Boss of the department smoked a pipe continuously and laughed when anyone asked how much information could it hold “More than you can possibly imagine!” he grinned, and puffed in his glee!
Taking into account inflation, paying £1499 for that computer in 1997 would be the equivalent of nearly £3k today. I’ve noted this phenomenon before in looking up how much a SNES, N64 etc. cost at launch, or games either. We complain about how expensive games and computers are today but for the most part they seem to actually be comparatively cheaper than predecessors, and unbelievably more technologically advanced!
See the excellent graphic at the top here for price changes (US) by category of good since 1998.
An Atari 800. I still have it.
So happy to see Jack’s milkshake has brought all us geeks to the yard.
So since we’re doing bands, Italy, and nonsense English. John…
Might be a time to listen to the classic, “Prisencolinensinainciusol”, just for inspiration.
Johnny A. is doing a fine job composing gibberish without it. I do wonder about his process. First thought best thought? A list of 12, narrowed down to 6, then 3, then the final copy? Days spent agonizing over the best time-paradox gib?
I am well aware of this song and can probably sing an approximation of it.
My nearest equivalent would be “Ça plane pour moi”, although I could also manage a reasonable facsimile of the theme song for The Water Margin (presuming no Japanese speakers were present). Adding the obligatory “Do not despise the snake for having no horns…” tended to give it away (RIP Bert Kwouk).
A local TV network was using “Ça plane pour moi” to promote the Paris Olympics, which infuriated me every time I heard it. Plastic Bertrand is BELGIAN!
J.A. was composing fine gibberish long before this story line. There were brilliant comments from Humphrey, such as “Glorb!”
The first business system I worked on in my programming career was the Wang 2200.
Yes – I’ll wait for the laughing and snide remarks to die down…
It was the size of a suitcase and could handle up to EIGHT(!!!) 56K(!!!) terminal partitions. It started out with a large end-table-sized disk drive with one internal and one removable 5mb disk each. But I quickly was introduced to the engineering marvel of the DS disk drive – which held a whopping 5 internal and 1 removable 13(!!!)mb disk in a file cabinet-sized cabinet. The programming was done in BASIC-2, an interpretive language.
Good times…
I got my first PC in about 1990 I think. It had a Pentium chip! Way-hay! I’d worked at IBM for a while, so I knew what a real computer looked like. (I wasn’t a computer nerd there. I worked in the drawing office.) I’d had little computers before that, of course, starting with an Acorn Electron in the mid 1980s and graduating to a BBC “B.” Never got beyond programming in BBC BASIC but it was fun while it lasted. I think my biggest achievement was programming the theme tune to “Chariots of Fire” note by tedious note, and then making a little animated graphic of the Olympic rings and a flickering flame.