My first computer
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@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
common and easy at the time (hard now.) And if you had an 8086, that meant it couldn't be a PC or PC-compatible as no one
This is like calling a Surface a tablet - and people think youre talking about something like an iPad or an Android tablet.
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@phlipelder said in My first computer:
@dashrender said in My first computer:
I bought my first computer when I was 12 (1988). It was a used 8088 with 640K memory (if memory serves), amber screen, two 5.25 floppies, no hard disk - $250. turned right around and went to Sam's club and bought a 30 MB drive for $300 - that was pre ATA (is that called Winchester?) My dad installed the drive, then I installed DOS 3.x on it.
I know I used computers before that, but I don't recall what they were though. I do remember playing with an Apple IIe in elemetry school, but we didn't have one at home. I think my computer was the first one owned by us in the house. Though my dad had a "portable" computer from the military that he brought home often. It was as large as carry on luggage today.
MFM was the precursor to parallel ATA and SCSI IIRC. The drives filled two 5 1/4" drive bays full-height and were xMB to xxMB in size.
That sounds familiar - yep, my drive was huge - two 5.25 bays and had two connectors(ribbon cables) plus power.
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I think we got our first computer in the house in the early 90's. I have no idea what they would have been, probably some sort of whitebox special. But I remember that we had two, one had one of those green on black monitors and DOS only, and then we got one with a color monitor and windows 3.1. I still remember having to press 7 to boot into windows or press 5 to play commander keen.
My first computer I built/owned personally had AMD K6-2 500mhz processor and like 128mb of RAM. This would have been late 90's. I remember thinking at the time that there was no way I would ever fill up the huge 20GB hard drive. Of course, we then tried to find everything we could on Napster anyways. It's funny how much has changed only in the last 20 years for me. I cant imagine some of you more 'seasoned' guys seeing it all from the beginning.
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@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
Example...
In the era IBM made the PC and soon thereafter Compaq made a PC-compatible. Using x86 that wasn't PC compatible was common and easy at the time (hard now.) And if you had an 8086, that meant it couldn't be a PC or PC-compatible as no one made that. If you had an 8088 it was likely PC or PC-compatible, but not for certain.
But PC always meant IBM's PC line, and PC-compatible always meant PC architecture that wasn't made by IBM. Not longer after that, they were all called PC as it was PC architecture either way.
But if you use PC to mean something else, it would be super confusing because you'd be talking about machines that had nothing alike between them. Because an 8086 machine couldn't run PC software.
I still remember the phrase "IBM compatible". I never knew what it meant at the time, I always associated that with DOS and Windows as a kid.
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@donahue said in My first computer:
@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
Example...
In the era IBM made the PC and soon thereafter Compaq made a PC-compatible. Using x86 that wasn't PC compatible was common and easy at the time (hard now.) And if you had an 8086, that meant it couldn't be a PC or PC-compatible as no one made that. If you had an 8088 it was likely PC or PC-compatible, but not for certain.
But PC always meant IBM's PC line, and PC-compatible always meant PC architecture that wasn't made by IBM. Not longer after that, they were all called PC as it was PC architecture either way.
But if you use PC to mean something else, it would be super confusing because you'd be talking about machines that had nothing alike between them. Because an 8086 machine couldn't run PC software.
I still remember the phrase "IBM compatible". I never knew what it meant at the time, I always associated that with DOS and Windows as a kid.
LOL, yeah definitely doesn't mean that. That would have been "Microsoft compatible", if we were going by companies.
IBM compatible was always a misnomer, as would be Microsoft compatible. Since when DOS came about, Microsoft's main product was actually XENIX UNIX, so being compatible with Microsoft would be more towards Linux, than DOS.
IBM always had many products and they were in no way compatible with each other. Today, nothing that people traditionally associate with IBM is compatible with anything IBM makes. IBM compatible today means more than it ever did, as IBM today uses a single platform family, the Power family.
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@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
@donahue said in My first computer:
@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
Example...
In the era IBM made the PC and soon thereafter Compaq made a PC-compatible. Using x86 that wasn't PC compatible was common and easy at the time (hard now.) And if you had an 8086, that meant it couldn't be a PC or PC-compatible as no one made that. If you had an 8088 it was likely PC or PC-compatible, but not for certain.
But PC always meant IBM's PC line, and PC-compatible always meant PC architecture that wasn't made by IBM. Not longer after that, they were all called PC as it was PC architecture either way.
But if you use PC to mean something else, it would be super confusing because you'd be talking about machines that had nothing alike between them. Because an 8086 machine couldn't run PC software.
I still remember the phrase "IBM compatible". I never knew what it meant at the time, I always associated that with DOS and Windows as a kid.
LOL, yeah definitely doesn't mean that. That would have been "Microsoft compatible", if we were going by companies.
IBM compatible was always a misnomer, as would be Microsoft compatible. Since when DOS came about, Microsoft's main product was actually XENIX UNIX, so being compatible with Microsoft would be more towards Linux, than DOS.
IBM always had many products and they were in no way compatible with each other. Today, nothing that people traditionally associate with IBM is compatible with anything IBM makes. IBM compatible today means more than it ever did, as IBM today uses a single platform family, the Power family.
Yeah, my mom has been in IT for probably the last 35ish years, she is essentially the IT manager for a regional retail store (probably about 150-200 stores) here in the NW. Now that I do this, its kind of weird trying to talk shop to her because most of her hands on experience is from at least 20 years ago. One of the last conversations we had, I was trying to explain some of the benefits of virtualization to her as she said they basically didn't have anything virtualized and they had several hundred physical servers. She deals a lot more with things like VISA processing that I didn't understand, but from my perspective we jumped straight to virtualization with our first server. She was the one always telling me "IBM compatible", but it comes from the early 90's.
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@donahue said in My first computer:
@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
@donahue said in My first computer:
@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
Example...
In the era IBM made the PC and soon thereafter Compaq made a PC-compatible. Using x86 that wasn't PC compatible was common and easy at the time (hard now.) And if you had an 8086, that meant it couldn't be a PC or PC-compatible as no one made that. If you had an 8088 it was likely PC or PC-compatible, but not for certain.
But PC always meant IBM's PC line, and PC-compatible always meant PC architecture that wasn't made by IBM. Not longer after that, they were all called PC as it was PC architecture either way.
But if you use PC to mean something else, it would be super confusing because you'd be talking about machines that had nothing alike between them. Because an 8086 machine couldn't run PC software.
I still remember the phrase "IBM compatible". I never knew what it meant at the time, I always associated that with DOS and Windows as a kid.
LOL, yeah definitely doesn't mean that. That would have been "Microsoft compatible", if we were going by companies.
IBM compatible was always a misnomer, as would be Microsoft compatible. Since when DOS came about, Microsoft's main product was actually XENIX UNIX, so being compatible with Microsoft would be more towards Linux, than DOS.
IBM always had many products and they were in no way compatible with each other. Today, nothing that people traditionally associate with IBM is compatible with anything IBM makes. IBM compatible today means more than it ever did, as IBM today uses a single platform family, the Power family.
Yeah, my mom has been in IT for probably the last 35ish years, she is essentially the IT manager for a regional retail store (probably about 150-200 stores) here in the NW. Now that I do this, its kind of weird trying to talk shop to her because most of her hands on experience is from at least 20 years ago. One of the last conversations we had, I was trying to explain some of the benefits of virtualization to her as she said they basically didn't have anything virtualized and they had several hundred physical servers. She deals a lot more with things like VISA processing that I didn't understand, but from my perspective we jumped straight to virtualization with our first server. She was the one always telling me "IBM compatible", but it comes from the early 90's.
Yeah, by the early 90s it should have been a long dead term. I remember people using it incorrectly. Traditionally that term was a reference to mainframes, not PCs. IBM Mainframes had their own architecture and to be compatible with it took some doing.
Virtualization is not new, it's been standard since 1964 (IBM again.) I started in IT in 1989 and it was well known by then. If they are lacking it where she works, it's not from being "out of date." Vendors like IBM, Sun (now Oracle), and many others were virtualizing for decades before the SMB market got into it. And the SMB only took so long due to a lack of power in the chips, nothing to do with not being aware of it or not wanting it.
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I dont know a lot about their setup, just that it's a completely different business type with different needs, and a night and day difference between staff levels. She is a manager with probably 20 or 30 staff in her department. My department consists of me :). Its hard for us to relate because there is not a lot of common ground.
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@donahue said in My first computer:
I dont know a lot about their setup, just that it's a completely different business type with different needs, and a night and day difference between staff levels. She is a manager with probably 20 or 30 staff in her department. My department consists of me :). Its hard for us to relate because there is not a lot of common ground.
Except the universal need for virtualization
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@scottalanmiller that's my thought. But you just cant come out an tell your mother that, especially since I am still relatively inexperienced. The same thing happens with my father in law. He just recently retired from working as some sort of systems admin for the EPA. I don't know what exactly he did, but I always get the feeling that he is going to tell me something that was relevant in server 2003.
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@donahue said in My first computer:
@scottalanmiller that's my thought. But you just cant come out an tell your mother that, especially since I am still relatively inexperienced. The same thing happens with my father in law. He just recently retired from working as some sort of systems admin for the EPA. I don't know what exactly he did, but I always get the feeling that he is going to tell me something that was relevant in server 2003.
Haha.
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@phlipelder said in My first computer:
@dashrender said in My first computer:
I bought my first computer when I was 12 (1988). It was a used 8088 with 640K memory (if memory serves), amber screen, two 5.25 floppies, no hard disk - $250. turned right around and went to Sam's club and bought a 30 MB drive for $300 - that was pre ATA (is that called Winchester?) My dad installed the drive, then I installed DOS 3.x on it.
I know I used computers before that, but I don't recall what they were though. I do remember playing with an Apple IIe in elemetry school, but we didn't have one at home. I think my computer was the first one owned by us in the house. Though my dad had a "portable" computer from the military that he brought home often. It was as large as carry on luggage today.
MFM was the precursor to parallel ATA and SCSI IIRC. The drives filled two 5 1/4" drive bays full-height and were xMB to xxMB in size.
I think MFM was really the encoding of the data on the drive but the interface was ST-506.
The first SCSI disk I got was for a file server and it was a monster drive from Micropolis. It was state-of-the-art, fast seek times and about 500 MB. Normal disks were 20-40MB at the time.
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@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
@donahue said in My first computer:
@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
Example...
In the era IBM made the PC and soon thereafter Compaq made a PC-compatible. Using x86 that wasn't PC compatible was common and easy at the time (hard now.) And if you had an 8086, that meant it couldn't be a PC or PC-compatible as no one made that. If you had an 8088 it was likely PC or PC-compatible, but not for certain.
But PC always meant IBM's PC line, and PC-compatible always meant PC architecture that wasn't made by IBM. Not longer after that, they were all called PC as it was PC architecture either way.
But if you use PC to mean something else, it would be super confusing because you'd be talking about machines that had nothing alike between them. Because an 8086 machine couldn't run PC software.
I still remember the phrase "IBM compatible". I never knew what it meant at the time, I always associated that with DOS and Windows as a kid.
LOL, yeah definitely doesn't mean that. That would have been "Microsoft compatible", if we were going by companies.
IBM compatible was always a misnomer, as would be Microsoft compatible. Since when DOS came about, Microsoft's main product was actually XENIX UNIX, so being compatible with Microsoft would be more towards Linux, than DOS.
IBM always had many products and they were in no way compatible with each other. Today, nothing that people traditionally associate with IBM is compatible with anything IBM makes. IBM compatible today means more than it ever did, as IBM today uses a single platform family, the Power family.
It was really IBM PC compatible, not IBM compatible, that was the proper term and what other manufacturer used when describing their products. But it surely was talked about as IBM compatible, PC compatible, compatible, clone, PC etc.
Which reminds me of IBM's PS/2. A failure in my opinion but we got the PS/2 keyboard and mouse connector out of it. Before that is was the 5-pin DIN connector for the keyboard and serial RS232 for the mouse.
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@pete-s said in My first computer:
It was really IBM PC compatible, not IBM compatible...
Right, that's how you knew if people were using the terms meaningfully or just repeating things that they heard without understanding them.
PC = IBM PC Compatible.
IBM = company making an insane number of incompatible things.
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@pete-s said in My first computer:
Which reminds me of IBM's PS/2.
What a train wreck that thing was.
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@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
@pete-s said in My first computer:
Which reminds me of IBM's PS/2.
What a train wreck that thing was.
Guess what made up the entire computer lab in my high school... Yep IBM PS/2. They actually network booted.
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@travisdh1 said in My first computer:
@scottalanmiller said in My first computer:
@pete-s said in My first computer:
Which reminds me of IBM's PS/2.
What a train wreck that thing was.
Guess what made up the entire computer lab in my high school... Yep IBM PS/2. They actually network booted.
That's crazy. that must be all that IBM ever managed to sell.
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You know what, the PS/2 entry level actually had the 8086! I had no idea, it was so late in the game, I can't believe that they put in such an ancient chip. Basically all models sold were 286.
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The PS/2 released in 1987, and was a joke. It's entry level processors had been on the market since 1978! So chips that predated the Commodore VIC=20 by two years, were powering IBM's "flagship" line of desktops in 1987. It's amazing that anyone ever bought a PC.
