Pre- pc computers you have owned and loved (or hated)?

[adds21]

ZX80 (yes, the white one)
Dragon 32
Apple IIe
Apricot (my Dad bought home from work, can't remember much about it except it had a little screen on keyboard and ran CP/M 86 I think).
Amstrad PCW 8256

My first PC's where an Amstrad PC1512, and (at work) an IBM Convertible (kinda a big laptop).

Happy days!

 

[beanzontoast]

I didn't own it, but I've just remembered I also had time on a Commodore Pet. It was meant as a resource for the maths students to use (?) but there was a bit of free time when budding programmers could have a go. There was also a game I remember that involved chasing the tail of a circle trailing a few dashes behind it.

The ZX81 knocked spots off it, IMO.

 

[Alien8]

Me in my younger days:
View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70pAH8zciQI

 

[rh100]

Ha ha ... you are all good candidates for my next forum project: www.GeeksKickAss.com

(Won't be going "live" anytime soon as I'm still firming-up CC ... )

Cheers,
Shaun

should be good - what are we waiting for??!!

 

[CopperBrompton]

Learned to program (in BASIC ...) on a Dragon 32, which was a TRS-80 clone. Then ZX81, RML-380Z (a stonking machine for its time), BBC Model B (fabulous), ACT Sirius, ACT Acorn which was the first machine I used with a hard drive - it was 5Mb and I thought it would be impossible to fill it. Also the most beautiful machine I ever owned prior to my current one. Osborne 1 was great to be able to take between home and office, but the claim that it fit under an airline seat was ... well, true if you spent 20 minutes wiggling it. Continued with the Osborne until I bought the first Mac, spending a quarter of my annual salary at the time to do it.

 

[ufkacbln]

Lords of Midnight!

... and you can get it for your PC!

 

[slowmotion]

BBC Model B (fabulous)

An absolutely brilliant computer. I think it cost about £399 and you still had to buy a monitor and disk drive. It had an A-D port and digital I/O. You could make it measure things and control gadgets!
I was in Geek Heaven. I still have all the kit. Maybe I'll experience again the wonderful two second boot that somebody mentioned earlier...

 

[martint235]

Lords of Midnight!

... and you can get it for your PC!

NOOOOO! It took too much of my life as a teenager!!! I've still got a boxed copy at my parents house somewhere, in fact I think my spectrum is still in their loft as well.

 

[rh100]

Lords of Midnight!

... and you can get it for your PC!

I remember it, great game. Trouble was I found the easy way to win, just go around collecting all the armies from all castles and take them all to the same citadel at the bottom of the map - then wait for them to attack and they cant win as there is too many of you in one place - so you win!

These games prove that its about gameplay and imagination rather than graphics effects.

 

[Piemaster]

C64 - good times.
Sony MSX.
MSX was probably one of the worst computer buys I've made, never much in the way of games for it. Some of the other Jap manufacturers made their own versions of it, Betamax to the pc DOS if you will.
I was also one of the unfortunates that bought an early Pentium processor powered PC, the 60Hz one with the floating point error. Shortly before the company I bought it from went bust.
And a Iomega Jaz drive - actually that was ok, just horrendously expensive.

 

[rusky]

I bet you also had a LS120 too!

 

[ufkacbln]

Anyway the answer to the OP

Sinclair ZX80 and 81
Commodore VIC20
Sinclair 48k Spectrum plus
Amstrad PCW 8256 upgraded with "Sprinter" (64 MHz!!!!), extra memory (1Mb!!!!) and a dot metrix printer.

I wrote several articles for the PCW magazines including on how to use "MicrDesign"and colour printing on single colour printers

 

[beanzontoast]

Did anyone see Micro Men on the BBC last year? Excellent drama with more than a tinge of humour - a major bit of reminiscing and reflection about the days of Sinclair, Acorn and the race for getting products onto the market. While we watched it, I found it hard not to exclaim: "I had one of those!" and "I remember that advert!" and "Tape loaders! What a nightmare!"

 

[palinurus]

Same as many others: ZX81, 16k ram pack. Spectrum, 48K.

After that I didn't have a computer at home until I got an early Pentium PC, then an eMac. Which I am using now.

 

[mcshroom]

I missed out on the spectrums, but went
Commadore +4
Commadore 64 (with tape drive, oh the days )
Some ICL 086 thing we inherited from my dad's work
and then onto the Ollivetti 386 with Windows 3.1 (which I managed to spend 8 hours rewriting ini files to get the OS to work again after moving the windows folder into a different place )

I still remember the first time at school we got a Roamer (pictured) to drive all around the hall using a BBC B (and a program called LOGO?). We thought it was amazing