the good old days before iPad

[Fnaar]

I've helped a few 'older than me' people with this concept too... I told them to think of it like a (physical) filing cabinet. The computer is the metal box, the folders are the drawers. Seemed to help.

Correction...
Computer = the metal cabinet
Drives = drawers
Folders = hanging folders
Documents = documents

 

[phil_hg_uk]

My first laptop

 

[Fnaar]

I think (if I remember rightly) my first ever was one of these

Amstrad PC1512, monochrome display, bought for £200 off my brother-in-law, who wrote for a magazine, in those days. I think it must have been about 1991 when I got it.
I wrote a couple of essays on it, and god knows what else I did with it....certainly not £200-worth of use!!... I'm not a gamer at all, so didn't experiment with anything like that.
I didn't fully become a 'convert' to using computers fruitfully till I got a 'proper' Windows PC* with more memory (a huge 1MB hard disk and 4MB RAM) and a mouse. Once I'd worked out the basics of using word and powerpoint, I was off. The internet was (and continues to be) a positive revelation to me.


*(yes, yes, get a mac, I know...)

 

[Cyclist33]

My Mum, a computer novice has been taking computer lessons lately and I have been helping her with some of the course content, the most recent thing being creating folders, sub directories, moving files around etc. I'm sitting thinking "why are you struggling to do this? I had to learn in MS DOS with typed commands and 8 character file names and wild cards"

Still the best system!

 

[Cyclist33]

Correction...
Computer = the metal cabinet
Drives = drawers
Folders = hanging folders
Documents = documents

Surely Explorer is the metal cabinet?

 

[Fnaar]

Surely Explorer is the metal cabinet?

Good point there...

 

[byegad]

I had a powerful 64k Spectrum. I learned its version of Basic and had the thing doing all kinds of things, including drawing graphs and printing (On a little silver paper toilet roll!) details of people on a data base. The laptop I'm using now has 500Gb of memory and is about three times the size of a spectrum, which needed to be connected to a TV to use. In corrected for inflation terms, it was cheaper too!

 

[Kestevan]

My first "proper" job involved wielding one of these.....although admittedly it was obsolete tech even then (1988).

 

[Cyclist33]

I started with an Amstrad CPC but my first PC was one of these http://www.bing.com/images/search?q...488469E95C4C0B4B16E079DA3B53&selectedIndex=13

which I liked for its smallness compared to the somewhat meatier PC3286. Also it had one of the 80286 "AT" processors instead of the rather less potent 8086 "XT"s!

It had a whopping 1 megabyte of RAM supporting a speedy 16 Mhz processor.

 

[ayceejay]

Boy! was I smug when I cut through all that to buy one of those little Macintosh jobbies, with a printer and software (Word Excel etc.) it cost me close to £5000.00, when I look back I feel more like a mug £5000???

 

[phil_hg_uk]

Boy! was I smug when I cut through all that to buy one of those little Macintosh jobbies, with a printer and software (Word Excel etc.) it cost me close to £5000.00, when I look back I feel more like a mug £5000??? View attachment 35778

I chucked one of those out a few years ago I got it for £5 from a computer fair, made a great door stop

 

[phil_hg_uk]

I still have one of these

with one of these proper apple swivel screen monitor

 

[Over The Hill]

One thing that amazes me is that with all these advances, the vast amount of data generated is (in most cases for home use) still being shoved along a copper wire that was put in to send a telephone conversation down the wire before computers ever existed.

 

[phil_hg_uk]

One thing that amazes me is that with all these advances, the vast amount of data generated is (in most cases for home use) still being shoved along a copper wire that was put in to send a telephone conversation down the wire before computers ever existed.

Not for much longer, I have fibre to the box and hopefully full fibre will be along shortly

 

[PK99]

A Fullers spiral slide rule - pristine example tucked away in my loft - equivalent to a 500inch linear slide rule. I'm not quite old enough to have used one, but the one i have was in regular use until the late 1970's