the good old days before iPad

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Fnaar

Smutmaster General
Location
Thumberland
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

:smile::thumbsup:
 

phil_hg_uk

I am not a member, I am a free man !!!!!!
My first laptop

Compaq_portable.jpg
 

Fnaar

Smutmaster General
Location
Thumberland
I think (if I remember rightly) my first ever was one of these
250px-Schneider_Amstrad_PC_1512_DD_Transparent_BG.png

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...:stop:)
 

Cyclist33

Guest
Location
Warrington
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!
 

byegad

Legendary Member
Location
NE England
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

Last of the Summer Winos
Location
Holmfirth.
My first "proper" job involved wielding one of these.....although admittedly it was obsolete tech even then (1988).

ptr.jpg
 

Cyclist33

Guest
Location
Warrington
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.
 
OP
OP
ayceejay

ayceejay

Guru
Location
Rural Quebec
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???
mac.jpg
 

phil_hg_uk

I am not a member, I am a free man !!!!!!
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 ^_^
 
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

I am not a member, I am a free man !!!!!!
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 :hyper:
 

PK99

Legendary Member
Location
SW19
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

$T2eC16JHJFsFFS!EHvHTBSbkLW)sQ!~~60_12.JPG
 
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