I got my first PC around that time. Maybe '91 or '92. Prior to that was C64 and A500. 4MB RAM, 128MB HD. Those were the days of the turbo button, industrial deafness from printers and an audible click whenever you changed screen resolution. What I find interesting is when you look at your phone compared to these old PCs. It's just astounding. Assuming the trend continues, it wont be long before we're all carrying "super computers" to tell everyone what we had for breakfast.
David "If we can hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... checkmate!" -Zapp Brannigan, Futurama On 25 May 2012 09:12, Greg Keogh <[email protected]> wrote: > Folks, it’s a Friday in late May 2012 and I just realised that this week is > the 20th anniversary of buying my first PC. It cost $5000 from Microway and > it had (I think) a 486-DX2 processor, 16MB of RAM a 240MB HD, two floppy > drives and a 14" monitor, nothing else. It came with floppy discs to install > DOS 5 and Windows 3.1, both of which had only just been released. > > > > Several weeks later I had my first encounter with the knuckle-whitening > frustration that would be a part of my life with PCs for the next 20 years: > I bought a Sound blaster card which was faulty. It randomly worked and then > didn’t, and it would popup "Error 2". After days of suffering I guessed that > it was a hardware fault and asked the Dick Smith store to let me try another > card, and it worked immediately. This was the first piece of hardware I ever > added, and it was cactus, what luck! Also, luckily a friend showed me how to > install video drivers and I managed to get the 640x480 display up to the > maximum of 1024x768 with high colour. > > > > I build a new PC for my wife last night and compared to my original PC it > has 500 times more RAM, 5000 times the disc space and the CPU is so much > faster and different that I’m not sure a comparison would be meaningful. > With SSD, memory sticks, LCD screens, disc burners, networking, Internet > etc, we’ve come a long way, thank heavens. > > > > Greg
