My New Hard Drive

[JSR]

Re: My New Hard Drive

Prior to our ZX81, our school had a computer room (or, more accurately, a broom closet) with a ZX80, an Acorn Atom (if memory serves), and a Commodore Pet. Oh and a Texas Instruments programmable calculator.

A short time after that there was some government school's IT "initiative" and we suddenly had a room full of BBC Micro B computers - with floppy disk drives! We also had a couple of dot-matrix printers and daisywheels.

A few years later, my brother bought an Acorn Electron and, later still, we had an Amiga 1200 (now that was fun!), before moving onto a PC with a 75MHz processor and 12MB RAM (I think the hard drive was a whopping 1.7GB) - I had to specifically tell the shop that I wanted Windows 95 on it. For a time, we had a more advanced computer than the place I worked at.

They were the days. Now you can't get by without multiple GBs and GHz all over the place just for the machine to run!

[Ian]

Re: My New Hard Drive

Our maths department had a Ti programmable calculator as well - which ran an obligatory moon lander program I must be a bit older than you because I was about 21 when the BBC Micro came out but when I was in the 6th form we did have an Apple II clone (ITT 2020) and a Commodore Pet

Ian

[JSR]

Re: My New Hard Drive

The oldest computer I still have is an Acorn RiscPC, circa 1994, the last commercially produced Acorn range - it had a 30MHz ARM610 processor and I think mine has 8MB RAM. From memory it was fitted with a 100MB hard drive. It's sitting here in my office, complete with quite a range of accessories and an original monitor. Apparently it's still worth a fair bit.

My oldest working computer is a 2002 Sony Vaio C1MHP Picture Book. It has an 8.9 inch screen but very high resolution at 1280x600. It runs XP:



I upgraded the hard drive from 30GB to 60GB. It has a fantastic screen and it's tiny too, but the Transmeta Crusoe processor was just simply too slow. I did use it regularly for 6 years though!

Ian

This is a photo of my oldest still-working computer (picture found on the web but it looks like the same thing):


The battery is now useless, it gets wayyyy too hot to sit on your lap, it does have a floppy drive but it swaps with the AC adapter which has a dodgy cable so the adapter really needs to stay in situ. No USB ports, but it has a parallel port (I have an old PP Iomega Zip drive somewhere). It's looking a bit worse for wear now around the hinges, but it still fires up and works.

[JSR]

Re: My New Hard Drive

Our maths department had a Ti programmable calculator as well - which ran an obligatory moon lander program I must be a bit older than you because I was about 21 when the BBC Micro came out but when I was in the 6th form we did have an Apple II clone (ITT 2020) and a Commodore Pet

Ian

I can't recall too much about the calculator other than it having a red LED screen. It could be programmed with number games - it could probably do a lot more, but I was more interested in the Pet.

Our school got our BBC Micros just in time for me to start my O-Levels, which was handy.